Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Act 4 Scene 0 — Summary & Analysis

What happens

Gower returns to advance the story fourteen years forward. Marina has grown into an extraordinarily talented woman—accomplished in music, needlework, and learning—but her beauty and gifts provoke the envy of Cleon's daughter, Philoten. Dionyza, consumed by jealousy, plots Marina's murder through the hired assassin Leonine. Lychorida, Marina's nurse, dies, clearing the way for Dionyza to execute her dark scheme.

Why it matters

Gower's prologue marks a radical temporal leap, the kind only narrative can manage without breaking verisimilitude. By compressing sixteen years into a speech, the play establishes Marina as a living rebuke to the world around her. Her accomplishments—music, embroidery, learning—are rendered not as individual talents but as a unified grace that makes 'her both the heart and place / Of general wonder.' The prologue explicitly frames this excellence as threatening. It is not Marina's virtue that endangers her, but her superiority itself. Dionyza's envy is not petty jealousy but a rational response to Marina's eclipse of her own daughter. The prologue thus prepares us for a turn in the play's logic: virtue, which we have been taught to admire, becomes a liability.

The introduction of Leonine and the planned murder shifts the play's register sharply. Where Antioch's incest was a sin committed by those in power, Tarsus's murder plot emerges from wounded pride—Dionyza cannot bear to see her daughter diminished. The death of Lychorida, Marina's nurse and her last connection to her true family, is presented almost as convenience: 'The sooner her vile thoughts to stead, / Lychorida, our nurse, is dead.' This casual fatality underscores how thoroughly Marina is now alone, bereft of even the knowledge of who she truly is. The prologue's tone is urgent, almost breathless—'I do commend to your content'—as if rushing toward a catastrophe that only an external force can prevent.