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English Department | University of Texas | Arlington

Shipwreck, Immersion, and a Great Sea of Joys: Watery Tropes, the Blue Humanities, and Affective Ecologies in PERICLES

Susan Rojas, Independent Scholar, Naples, FL

Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness. (Pericles 5.1.181–184)[1]

The above quotation from the 1609 play Pericles represents the voicing of extreme emotion. Pericles feels intense affect physically surrounding him, and in response, calls out for others to prevent his drowning in joy. This response differs from the well-known “sea of troubles” (3.1.58) voiced in Hamlet, wherein Hamlet’s words point to psychologically oppressive affect.[2] Hamlet’s lines are “in the mind,” as he considers challenging the turbulent emotion surrounding him, in contrast to Pericles’s outward response. Although both descriptions imply a brush with mortality, Hamlet posits the possibility of taking a stance against his troubles, whereas Pericles seeks rescue from his overwhelming happiness. The two plays embody responses representing opposing instances of affective ecologies: psychological and physical. Such ecologies are collective emotions and passions, amalgamations of the stressors, confusions, and delights of life surrounding an individual. In Pericles, the physicality of these affective ecologies comes to the fore, reflected in their relationship to sea imagery and watery tropes. Marine imagery in Pericles blends multiple qualities of water: its physicality, cultural resonance (past and present), and facility in making the experience of affect accessible.[3] This comingling occurs whether the presence of the sea is subtle or pronounced and is pivotal in creating the affective ecologies that flesh out character and engage the audience. As a result, effectively considering this aspect of Pericles calls for viewing water as both natural element and linguistic expression, a perspective enhanced by ideas espoused by the blue humanities scholars. According to Steve Mentz, “Blue humanities scholarship tends to oscillate between rigorous materiality…and more expansive or poetic ideas.”[4]

In line with his statement, my reading retains the physicality of water while addressing it in its many forms throughout Pericles as literary device, corresponding with what Gaston Bachelard deems a “water mind-set,” allowing “recogni[tion] in water, in its substance, a type of intimacy that is very different from those suggested by the ‘depths’ of fire or rock” (emphasis in original).[5] Thinking this way means acknowledging water’s physicality and cultural importance while also seeing it as a useful representation of how passion, joy, and stress move through daily life. As Julian Yates observes, we are “mixed beings, sharing characteristics that belong to one another, characteristics that wander across the lines of species, kingdom, and kind.”[6] This recognition of our intermixed origins and blended composition suggests our water-based bodies can easily identify with the physicality, emotion, and cultural elements of watery tropes, and helps point to why they are such effective literary tools. Water’s movement and ubiquitous presence—there but always flowing—is germane to its reflection of human emotion. Its liquidity allows for instantaneous change (quickly diverting a small stream, scooping a cup of water), unlike the rootedness of flora or density of fauna. Although fire is a trope often used to describe extreme passion, flames burn away and consume. Water is more constant; it evaporates but remains in air or soil as humidity or damp. Although water can become vapor or condense into clouds, these forms do not suggest as wide an array of emotions as water’s tangible, flowing state. Clouds bring to mind depression or anger hanging over an individual but are not useful for describing degrees of happiness like joy or ecstasy.[7] My point of departure for exploring aqueous imagery in Pericles is the expression “sea of joys,” with its linguistic construction suggesting the importance of watery tropes in sharing the effects of emotional extremity. The phrasing points to a connection between the liquid element’s natural properties and the desire to express pain, happiness, and everything in between. This association remains to the purpose; Hamlet’s “sea of trouble” is still recognizable as describing a surfeit of angst, and saying one is “drowning in sadness” or “swimming in delight” is easily grasped as a description of situation or status. Clearly, the water + affect relationship is enduring, important, and worth considering more carefully.

The construction “sea of” is not unique to Shakespeare. An EEBO search of the years 1590–1616 shows it frequently in biblical exegesis and other religious tracts, as well as histories, elegies, poetry, and works by playwrights such as John Marston, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman. Peter Stallybrass points to the use of “sea of troubles” by Erasmus, Painter, Norden, and Digby in the fifty years or so prior to Hamlet and observes that Shakespeare “practiced his own form of database” and “appropriated for his own use what he read or heard.”[8] This linguistic history argues for the ubiquity of sea imagery during the sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries and confirms its importance for expressing affect or situation. Nor is the “sea of joys” syntactical construction unique in the Shakespeare canon. Besides Hamlet’s metaphorical sea, variations of the phrase are found in Henry VI Part 3 (“seas of tears” [2.5.106]), The Rape of Lucrece (“sea of care” [1100]), and King Henry VIII (“wild sea of my conscience” [2.4.197] and “sea of glory” [3.2.360]). In all occurrences the intent is the same: the suggestion of a “boundless expanse” or “indefinite quantity” usually affective or metaphorical.[9] Although “seas of tears” suggests deep sadness or remorse and “sea of glory” implies unlimited fame or recognition, neither imparts a level of affect matching the despair voiced in Hamlet’s soliloquy or the overwhelming bliss reflected in Pericles’s exclamation of joy. In Hamlet and Pericles, the construction’s use is less descriptive and more of an invitation. It is a call to experience emotion through the lens of watery power and flow, making these particular instances ripe for further analysis and exploration. Albert Cook, for example, considers “sea of troubles” metaphorically; he finds the phrase positions Hamlet against the boundless and immeasurable. Cook describes the prince as a “fixed point” spatially set against “something so large and inchoate, ‘a sea of troubles,’ as to seem infinite,” an argument gesturing to the breakdown of language in portraying such a situation.[10] Vincent Petronella, on the other hand, examines the linguistic importance of the phrase, parsing it in light of Hamlet’s indecision, delay, and ultimate intentions. Petronella declares, “The crucial phrase in the [soliloquy] is ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles,’” an observation pointing to not only the phrase’s textual significance but also the aqueous imagery used in its construction.[11]

