The greatest “recognition” scene in Western literature takes place in Homer’s Odyssey, and occurs between storm-buffeted Odysseus and long-suffering Penelope. Shakespeare’s Pericles, a play with deep Hellenic—and specifically Homeric and Sophoclean—undertones, is its closest rival in the portrayal of recognition, this time between Pericles and his daughter, Marina. This powerful scene, a standout in a play that can appear, at least on stage, disjunctive, is performed with such sensitivity that one might recommend Joseph Haj’s Folger Theatre production on these few minutes alone.

The story of Pericles is, for all its meanderings, relatively straightforward: A prince, alone in this world save two trusted counselors and a faceless kingdom, arrives in Antioch in search of a wife. The king, Antiochus, has a lovely daughter who is prize for any suitor who solves his riddle. The solution contains a terrible truth—the king is sleeping his daughter—which Pericles guesses correctly (to himself). Fearing, again correctly, that the Antiochus suspects he alighted on the answer and wants him dead, Pericles flees. This sets in motion a play that will, at various times, find Pericles saving a town from famine, drowning at sea, washing up on a foreign shore and winning the hand of a new princess, losing his wife during childbirth, abandoning his daughter to the same people who he rescued from starvation (they sell her into sex slavery), and without boring you with even more details, conversing with the goddess Diana in a dream.