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