Maritime adventures : the example of Apollonius of Tyre and Sydney's Arcadia

Maritime adventures: the example of Apollonius of Tyre and Sidney’s Arcadia. In the paper I investigate two plays deeply concerned with shipwrecks and maritime adventures, The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Despite belonging to different genres and periods of Shakespeare’s dramatic production, they are respectively a comedy of the first phase and a romance of the last, they show significant similarities and common sources, such as an Alexandrine romance called Apollonius of Tyre and Sidney’s Arcadia, which both revolve around shipwrecks and sea adventures. I will analyze how Shakespeare has recourse to these works as a source, considering the influence of each of them and evaluating the different impact of the sea on the dynamics of the plays. In The Comedy of Errors they both represent the starting point for the development of the story: they offer character names or situations and are combined with the marked influence of Plautus’s Menaechmi which shapes the plot of the comedy. Instead, in Pericles their influence is so relevant that they become a key element of the romance. Actually, on the one hand, the poet John Gower, who put the story of Apollonius of Tyre into verse in his Confessio Amantis, is the chorus of the play; on the other hand, Pericles embodies the spirit of Sidney’s work so that the story is turned into an acute analysis of human condition also in terms of politics.