‘What Now Ensues’: Nowness, the Chronotope and Ritualistic Atemporality in Pericles, Prince of Tyre

With its episodic structure and pivotal deployment of the medieval author John Gower as a choric figure, Pericles is one of the most unconventional plays in the wider Shakespeare oeuvre. Exploring the play through the lens of the Bakhtinian chronotope, commonly defined as the narrative conjunction of space and time, our paper discusses this frequently undervalued but, in its time, hugely popular work as a temporally and topographically blurred drama whose onstage action and narrative continuity exist in a state of ‘nowness’. This occurs, paradoxically, through the authors’ circumvention of the Aristotelian unities, together with skilful manipulations and invocations of past and future temporalities and multiple locales in an ever-present time and space. We consider the figure of Gower as a sublimation of the ancient, medieval and Jacobean prologue device, and argue that his vital function in the play is to manipulate time and space for methectic and ritualistic, rather than purely diegetic and mimetic purposes. Methexis in Pericles is predicated on a shared internalised perception of performance time and locale. While its fluidity set the pattern for the remarkable spatiotemporal experiments of late Shakespearean romance, the work also should be recognised as a preeminent example of early modern metatheatricality.