Note 95 — Chapter V · SIX DIRECT REFERENCES IN THE PERICLES TO BOOKS OF EMBLEMS, SOME OF THEIR DEVICES DESCRIBED, AND OF THEIR MOTTOES QUOTED.

See Penny Cyclopædia, vol. xxi. p. 343, where the Pericles and eight other plays are assigned “to the period from Shakspere’s early manhood to 1591. Some of those dramas may possibly then have been created in an imperfect state, very different from that in which we have received them. If the Titus Andronicus and Pericles are Shakspere’s, they belong to this epoch in their first state, whatever it might have been.” See also Knight’s Pictorial Shakspere, supplemental volume, p. 119, where, as before mentioned, the opinion is laid down,—“We think that the Pericles of the beginning of the seventeenth century was the revival of a play written by Shakspere some twenty years earlier.”