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The Nineteenth Century Series
General Editors’ Preface
Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester
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The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest
in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that
former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding
not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily
upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also
includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of
current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical
literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are
dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy
is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and
both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested
by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and
theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which
predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in
the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so
manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.
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The Neglected Shelley
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Edited by
Alan M. Weinberg
University of South Africa, RSA
and
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Timothy Webb
University of Bristol, UK
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© Alan M. Weinberg, Timothy Webb and the contributors 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
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Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited
Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East
110 Cherry Street
Union Road
Suite 3-1
Farnham
Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT
USA
England
www.ashgate.com
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
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The Neglected Shelley / edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb.
pages cm. — (The nineteenth century series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-6564-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4724-6565-8 (ebook)
— ISBN 978-1-4724-6566-5 (epub)
1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822—Criticism and interpretation. I. Weinberg, Alan M.
(Alan Mendel) editor. II. Webb, Timothy, editor.
PR5438.N35 2015
821’.7—dc23
2015015369
ISBN: 9781472465641 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781472465658 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472465665 (ebk – ePUB)
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,
at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
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To the memory of Geoffrey Matthews, whose lifelong and passionate
dedication to the better understanding of Shelley has paved the way for
many future scholars and researchers.
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Contents
Illustration Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Editorial Note Introduction Timothy Webb and Alan M. Weinberg
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1 An Uncelebrated Facility: The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters Timothy Webb
2 Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms: Observing the Body in
Percy Shelley’s Gothic Fiction Diego Saglia
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3Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections David Duff
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4 The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism Timothy Morton
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5 ‘His left hand held the lyre’: Shelley’s Narrative Fiction Fragments 95
Stephen C. Behrendt
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6 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s
Frankenstein Charles E. Robinson
7 Shelley’s Second Kingdom: Rosalind and Helen and ‘Mazenghi’ Jack Donovan
8 Shelley’s Work in Progress: ‘Athanase: A Fragment’ and the
Unfinished Draft of ‘Prince Athanase’ Alan M. Weinberg
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9 Satyr Play in a Radical Vein: Shelley’s ‘Cyclops’ Maria Schoina
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10 The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility Richard Cronin
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11 ‘Infinitely comical’: Italianizing the ‘Hymn to Mercury’ Timothy Webb
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12 ‘Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream’: Shelley’s Art of Ambivalence in
Hellas Michael O’Neill
13 Shelley, Jews and the Land of Promise Nora Crook
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14 Shelley’s Italian Verse Fragments: Exploring the Notebook Drafts 281
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Bibliography 307 9
Index329 10
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Illustration
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3.1
Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire. 1810. Page 11. Text,
with pencil annotation probably by Shelley. The Carl H.
Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, The New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Pforz 557L 04
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Notes on Contributors
Stephen C. Behrendt is George Holmes Distinguished University Professor
of English at the University of Nebraska. Among his books are Shelley and His
Audiences (1989), Reading William Blake (1992), Royal Mourning and Regency
Culture (1997), and British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community
(2009), as well as several collections of original poetry, including most recently
Refractions (2014). He is also the author of many interdisciplinary essays and
articles on Romantic-era literature, art and culture, and on the relations among the
arts generally.
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Richard Cronin is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow. He has
published widely on nineteenth-century literature. His most recent books are
Romantic Victorians: English Literature 1824–1840 (2002), Paper Pellets: British
Literary Culture after Waterloo (2010), and Reading Victorian Poetry (2012).
With Dorothy McMillan he edited Emma for the Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Jane Austen (2013), and works of Robert Browning in the Oxford Twenty-First
Century Author series (2015).
Nora Crook is Professor Emerita of English at Anglia Ruskin University,
Cambridge. She has published widely on both Shelleys. She has edited two volumes
of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, and 12 volumes (as General Editor) of the
novels and works of Mary Shelley. She is a co-general editor of The Complete
Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and editor of the forthcoming Volume VII, which
will consist chiefly of Shelley’s posthumous poems.
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Jack Donovan was formerly Reader in English at the University of York. He
was one of the editors of The Poems of Shelley, Volumes 2 (2000), 3 (2011) and 4
(2013) in the series Longman Annotated English Poets and is currently part of the
editorial team preparing Volume 5.
David Duff is Professor in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London.
His previous work on Shelley includes Romance and Revolution: Shelley and
the Politics of a Genre (1994), and a number of essays on Shelley’s early poetry
published in The Wordsworth Circle, The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe
Shelley (2012) and The Unfamiliar Shelley (2009). He is author of the awardwinning Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009), co-editor of Scotland,
Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007) and editor of The Oxford Handbook
of British Romanticism (2016). He is currently editing The Oxford Anthology of
Romanticism and writing a literary history of the Romantic prospectus.
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xii
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave 1
the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a 2
Logic of Future Coexistence (forthcoming), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism 3
and Critical Theory (forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after 4
the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), 5
The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), Shelley and the 6
Revolution in Taste (1994). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to 7
Shelley (2006). He has published five other books and 120 essays on philosophy, 8
ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at http://www. 9
ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.
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Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His books include
The Human Mind’s Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry
(1989), Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (1997) and The All-Sustaining
Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry
since 1900 (2007). He is the editor of The Cambridge History of English Poetry
(2010). His recent publications include, as co-author with Michael D. Hurley,
Poetic Form: An Introduction (2012), as co-editor (with Anthony Howe and with
the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan), The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe
Shelley (2013) and Gangs of Shadow (2014), his third collection of poems. He is
part of the editorial team for the Johns Hopkins UP edition of The Complete Poetry
of Percy Bysshe Shelley, volume 3 of which appeared in 2012.
Charles E. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Delaware, has published a number of books and articles on the English Romantic
writers, including Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight
(1976), Mary Shelley’s Collected Tales and Stories (1976; 1990), Lord Byron and
His Contemporaries (1982), The Mary Shelley Reader (1990), The Frankenstein
Notebooks (1996) and The Original Frankenstein (2008; 2009). He is currently
preparing a new edition of ‘The Letters of William Hazlitt’.
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The Neglected Shelley
Diego Saglia teaches English Literature at the University of Parma (Italy) and
his research centres on the Romantic period. In the field of Gothic studies, he
has published on Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford, drama and melodrama, and
narrative verse. He is responsible for the first critical edition of Robert Southey’s
Roderick, the Last of the Goths (2012), and has recently contributed to the special
issue of Gothic Studies on ‘Eighteenth-Century Gothic’ (2012); Ann Radcliffe,
Romanticism and the Gothic (eds Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, 2014); and
The Gothic World (eds Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 2014). His chapter on
‘The Gothic Stage: Visions of Instability, Performances of Anxiety’ in Romantic
Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (eds Dale Townshend and Angela Wright) is
forthcoming in 2015.
Maria Schoina is Assistant Professor in the School of English at Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is the author of Romantic ‘Anglo-
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Notes on Contributors
Italians’: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle
(2009) and co-editor of The Place of Lord Byron in World History: Studies in His
Life, Writings, and Influence. Selected Papers from the 35th International Byron
Conference (2012). She has also contributed a chapter on Shelley’s reception
in Greece for The Reception of P.B. Shelley in Europe (2008). She is currently
working on a book project on Mary Shelley and Greece.
