A good game for historians to play is “Notice what you’re not noticing.” It can be easy to take for granted what survives from the past. Mosaics or monuments, textiles or texts, all represent great expenditure of thought, energy, time, and money. None of them sprang forth fully formed, and they tell us something about commerce and priorities in days gone by.

This principle applies also to the writings of William Shakespeare. In one of his fine fairy tales, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, first published in 1609, Shakespeare uses as his Chorus a medieval English poet, John Gower. Shakespeare has this Chorus introduce each Act of the play, and alone of all Shakespeare’s plays, he meant this Chorus to be a recognizable figure from history, so it makes sense to ask about John Gower.

Born probably in Kent, John Gower died in London in 1408 well into his seventies. He was thus a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, best known now as the author of The Canterbury Tales. Like Chaucer, Gower was a poet and wrote in what we call Middle English, a craggy crossbreed of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Despite writing in his vernacular, Gower gave his major poem a Latin title, Confessio Amantis, “A Lover’s Confession.” In it he adapted stories from classical mythology, and C. S. Lewis, in The Allegory of Love (1936), said that Gower was nearly Chaucer’s equal as a poet. “Gower everywhere shows a concern for form and unity,” Lewis wrote, “which is rare at any time and which, in the fourteenth century in England, entitles him to all but the highest praise.”

In Brief Lives, compiled in the 1690s, John Aubrey wrote down oral traditions about Shakespeare’s life. A son of one of Shakespeare’s fellow actors told Aubrey that Shakespeare had in his younger days taught school in the country. However vague that tale may be, it sounds plausible, and back then teaching school meant teaching Latin.

While Shakespeare certainly studied classical Latin in school at Stratford, whether during his lost years he taught it remains essentially hearsay. Somewhere along the line, Shakespeare picked up enough French for use in plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. More to the point, he knew how to read Middle English.

Here recurs the game of noticing what we are not noticing. We are to imagine Shakespeare curling up with Gower’s Confessio Amantis, maybe the edition printed in 1554, and sounding out the antique lines and deciding one of Gower’s stories would work as a play. Then he saw that it would work to use Gower himself as the Chorus to preface each Act.

As Marchette Chute pointed out in Shakespeare of London (1949), Gower lay entombed a few minutes’ walk from the Globe theatre, in what is now Southwark cathedral. Also buried there was Shakespeare’s brother, Edmund. Although Gower today is hardly a household name, evidently in the early 1600s Shakespeare could have the Chorus introduce himself as “ancient Gower” and count on his audience knowing who Gower was. That is, if it was his audience.

Since Edmond Malone in the late eighteenth century, scholars have debated whether Shakespeare wrote all of Pericles. In recent years, such formidable authorities on Shakespeare as Harold Bloom and Stanley Wells have endorsed the interpretation that for about half of this play Shakespeare had a less than skillful co-author, probably a now obscure writer for hire, George Wilkins. However, the editors of the new Folger edition of Pericles, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, are skeptical of the skeptics and judiciously conclude, “Whatever the scholarly doubts about the authorship of the play, a good production shows that it has the power and the strong emotional effect that one associates most of all with Shakespeare.”

While it is true that Pericles does not appear in the First Folio, Henry VIII does, although modern scholars suspect that John Fletcher, who often collaborated with Francis Beaumont, wrote sections of that history play. Yet, only once did Fletcher’s name appear in print with Shakespeare’s, on the title page of The Two Noble Kinsmen, written around 1613 and published in 1634.

In plain terms, a lot of modern critical declarations that for this or that play Shakespeare must have had a collaborator boil down to, “I don’t like that scene, so Shakespeare couldn’t have written it.” While some literary critics sniff that passages of Pericles are unworthy of Shakespeare, they seem to agree that Shakespeare thought out the play’s structure and chose to have Gower as the Chorus. As a prologue to each Act, Gower sets the scene and offers a synopsis of the action.

Whereas the basic meter of Shakespearean verse is iambic pentameter, Shakespeare has Gower speak in octosyllabic lines, a verse form like Gower’s own. To add to the patina effect of recreating Gower’s poetry, Shakespeare uses words from Middle English. What folks at the Globe made of obsolete words like iwis and yslackèd challenges the imagination. All the same, Shakespeare also has Gower use some Latin, “Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius,” and lets it drift without translation.

Whether, as Gower’s Latin would have it, for a good thing, the older, the better, delving into Gower’s poetry and recrafting it suited Shakespeare’s sense of history. Shakespeare’s Gower likewise looks to the past and reads old books. As Gower says in his first prologue, “I tell you what mine authors say.”

By making his Chorus an English poet who had been dead two hundred years, Shakespeare tells us not only about his own reading, but also about the level of culture in his audience. Alec Guinness, in A Positively Final Appearance (1999), wrote about trying to fix his garden fountain and getting soaked. It reminded him of “Enter Pericles, wet,” and Guinness noted, “That is a nice, specific stage direction which makes me think that Shakespeare’s theatre paid more attention to realistic detail than we give it credit for.” Much the same could be said for its cultural literacy.

Popular in the early 1600s, Shakespeare’s Pericles rarely gets performed these days. Tellingly, Guinness said that he had never seen the play. Still, it features a riddle and a shipwreck, dancing and fighting, family reconciliation and much else to entertain a varied crowd. A modern production might consider how to present “ancient Gower” and recall how each episode of a weekly television anthology series, Masterpiece Theatre, had an erudite introduction by Alistair Cooke.