Less ink has been spilled on “sea of joys,” but those addressing it include Suparna Roychoudhury and Arthur Kirsch.[12] Roychodhury reads “seas of joys” against “sea of troubles” and “this tempest in my mind” (King Lear 3.4.13) and remarks how the groupings, “proverbial in early modern writings, make up a dynamic tropological space, one supporting multiple views of subjectivity.”[13] Her observation supports my argument that not only would a watery reference like “sea of joys” have been known and accessible to early modern audiences, it has a flexibility allowing it to reflect various forms of affect (i.e., happiness, angst, sadness). Kirsch’s analysis of “sea of joys” moves from the flexibility of the phrase to its association with the sacred, and includes language such as: “The wish for a physical gash of pain…invokes the homilists’ warning against the extremity of emotions,” “litany of relationships,” and “holiness of worship.”[14] Kirsch’s findings are based on Christian teachings, but the numinous associations in the “sea of joys” scene also align with traditional beliefs in the sea’s mythic or god-like power. Making this secondary connection lends energy, agency, and intensity to the aqueous images and affective ecologies they suggest, especially Pericles’s hearing the music of the spheres and seeing Diana in a vision, metaphysical experiences that occur after his exclamation of joy.

Throughout this paper, my methodology resonates with Debapriya Sarkar’s view of close reading as a “thought experiment” that focuses attention on word choice and the myriad ways text can be generative of meanings outside the literal.[15] Using this process, I consider and expand on the affective ecologies surrounding the main characters in Pericles to reveal how effectively the trope of water textually embodies the representation of affect, a difficult and often exceptionally challenging endeavor when language proves inadequate. To quote Yates, when words are lacking, “tropes seed our discourses with possibilities for imagining our worlds differently.”[16] Similarly, watery images help fill in what Katherine Craik calls “the endlessly malleable spaces in Shakespeare’s works” and help reify affective experiences, whether fully psychological or mapped over the body and writ large to the point of physical trauma.[17] The actions Yates and Craik describe align with “trans-corporeality” as defined by Stacy Alaimo, “in which the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world…the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’”[18] This “inter-meshing” gestures to the watery tropes as they “seed” the “malleable spaces” of the text, generative interactions forming crucial threads that, like water, flow into one another. In Pericles, this flow is found in the sea’s continual presence, creating and foregrounding affective ecologies that wash over characters and situations, mimicking the flow of emotion in real life. As Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis state, “water offers a visceral experience of the transformations that all biota sense, both internally and in their surrounding environments.”[19] The aqueous threads in the play allow for a similarly intuitive response by the audience, but their mingling flow also helps indicate how deeply Pericles’s experience of grief and loss touches the shores of several kingdoms.

While these aqueous threads mirror the rise and fall of the action and keep the audience situated through their movement, the text’s watery images create accessible and shareable affective ecologies around the characters. These ecologies can merge with the experience of those both on and off stage, and their ability to ebb and flow connects with Gail Kern Paster’s foundational scholarship on the passions and the porosity of the humoral body. Emotional collectivities like these also resonate with the work of scholars such as Drew Daniel and Patricia Cahill via their descriptions of affect’s motion and shareability. Daniel observes, “Affects are movements, arcs of force that ramp up or down in intensity within material bodies as those bodies change their states, sometimes putting those bodies into motion, sometimes bringing them to rest,” and the fluctuations he describes makes the connection between affect and sea imagery clear.[20] Cahill’s work on trauma similarly maps over Pericles’s and Thaisa’s experiences as examples of “the affective force of the transactions between playgoers and plays in Elizabethan playhouses.”[21] In Pericles, for instance, moments of existential trauma incorporate aqueous imagery in some way: the storm surrounding Marina’s birth, the king fearing he will “drown[] in sweetness” during the reunion scene (5.1.184). The easily imagined physicality of these watery tropes generates an affective force and energy that intermeshes with readily understood, shareable emotions. Put simply, when the text breaks down or is inadequate to convey extreme affect, marine imagery makes it accessible.

The physicality of the watery tropes in Pericles also creates a sense of embodied affect. Rather than enduring only psychological oppression, the main characters are literally immersed in seas mirroring their flow of emotion: the Act 2 shipwreck echoes the king’s confusion and agitation after the riddle test in Act 1, and the Act 3 storm mimics his concern for Thaisa as she gives birth. In Act 4, the waters duplicate Pericles’s non-responsive state and renunciation of the world as described in Gower’s Chorus; they are seemingly uneventful as his ship drifts with the tides. These examples indicate how water’s physicality becomes the image of Pericles’s angst or apathy, creating an ecology audiences can quickly grasp and situating them in the character’s mindset and physical environment. Images such as these also point to how the trope of water in Pericles spans the tangible and affective, linking concepts of emotion with blue humanities thinking.

Water as both physical phenomenon and trope in the play signifies Pericles as physically beset by affective pressure and allows him to respond in kind. Mentz points to Pericles’s “struggle to maintain social and personal bonds in the face of sea-borne disruption” and his connection to larger narratives, including the human experience in general.[22] Pericles’s literal immersion and buffeting in the waves helps audiences understand his emotional struggle and empathize with his experience of embodied affect. Cahill describes a type of dramatic reenactment that “puts playgoers on the alert about their own somatic vulnerability,” and the physical interactions between bodies and sea in Pericles suggest this effect.[23] The king’s surviving shipwreck and Thaisa’s rescue from her sealed and submerged coffin, for example, likely reminded early modern audiences how encounters with water could be fraught with peril. A character’s immersion in or experience with the waves in Pericles therefore transcends expected outcomes and meteorological associations, creating a tangible sense of physical vulnerability, anguish, and (eventual) renewal.

Grappling with Emotion: Navigating Toward Pericles’s “Sea of Joys”

The text Pericles can be challenging for contemporary readers and audiences, as the setting moves quickly from city to city and the plot and place names, based on an ancient tale, can prove difficult to follow. The text has variously been called incoherent, incomplete, or a haphazard attempt to stitch Shakespeare’s Acts 3–5 with the opening acts now attributed to George Wilkins. In a somewhat meta turn, however, this textual unevenness seems apt since it gestures to the motion of waves and the tossing of emotions experienced by Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina.

