The play-opening chorus of Pericles, spoken by Gower, runs 42 lines, mostly in iambic tetrameter. Those are four-foot lines, as opposed to the five-foot iambic pentameter we’re used to hearing come from Shakespeare; of course, the historical Gower wrote in tetrameter, so it fits.
The speech in interesting as it introduces the play and Gower…but not Pericles. He’s not mentioned a single time in the speech, one that spends almost its entire length on Antioch and Antiochus.
And that’s not the only weirdness in the speech…
Continue reading “Speech Study: Gower, opening chorus”