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Timothy Webb was for some years Winterstoke Professor and Head of the
Department of English at the University of Bristol where he is now a Senior
Research Fellow and an Emeritus Professor. As well as a pioneering edition of
Yeats’s poetry for Penguin and an introduction to English Romantic Hellenism, he
has published six books on Shelley (three jointly authored or edited), including The
Violet in the Crucible, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood and Shelley’s Poems and
Prose. He was for 18 years editor of Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin (later retitled
Keats-Shelley Review) and a founding editor of Romanticism. He has written and
lectured widely, on Romantic topics and writers and on Irish matters. Recently,
he completed a two-volume annotated edition of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography for
Oxford University Press.
Alan M. Weinberg is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of South
Africa. He is the author of Shelley’s Italian Experience (1991), has edited Volume
XXII, Parts 1 and 2, of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (1997) and has coedited (with Romaine Hill), the bicentenary collection The Most Unfailing Herald
(1995), and (with Timothy Webb) The Unfamiliar Shelley (2009), the first volume
of essays on the poet’s neglected works. He has published numerous essays on
Shelley across a wide range of interdisciplinary subjects, including revolutionary
and reform politics, the Italian cultural precedent, and the creative process. He
is planning further editorial work and studies on unfamiliar aspects of Shelley,
especially the poet’s large extant corpus of literary fragments.
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Acknowledgments
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We would like to thank The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His
Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations for
permission to reproduce an annotated page from Original Poetry; by Victor
and Cazire; and the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, for permission to
reproduce a sketch from the Bodleian Shelley manuscripts.
Our thanks to all our fellow contributors for their kind acknowledgements of
editorial assistance, their dedication, energy, enthusiasm, and their great willingness
to review and revise earlier drafts at all stages of the project; to Ann Donahue,
commissioning editor at Ashgate Publishing, for expressing her continued interest
in the project, and for accommodating and warmly encouraging communiqués;
to Seth F. Hibbert and Laura Kopp at Ashgate for their meticulous supervision
and copy editing of the proofs; to the reader at Ashgate for a valuable assessment
of the MS; to other members of the Ashgate team, especially Michael Bourne
and Elizabeth Hoff for processing and indexing of the typescript; to Elizabeth
Denlinger, Curator of The Carl Pforzheimer Collection, Dr Christopher Fletcher,
Keeper of Special Collections and Tricia Buckingham, Principal Library Assistant
at the Bodleian Library, for their prompt and courteous assistance with illustrations;
to Dawie Malan, Subject Reference Librarian at the University of South Africa,
for his help in tracing and acquiring texts, and the University of South Africa for
resources which have helped to advance important stages of the project, including
first The Unfamiliar Shelley and now its successor, The Neglected Shelley.
We also continue to be very grateful to families, friends and colleagues who
have supported us in our endeavour.
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List of Abbreviations
References to the following primary sources are abbreviated as follows.
The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald H. Reiman et
al. 23 vols. New York: Garland, 1986–2001; New York and
London: Routledge, 2002.
CPPBS
The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Donald H.
Reiman and Neil Fraistat (vols 1–2); Donald H. Reiman, Neil
Fraistat and Nora Crook (vol. 3). Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000–12.
Letters
The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2
vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
MS Journals The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814–1844, eds Paula R. Feldman
and Diana Scott-Kilvert. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987;
one-vol. edn, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995.
MWS Letters
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T.
Bennett. 3 vols. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1980–88.
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The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe
Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman et al. 9 vols. New York: Garland,
1985–96.
Prose
The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. E.B. Murray, vol.
1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
PP
Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, [ed. Mary Shelley].
London, 1824.
PS
The Poems of Shelley, eds Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin
Everest (vols 1–2); Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest
and Michael Rossington (vol. 3); Michael Rossington, Jack
Donovan and Kelvin Everest (vol. 4). London, New York,
Harlow: Longman, 1989–2011; London: Routledge, 2014.
PW
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mrs Shelley. 4
vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1839.
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SC
Shelley and His Circle, eds Kenneth Neill Cameron (vols
1–4); Donald H. Reiman (vols 5–8); Donald H. Reiman and
Doucet Devin Fischer (vols 9–10). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1961–2001.
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Fraistat. Rev. edn. New York: Norton, 2002.
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Editorial Note
The contents of the volume are conceived in accordance with the full span of the
poet’s career (1808–22) and its diversity of achievement.
On the Use of Editions and Titles for Shelley’s Works
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An important feature of the present volume (as it was of The Unfamiliar Shelley,
its predecessor) is its recognition of the heterogeneous nature of adequate textual
sources for the study of Shelley. Although good progress is being made in the
field of editing, no one scholarly text or collection of texts presently suffices to
encompass the range of editions which have provided a sound textual basis for
discussion. Each essay has had to find its own way through a forest of notebooks,
facsimiles, transcripts and published editions. Each chapter will accordingly
signpost the editions upon which the discussion is based, often with indications
of MS sources.
Because Shelley did not live to see the publication of a large portion of his
extant writing – a fact not often appreciated – and because much of that writing
was unfinished and perhaps never intended for publication, the editors have chosen
to distinguish typographically between published and unpublished compositions.
Published texts are signalled in italics (for example Zastrozzi, Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty, Rosalind and Helen, The Sensitive-Plant, Hellas) and
unpublished texts in quotation marks (for example ‘The Assassins’, the translations
of ‘Cyclops’ and ‘Hymn to Mercury’, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, ‘The Tower of
Famine’, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, ‘The Zucca’, ‘The Triumph of Life’) irrespective
of whether these are long or short works, finished or unfinished. It is hoped that
this signal will serve as a continued reminder of the fluid nature of the Shelleyan
corpus, so much of it experimental, provisional and expressive of a creative drive
that seldom (if ever) sought publication for its own sake, but which yet did, on
occasion, and often against the odds, find an immediate audience.
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Introduction
Timothy Webb and Alan M. Weinberg
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When we conceived the first volume of essays on neglected/marginalized texts
which we entitled The Unfamiliar Shelley,1 we were primarily motivated by the
sense that, for all his celebrity, the scope of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s achievement
as a writer was only narrowly recognized and his literary virtues had not been
carefully analyzed. We had no doubt, though, that in certain circles Shelley was,
or had been, widely acknowledged as a quintessential poet. His achievement
seemed unquestionable, although often unquestioned. For example, ‘when
William Carlos Williams was in his last illness he asked Robert Lowell, “Tell
me honestly, Cal. Am I as good a poet as Shelley?”’2 The sudden conjunction of
Williams and Shelley is as unexpected as the implication that Shelley represented
something whose value was beyond dispute to both poets. Lowell himself had
serious difficulties with Shelley and admitted in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop that
Shelley ‘suffered from that universal European romantic rhetoric, grand without
observation, humor or the heart-breaking loving-kindness of Hardy’; some, at
least, of these objections might be queried, but it is also worth noting that Lowell
(‘America’s Shelley’, as The Economist once called him3) confessed to a reluctant
admiration for Prometheus Unbound since ‘scattered through it are many of his
lovely verses’.4 Wallace Stevens, who might be thought to occupy the opposite
polarity to Williams, could not bring himself to believe in what appeared to be
Shelley’s unqualified optimism that ‘the structure of nature’ could be altered;
yet in a letter of 27 August 1940 he admitted that, in spite of such reservations,
he was a believer: ‘Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman
hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and
the Shelleyan will have transformed the world.’5
These tributes, which could easily be multiplied, are even more telling because
they have been deliberately collected from three poets who are distinctively
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1
Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb, eds. The Unfamiliar Shelley. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009.