Shakespeare and Wilkins deviate from their source texts, John Gower’s “The Tale of Apollonius of Tyre” (from Book VIII of his 1390 poem Confessio Amantis) and Laurence Twine’s 1576 prose novel The Patterne of Painefull Aduentures…, especially in their treatment of marine imagery. In both Gower and Twine, the sea is a geographical space serving mainly as background for the plot, with no connection to affect and no suggestion of participation. There is a sense that, to quote Helen Rozwadowski, “The fundamental quandary of the sea’s apparent timelessness makes it difficult […] to accept the unfamiliar view of the ocean as a place of dynamic change.”[24] Gower, however, appears as the Chorus in Shakespeare and Wilkins’s play, a cheeky move implying their newly adapted, more affective version has his approval and imprimatur. Gower as Chorus also ties into the more embodied aspect of their version. The poet appears in the flesh, rather than as a specter haunting the retelling of the tale; he becomes a “living relay,” as Yates calls Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part 2. Like Cade, Gower is “Bodied forth by an actor on stage or screen…[and] makes manifest the fictive process of giving voice or face to things.”[25] Gower’s presence spans past recountings of his Confessio Amantis, where the sea is merely a geographical space, and Shakespeare and Wilkins’s version, with its reliance on watery images to reflect emotional states. Gower as Chorus therefore suggests a convergence of past and “present” gesturing to blue humanities thinking via layers of legend, cultural significance, and participatory physicality.

In Act 1 of Pericles there is no indication water is for anything other than human utility, and its use aligns with early modern attempts to better understand and integrate the sea as useful tool while acknowledging its supernatural aspects.[26] Perhaps, however, the sea’s nondescript nature in Shakespeare and Wilkins’s opening act is better interpreted as the calm before the storm—in both the main character’s life and the play itself. Everything changes in Act 2 when (to quote Mentz) the “bodies hit the water.”[27] Lowell Duckert also observes that “when watery bodies materialize on the early modern stage, they indicate embodiments that push our ontological categories into stranger waters.”[28] Pericles’s shift from the known to the strange is rapid; his Act 2 shipwreck and immersion sets up a destabilizing affective ecology that follows him into the final act, leading to unexpected and unasked for transformations. In recounting the king’s shipwreck, Gower as Chorus notes the sea’s involvement but puts the onus on fortune: “…By waves from coast to coast is tossed. / …Till Fortune, tired with doing bad, / Threw him ashore to give him glad” (2.0.34, 37–38). Pericles’s response to the experience is to chide the powers for their carelessness (“Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man / Is but a substance that must yield to you” [2.1.2–3]), and his offhand mention of the waves suggests the sea holds less blame (“Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks, / Washed me from shore to shore, and left me breath / Nothing to think on but ensuing death” [2.1.5–7]). The juxtaposition of “cast” and “washed” hints at sudden ejection followed by gentle laving rather than sustained violence. Pericles’s tone is angry yet resigned, and his holding the sea relatively blameless may gesture to traditional views of the entity as too timeless to be concerned with “earthly man” and his physical limitations. In any event, Pericles’s first watery immersion clearly leaves him humbled and aware of his vulnerability, his affect a response to powerlessness when faced with the strength of natural forces and elements.

After his shipwreck Pericles encounters three fishermen, the first of several characters who act in ways best described as extensions of the sea. Their association with water informs their relationship with it, and they perform actions connected with the entity. The fishermen’s opening conversation, overheard by Pericles, posits the sea as a macrocosm mirroring the microcosm of humanity. Laurence Publicover notes how Pericles “registers—even celebrates—the manner in which these men look to sea to find land-based meanings” and how “for all its physical dangers, the sea has been brought under the fishermen’s conceptual control.”[29] This ability to in some manner control and understand the sea signals the men’s deep familiarity with its ways, a knowledge born of lifetime exposure. As if to confirm this relationship, when they notice Pericles the men speak of the sea as a mate, someone they know well and find amusing: “What a drunken knave was the sea to cast thee in our way!” (2.1.56–57). For the men, the sea is an occupational partner. They live near it and by it, respect its secrets, and carry a sense of the waves in their lives, bodies, and daily interactions.

The First Fisherman performs the initial sea-connected action that aids Pericles. Taking pity on the cold and exhausted man, he tells him, “…I have a gown here! Come, put it on, keep thee warm” (2.1.76–77). This act of compassion, as well as those of the other fishermen, likely saves Pericles; Maurice Hunt compares the three men to the Apostles, noting their “charity,” “kindness,” and stating Shakespeare “characterizes these honest laborers by their good hearts.”[30] These men do not ask who the stranger may be, they merely provide from their sea-related supplies. The gown the First Fisherman offers Pericles, for instance, is likely a seamen’s coat or other sea gear since the men are coming or going from their vessel. By clothing himself in this sea-related garment as protection from the cold and damp, the king wraps himself in the watery entity that will come to reflect his affective ecology. The First Fisherman’s act of generosity becomes a pivot point for Pericles’s relationship with the tides.

The correspondence between Pericles and the waves quickens when the Second and Third Fishermen find their net laden with a rusty set of armor, promptly identified by Pericles as once belonging to his father. The armor was, like Pericles, cast ashore, and seems a response to his new intimacy with the sea: consolation, perhaps, for the destruction of his ship and men. Not only do the tides provide what is necessary for participation in Simonides’s tournament, recovering the armor means Pericles can reclaim part of his history—and thereby his self. His evolving relationship with the waters becomes more noticeable upon recovering the armor, and his being clad in sea-provided fighting attire strengthens the play’s focus on the physical experience of affect. Although Pericles first decides the armor is sent by fortune, exclaiming “Thanks, Fortune, yet, that after all thy crosses / Thou givest me somewhat to repair myself” (2.1.117–118), he then ascribes its loss and recovery to the waters: “Till the rough seas, that spares not any man, / Took it in rage, though calmed have given’t again. / I thank thee for’t” (2.1.127–129). One may be forgiven for thinking “I thank thee for’t” is addressed to the sea, but his preface “An armour, friends” (2.1.116) suggests “thee” is one of the fishermen who pulled it ashore. Pericles does, however, assign the sea agency and participation, suggesting he considers it involved. The seas “took” the armor in their rage, he says, but when “calmed” gave it back. This observation hints at his perception of the waves and suggests an updated view of the water as participatory, one bordering on the mythic. In Pericles’s mind the sea becomes a place of considered movement and action, a place where lives can end, as with his crew, or become part of another reality, which he himself experiences.[31]

