This week on Heavenly Shows and Unnecessary Letters: Pericles, Prince of Tyre, directed by David Hugh Jones for the BBC in 1984, and written circa 1608 by William Shakespeare.

EPISODE NOTES: This week’s show is another semi-shakespearean work - promoted in it’s day as a work by Shakespeare, but with the first two acts written by another man. This week’s show was also regarded as having the most mass popularity of any Shakespearean play in the time it was written, to the point where critics of the day bemoaned its popularity when compared to the great works like Macbeth and Hamlet. That popularity has waned, however, and Pericles is now considered to be mostly a dramatic oddity, an experimental work of literature rarely thought about and even more rarely staged. We’re not about literature, however, we’re about the work performed, so we dug up the only recorded version of Pericles, Prince of Tyre ever made, and set out to find out why this work was so popular in its day.

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Editing by Tammy Sarah Linde and Luke O'Hagan

Music by Luke O'Hagan

Audio excerpt from Henry V used under a Creative Commons License from Archive.org - license available here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

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