Moldy Pericles

This essay adopts Ben Jonson’s famous disparagement of  Pericles  as a “mouldy tale” in order to explore an important yet overlooked material prosthesis of poetic authority in the late medieval and early modern period: the tomb. Aiming to work around the critical preoccupation with the authorship of  Pericles , I argue that, in contrast to modern, post-Romantic models of abstracted literary genius, the choric figure of Gower represents a premodern tradition wherein the graves of dead poets offer fertile ground, and their tomb monuments solid foundations, for the simultaneous dissolution and rebirth of poets. Moldy tales arising from moldy tombs thus find convention and innovation to be not agonistically opposed but fruitfully — if perhaps incestuously — interdependent.