The fishermen are already cognizant of this reality, as they consider the sea an entity deserving of respect and gratitude and see their own work and partnership with the waters in a similar light. When Pericles receives the rusty armor, the Second Fisherman reminds him:

…twas we that made up this garment through the rough
seams of the waters. There are certain condolements, certain

vails, I hope sir, if you thrive you’ll remember from whence
you had them. (2.1.144–149)

His lines point out how the fishermen “made,” or made manifest, the armor, bringing it up between the waves, “the rough seams of the waters.” The tides may have pushed it towards the shore, but the men, working in tandem with the waters, brought the armor into being. A certain recompense is expected, but it is not stipulated who should be the recipient. Pericles’s response, “Believe it, I will” (2.1.149), is unclear; does he address the men or the waters? According to C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, in Pericles, “Neptune takes away, and again Neptune restores, without accountability, seemingly without reason,” but there is no indication the king is fully of this mind.[32] He is admonished, however, to remember how he received the things that allow him to attempt amendment of his fortune.

When Pericles realizes he lacks “a pair of bases,” or the skirts covering from where the upper armor stops to the knee, the Second Fisherman quickly proposes a sea-related solution: “Thou shalt have my best gown to make thee a pair, and I’ll bring thee to the court myself” (2.1.158–160). Whether this is his best sea-gown or a different article of clothing, this sea-adjacent garment will complete Pericles’s new-found armor. The fabric, imbued with its owner’s watery occupation, will keep the sea with the king by proxy, becoming part of his attempt to recover the losses of his shipwreck. Through his offer to personally take Pericles to the court, the Second Fisherman serves as an extension of the entity. His presence means a sense of the waves will accompany Pericles on the trek, keeping his new-forged connection with the sea in place.

Nearly all Pericles’s associates connect with water, and therefore his affective ecology, through their proximity to the shore, turns of phrase, or physical encounters with the tides. Helicanus, the friend and trusted lord Pericles leaves in charge of the kingdom during his absence, wants nothing more than his monarch’s speedy return. The other lords, growing restless, request Helicanus either find Pericles or assume full reign. His reply associates him with Pericles’s recent watery experience: “I leap into the seas” (2.4.44). This choice of phrase subtly connects Helicanus with his friend and king, confirming his willingness to emulate Pericles as well as give himself fully to the search. Similarly, before her physical encounter with the waves in Act 3, Thaisa is linked to the sea via her veneration of Diana, goddess of the moon (and by extension, the tides).[33] Caroline Bicks remarks on Diana’s importance to the text, calling her a “persistent feature” of the play, a prominence usually attributed to the goddess’s association with chastity and purity rather than her connection with the moon and tides.[34] After pointing out that Gower and Twine only mention Diana twice in their texts (both times in association with her temple), Bicks pushes back against traditional analyses of Pericles, arguing that confining Diana to goddess of the chaste strips Thaisa of her agency in choosing “a vestal livery” (3.4.9).[35] In Shakespeare and Wilkins’s play, all three main characters call on Diana; clearly she is more than simply protector of chastity and purity. Although the goddess’s first mention references virgins’ devotion—Simonides tells Thaisa’s suitors, “One twelvemoons more [Thaisa will] wear Diana’s livery, / This by the eye of Cynthis hath she vowed” (2.5.10–11)—allying Thaisa with the goddess of the moon subtly cements the girl’s association with the tides and sea, confirming her as an appropriate match for the similarly-connected Pericles.

The couple’s individual correspondences with the moon and sea suggest their coming together forges an even stronger relationship with the watery elements. Act 3 reifies this connection by showing Pericles shipboard, ranting at a raging storm, while below deck Thaisa gives birth to their child. The main characters’ affective ecologies truly begin to take shape and overlap during this scene, as the danger equally imperils father, mother, and newborn baby. Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis state, “Our spatial and temporal relations to water may seem unintelligible, unruly, and vague, but they are also full of disturbing potential.”[36] This is exactly the family’s situation: the stormy sea surrounds them and appears in control, creating a frightening, destabilizing situation with no way of escape. Pericles beseeches the elements, but they are unreadable, chaotic, and their intention opaque. The family’s experience could go either way, but the likely aftermath is anguish or loss.

Pericles’s Act 2 shipwreck showed him how little agency human beings have in the face of natural elements, so he knows what immersion in the water can bring. His first encounter with the waves may have seemed miraculous to early modern audiences since shipwreck or falling into deep water often meant certain death. The Act 3 storm, however, holds additional peril for Thaisa: childbirth. During Pericles’s rage at the elements, he calls on Lucina, Diana’s name when invoked by women in labor. Invoking Diana/Lucina was surely not only for Thaisa’s protection through the birth but also a recognition of Diana as goddess of the tides. He also calls on Neptune, “the god of this great vast,” to “rebuke these surges” (3.1.1) and beseeches the gods of the wind and thunder to stay their fury. His desperate cries to these mythic and natural powers evince more intensity and less despondency than his scolding after the Act 2 shipwreck. According to Mentz, while the earlier storm gestures to the “hand of Fortune,” the Act 3 event points to “hostile Fortune” and Pericles’s “more intimate interrelationship with the violent waters.”[37] Indeed, it is during the Act 3 storm that Pericles’s emotional state begins to cleave to and manifest as concurrent with the physical representation of the tides. He rages, the waves rage. He finds stasis; they find calm. Pericles’s affective ecology, and that of the other characters, begins to shift, and transformations happen. There is the existential change, in that Pericles becomes a father and grieving widow; the metaphysical change, via Thaisa’s near-death experience; and the physical change, through the birth of Marina. The hand of Fortune may have turned hostile, but the affective ecologies it encourages are integral to who the characters will become in the final act.

