"If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts": Stephen argues that the experiences responsible for the bitterness and anger in Shakespeare's great tragedies reveal themselves in the late romances which the playwright produced in his "closing period" from roughly 1608 to 1611. In his view, the powerfully moving stories of fathers and daughters in those plays––Pericles and Marina in Pericles, Leontes and Perdita in The Winter's Tale, Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest––show the author coming to peace with his wife's unfaithfulness.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, entered on the Stationer's Register in 1608, shows a man suffering a string of misadventures, including the apparent death of his wife after she gives birth at sea. Pericles entrusts the infant––"a child of storm," Stephen calls her ––to foster parents, but when she grows to young womanhood they attempt to have her murdered. Pirates capture her and sell her to a brothel. Hearing that his daughter has died, Pericles descends into despair. The disheveled old wanderer eventually comes to Mitylene, where the governor offers help by introducing him to a miraculous young woman whose virtues have preserved her virginity and spread her fame throughout the city. The play's climactic scene is an interview between the old man and the girl. In an exquisitely prolonged exchange of information, Pericles and Marina slowly become known to one another, borne up by deep swells of grief and joy. At the end of the play Pericles finds that his wife Thaisa too has survived. A family is saved from blind and brutal forces: wind, water, lust, theft, murder.

Stephen asks, "What softens the heart of a man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of Tyre?" Joyce here allows his Homeric theme to peek through by echoing the words of Georg Brandes: "Pericles is a romantic Ulysses, a far-travelled, sorely tried, much-enduring man, who has, little by little, lost all that was dear to him" (585). In interior monologue Stephen thinks, "Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded." The final two adjectives reflect the sea travels and violent storms of Pericles' story, though Slote et al observe that they may also allude to Odyssey 12, where the hero "navigates between the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, blinded by the brine of the sea." This line of reasoning is supported by their gloss (suggested, they note, by Anne Marie D'Arcy) of the other adjective: "the red cone cap would be the conical pileus cap, which is often depicted as being red." The pilos or pileus, equally appropriate to Odysseus or Pericles, was a brimless felt cap worn in ancient Greece.

Despite these suggestions of affinities with the Odyssey, Stephen's focuses chiefly on Pericles. What softens the prince's heart, he says, is "A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina," echoing the language of the play: "Take in your arms this piece / Of your dead queen" (Per 3.117-18). In addition to this child named for the sea (Latin mare), the late romances feature two more adolescent girls with Latinate names: "Miranda, a wonder" and "Perdita, that which was lost." Ferdinand calls Miranda "O you wonder!" when he first meets her (Tmp 1.2.427), and Perdita is lost when Leontes orders this newborn child of his accused wife to be burned in a fire (WT 2.3.132-34). Although the order is thwarted, Leontes thinks his daughter dead until the end of the play.

The three lost-and-found girls are all miracles of nature who redeem the faults and sorrows of the previous generation. For Stephen, the strength of the father-daughter bond featured in their stories testifies to the family ties that called Shakespeare back to Stratford at the end of his life. Pericles says during the recognition scene that "My dearest wife was like this maid, and such a one / My daughter might have been" (Per 5.1.108-9). Stephen reads into these lines the playwright's memory of a lost love: "My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?" He hears in Pericles' memory of Thaisa  Shakespeare's acknowledgement that he once loved Anne Hathaway. In making this biographical connection Stephen goes beyond the evidence of the play, saying, "What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's child." Pericles is never given his daughter's child, but Shakespeare did have this experience in 1608, when his daughter Susanna gave birth to a girl, Elizabeth. As Gifford observes, Brandes infers that Susanna was Shakespeare's "favorite daughter" because he made her his heir (677).

Stephen correctly notes that Brandes "accepts" Pericles "as the first play of the closing period." So have most modern Shakespeare scholars, though the consensus today is that much of the play––especially the earlier parts––must have been penned by different hands. Extant by 1608, Pericles initiated a new and conclusive chapter in the playwright's artistic output, shortly before he left the theater and retired to Stratford. These romances draw powerful emotion from the recovery of lost girls and the restoration of family bonds. In Stephen's view, they show Shakespeare reversing the profound current of alienation ("sundering") expressed in his mature tragedies and effecting some kind of acceptance ("reconciliation") of the sexual choice that gave his life its shape.

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John Hunt 2023