The play draws upon two sources for the plot. The first is Confessio Amantis (1393) of John Gower, an English poet and contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer. This provides the story of Apollonius of Tyre. The second source is the Lawrence Twine prose version of Gower's tale, The Pattern of Painful Adventures, dating from c. 1576, reprinted in 1607.
A third related work is The Painful Adventures of Pericles by George Wilkins, published in 1608. But this seems to be a "novelization" of the play, stitched together with bits from Twine; Wilkins mentions the play in the Argument to his version of the story[7] – so that Wilkins' novel derives from the play, not the play from the novel. Wilkins, who with Shakespeare was a witness in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit of 1612,[8] has been an obvious candidate for the author of the non-Shakespearean matter in the play's first two acts; Wilkins wrote plays very similar in style, and no better candidate has been found.
The choruses spoken by Gower were influenced by Barnabe Barnes's The Diuils Charter (1607) and by The Trauailes of the Three English Brothers (1607), by John Day, William Rowley, and Wilkins.[9]