The Master and sailors witness these transformations and participate in that of Thaisa. Like the Fishermen in Act 2, they act as extensions of the entity, facilitators for the affective ecologies that begin to grow more oppressive and fully surround the main characters. They too respect the sea’s secrets and laws, leading the Master to insist Thaisa’s body must go overboard: “The sea works high, the wind is loud and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead” (3.1.47-49). Pericles scoffs, calling it “your superstition” (3.1.50), but Thaisa is placed in a coffin with spices, jewels, cloth of state, and a letter detailing her identity before being committed to the deep.[38] Despite Pericles’s hesitation, the waters are apparently satisfied: the storm is not mentioned again. As he watches Thaisa’s coffin sink, Pericles laments that her body now belongs to the tides:

…for a monument upon thy bones
And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale
And humming water must o’erwhelm they corpse,
Lying with simple shells.  (3.1.61–64)

His words describe a living sea, alive with light (“aye-remaining lamps”), sound (“humming water”), and movement (“the belching whale”). Pericles’s description of Thaisa’s coffin lying among “simple shells” in this softly active environment is emotional and filled with loss, but strangely comforting as he envisions the waters gently taking his wife and settling her body with care.[39] Pericles pictures Thaisa’s body becoming part of the sea’s physical ecology, her perceived death becoming part of his affective ecology.

The waves, however, do not incorporate Thaisa and quickly expel her coffin. The waters’ rejection of the coffin, as well as subsequent events in the play, point to the validity of Duckert’s statement, “all early modern waterscapes are…transitional areas.”[40] The three main characters are now in the midst of drastic existential transitions, changes reflected by their 3.1 encounters with the sea. Thaisa is transformed from newly-married wife and mother to perceived widow to votaress; her watery grave, coffin’s expulsion, and resultant life changes suggesting Duckert’s transitional area affects her both physically and psychologically. Like the Act 2 recovery of the armor, the waves’ rejection of Thaisa’s coffin also hints at the presence of a participatory entity with the agency to direct events. Indeed, the servant finding the coffin gestures to this idea when he tells Cerimon, “I never saw so huge a billow, sir, / As tossed it upon the shore” (3.2.53–54). The implication is one of an action done with purpose, the waves quickly clearing the sea of the coffin with the believed-dead woman inside. Cerimon’s response agrees with this assessment and adds to the waters’ involvement: “If the sea’s stomach be o’ercharged with gold, / ‘Tis a good constraint of fortune / It belches upon us” (56–58). Belching, of course, recalls the whale hovering near Thaisa’s watery burial, but here it refers to the sea ridding itself of a surfeit or unwanted thing. This casting out also mimics Marina’s birth, the coffin ejected from the womb of the sea just as a baby is expelled from the body of its mother. The rejection of the coffin is arguably Thaisa’s rebirth, prefacing the transitions imposed by her encounter with the waterscape and creating a new ecology to map over her existing affect.

After the Act 3 storm, no watery encounters hinder Pericles. His learning of the perceived death of Marina—the event that drives him to despair—takes place on land. Although Marina’s name and shipboard nativity give her an obvious association with the tides, after her stormy birth the text does not show her in conjunction with the waves. Perhaps this suggests that, like Ophelia, Marina has “Too much of water” (Hamlet 4.7.183) and placing her on the sea would merely fuse her with the entity. Instead, sea-adjacent events maintain the girl’s relationship with the waves. When orchestrating Marina’s murder, for instance, Dionyza instructs Leonine to walk with the girl near the “sea-margin” or sea’s edge (Pericles 4.1.25). Rather than being killed, however, Marina is kidnapped by pirates: men of the sea seize a child of the sea. Leonine, her would-be executioner, then states, “I’ll swear she’s dead / And thrown into the sea” (94–95). For the audience, his remark gestures to both Thaisa’s fate and Pericles’s earlier experience of immersion in the waves. Although Marina does not endure submersion or shipwreck, her aqueous proximity suggests a connection to her parents’ affective ecologies and offers the promise of reunion.

The perceived loss of Marina causes Pericles to take to the water once more. He appears to have forgotten his previous experiences with shipwreck and storms, or in his despair, welcomes their risk of death. His return to the sea is both physical and psychological; Gower’s 4.4 Chorus describes him as “bear[ing] / A tempest which his mortal vessel tears” (29–30). Pericles’s affective ecology breaks through the mind-body boundary, merging and cresting like crashing waves—an intermeshing recalling Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality” where body and environment seem to become one.[41] The emotion he feels for those believed dead becomes embodied, and unlike the other storms he has experienced, rages only “in his mortal vessel.” Through his affective ecology, Pericles seems to “become” the sea, bearing inside the memories of past tempests and wrecks. He no longer has the strength or desire to impose his agency on the waves, and Gower’s explanation that after leaving Tarsus, the king “bear[s] his courses to be ordered / by Lady Fortune” (4.4.47–48)—and not the tides—effaces the water’s importance. Pericles may feel the seas of affect surging inside of him are too strong to trust navigating the physical waves. The tides’ mirroring his present emotions, as they did in past encounters, would endanger his ship and crew.

If Pericles’s affect led him to “become” a stormy sea, his subsequent renunciation of the world attempts to calm or stay this inner tempest. He refuses sustenance and takes to his cabin, likely finding comfort drifting near the ecology he believes incorporated Thaisa’s coffin. By dissociating from the world, Pericles attempts to still the storms raging inside of him. Mentz points to the analogous relationship between bodies of water and human bodies, and by extension, the correlation of our interior tides with whatever tidal motion surrounds us.[42] Pericles’s renunciation aligns with Mentz’s observation, as do previous images of the waters reflecting the king’s inner torment. Gower recounts in Chorus 5, “…we left him on the sea. We there him lost / Whence driven before the winds, he is arrived / Here where his daughter dwells…” (13–15). Gower’s uneventful description of the sea suggests Pericles’s apparent success in calming his affective tempest; the tides seem to mirror his stillness and bear his ship without loss or harm.

