CMS & CREMS Seminar - The Page on Stage: Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Shakespeare’s Pericles

This seminar is co-hosted with the Centre for Medieval Studies, please note the date and slightly later start time.

Other than perhaps Titus Andronicus, no play by Shakespeare so explicitly advertises its own source material as Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Based on a story retold in John Gower’s late medieval poem, Confessio Amantis, Pericles features the Middle English poet himself as a quasi-chorus who summarizes and comments upon the play’s main action. This paper will explore the relationship between Jacobean drama and late medieval narrative poetry encapsulated by this chorus-author figure. Attending in particular to Gower’s relationship to medieval manuscript culture and his reception via print in the sixteenth century, this paper argues that Pericles engages with the Confessio Amantis as not only ‘narrative’ but also as book.

Jane Raisch is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature in the department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She works on the reception of Greek antiquity in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and Europe, as well as print and book history, the history of gaming, philosophy and literature, and drama.  Her work has been published in ELH, LIAS, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography at Rare Books School; New York Public Library; SHARP; the Huntington, and other institutions. 

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