A prince of Tyre, a long run of sea voyages, and a play that has kept editors arguing since 1609. Pericles, Prince of Tyre moves across the ancient eastern Mediterranean at the pace of a told story rather than a tight tragedy, and it carries Shakespeare's name with an asterisk attached.

That name sat on the 1609 quarto, but the play stayed out of the First Folio and did not join the collected works until the third. Modern textual scholars split it close to down the middle. Roughly 827 lines, the stretch after scene 9 that follows Pericles and Marina, read as Shakespeare's. The 835 lines of voyaging in the first two acts look like the work of a collaborator, most often identified as George Wilkins, a victualler, panderer and pamphleteer who published his own prose version, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Behind both sits Gower's Confessio Amantis, the play's main source, and behind that Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures.

Readers of the period had fewer doubts. Pericles was one of seventeen Shakespeare plays in print during his lifetime, and it went through five printings between 1609 and 1635.

This edition is built for study and for staging. It opens with a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and the Elizabethan theatre, then a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay on how directors have handled the text on stage and on screen, and a running commentary.