A Shakespearean drama with pirates and princes, a princess who is sold to a brothel and incestuous affairs, was left out of the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. First Folio was collated and published in 1623 but contained no mention of the bard’s play Pericles, Prince Of Tyre.
The play is still rarely performed anywhere in the world, but recently it breathed new life when a Malayalam translation by writer P Velu from 1891, Pariklesharajavinte Katha, made its way to the British Library’s South Asia collection.
This re-telling of the original tale would have been forgotten but for Thea Buckley, a scholar who came across the Pariklesharajavinte Katha while working on a thesis on productions of Macbeth, for indigenous South Indian theatre forms. Buckley, an American scholar at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, grew up in Kerala. At present, she is researching the intersection between Shakespeare’s original works and their 21st-century adaptations into South Indian languages, which she took up after she chanced upon Velu’s translation of Pericles and realised that no scholar had written about it.
Buckley said she still has no idea why Pericles was omitted from the First Folio. The play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins.
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