Under Development
The play draws upon two sources. One is the Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, a poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer; this provides the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The second source is Lawrence Twine's prose version of Gower's tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, which dates from ca. 1576 and was reprinted in 1607. A third related work is The Painful Adventures of Pericles published in 1608. But this seems to be a "novelization" of the play, stitched together with bits of Twine; Wilkins mentions the play in the Argument to his version of the story – so that Wilkins' novel derives from the play, not the play from the novel. Wilkins, who with Shakespeare was a witness in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit of 1612, has been an obvious candidate for the author of the non-Shakespearean matter in the play's first two acts; Wilkins was a playwright, and no one has presented a better candidate.
Due to the issue of dual authorship, the dating of Pericles is widely debated. Some scholars support a date of ca. 1603-8, which accords well with what is known about the play's likely co-author, George Wilkins (see below). Other researchers have named it one of Shakespeare's "early plays" that was later revised by Wilkins or another writer. The only published text of Pericles, the 1609 quarto (all subsequent quartos were reprints of the original), is manifestly corrupt; it is often clumsily-written and/or incomprehensible and has been interpreted as a pirated text reconstructed from memory by someone who witnessed the play (much like theories surrounding the 1603 "bad quarto" of Hamlet). The play was printed in quarto twice in 1609 by the stationer Henry Gosson. Subsequent quarto printings appeared in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635; it was one of Shakespeare's most popular plays in his own historical era. The play was not included in the First Folio in 1623; it was one of seven plays added to the original Folio thirty-six in the second impression of the Third Folio in 1664. [See: Folios and Quartos (Shakespeare).]
The editors of the Oxford and Arden editions of Pericles support the contention that it is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins, citing stylistic links between the play and Wilkins's style that are found nowhere else in Shakespeare. The Cambridge editors reject this contention, arguing that the play is entirely by Shakespeare, and that all the oddities can be defended as a deliberately old-fashioned style; however, they do not discuss the stylistic links with Wilkins's work. If the play was co-written, or revised by Wilkins, this would support a later date, as it is believed Wilkins' career as a writer spanned only the years 1603-8.
The 1986 Oxford University Press edition of the Complete Works, and the subsequent individual edition, include a "reconstructed text" of Pericles, which in places adapts passages from Wilkins' novel on the assumption that they are based on the play and record the dialogue more accurately than the quarto.