2
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets (1998). London: Phoenix [Orion Books], 1999,
p. 443.
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The title of an anonymous review of Lowell’s Collected Poems. The Economist, 3
July 2003 (Books and Arts), available at: http://www.economist.com/node/1893038.
4
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert
Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano. London and New York: faber and faber, 2008, p. 560.
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Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1966, p. 367.
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American and different from each other. Although each of the three may have
been looking back to the canonical expression of the poetic in their own youth,
such enduring admiration can hardly be explained, or explained away, on the
grounds that it represents a taste or a predilection they had all outgrown. Even
among his own contemporaries, Shelley attracted the respect of Byron and in
1827 the endorsement of Wordsworth, who cannot have shared many of his ideas
but acknowledged the force of his poetry: ‘Shelley is one of the best artists of
us all: I mean in workmanship of style.’6 One of Shelley’s other voices (what
he called the exoteric) has exercised its force in a diversity of twentieth-century
contexts: for instance, and in strikingly different circumstances, the German poet
and playwright Bertolt Brecht and the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella have both been
indebted to the example of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Much more recently, Michael
Schmidt (another American, best known, perhaps, as an inventive and determined
publisher of modern poetry) has stated that Shelley ‘was a poet first and last’ and
claimed that he still has a value for those who are prepared to listen: ‘A serious
and questing poet will recognize in Shelley a more challenging mentor [than in
the more obviously popular, or even populist, Byron], and one who will give only
private instruction.’7
The message from this variety of reactions seemed to be clear. Shelley was
not to be ignored; in fact, Shelley seems to have been a favourite with poets,
playwrights, novelists, philosophers, scientists, reformers, perhaps because
he was not content with limited horizons but was forever exploring as well as
extending the boundaries of the possible. Yet, although he needed to be revalued or
revisited or perhaps even unbound, his reputation, especially in England, was still
based on some received though often unexamined responses; critical evaluations
were usually affected by the confusion of biography and criticism, by political
anxiety or even hostility, and by the fact that judgements were often founded on
unexamined prejudice and the study of an increasingly small number of poems.
Some university courses in English literature even avoided Shelley altogether. It
was common to be afraid of Shelley for his habit of exploring subjects which
were too uncompromisingly intellectual or dangerous and to dismiss him with
contempt as politically naïve, or adolescent and confused. For a century and a half,
Shelley’s unusual gifts as a lyric poet have comfortably and conveniently served
to deflect attention from his longer and more difficult poems, with the possible
exception of ‘The Triumph of Life’, an undoubtedly great though unfinished and
unpublished poem, which has seemed to conform to a variety of current critical
concerns. Ironically ‘The Triumph’ is intricately tied to the copious and diverse
volume of work that Shelley produced before it – in short to the epic scope of his
work and ideas – and may best be understood (or at least explored) in relation to it.
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Introduction
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A critical industry mainly in academic circles tends to focus on a narrow range
of poems, thus excluding the larger and extraordinarily diverse corpus. The recently
published Oxford Handbook, edited by Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe,
is a wide-ranging attempt to offset this tendency, as is The Unfamiliar Shelley.
Although he may have been prompted by the vagaries of classical and biblical
scholarship, Shelley seems to have anticipated such fluctuations in reputation
when in his ‘Dedication’ to ‘Peter Bell the Third’ (itself a study in the making of
literary reputation) he predicted a time ‘when some transatlantic commentator will
be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism,
the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians’ (that is,
Wordsworth, John Hamilton Reynolds, Shelley himself, Thomas Moore, to whom
Shelley’s poem [not published until 1839] is jokingly but sincerely dedicated – as
well as those who kept their names alive).
In the face of such ignorance and such prejudice, we felt impelled to go against
the prevailing tendency and to secure for Shelley a second hearing, not necessarily
uncritical, but based as far as possible on facts and on the best texts available. Our
task was greatly simplified by the gradual publication of the Garland Shelley which
made the manuscripts of Shelley’s notebooks, both in serviceable facsimile and in
careful transcription and together with enabling technical annotation, available to
a general reading public which could not be expected to pursue the originals on
their own account. This milestone in the understanding of Shelley (if one can think
of a milestone as animated and in constant motion) coincided with or stimulated
two very different editions of Shelley’s complete poetry – Poems of Shelley (5
vols, Longman-Routledge) and The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (8
vols, Johns Hopkins). So challenging and complicated is the editorial assignment
that neither edition has yet been concluded, but the eventual completion of these
two editions and the second volume of Shelley’s highly various prose (including
translations and mostly unpublished at his death) will eventually ensure that, if one
also includes the two volumes of letters and the large variety of associated material
published in Shelley and his Circle, we will for the first time possess the full range
of materials for an informed understanding of Shelley’s achievement.
As our plans for the first volume evolved, we were able to make use of many of
these new materials: in particular, the Garland notebooks were frequently referred
to and furnished evidence for the evolution of a number of Shelley’s texts. They
also provided material for a number of illustrations both of pages in draft and of
Shelley’s highly characteristic doodles and sketches. All of this was intended to
bring the reader, whether experienced or relatively innocent, into closer touch with
the complicated workings of Shelley’s mind and poetic imagination as recorded
in his notebooks and with the often challenging realities of being a Shelley editor.
This first volume addressed a number of topics which have not always been at
the centre of Shelley scholarship or an understanding of his work and are usually
neglected: the verse letter, plays, prose essays, satire, pamphlets, political verse,
prefaces, translations from the Greek, artistic representations, fragments and early
writings. This polymathic Shelley was a notable translator of Plato (his version
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of The Symposium was shown to be a highly accomplished one which – in its
unstilted and unaffected diction and fluent style – can be compared to its advantage
with other, more reputable, scholarly translations); a practising and ambitious
playwright (the unfinished ‘Charles the First’ was now explored in detail so that,
for all its obvious differences and the difficulties of its draft, it could seriously be
set alongside the better-recognized The Cenci); in the best sense, a propagandist
whose prefaces are in themselves an impressive contribution to Romantic prose
and an unparalleled introduction to many of his works; a satirist whose political
objectives do not detract from that rich and scarcely acknowledged sense of
humour, which runs throughout the under-considered ‘Peter Bell the Third’ and the
rarely-revisited Oedipus Tyrannus; or Swellfoot the Tyrant, as it informs ‘Letter to
Maria Gisborne’, which is witty and charmingly self-deprecating but haunted by
a sense of darker realities.
