Play by William Shakespeare. Part of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare project. Note that this is a work in progress, and things may be subject to great revision and/or actually getting done.

Just some notes about the formatting along the way. I've grabbed The MIT Tech's copy of the complete works version of Pericles, and it seems to be missing things. (Like, chunks of speeches.) They'll be reinserted. The line numbering is completely out to sea -- it looks like it was done by a not-very-bright Perl script, or something. But i'm keeping it, because even if it's glitchy, it's a reference point. (GPS accurate to within 100 m, while not as good as accurate to 10 m, is better than no GPS at all.) I'm doing much of the first-pass formatting using some Emacs Code to Nodify The Tech's Shakespeare Texts.

Some of the line breaks in the Pericles text are editorially ludicrous.

There are good reasons for this, of course. Pericles is one of the worst plays in the canon, in terms of the textual sources editors have to work from. There is one copy of the play, printed in the folio. There were no quartos, and the folio seems to be glitchy. There are also questions of authorship surrounding Pericles. When i get act three noded, you'll feel the difference. (Quick précis of the story here: the play is very clearly based on some older sources, including the Appolonius of Tyre story, and bits of it feel like they were written either by somebody else, or by somebody working with Shakespeare. Many people feel that the poetry revs into high gear about half way through the play, but there's much disagreement about why it is that way.)

I'm noding this play because it's just about my favorite Shakespeare play, and i think it needs more attention and respect. I'm going to add some notes here about what Pericles can be like in performance, and why i think it works.

Still to be done: I have quickly autonoded the entire text. There are scene breaks which i want to fix, and there are really odd line-numbering issues that i want to look at. There are words missing from the text, and i (lazily) just let Emacs lisp make every reference to the glossary into a hard link. It has also (joy of joys) made all the character headings into hard links, too. I want them to be links, but i think i'll redirect them to the dramatis personae, where i hope to take up some space introducing some of the characters. I also want to annotate the text a little.

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