From Pericles to Marina: ‘While Women are to be had for Money, Love, or Importunity’

Summary

George Lillo's Marina was first staged at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden on 1 August 1738. After its lack-lustre premiere, Marina was only revived twice, although the Shakespearian original was restored to the stage as late as 1854. Despite the recently renewed interest in Shakespearian adaptations and the after-life of the Shakespearian text both on stage and on the page, Lillo's Marina remains one of the least-known early Augustan adaptations of Shakespeare.

There are several reasons for the limited critical attention devoted to Lillo's only attempt to 'improve' on Shakespeare: first, Lillo's reputation as a playwright rests exclusively on his best-known play, The London Merchant, Or the History of George Bamwell, an experimental domestic tragedy which secured him vast success and popularity during his life-time, and enduring credit among theatre scholars; secondly, the tendency to use Shakespeare as raw material for new plays had started to decline by the early 1730s; and, most importantly, Lillo's adaptation seems to have shared the critical and theatrical misfortunes of its Shakespearian original. Ever since Ben Jonson sarcastically described Pericles as a 'mouldy tale', where 'we see . . . many seas, countries, and kingdoms passed over with . . . admirable dexterity', critics have regarded this late romance as exceptionally unshakespearian, as a 'curiously amorphous anomaly'.