Though John Gower's poetry is now rarely regarded as central to medieval studies, his work was popularly read and very well known in the early modern period. The figure of the poet Gower ‘that first garnisshed our Englysshe rude’ is mentioned five times in John Skelton's Garland of Laurel, and Gower is cited or appears subsequently as an emblem of a great poet in early modern works by Robert Greene, Ben Jonson and John Webster. The poet Gower further appears as the central player in William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, in which he is given sustained dramatic life well beyond the limited mention Shakespeare makes directly to another medieval poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. Helen Cooper points out that ‘Shakespeare's return to Gower is a measure of the high value he was prepared to place on the native English traditions of poetry.’ This essay expands upon Cooper's assertion to explore the poet's early modern reputation as specifically seen in Shakespeare's representation of Gower, and then briefly examines aspects of Gower's resurrection in modern stage productions of Shakespeare's play.

As is well known, Pericles does not appear in the First Folio; its text was first published in the later Quarto of 1609. The play was entered on 20 May 1608 in the Stationers’ Register. It is often described as flawed and badly written; some scholars believe it was a memorial reconstruction by some of the actors similar to the ‘bad quarto’ of Hamlet. Others say Shakespeare picked up a dramatic project begun by George Wilkins, author of a related novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre, published in 1608. Wilkins gave evidence along with Shakespeare in a lawsuit in 1613, and Katherine Duncan-Jones has proposed that Shakespeare may have dined in Wilkins's house (Wilkins was also a victualler) between 1604 and 1608. Earlier critics believed the play was a product of Shakespeare's youth, among them John Dryden, who wrote ‘Shakespeare's own muse her Pericles first bore’, while Edmund Malone, in his Shakespeare editions of the 1780s, asserted that ‘Pericles was the entire work of Shakespeare, and one of his earliest compositions.’ This idea was repeated by Henry Norman Hudson, who, in his 1901 introduction to the Aldus Shakespeare Pericles, described the play as ‘some exercise of the “prentice hand”’.