Voices of the Past: Queer Influence and Poetic Salvage in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent

Shakespeare and Wilkins’ Pericles and Middleton’s Hengist share a unique feature: a mediaeval author as choric figure. Choric figures are typically embodied plot devices rather than dramatic characters; they do not usually present singular voices but collective, often anonymised, identities. In contrast, Pericles and Hengist present these mediaeval voices, Gower and Raynulph respectively, as guides who embody and make visible the backward-facing project of these plays. The dynamic that emerges in these two plays between readers and writers, audience members and on-stage authors echoes a queered relationship between outmoded cultural objects and those who reclaim and love them. I argue that we can read the reanimation of mediaeval authors as a project of poetic salvage, in which the voice of the long-dead authorial figure guides audiences through multiple histories and literary temporalities. My critical term, poetic salvage, describes the recovery of material remnants of the past as a kind of emotionally-charged rescue founded in recognition and resonance. Read as a formal and aesthetic process of non-normative reproduction, poetic salvage can be understood not just as a way of preserving resonent echoes of the past, but as a transformative mode of reading that incorporates beloved objects into a new, loverly textual object..