There are some significant doubts over the authorship of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a Jacobean play most frequently attributed to William Shakespeare. It is widely agreed that the Bard was the author of the main portion of the play that follows Scene 9, and that the first eight scenes were penned by dramatist, pamphleteer, and panderer George Wilkins, who was involved in a variety of criminal activities at the time.
The play opens in the court of Antiochus, king of Antioch, who has offered his daughter's hand in marriage to any man who can solve a complicated riddle. There is a catch to this offer, though—any man who tries to solve the riddle, but fails, will be killed. The play follows the lives of Pericles and his daughter Marina, and is informed by two main sources. John Gower's Confessio Amantis was the source of the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The second is Lawrence Twaine's adaptation of Gower's tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures.
It is believed that the play was written in 1608, largely because of the assumed co-authorship by George Wilkins who was only writing during the years 1607-1609. It was published as a quarto several times, through to the year 1635; it was one of Shakespeare's more popular plays during his own era but fell out of favor in later ages.
The play has traditionally been more of a success with the public than with critics, even at the time of writing, and was produced for performance many times during the Restoration. Until the twentieth century, there existed virtually no critical praise for the play. It experienced a small resurgence when poet T.S. Eliot, in the early 1900s, praised the play for its exceptionally dramatic storyline and courageous, beyond-human characters.
