Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act 1 Scene 0 — Summary & Analysis

What happens

Gower, the medieval poet, emerges from the past to frame the tale. He introduces Antioch, where King Antiochus has committed incest with his daughter and made a riddle of the crime—any suitor who cannot solve it will die. Gower promises to show us princes and princesses tested by fortune, and invites the audience to receive this old story as a cure for modern troubles, asking their patience and imagination as the play unfolds.

Why it matters

Gower's appearance immediately signals that this is not naturalistic drama but rather a tale—an old, tested story shaped by narrative art rather than verisimilitude. By resurrecting a medieval poet to tell a Renaissance play, Shakespeare places us outside ordinary time. The prologue does not hide the incest; it announces it plainly, making clear that the play's interest lies not in suspense about what happened at Antioch but in how characters survive and recover from such horrors. Gower invites us to see the story as a kind of medicine—something read at festivals to cure grief. This frames the entire play as an act of generosity: we are being offered comfort through narrative.

The riddle itself—'I am no viper, yet I feed / On mother's flesh'—encodes the unspeakable in language. It transforms incest into a puzzle, a thing that can be stated but not directly named. This tension between what can be said and what must remain hidden animates the whole scene. Gower's tone is warm and colloquial ('I tell you what mine authors say'), making him feel like a friend, yet his archaic diction ('Et bonum quo antiquius') and his invocation of 'lords and ladies' who have read this story before position it as timeless. We are invited to trust both the teller and the tale itself—to believe that virtue survives, that time restores, and that the gods reward the righteous and punish the wicked.