Despite drifting aimlessly, Pericles’s vessel conveys him to healing when it arrives at Mytilene during the city’s celebration of “the god Neptune’s annual feast” (5.1.17). With this mention of Neptune, Shakespeare and Wilkins once more hint at the idea of a participatory entity. In Pericles, to reference the earlier Barber and Wheeler observation, Neptune gives and takes at will. Delivering Pericles’s free-floating ship to a port celebrating the sea god is, as Bernhard Klein points out, not “entirely free of metaphor” or “to be understood as [a] moment[] of full textual transparency.”[43] The vessel’s arrival in Mytilene during the festival instead situates Neptune as a part of Pericles and Marina’s reunion, as Diana will be later in the scene. Uniting father and daughter shipboard also allows the mayor of the city, Lysimachus, to act as bridge between land and water. Lysimachus puts into action events that turn the family’s churning waters of pain into pools of relief and bliss, bringing solidity and calm to the tempest of affective ecologies surrounding them.

The success of the mayor’s suggestion that Marina might cure the grieving king sparks an existential shift Pericles can only voice through watery tropes. His words mix suffering and redemption, happiness and concern:

…put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness. (5.1.181–184)

Pericles’s affective tides are turning with such intensity he feels imperiled. The flow of happiness is too great, and his cry is one of bliss mingled with fear: the surge of affect threatens him physically. His tempest of pain is now a tempest of joy, the physical presence of his loved one generating an all-enveloping emotional response. Language is inadequate, so he turns to aqueous tropes, speaking of waters “rushing in” to “o’erbear” and “drown” him. In his ecstasy, Pericles relies on marine imagery, drawing from his experiences with the sea to mirror his intensity of emotion. Water moves from phenomenon to trope, physical reflection to literary device.

The surge of affect has not crested, however, as Pericles’s newly joyful ecology fills with the numinous, overflowing his body. He hears the music of the spheres and, in a vision, sees Diana directing him to her temple. These encounters reflect the fullness of his affective tides, and his sudden shift from renunciation to full participation aligns with Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis’s argument “that waters enable lively possibility even as they exceed current understandings.”[44] Pericles’s affective ecology, as mirrored by watery elements, shows him the way to bliss and fulfillment beyond his imagination: reunion with Thaisa and the restoration of his family. Just as the festival of Neptune was an apt background for the meeting of father and daughter, Diana’s temple is a fitting space for resolution of the family’s watery tale. The characters’ affective and physical seas appear tamed; the waves no longer need mirror the characters’ affect, and the final scene includes no tidal catalyst, provider, or imagery. The sea once more fades to background or setting, and the change is implicit in Gower’s epilogue: “In Pericles, his queen and daughter seen, / Although assailed with Fortune fierce and keen” (8.3–4). There is no mention of the sea’s participation, and the entity is not mentioned again.

Seas of Joys, the Blue Humanities, and Aqueous Affective Ecologies

Reading Pericles with attention to sea imagery underscores the usefulness of aqueous tropes in the creation and expansion of affective ecologies. Pericles experiences the sea physically, as do most around him; if not directly immersed in the waves, the characters in the play have a strong connection with the water, making their lives by or near it. Their lives are shaped by this bond, even enriched. Pericles’s recurring references to Diana, goddess of the moon and therefore the tides, show a different connection with the waves—metaphysical but undeniably deep, since Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina’s devotion to the goddess arguably sustains, guides, and strengthens them as they navigate their seas of affect.

Although the grouping “sea of” is not unique to either Pericles or Shakespeare in general, its use allows an examination of how wide-ranging and flexible watery tropes can be in conveying the experience of intense emotion. Recognizing the construction’s capacity to suggest a spectrum of responses expands on the conversation surrounding representations of affect, especially as this relates to the aqueous elements’ ability to make emotion more accessible to actor and audience. Paster’s findings on the correlation and intermeshing of the humoral body and environment are important to understanding the creation of these shareable ecologies and how they map over the language of a text. In light of Paster’s work, water’s use as a physical reflection of Pericles’s intense affect and psychological state is more easily parsed; it makes clear marine tropes are effective literary tools when syntactical constructions and word choice prove inadequate. Marine imagery appears to connect with individuals in a visceral way, incorporating personal and cultural experiences with traditional beliefs and physical phenomena. The resulting blend creates a shareable affective response that moves with the plot rather than remaining static, creating ecologies that surround and intermesh in myriad ways.

Tropes such as those in Pericles indicate movement and engagement, whether between physical bodies or psychological states, and echo water’s ability to circulate and find its own level. The flow of emotion moves in a similar way, both currents carrying stores of what Daniel calls “potential energy.”[45] This combination of energy and motion points to the unabated power described by Mentz when he writes, “storms fracture understanding, and it is by breaking existing structures that they reveal hidden truths.”[46] In Pericles, the main characters all experience the painful destruction of existing emotional structures. Pericles’s life as monarch of Tyre completely changes after his shipwreck and the perceived losses of Thaisa and Marina; Thaisa becomes a votress mourning her husband and daughter; Marina grieves for her parents and the family life she never knew. The characters’ affective ecologies grow and change as their experiences are parsed and shattered, a breakage allowing for examination of their situations in a different light. As Yates remarks, “Each tropic performance remains tuned to its respective historical moment but also and always turns toward an aesthetic (sensory) domain…that offers a potential or energetics regardless of…time and place.”[47] Lived pain and isolation viewed through the lens of a character’s affective ecology can similarly encourage emotional participation between actor and audience—regardless of time or place. In the case of Pericles, the apparent catalyst is water as trope, its physicality and flow a reflection of life, emotion, and the ecology of being human.