This Shelley is the author of copious ‘fragments’ which are now examined
from a more panoramic perspective, informed by a sense of Shelley’s own poetic
objectives and by the findings of more recent engagements with the phenomenon
of fragmentation. As students of his writing would recognize, he is also the author
of a number of essays on philosophical and religious topics, mostly unfinished
and unpublished, and an explorer of political issues, which are here accorded
more coherent scrutiny; in particular, ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, left to
posterity in notebook draft and not published until 1920, and then only in limited
copies, is granted some of the attention it deserves both for its own perceptive
analysis of ‘force and fraud’ in the course of history and the state of contemporary
society and as an attempt to provide a prose dimension to the study of those issues
which inform the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound.8 Parts of Shelley’s littleread epic poem Laon and Cythna are taken seriously and examined in the context
of Rousseau and Godwin, both of whom the young Shelley had absorbed in his
reading. A projected ‘Volume of Minor Poems’ is reconstructed in detail and,
almost for the first time, poems dismissed as ‘Juvenilia’ are read carefully both for
what they might reveal about informing contexts and as indications of the vigorous
and dedicated apprenticeship which grounded Shelley’s later achievements. The
visual evidence of the notebooks is examined and various theories are proposed
as to the ways in which they might relate to larger patterns of creativity. Much of
this exploration is new to Shelley criticism or, at the least, very uncommon; the
book also engages with ‘unfamiliarity’ by suggesting that received readings of
poems we think we know, need to be seriously revised. So, for example, Queen
Mab and ‘Political Greatness’ are examined from new perspectives and in the light
of a variety of contexts; much the same might also apply to early poems, Laon
and Cythna, ‘Peter Bell the Third’, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, and even some of
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Credit must be given to Steve Behrendt, Michael Scrivener, Terence Allen 42
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championing this still generally neglected treatise.
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Introduction
the fragments. Under this scrutiny, even the apparently familiar Shelley becomes
much less predictable or unthreateningly familiar than one might have expected.
It is not for contributors to the first volume to claim that we have succeeded in
changing attitudes or in causing more people to read a wider range of Shelley and
to take him more seriously. At the least, it will require some time for any effects to
be felt or for people’s attitudes and practices to alter significantly. A recent review
in the authoritative pages of the Times Literary Supplement of a volume in the
Johns Hopkins Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests that many of the
old prejudices are still vigorously alive.9 It was prepared to ignore the fastidious
and pioneering scholarship of the edition by questioning Shelley’s right to such
careful consideration, focusing narrowly on presumed poetical inadequacies and
Shelley’s supposedly limited grasp of more complicated realities. Such attitudes
indicate that critical opinion, even when well informed, has not yet achieved
that general shift which might have been hoped for or unlocked that informed
generosity of interpretation which might have been expected. Whatever the
ultimate effects of the first volume, though, one of the consequences of uncertainty
was to make us think of the necessity of a second. Both editors recognized that,
if ‘unfamiliarity’ or ‘neglect’ were the central criterion, there was still much work
to be done. Notwithstanding an initial foray into the domain of the ‘neglected’
or ‘unfamiliar’, a surprising number of works (in both verse and prose) still
remain quite outside the canon of the known or established Shelley. There were
opportunities for interesting continuities between the first and the second volumes.
The various verse and prose fragments, brief and extensive, examined in (1) could
be followed with an examination of further fragments in (2); the verse ‘Letter to
Maria Gisborne’ (in 1), with the prose letters more generally (2); the translation of
The Symposium, with other translations from the Greek in verse; the collection of
unpublished ‘Minor Poems’, with Shelley’s first publications of verse and prose
(including his Gothic romances); the verse of Queen Mab, with the Notes; the
prefaces to poems, with the Preface to Frankenstein (which Shelley wrote for his
wife); some experimental dramas, with Hellas; philosophical writings generally,
with ideas often specifically concerned with Spinoza, whom Shelley recurrently
translated; the 1817 Laon and Cythna, with immediately contemporary works,
Rosalind and Helen and ‘Prince Athanase’ that mark the move from England to
Italy; ‘Peter Bell the Third’, with other parodic styles in early and later writings.
One of the pleasures of commissioning this book and working our way through
the editorial process is that we have now come to recognize even more clearly than
before that, although all contributions engage in some way or other with the topic
of unfamiliarity, there can be no simple or single definition. Take, for example, the
pastoral romance Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue which was published in
a volume with other poems as early as 1819 and follows Laon and Cythna; or, The
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Literary Supplement) 5734 (22 February 2013), pp. 11–12.
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Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century and its modified
and more ‘diplomatic’ version, The Revolt of Islam; A Poem, in Twelve Cantos.
Like both its predecessors, this volume was published by the Ollier brothers.
Rosalind and Helen might be equally paired with the slightly later ‘conversation
poem’, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, so if we include Laon and Cythna, we have a variety
of gender relationships represented in sequence,10 as well as a diversity of literary
forms (epic, eclogue and conversation – Horace’s sermo pedestris), each of which
has its own dialogic mode or raison d’être. Yet few readers of Romantic poetry
have noted the care Shelley takes to explore appropriate genres and styles, arriving
in the case of Rosalind and Helen at distinct as well as interesting results. In fact,
most readers might even be pressed to identify the author of this eclogue, although
its generic definition looks back to Southey (and much earlier to Virgil) and forward
to Tennyson. Jack Donovan situates this work within the complicated pattern of
Shelley’s life and work and identifies its main thematic structures. In addition to
unravelling an authorial code, the essay places the poem in a variety of creative
contexts, especially that of its seemingly unlikely but probable connections with
Dantean pilgrimage, and engages with its generic identity. While conscious of the
poem’s limitations, Donovan is also alert to its larger implications. This reading
establishes Shelley’s poem as part of a more extensive canon from which it has
been too easily and too unquestioningly excluded.
Donovan’s essay links Rosalind and Helen with the unfinished ‘Mazenghi’,
finding in both poems variations on a Dantean narrative of suffering and
redemption. ‘Mazenghi’ (apparently, Shelley’s deliberate adjustment of the
historical ‘Marenghi’) is also given attention in Alan Weinberg’s chapter on the
Italian verse fragments in which he examines their experimental nature – signs of
the poet’s growing mastery and appropriate use of verse-form, and of a network of
inseparable interests infusing his poetry – and his engagement with various Italian
points of inspiration. Together, these two readings of an understandably neglected
poem help to place ‘Mazenghi’ in the graph of Shelley’s poetic development and
to suggest that it contains many striking stanzas and has not yet been granted the
recognition which it deserves. Much the same might be said about the other poems
which Weinberg explores: ‘Athanase’ and ‘Prince Athanase’ (in a separate chapter),
‘Fiordispina’, ‘Ginevra’, ‘The Boat on the Serchio’, as well as the ‘Tasso’ and
‘Pisan fragments’. ‘Athanase’, was completed for publication but was conflated
with the fragments of ‘Prince Athanase’ when Mary Shelley published them
all under the heading of ‘Prince Athanase’ in 1824. This deliberately enigmatic
narrative, wherein virtue is both inextricably and inexplicably linked to suffering,
has much in common with Alastor and ‘Julian and Maddalo’ but, almost from
the start, its identity and its apparent intentions were confused by Mary Shelley’s
well-meaning editorial intervention. Of course, as this sad history indicates,
despite Shelley’s efforts, ‘Athanase’ itself (which Shelley generically sub-titled
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Urania’.
