Fantasy and the Imagined Music of the Spheres in Pericles

Gower, who speaks the chorus in Shakespeare’s Pericles, continually reminds the audience that they must use their imaginative faculties as they watch the play. During the seventeenth century, imagination was often feared to be a dangerously free agent, but Gower reminds the audience that they can and must control their imaginations. Pericles exhibits such a control over his faculties when he tells Marina in Act 5 that he will force himself—that is, his imagination—to hear and believe her story. When Pericles believes, he is rewarded by a divine blessing in the form of the music of the spheres. Audiences, too, have been controlling their imaginations, and thus they too share in the divine blessing by hearing the music. The music of the spheres, in early modern thought, is “unhearable” by human ears, which has led some critics to argue that no audible music should sound in the theater when Pericles speaks of heavenly music. I argue that in the play, performing a musical fantasy as a theatrical representation of the music of the spheres rewards the audience and Pericles for using and controlling their imaginations. Pericles is comforted and assured by the divine approbation represented by the “divine” music, and the audience is granted a clever and insightful pun that has been five Acts in the making. Moreover, a musical fantasy representing the music of the spheres reminds the audience and readers of the play that if a person were to hear the music of the spheres, that music must enter the body by an organ that is both spiritual and physical: the organ of the imagination or fantasy.