Pericles is one of the few “Shakespeare” plays I hadn’t seen, so I jumped at the opportunity to catch it at the Globe with the other late romances. Having attended Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale in a standing spot, I’d opted to have a seat (albeit restricted by a pillar), which was definitely the right choice, given how much my legs (and poor, PhD back) were protesting.

There’s been much speculation on Pericles‘s authorship, with general agreement that George Wilkins was Shakespeare’s collaborator. While I’ve read the play before (during a three-week pre-PhD frenzy of tackling the Norton Shakespeare from cover to cover), only a few key moments remained with me (namely, the climactic father-daughter reunion). In this sense, I went into the performance as a novice, a feeling in which I luxuriated because there are only so many times one can experience a Shakespeare/Shakespearean play for the first time (38, to be exact).

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