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Introduction
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‘A Fragment’, perhaps to complicate and conceal its origins) did not appear
in print during his lifetime and, apart from its faithful transcription by Donald
Reiman in Shelley and His Circle, has still to be published as a unique poem quite
distinct from ‘Prince Athanase’, resulting in an unfortunate confusion between
the two versions. Weinberg underlines the integrity of the work, its absence of
resolution and insistent self-closure which intentionally ward off easy answers.
The rough draft indicates Shelley’s originally broader conception suggestive of
an unrealizable Platonic quest, and its fragmentary sequence (or design) – which
has been an obstacle to its critical reception – is made intelligible through close
examination of the manuscript. Weinberg shows that, intriguingly, the disrupted
and finally aborted narrative prolongs the mystery of Athanase’s grief, even while
attempts are made by the poet to explain it.
Not one of the other poems in question – the ‘Italian’ verse fragments – was
published either, or even completed, with the result that Weinberg’s attempt to
engage critically with their poetic significance, by focusing on the manuscript
drafts, necessarily depends on the results of reconstructive scholarship. Not
surprisingly, there were other obstacles. For instance, ‘Fiordispina’ has too easily
been interpreted and dismissed as a quarry for Epipsychidion while (in spite
of the pioneering editorial efforts of Nora Crook and, more recently, Michael
Rossington) responses to the refreshing and lively, though slightly ominous traveljournal of ‘The Boat on the Serchio’ are usually still hampered by fundamental
questions concerning its dialogue and structure. Not many years ago, few (if
any) of these cases could have been unravelled with such confidence. The longer
fragments emerge as products of Shelley’s extraordinary poetic fertility and, like
the shorter ones, indicate a temperament acutely responsive to Italy in exile –
a source both of inspiration and disillusionment. Together the works indicate a
rather different picture from the one that overdetermines his ideological concerns.
Above all, perhaps, these exercises in reclamation (to use an image which Shelley
found especially resonant)11 point to the uncertainties and dilemmas which, as a
conscientious artist, he confronted but could leave deliberately unresolved, and
have resulted in an expansion of the Shelley canon.
This new version of Shelley also necessarily includes a rich dimension of prose.
The absence of an authoritative collection of all Shelley’s prose has not helped his
cause; nor has the fact that many of his prose works were left unpublished; nor
has the traditional generic distinction between poetry and prose which Shelley
sometimes advanced in his earlier days, but which was emphatically superseded
by a wider definition in ‘A Defence of Poetry’.
Unlike the previous volume, which found a good deal of space for Shelley’s
political essays, the present selection mainly focuses on other elements in Shelley’s
prose, though his politics are never far away, even in his Gothic novels. Nora Crook’s
essay on Shelley and the Jews interweaves his ambivalent conception of Jews
(among them figures such as Spinoza, Jesus and Ahasuerus), Jewish moneylenders
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and Jewish communities, with analyses of two short prose pieces, both unfinished,
which engage with Jewish topics. The first focuses on the Arch of Titus, generally –
though mistakenly – included with Shelley’s descriptive notes on classical statues
in Florence. But it is actually an address to Jews, evoking the fall of Jerusalem,
articulated by a supposed Jew, and expressing a point of view strongly antipathetic
to Roman depredations and sympathetic to the Jewish cause. The second fragment
– possibly a companion piece (an uncollected and little-known MS now housed in
the University of Tokyo) – calls for a Jewish homeland, and gives expression to a
point of view with which Shelley is not usually associated. On the basis of these
two fragments and a range of allusions, Crook queries the view that Shelley was
concerned with Jews exclusively in relation to scripture or legend, and establishes
a foundation for the understanding of an element in Shelley’s political thinking –
touching too on religion and philosophy – which has usually been ignored.
Timothy Morton’s essay on the notes to Queen Mab starts from a position
which is strikingly different because the notes were, in several instances,
constructed as essays which accompanied the text of Shelley’s poem, to which
they have always been accorded a subordinate place. Unlike the short pieces
from which Shelley’s views on the Jewish question may be extrapolated, these
‘notes’ are full and complete and even appeared in print, at first relatively early in
Shelley’s literary career and later in pirated editions. In the case of the notes, as
elsewhere, Morton celebrates the exceptional level of knowledge and the dazzling
virtuosity of the writing; he argues that the notes should not be seen (as they so
often have been) as a trivial appendix to the poem or to Shelley’s ideology, but as
a central expression of his most profound beliefs and forming a body of material
that may be considered separate from the verse (they subvert their own status as
notes). While the influence of Spinoza is a key point in the discussion, the range
of subjects eloquently demonstrates the comprehensiveness of Shelley’s concerns.
What this volume also helps to show is that Shelley’s interest in prose went
beyond the dimension of essays, pamphlets and shorter reflections, and involved
a commitment to fiction, especially in his earlier days. While he was still very
young, he published two Gothic novels, which brought him more success in the
marketplace than his later, more considered works. These novels have often been an
embarrassment to those who admire his poetry and have usually been written about
dismissively or even comically or in a manner which is reductively psychological.
While not claiming an unrecognized greatness, Diego Saglia has looked at these
‘romances’ (as they were called) particularly in connection with the contexts of the
Gothic novel, and as texts worthy of attention in their own right. In many cases,
he is able to examine Shelley’s recurrent concerns, especially with displays of the
body, in terms of prevailing Gothic conventions and in relation to theories of life
and medicine that foreshadow Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which, surprisingly,
might be considered an offspring – or relative – of these early works).
In this willingness to scrutinize with appropriate seriousness these significant
but youthful productions and to bring to bear many of the advances of Romantic
scholarship, Saglia’s discussion has much in common with that of David Duff
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Introduction
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who builds on a chapter in the first volume by exploring the contexts of two very
early collections of poems. In Duff’s case as in that of Saglia, the investigation of
unexpected sources and models, and of conventions widely prevailing but now
largely forgotten, makes possible a reappraisal of what might be thought of as
merely juvenile, and presents young Shelley as a writer, much better read, more
thoughtful and genuinely experimental than has traditionally been supposed.
Shelley is shown to be very alive to fashionable trends, including various forms
of Gothic and of literary minstrelsy, which he exploits, subverts and ridicules.
Running through his early works, especially his highly allusive and at times
provocatively plagiaristic poetry, is a marked thread of intertextuality which
readers have not reckoned with or have chosen to ignore. What both treatments
reveal is an unfamiliar or neglected Shelley who is strikingly different from his
general reputation.
This volume also investigates a number of Shelley’s other prose writings
which add substantially to his output. Stephen Behrendt explores his other fictions,
all unfortunately unfinished or lost, but worthy of consideration, not least in the
light of Shelley’s poetic achievements. Stories known as ‘The Assassins’ and ‘The
Coliseum’ are perhaps even more mysterious because they are seriously lacking
further development; in a different way, much the same might be said about
‘Una Favola’ which reveals the influence of Italian models and, in its frustrating
incompletion, might be set alongside the dark and compelling terza rima of ‘The
Triumph of Life’. Like so many of his prose works and his poetry (see, for example,
the two chapters by Alan Weinberg and Michael Bradshaw’s analysis in the first
volume) these pieces must be handled with an almost archaeological care and
allowed to speak for themselves, while necessarily contributing to a larger picture.
