Not So Obvious

Read Shakespeare's Pericles over the last few days. It's got some good publicity of late and is reckoned by those who know about these things to work well in the theatre. Impossible to tell from the page, though the Act 4 brothel scenes are obviously excellent. The problem lies in the early acts, though nobody seems to think these actually come from Shakespeare himself. Very wooden stuff. I'm not convinced by those who rate Pericles as some kind of masterpiece, but I'd love to see a production to get a better sense of the impact of the drama as a whole.