The Third Fisherman appears in Act 2, Scene 1 as one of three working men who rescue the shipwrecked Pericles on the shore of Pentapolis. Though he speaks only six lines, he serves as the play’s comic conscience—the voice of ordinary people observing both the natural world and the moral failures of their betters. His humor is not decorative but pointed: when the First Fisherman compares rich misers to whales that swallow whole parishes “church, steeple, bells, and all,” it is the Third Fisherman who extends the joke with a vivid, almost desperate image. He imagines being the sexton during such a catastrophe, ringing the bells so loudly from inside the whale’s belly that it would be forced to vomit up the entire town. The comedy masks a real anxiety—these are poor men living in a world where the powerful consume resources and people with impunity, and survival depends on wit and community rather than law.
The Third Fisherman’s wit also marks him as one of Shakespeare’s “witty commons”—figures like the gravediggers in Hamlet or the shepherds in The Winter’s Tale who often see more clearly than princes. He notices things: he observes the porpoise, remarks on the seasons, remembers that when he saw it before he expected to be drenched. This attention to the natural world gives him standing to speak about human nature. When he jokes about the sexton and the whale, he is not merely being comic; he is imagining a world where the poor have agency, where their noise and persistence matter, where they can fight back against consumption. In a play obsessed with loss, separation, and the powerlessness of even kings to control their fates, the fishermen—and especially the Third Fisherman—embody a kind of resilient, communal wisdom that no storm or tyrant can entirely destroy.
His role in rescuing Pericles is also significant because it is utterly unsentimental. The fishermen are not sentimentalists; they are working men with nets and a living to make. Yet they help the prince not out of pity but out of human decency and a kind of practical charity. The Third Fisherman’s six lines remind us that in this play, as in life, the real grace often comes from those with nothing to give but their time, their labor, and their humor—and these, it turns out, are enough.
