Incest
The riddle that Pericles solves reveals the dark secret of Antiochus and his daughter being involved in an incestuous relationship. Later, the audience learns that both the king and his daughter are burned to death by the gods. On a more figurative level, Cleon and Dionyza are implicated as incestuous when their love for their daughter is manifested in murderous jealousy of an innocent. Sure enough, Cleon and Dionyza also wind up among the dead. Incest in the play therefore symbolizes an abuse of power, which contrasts starkly with the leadership of Simonides and Pericles.
Virginity
Marina exhibits a remarkable ability to maintain her chastity in the face of many who buy it or take it by force. Just as incest is the sin that the gods cannot abide, virginity is a symbol of virtue that the gods cannot deny and are moved to protect. Marina’s defense of her maidenhood is the only act that comes close to an exercise in free will, but since the construction of the play fosters the idea that it is the gods who are protecting her, even this becomes an act of submitting to predetermined destiny.
The Pirates
The sudden arrival and equally rapid departure of the pirates as agents in the narrative is perhaps the most famous element of Pericles. The pirates are never alluded to prior to arriving and mentioned just once in passing by Marina after they leave. Total stage time for the buccaneers is about as long as it takes to speak around fifteen lines of dialogue. And yet, despite this minimal presence, they wield enormous influence over the course of events. Whether one sees them as a type of deus ex machina or not, their introduction into events eventually results in changes in the story and the characters. They are the symbol of utterly random yet utterly predetermined fate that guides human destiny.
Tennis
The concept that man is subject to the fates is situated quickly but effectively in the conversation Pericles has with the fishermen who attend to him following his shipwreck at Pentapolis. Perhaps for the first time, but definitely not for the last, tennis becomes the symbolic playground in describing man as he relates to external forces defining his fate. In reply to what kind of man Pericles is that the sea has cast him out of the waters, he says: "A man whom both the waters and the wind, / In that vast tennis-court, have made the ball" (2.1), emphasizing his sense of lost free will.
Storms
Storms and tempests are both symbolically and literally the agents of uncontrollable fate that determine destiny. It is during a tempest while aboard a ship at sea that Pericles becomes a father and a widower in the same moment. Before that, it was a storm that wrecked his ship and washed him ashore at Pentapolis where he would go to meet the woman who would become his bride and Marina’s mother. Marina recognizes the symbolic role played by storms when she acknowledges the part they have played in her fate and destiny: "Born in a tempest, when my mother died, / This world to me is like a lasting storm, / Whirring me from my friends" (4.1).
