Despite being presided over by “moral Gower,” Shakespeare’s Pericles is fascinated with sex. From its opening in Antioch, where the audience is immediately made aware of the king’s incestuous relationship with his daughter, to the onstage spectacle of the visibly pregnant Thaisa at 2.5, to the bawdy exchanges in the brothel between Marina’s captors, the play punctuates its moral strictures and highly mediated structure with scenes that tantalize even as they claim to teach through negative example. It is interesting, therefore, that the moment in the play that contains the greatest potential for dramatizing this tension between the titillating and the temperate is related as an eyewitness account rather than shown onstage. Departing from his source material (Laurence Twine’s prose romance The Patterne of Painefull Adventures) where Marina is literally paraded through the streets of Mytilene by her captors as self-advertisement, Shakespeare instead chooses to relate this scene as an exchange between two nameless witnesses who have been “converted” from their lustful ways by Marina’s purity of speech and demeanor. In a play that hardly shies away from risqué material, why does Shakespeare choose to render this scene through audial rather than visual channels?

            My paper explores the way in which this scene is not, actually, unique in the play, but part of a larger communicative mode that Shakespeare employs throughout Pericles, one I call the “didactic model.” In diverting moments of potential visual pleasure in Pericles, Shakespeare promotes a multisensory approach as the “right” way of engaging with what is seen. Rather than reading this didactic model through the lens of religion or genre, I use it to explore the certain Shakespearean anxieties about and projections onto the figure of the early modern spectator. In doing so, I suggest one possible way that the early modern period theorized the act of looking itself.