Behrendt traces a number of similar configurations and concerns in all three
extant prose fragments. If, as he argues, Shelley was impatient with the ordinary
conventions of narrative fiction, the poetic contours of the fragments might well
have prompted his development of new forms better suited to his imagination.
Behrendt therefore encourages us to believe that Shelley was not unsympathetic
to the novel or its shorter forms, or incapable of bringing a story to completion.
Possibly the most unsuspected perspective on Shelley’s work as a prose writer,
in some ways also the most apparently familiar, is provided by Charles Robinson’s
enquiry into Shelley’s role in the creation of Frankenstein. Robinson demonstrates
that Percy Shelley advised Mary Shelley on some parts of the plot and that he was
responsible for a number of passages (precisely indicated) and for a considerable
accumulation of local choices of word or phrase. As Robinson carefully documents,
at certain points Frankenstein bears traces of vocabulary which is unexampled
elsewhere in the writings of Mary Shelley but carries unmistakeable evidence of
Percy Shelley’s influence. Despite proving that Percy Shelley collaborated with
Mary Shelley in the writing of Frankenstein, Robinson also provides evidence that
Percy must not be considered as the ‘co-author’ (and certainly not the ‘author’)
of the novel. Nevertheless, Percy influenced the novel in a number of significant
ways; and, guided by Robinson’s chapter, we may approach the seemingly
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established summit of Frankenstein from a new perspective and, at the same time,
gain a new understanding of the nature of literary collaboration.
Perhaps the most obvious example of Shelley’s continued work as a writer
of prose is the record of his correspondence. Though incomplete, the standard
2-volume Oxford edition of the letters presents a various and vivid picture of his
life and thought, and of the various places he visited in his travels throughout
Britain and, in later years, in Italy. His literary friendships (with, for example,
Byron, Peacock, Hunt) and the needs that arose from them are especially notable
in correspondence. Somehow, as Timothy Webb argues, these letters have never
been accorded much attention in their own right. Yet, as Webb suggests, the
achievement of Shelley’s letters compares very favourably with that of literary
contemporaries. Shelley’s imagination is strongly in evidence, in recording his
observations, in subtly registering and transforming matters of everyday, or in the
gestures of friendship, in which he repeatedly accommodates or aligns himself
with the attitudes and opinions of his correspondents. While any analysis of letters
cannot escape entirely from the biographical, it is more than time that we began
to evaluate the nature of their achievement. Perhaps, this too is, or would be, an
exercise in constructive unfamiliarity or in repairing an unjustified neglect; most
readers will certainly not recognize the letters, in the first place, although even
those who do might now begin to reflect on their wider significance.
For some years, Shelley has been acknowledged as an important translator
but, for the most part, his translations have been hard to access or they have been
marginalized. Yet, the range of Shelley’s work as a translator is considerable and
would be recognizably even more significant, if we could discover his missing
version of Spinoza (a philosopher whose marked influence on Shelley is gradually
being recognized). Shelley’s translations are often important in their own right; we
have already mentioned his fine version of the Symposium; his translations of the
Homeric Hymns, of scenes from Calderón and Goethe’s Faust, of Euripides and
Dante are notable not only in themselves and as indications of early nineteenthcentury taste, but as clear signs of the European catholicity of Shelley’s sensibility
and interests. As this current collection of essays argues, many of the translations
also need to be seen not simply as passive renditions of their originals (if there is
such a thing) but as intimately linked to Shelley’s own creativity. This is reflected
in his choice of lesser-known originals that appealed to the light-hearted and
playful side of Shelley’s personality, and his affinity for pagan mythology. Both
Maria Schoina’s analysis of the little-considered version of Euripides’s satyr play,
Cyclops, and Timothy Webb’s account of the admired but little-analyzed Homeric
‘Hymn to Mercury’ insist that these translations should not be interpreted as neutral
renderings but recognized as part of Shelley’s often radical critique of the society
in which he lived and its prevailing orthodoxies. In both cases, experience of the
Italian countryside (rather than that of Greece) seems to have left its mark, while the
Shelley version is more fundamentally and playfully engaged with the limitations
of urban culture than has been generally understood. Verse-form is important here
and, in particular, Shelley’s decision to translate the Hymn into ottava rima, rather
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Introduction
than more traditional couplets, should be seen both as an inspired choice which, by
heightening the comic element, transforms the poem, and as an admission that he
approached his work as translator informed and stimulated by the poetic examples
of Italian predecessors. Comedy too is manifest in the Cyclops, and Maria Schoina
shows how Shelley intensifies incongruities in the original, exposing the civilized
Odysseus to laughter and perhaps ridicule by making him less sympathetic than
his arch-opponent, the monster Cyclops (Polypheme), who in Shelley’s conception
seems to bear traces of the creature in Frankenstein. In the case of the ‘Hymn to
Mercury’, the extraordinary self-possession of the thieving infant-god Mercury is
both amusing and instructive, in ways that reflect Shelley’s own pagan sympathies
(in contrast to his antipathy towards Christian divinities).
Not surprisingly, these two essays focus on Shelley’s engagement with ancient
Greece. They concentrate on a strand in his sensibility which has often been
acknowledged but which has tended to be regarded as ‘safer’ than it actually is.
Often, they can be linked to other chapters in the book,12 and not least to Michael
O’Neill’s account of Hellas which demonstrates that this ‘improvise’ is much less
obviously triumphalist than has generally been thought and much less comfortable
and conformist, even to a radical and philhellenic programme. As O’Neill shows,
Shelley is (with the finest art) able to hold in the balance positive and negative
outcomes, as if a firm decision either way would falsify the complexity and
uncertainty of life. Although not explicitly stated, his reading brings Hellas closer
in spirit to ‘The Triumph of Life’, a composition which it precedes by just six or so
months. Yet, with whatever qualifications, this drama, too, looks to Greek example
as the guiding spirit of liberal and expansive thought.
It could be argued, then, that the main intention of this book is to encourage
readers to abandon preconceptions and to approach Shelley with unprejudiced
eyes. The neglected deserves full scrutiny. Of course, all the contributors are
united by an urgent belief that Shelley more than deserves fuller and closer
consideration. Perhaps, that can be seen as a prejudice; but in the book as a whole,
essay speaks to essay, sometimes confirming or supplementing what the other has
said, sometimes expressing another point of view. As already noticed, no single
definition of unfamiliarity or neglect informs the whole; but an aspect of oversight
characterizes the critical legacy of all the texts considered in this volume; and the
cumulative force of the contributions attests to the versatility of the ‘unfamiliar’
and its capacity to open up the unexpected. Naturally, this procedure involves the
introduction of parts of Shelley’s work which lie beyond the normal boundaries;
at least one result of these investigations is to draw attention to parts of Shelley’s
oeuvre which have been generally neglected. More than once, though, this process
also involves examining again texts which are now comfortably established as
part of the canon: for example, most readers know Hellas (in so far as they do)
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See also Nora Crook’s comparison of Jewish and Greek independence (Chapter 13), 42
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Grecian) reverberations (Chapter 8).
