A historicist reading of Pericles would take note of its celebration of the family as a political concept—a concept that glorifies King James and the Stuart royal family, seen as a fertile, “natural” family after the reign of a sterile, “unnatural” Virgin Queen, as the site of authority. The bad family structure of the incestuous Antiochus and his nameless daughter is displaced and replaced through the reunion of the good father and daughter, Pericles and Marina, and the reunion of the good husband and wife, Pericles and Thaisa.
