The Rapture of the Sea

Abstract

The word ‘rapture’ is an emendation. The original text of Pericles — a very corrupt text — reads ‘the rupture of the Sea’. It is George Wilkins’s prose version of the play, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, which gives us ‘rapture’: ‘a Jewel, whom all the raptures of the sea could not bereave from his arme ... .’² Neither ‘rapture’ not ‘rupture’ is common in Shakespeare. The word ‘rapture’, which here would mean a violent seizure, is only used by Shakespeare to mean a seizure of a different kind — delirium, or enchantment. The word ‘rupture’ occurs only twice: once in the medical sense, and once almost as a metaphor of the medical sense, to indicate a breach in personal relations — between Angelo and Mariana in Measure for Measure — which Isabella is to ‘heal’. The hesitation between ‘rapture’ and ‘rupture’, like the hesitation between ‘solid’ and ‘sullied’ in Hamlet, is a fertile uncertainty. Robbery, separation, and enchantment are all included in the power of the sea, which at this moment in the play has relented and given up to the shipwrecked Pericles a jewelled armour, his inheritance from his father. I propose in this essay to compare the theme of the recovery of undersea riches in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton.

And, spite of all the rapture of the sea, This jewel holds his building on my arm.

(Pericles, 2.i.155–6)¹