Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in Pericles

fter wielding the power to command storm and shipwreck throughout The Tempest, Prospero speaks an Epilogue in which he acknowledges a how his manipulation of the sea has always been subject to the indulgence of the audience. In comparing the audience’s compliance to favorable sea winds, Prospero’s speech plays upon a familiar association between theatrical performance and seafaring in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Prologue to ThomasMiddleton’sNoWit, NoHelp Like aWoman’s (1611) wonders “How is’t possible to please / Opinion tos’d in such wilde Seas?” given the sheer numbers of people who attend the theater and the diversity of their tastes. As Douglas Bruster has argued, The Tempest’s opening shipwreck can itself be read as an allegory for playhouse labor, since theatrical productions, like seafaring, required hard work and cooperation. Unwilling audiences interfered with this labor by disrupting the performance or its representational fictions, rather than helping to keep the ship afloat. Theater and seafaring also shared a precarious status as risky enterprises undergoing new forms of commercialization in early modern England. For early modern playwrights, the risks, dangers, and