Pericles was one of the most popular plays of its time, and it has regained much of that popularity today. In a wide-ranging introduction, Roger Warren draws on his experience of the play in
rehearsal and performance to explore the reasons for this enduring popularity. Unfortunately Pericles survives only in a corrupt text, the Quarto of 1609, in which many passages are nonsensical
and others appear to be missing altogether. Earlier editions have merely cleaned-up the Quarto, but this edition offers a conjectural reconstruction of what the original play might have been
like. It draws upon George Wilkin's The Painful Adventures of Pericles (1608) to emend some of the errors and missing material. It does so in the belief that the play is a collaboration between
Shakespeare and Wilkins. The entire Quarto text is reprinted in an appendix, together with the passages from Wilkin's narrative that have particularly contributed to the reconstruction, so that
readers can see for themselves how the reconstruction has been made.
