Summary
Gower enters to inform audiences of the passage of time: Pericles has reclaimed his title as King of Tyre, Thaisa is a priestess in Ephesus, and Marina has grown into a beautiful young woman in Tarsus.
However, Cleon and Dionyza have a daughter of their own, but she is not as beautiful as Marina and Dionyza becomes very jealous. She decides to hire Leonine, a murderer, to kill Marina.
After the death of Marina's nurse, Lychordia, Leonine offers to take a walk with her to help her grieve. There, he informs Marina that he plans to kill her.
She begs him to spare her, but the two are soon interrupted by a hoard of rogue pirates. They kidnap Marina, and Leonine decides to tell Dionyza that he killed her and threw her into the sea. The pirates take Marina to Myteline on the island of Lesbos, where they sell her to owners of a brothel. Marina is devastated but resolves to remain a virgin.
In Tarsus, Cleon is worried about what Pericles will do when he finds out his daughter is dead. Dionyza convinces him to build a monument to Marina so that it appears she died naturally and they mourned her appropriately.
Gower enters, introducing another dumb show in which Pericles arrives in Tarsus to discover that Marina is dead. He resolves never to cut his hair or wash his face again.
Back in Myteline, Marina is posing a problem for the brothel owners, as she convinces every potential client to pursue a more virtuous path. One of these clients is Lysimachus, the disguised governor. He falls in love with Marina and leaves her alone, which angers one of the brothel owners so much that he attempts to rape her. Marina in turn convinces him to free her from her station as a prostitute.
Analysis
Act Four of the play is unique, in that it switches focus from the titular character, Pericles, to instead follow his now adult daughter, Marina. Indeed, the only moment of Act Four when audiences really see Pericles is the dumb show when he discovers Marina's tomb in Tarsus. Aside from that brief moment, this act is entirely dedicated to the trials and challenges that Marina faces as a beautiful, young, virginal woman who has been separated from her parents.
Like Pericles, Marina is an innocent person who suffers at the hands of others – first Dionyza, in her plot to murder Marina, and then the brothel owners who exploit her and try to make money off of her virginal status. Marina's plot trajectory is, however, an unexpected one, and it stands in stark contrast to that of Pericles who sees only misfortune for most of his life.
Instead of giving herself over willingly to her fate as a prostitute, Marina intervenes and flips the power dynamic of the brothel, encouraging the clientele to pursue more ethical forms of pleasure and entertainment. In an entertaining twist, Marina becomes a problem for the brothel owners rather than their greatest asset.
In this way, the play sets up Marina as a foil to her own father. She assumes power over her own life because of her dedication to preserving her virginity, while the young Pericles appeared to passively absorb the trauma that befell him. It would seem that Marina has already matured into an ethical and effective leader on her own, and the play suggests that this keen sense of leadership has been inherited from her father despite the fact that she has not seen him for many years.
Marina's behavior therefore emphasizes the play's argument that familial bonds are stronger than any external force, and that even families who have been parted are still indelibly connected to one another. Through its extended focus on Marina, the play showcases how parents "live on" through their children even when they are physically absent.
