Pericles sits at a feast in Pentapolis, watching Simonides’ court, and suddenly speaks of something that pierces the bright moment: “Yon king’s to me like to my father’s picture, / Which tells me in that glory once he was; Had princes sit, like stars, about his throne, / And he the sun, for them to reverence: Where now his son’s like a glow-worm in the night.” In that image—a father reduced from sun to glow-worm—the play announces its deepest subject. Time is not merely passing; it is theft. It steals brightness, position, and presence. Yet Pericles goes further: “Whereby I see that Time’s the king of men, / He’s both their parent, and he is their grave, / And gives them what he will, not what they crave.” Time is not a neutral passage but a force that rules absolutely, that births us and buries us, and permits no negotiation.
Early in the play, loss arrives suddenly and violently. Thaisa dies at sea during labor; her body is cast into the ocean; Pericles surrenders his newborn daughter to strangers in Tarsus. The storm that births Marina also kills (apparently) Thaisa and separates the family across the Mediterranean. Pericles becomes a man unmade by time’s reversals—a prince who goes from ruling Tyre to washing up on a beach in rags, from husband and father to a ghostlike wanderer who swears never to wash his face or cut his hair. Sixteen years pass in silence. The middle of the play is largely Marina’s story, her growing up away from the father who left her, her excellence in music and needlework and virtue blooming unseen. Time continues to work, but not toward reunion; it seems to deepen separation. The world Pericles knew is erased.
Yet the play also stages a counter-argument, one that comes from Marina and from Cerimon. When Marina is threatened with destruction in the brothel, she refuses to be broken, and when she finally meets her father on the ship at Mytilene, she awakens him not through the passage of time but through her voice and presence in the moment. Cerimon, when he revives Thaisa, shows that knowledge, music, and the right human gesture can work against time’s entropy. He does not undo the past; he restores what seemed irrevocably lost. The play does not pretend that time can be reversed or that the years of separation do no damage. But it suggests that the human capacity to recognize, remember, and speak can pierce through time’s rule and recover relation.
What the play finally understands about time is that it moves in two directions at once. It destroys—it kills, scatters, erases, reduces the mighty to dust. But it also allows for the slow ripening of virtue, for the accumulation of wisdom through suffering, and for the possibility of reunion not as a return to what was but as a recognition of who we have become. Pericles does not get back the man he was before the storm. He gets Marina grown, Thaisa alive but changed by years in a temple, and himself remade by loss into someone capable of joy. Time is the king of men; it dictates suffering. But the play suggests that time can also be the condition for grace, if we survive it and remain open to being found.
