<i>Pericles</i> and the Secret

This article examines the role of secrecy in William Shakespeare and George Wilkins’ Pericles, showing how secrets are used to probe wider questions sexuality, time social power. Secrets can have a poisonous influence on societal familial relationships this play, but they also possess beneficial curative healing properties that potentially transformative body. Drawing work modern theorists including Georg Simmel, Jacques Derrida Anne Dufourmantelle, I argue Pericles has complexity which goes beyond simple opposition concealment revelation. reveal conceal at same time, ways may seem paradoxical, just as simultaneously bind people together separate them. They disruptive unpredictable, pushing past desires for control order. Political authority, Shakespeare’s day our own, often involves keeping secrets. But my reading play demonstrates, undo power structures disrupt orderly temporal patterns lives.