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The Neglected Shelley
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through the words of some of its choruses, but Michael O’Neill has discovered
even in these set-pieces more compelling poetic life than is normally identified;
other parts of the play have been approached which do credit to Shelley’s poetic
invention and succeed in making even the apparently familiar challengingly and
excitingly unfamiliar. A similar but slightly different procedure marks Richard
Cronin’s chapter on The Sensitive-Plant. This ‘famous’ poem (especially popular
in the early nineteenth century) is, in fact, much less well known than might be
supposed. Cronin’s attention to oscillations of language or verse-form strips the
varnish from Shelley’s poem and exposes it to the possibility of a full critical
scrutiny. We discover (or for some re-discover) a poem that refuses to yield its
secret, prompting the recognition of a certain kind of ‘irresponsibility’ in Shelley
– a refusal on his part to be cut-and-dried or to package a prescriptive or easily
digestible message – that the reader will find echoed in many parts of this book.
This is the Shelley who is not the eternal optimist of popular belief but rather, as
Cronin points out, one who does honour to Keats’s ‘negative capability’.
The final words can be granted to Shelley himself. In a letter to Leigh Hunt
written from Florence on 27 September 1819 he celebrates the many creative
virtues of Boccaccio. Among other things, he says: ‘What descriptions of nature
are those in his little introductions to every new day. It is the morning of life stript
of that mist of familiarity which makes it obscure to us.’13 Even here, Shelley’s
smooth slide from the implications of ‘every new day’ to ‘the morning of life’
requires careful attention. He is not admiring what is merely an alienation effect,
designed to startle readers out of their complacency, but he is acknowledging the
power of a great creative writer to act like the sun and disperse that obscuring
‘mist of familiarity’ which blunts the sharp edges of reality. A similar point is made
less specifically and more rhapsodically in ‘A Defence of Poetry’: ‘It [Poetry]
awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden
beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.’14
The central image is now more obviously sexualized but, in both cases, the effect
of great literature is to introduce an enabling unfamiliarity which dissolves the
comforting surfaces of custom. According to this way of thinking, unfamiliarity
is an agent both radical and positive. New perspectives may not only serve to
rescue the neglected and accord them a justified attention but may also enable us
to recognize the range of Shelley’s interests, his lifelong commitment to the craft
of writing and the nature of his literary achievement with a fresh vision unaffected
by preconceptions.
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Letters II: 122.
SPP: 517.
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Chapter 1
An Uncelebrated Facility:
The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters
1
Timothy Webb
I
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Like many of his contemporaries, Shelley was an assiduous and inventive writer
of letters. For 50 years now, we have had the resource of the two-volume edition
of his correspondence edited by Frederick L. Jones, which runs to 721 letters
(including fragments, postscripts and accompanying notes, although not the five
fragmentary letters to Emilia Viviani in Italian, which Jones prints as an appendix);
subsequently, this core has been slightly supplemented and partly revised,2 but the
correspondence is still too rarely recognized in its own right rather than as a mere
corollary, or corrective, or supplement, to contemporary letters and journals, or as
a useful tool for critics and biographers.
Jones’s edition of the letters provides enriching insights into Shelley’s life,
especially his intellectual development, and establishes indispensable contexts
for his frequent travels in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, in France and
Switzerland and, from April 1818, in Italy. In the early letters, particularly,
it allows us to observe Shelley struggling to understand and articulate the
fundamental problems of philosophy and theology and the challenging facts of
English society and contemporary politics. These letters enable us to reconstruct,
at least partially, the circumstances of his day-to-day existence in Oxford, London
(at many addresses), Cwm Elan, Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin, Nantgwillt,
Lynmouth, Tanyrallt, Bishopsgate, Geneva, Bath, Marlow, Milan, Bagni di
Lucca, Este, Naples, Rome, Livorno, Florence, Pisa and neighbouring Bagni di
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1
All quotations from Shelley’s letters, unless specifically indicated otherwise, are
cited by volume and page number from Letters.
2
See, for example: John Buxton, ‘On the Text of Some Letters by Shelley’, The
Bodleian Library Record 8.6 (June 1972), pp. 338–42; Neville Rogers, ‘An Unpublished
Shelley Letter’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 24 (1973) pp. 20–24; David M. Stocking
and Marion Kingston Stocking, ‘New Shelley Letters in a John Gisborne Notebook’, KeatsShelley Memorial Bulletin 31 (1980), pp. 1–9 (especially pp. 2–4); John Freeman, ‘Shelley’s
Letters to his Father’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983), pp. 1–15; B.C. BarkerBenfield, ‘Hogg-Shelley Papers of 1810–12’, The Bodleian Library Record 14.1 (October
1991), pp. 14–29; Christopher Goulding, ‘An Unpublished Shelley Letter’, RES, N.S.
52 (2001), pp. 233–7 (the Shelley letters in question have been purchased by University
College, Oxford and can be seen at the Bodleian); Shelley and his Circle (SC), passim.
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Pisa (San Giuliano Terme), Ravenna, and finally in Lerici (at numerous other
locations, such as Como, Venice or Bologna, he produced little or no surviving
correspondence). They trace his attitudes to the writing of numerous philosophers
and influential thinkers such as the French sceptics and the historians of the French
Revolution; and writers of other generations and sometimes of other cultures, such
as Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, the Greek tragedians, Plato, Dante, Boccaccio,
Tasso, Ariosto, Calderón and Goethe. They capture his changing critical
assessments of celebrated literary contemporaries such as Godwin, Walter Scott,
Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, Peacock, Keats, Byron and Hunt (all, except Scott
and Wordsworth, known to him personally and receivers of his correspondence).
And, recurrently if incompletely, they illuminate, directly and indirectly, his
complicated and frequently disappointing relations with publishers and critics,
his literary intentions and plans for publication and his own progress as a writer,
primarily of poetry and plays but also, significantly, of essays and prose.
The record of letters is necessarily partial, imperfect and sometimes
misleading. Even a quick glance at recent discoveries indicates how unpredictable
is the discovery of letters which were previously unknown and how, although
they sometimes confirm what we thought we knew, they also may disturb the
established surface of the canon. Writing from Pisa in August 1821, Shelley gently
and jokingly chides his cousin Thomas Medwin for a failure to be realistic about
the inevitable postal frustrations and inadequacies (II: 341). The disconcerting
rule of the arbitrariness of what letters survive certainly applies to the whole of
Shelley’s life, not least to the correspondence of earlier years when there was no
difficulty with Italian post offices or leaving letters to be collected; for instance,
Nicholas Joukovsky records that most of Peacock’s English letters to Shelley have
disappeared, some perhaps used as paper boats, others left behind among Shelley’s
papers at Marlow.