Accordingly, in line with Yates, I find watery tropes such as those in Pericles “constitute something like an infragenre or switchboard that subsists within and without texts of all kinds, whose surfaces they anchor, interrupt, deform, or cause to ripple.”[48] The substance of water, its physical properties of wetness, depth, and flow, is important to its use as literary device. This physicality, tangible to audiences both then and now, is experienced through immersion, imbibing, and the need for hydration. On a cultural level, past associations, legends, and traditional beliefs shade watery images and allusions. Pirates and fishermen, for instance, add color to the sea imagery in Pericles, but on a more quondam level, early modern theatregoers may have hired watermen to ferry them across the Thames. For contemporary audiences, marine imagery is personalized through water as a source of travel, work, or recreation. Despite early modern access to sound effects suggesting storms or rain—and our now-ubiquitous computer-generated technology—there remains no easy way to stage a storm-tossed sea or physically submerge an actor in the waves. The audience must use their imagination to experience what the character feels, virtually immersing themselves in a form of participation with the tale.

Discussions regarding water and affect are not new to early modern scholarship, but it is important to point to examples and consider what they bring to a text. In Pericles, watery tropes provide a nuance and richness combining the representation of affect with the cultural concerns and interdisciplinary explorations of the blue humanities. The play incorporates the physicality of water, traditions associated with the sea, and its importance for travel, exploration, and existence. Beyond these aspects, marine tropes help advance the plot, impart emotion, and make the characters’ experience more accessible to actor and audience. Their use gestures to Mentz’s understanding of blue humanities thinking: “a poetics of planetary water aims to clarify the relationships between humans and water in all its forms and phases” and “combines water with human ideas.”[49] This mindset reads across art, history, and scholarship to engage with interdisciplinary and intertextual ideas that explore our relationship with aquatic elements. Considering Pericles with these aims in mind not only reveals the text’s richly layered use of watery tropes but also suggests fresh ways to plumb or express human emotion.

It is evident that Shakespeare and Wilkins departed from their sources in their use of watery imagery. The resulting portrayal more fully conveys the experience of affect and the human response to psychological pressure via its blend of mental anguish and actual physicality. Marine imagery is key to this mix, an ecology of poetic language, water as phenomenon, and cultural significance. In turn, this rich, affective layering invites individual interpretation of the ways existential pain and angst can manifest in a body and mind. Through this use of aqueous tropes, the characters’ experiences are more accessible and compelling: evidence that the conjunction of affect theory, the blue humanities, and tropology offers enduring insight into mind, body, and emotion.

NOTES

Dedicated to my mother-in-law, Nancy Reese Rojas Rodgers, who lost her struggle with Alzheimer’s the day I began writing this paper. The disease took her ability to express her seas of affect, but now she rests in calmer waters.

My gratitude and appreciation to Amy L. Tigner, Hillary Nunn, and my two reviewers for their suggestions and comments on previous versions of this paper. I cannot thank you enough.

[1] All Pericles references taken from the Arden third series: Pericles, edited by Suzanne Gossett, (London: Arden, 2005).

[2] All Hamlet references taken from the Arden third series: Hamlet: Revised Edition, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, (London: Arden, 2016).

[3] For examples of the wide range of scholarship on affect and Pericles, see S. R. A. Waters, “Disrupted Dialogues: Exploring Misgendered Diagnoses and Experiences of Melancholia and Depression Through the Lens of Pericles and Contemporary Psychiatric Practice,” Shakespeare 17, no. 3 (2021): 296–317; Lowell Duckert, “Pericles’s Deep Ecology,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 59, no. 2 (2019): 367–81; Michael Witmore, “Phenomenology and Sensation: Shakespeare, Sensation, and Renaissance Existentialism,” Criticism 54, no. 3 (2012): 419–26; Kay Stockholder, “Sex and Authority in Hamlet, King Lear, and Pericles,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 18, no. 3 (1985): 17–29; Frederick Kiefer, “Art, Nature, and the Written Word in Pericles,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1991): 207-25; Grace Tiffany, “’Action May / Conveniently the Rest Convey’: Shakespeare and the Stage Translation of Gower,” English Studies  96, no. 8 (2015): 880–90; Sarah Beckwith, “The Recovery of Voice in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” chapter four in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2011); Gregg Andrew Hurwitz, “A Tempest, A Birth, and Death: Freud, Jung, and Shakespeare’s Pericles,” Sexuality and Culture 6 (2002): 3–73; Jessica Martin, “Shakespeare’s Pericles and Psalm 39,” Theology 117, no. 6 (2014): 411–416.

[3] Albert Cook, “Space and Culture,” New Literary History 29 (1998): 551–572 [567].

[4] Steve Mentz, An Introduction to the Blue Humanities, (NY: Routledge, 2024 [Google Books preview]), 1996.

[5] Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, [1942], translated by Edith R. Farrell, (Dallas TX: The Dallas Institute, 1983), 5, 6.

[6] Julian Yates, Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Google Books, no page number available: “Impression” (section head: “Multispecies Impressions”).

[7] In Hamlet, the interaction about cloud forms gestures to the futility of Polonius’s attempt to nail down or probe Hamlet’s behavior (3.2.367–373). Interpretation of affect, like clouds or vapor, is ever-changing. What one feels is not always easy to grasp or properly define, and one may also dissemble one’s affect to mislead, manipulate, or placate another. (See also Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.2–14 in which clouds suggest existential or life changes rather than affect.)

[8] Peter Stallybrass, “Against Thinking,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1580–1587 [1581].

[9] Compare “ocean, n.3a”. OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed September 2023. An EEBO search of “ocean of” from 1590–1616 shows use by authors such as Thomas Kyd (“To drowne thee with an ocean of my teares” [sig. D3r], The Spanish Tragedie Containing the Lamentable End of Don Horatio, and Bel-Imperia: With the Pittifull Death of Olde Hieronimo. London: 1592); John Lyly (“in endlesse Ocean of expected ioyes” [sig. Biiiv], The Vvoman in the Moone as it was Presented before Her Highnesse. by Iohn Lyllie Maister of Artes. London: 1597); Thomas Middleton (“If such a boundlesse Ocean of good deeds” [12.2], “But breakes into the ocean of deceit” [14.2], The Wisdome of Solomon Paraphrased. Written by Thomas Middleton [Bible. O.T. Apocrypha. Wisdom of Solomon.]. London: 1597); Thomas Nashe (“Out of the Ocean of aduersitie” [sig. D1r], A Pleasant Comedie, Called Summers Last Will and Testament. Written by Thomas Nash [Summer’s last will and testament]. London: 1600); and Ben Jonson (“Vnto the boundlesse ocean of thy bewtie” [sig. M1r], Euery Man in His Humor as it Hath Beene Sundry Times Publickly Acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine His Seruants. Written by Ben. Iohnson. London: 1601). Clearly, writers attempting to express extreme affect or other abstractions found evoking the vast expanse of the ocean or sea useful.

[10] Cook, “Space and Culture,” New Literary History 29 (1998): 551–572 [567].

[11] Vincent Petronella, “Hamlet’s ‘To Be or Not to Be’ Soliloquy: Once More Unto the Breach,” Studies in Philology 71, no. 1 (January 1974): 72–88 [79].

[12] Suparna Roychoudhury, “Mental Tempests, Seas of Trouble: The Perturbations of Shakespeare’s Pericles,” ELH 82, no. 4 (2015): 1013–39; Arthur Kirsch, “’Twixt Two Extremes of Passion, Joy and Grief’: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Last Plays,” Yale Review 103, no. 1 (2015): 26–47.

[13] Roychoudhury, “Mental Tempests,” 1013-14.

[14] Kirsch, “’Twixt Two Extremes,” 38.

[15] Debapriya Sarkar, Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 7.

[16] Yates, Sheep, Google Books, no page number available: “Impression” (section head: “Multispecies Impressions”).

[17] Katherine A. Craik, “Introduction,” in Shakespeare and Emotion; edited by Katherine A. Craik, (Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 2020). Google Books, no page number available: “Introduction: I.”

[18] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, (Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 2010), 2.

[19] Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, Thinking with Water, (Montreal: McGIll-Queen’s UP, 2013), 5.

[20] Drew Daniel, “Early Modern Affect Theory, Racialized Aversion, and the Strange Case of Foetor Judaicus,” in Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle, (Tempe AZ: ACMRS Press, 2022), 57–75 [59].

[21] Patricia Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 208), 9.

[22] Mentz, Bottom, 70.

[23] Patricia Cahill, “The Feel of the Slaughterhouse: Affective Temporalities and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris,” in Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form, edited by Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 155–76 [167–168].

[24] Helen M. Rozwadowski, Vast Expanses: A History of the Oceans, (London: Reaktion Books, 2018), 11.

[25] Yates, Sheep, Google Books, no page number available: “Impression” (section head: “Skin Memories”).

[26] Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization,1550–1790, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), xxvii.

[27] Steve Mentz, “God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of Ocean in Early Modern England and America,” in Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Carl Thompson, (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77–91 [79].

[28] Lowell Duckert, For All Waters: Finding Ourselves in Early Modern Wetscapes, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Google Books, no page number available: “Enter, Wet” (section head: “Thames”).

[29] Laurence Publicover, “Pericles’s Humming Waters: Nonhuman Agency, Textual Criticism, and the Practice of Material Ecocriticism,” Shakespeare Quarterly 73, no. 3–4 (Winter 2022): 280–302 [284, 285].

[30] Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s Pericles and the Acts of the Apostles,” Christianity and Literature 49, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 295-309 [300].

[31] Lowell Duckert, “Imaginary Worlds,” in A Cultural History of the Sea, Vol. 3: A Cultural History of the Sea in the Renaissance, edited by Steve Mentz, (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 205–34 [207].

[32] C. L. Barber and Richard Wheeler, “Excerpt from ‘The Masked Neptune,’” in Pericles: Critical Essays, edited by David Skeele, (New York and London: Garland, 2000), 147–63 [147].

[33] There is much discussion of the matter available online, but consensus is the moon’s influence on the tides was first bruited in the 2nd century BCE (perhaps earlier): “The tides of the Atlantic Ocean have been observed since ancient times. Medieval monks recorded tidal movements along the coast of England as early as 600 CE and correctly understood the relationship between the tides and the position of the sun and the phases of the moon.” Britannica Academic, s.v. “Atlantic Ocean: Tides.” Accessed September 2023.

[34] Caroline Bicks, “Backsliding at Ephesus: Shakespeare’s Diana and the Churching of Women,” in Pericles: Critical Essays, 205-227 [205].

[35] Bicks, “Backsliding at Ephesus,” 205.

[36] Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis, Thinking with Water, 8.

[37] Mentz, Bottom, 80.

[38] Pericles’s response to the Master is perplexing. Does he scoff at the sea and elements having agency—despite his experience with the Fishermen and his father’s armor? Or does he efface this belief and reply from a place of love and attachment to Thaisa (and the desire to give her a queen’s burial)? There is no clear answer.

[39] Compare Clarence’s nightmare vision of the sea bottom in Richard III (1.4.9–33 [Arden Third Series, edited by James R. Siemon, 2009) and Ariel’s fraught representation of sea-change in The Tempest (1.2.397–403 [Arden Third Series, Revised Edition, edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, 2011]). Pericles’s wistful, calming vision of a welcoming sea bottom arguably suggests his more comfortable association with the waters.

[40] Duckert, For All Waters, Google Books, no page number available: “Enter, Wet” (section head: “Thames”).

[41] Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2.

[42] Mentz, An Introduction, 1987.

[43] Bernhard Klein, “The Sea in Pericles,” in Shakespeare and Space: Theatrical Explorations of the Spatial Paradigm, edited by Ina Habermann and Michelle Witen, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 121–140 [132].

[44] Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis, Thinking with Water, 4.

[45] Daniel, “Early Modern Affect Theory,” 59.

[46] Steve Mentz, “Hurricanes, Tempests, and the Meteorological Globe,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, edited by Evelyn Tribble and Howard Marchitello, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 257–76 [267].

[47] Yates, Sheep, Google Books, no page number available: “Impression” (section head: “Multispecies Impressions”).

[48] Yates, Sheep, Google Books, no page number available: “Impression” (section head: “Multispecies Impressions”).

[49] Mentz, An Introduction, 1995.