Not surprisingly, the principle also holds good for the years in Italy, when
communication was necessarily more precarious. Joukovsky calculates that,
although on 24 August 1819 Shelley very gently reminded Peacock that his letters
had still not reached Livorno, ‘it would appear that even since 13 January Peacock
had written him a dozen or more letters’. Conversely, but entirely as one might
expect, some of Shelley’s letters to Peacock have also disappeared. Joukovsky
soberingly concludes that, although Peacock claimed that Shelley had written him
‘scarcely less than fifty’ letters from Italy (Peacock’s own figure), most have never
appeared in print, while others were probably done away with by Peacock himself
since they referred to business matters. In addition, says Joukovsky, ‘he is likely
to have destroyed his own letters for the same reasons that he destroyed some of
Shelley’s. Thus Peacock appears to have succeeded in manipulating both sides of
the epistolary record of his most important friendship’.3
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Nicholas A. Joukovsky. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, vol. 1, pp. lv–lxi (quotation, p. lx); 43
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see also p. 175 (n. 2).
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An Uncelebrated Facility
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Surviving correspondence is always subject to these and other distortions; yet,
even with the proviso that the testimony of letters must always be approached
with exceptional caution, Shelley’s extant correspondence is of great value. At
the least, it supplements the letters and journals of Claire Clairmont (an intimate
though occasional member of the Shelley party, the exact nature of whose
closeness to Shelley still remains controversial) and especially of Mary Shelley,
whom Shelley had first addressed as Mary Godwin (14 extant letters) and later as
his wife (18 extant letters), who usually stayed at home in various parts of Italy to
look after their child or children and did not accompany him on his expeditions;
to this arrangement we owe his first description of Venice, his detailed account
of Byron at Ravenna and of parts of the city, the report of his visit to Allegra (the
young daughter of Byron and Claire Clairmont) at the Convent of St Anna, and
his thoughtful but unknowingly final letter from Pisa (II: 34–5, 321–4, 334–5,
443–4).
Underneath all these letters, as in every collection of correspondence, there
is the graph of the writer’s own life, unknown and still evolving at the time but
now unchangeable (even if subject to a variety of interpretations), which leaves
its mark on his day-to-day existence. This can reflect both private life and public;
sometimes, as with Shelley, this distinction can often be maintained only with
difficulty.
Few readers can be ignorant of Shelley’s final destiny or fail to recognize the
retrospective irony of a passage written in a letter of 18 June:
Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind,
under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her
guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would
content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ‘Remain
thou, thou art so beautiful’. (II: 435–6)
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Less than three weeks later, Shelley and Edward Williams were to drown in the
same bay, while the suddenly widowed Jane Williams, whose guitar had recently
been purchased for her by an admiring Shelley,4 was soon to play a tragic and
unrehearsed part in Mary Shelley’s bewildered reactions. Shelley had been filling
his notebook with sketches of sailing boats and translating Faust, and the recipient
of this letter appropriately was John Gisborne, who had been his chief instructor
in German. In themselves, these facts assume a contour which is inevitably
bittersweet, even more so when the tense is irrevocably past and the recorder so
innocent of his own immediate future; what provides them with an even sharper
definition is the consciousness and skill of the writer, with which they are so vividly
and unforgettably informed. These qualities are evident in letters reporting on a
wide range of matters; for instance, there is his expulsion from Oxford; his brief
See Bruce Barker-Benfield, Shelley’s Guitar: A bicentenary exhibition of manuscripts,
first editions and relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Catalogue by B.C. Barker-Benfield.
Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1992, Item 148 (p. 176) and, for illustration, frontispiece.
4
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engagement in Irish politics; his gradual disenchantment with Harriet Westbrook,
followed shockingly by her unexpected suicide; his attraction and eventual
marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; his legal loss of two children by Harriet;
his imaginatively energizing visit to the lakes and mountains of Switzerland; his
translation to Italy, not intended to be permanent but ultimately leaving a shaping
impress on many of his works and achieving an irrevocable finality; his sojourns
in and visits to various cities in Italy; his responses to the distant echo of British
disturbances and his alertness to the immediacies and changing pattern, with all
its hopes and disappointments, of European, and especially Italian, political life.
Shelley’s letters often exhibit qualities of their own which are strongly
distinctive: a gracious consideration for his correspondents and a diplomatic
intuition, almost a special dimension of sensitivity (closely connected, perhaps,
with what Shelley himself might have described as a chameleon quality),5 which
sometimes caused him to be chosen as go-between in difficult situations, such
as the tangled relations between Claire Clairmont and Byron; an unmistakable
charm and elegance but with no sense of self-consciousness or assumed social
superiority; an unusual metaphorical capacity, sometimes combined with an
acute metaphysical intelligence; a descriptive immediacy in reporting on persons
and places which brings them vividly alive; an active political curiosity and an
informing set of determined political opinions (‘You know my passion for a
republic, or anything which approaches it’, II: 180); a disarming self-deprecation
often aimed at his own rhetorical excesses (‘So far the Preacher’, II: 191, following
a denunciation of Ollier, his publisher), or ‘But not to ascend in my balloon’ (II:
192, after he explains a theory to Peacock according to which everything a man
does contains ‘an allegorical idea of his own future life’); a recurrent good humour
(not without moments of sadness) and a strong sense of humour (see, for example,
the prolonged description of John Gisborne’s nose – ‘it weighs on the imagination
to look at it, – it is that sort of nose which transforms all the gs its wearer utters
into ks’, II: 114). The letters often throw an illuminating light on his character,
not always instantly evident from his prose and his poetry, and also enable his
readers to reconstruct what it might have been like to share his experiences in
the early years of the nineteenth century. Many of these letters are necessarily
connected to Shelley’s work as a writer (especially as a poet) and register with
melancholy exactness the fluctuations of his own attitude and his responses to
the recent successes of contemporaries and the unmatchable achievements of
their predecessors. This catalogue of attributes (which could easily be extended)
suggests that Shelley’s correspondence deserves careful consideration and might
profitably be compared not only with that of Byron, Keats and Coleridge but often
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Letters II: 308: ‘Poets, the best of them – are a very camaeleonic race: they take the
colour not only of what they feed on, but of the very leaves under which they pass.’ Some
months later, in a letter to Byron, he implied a more complicated model when praising the
language of the Fifth Canto of Don Juan as ‘a sort of cameleon under the changing sky of
the spirit that kindles it’ (II: 358).
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to his credit with the letters of Blake, William Wordsworth, Southey, Godwin,
Moore, Hazlitt, Peacock, Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley and many lesser writers
of the period.6
II
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The evidence of early letters clearly suggests that, at least at this stage of his
life, Shelley used his epistolary opportunities with playful and dramatic skill.7 For
example, under the name of ‘an elderly clergyman, highly-beneficed, and signing
himself Charles Meyton’, he gave spiritual guidance to Rev. George Stanley Faber
who had been troubled by a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. The irony
of this position and its potential for strengthening his own argumentative position
must have been evident to Shelley. In spite of his emotional commitment, he was
capable of assessing the situation with acidulous clarity: once in a letter to Thomas
Jefferson Hogg he classified Faber as one of ‘the Armageddon-Heroes [who]
maintain their posts with all the obstinacy of cabalistical dogmatism. How I pity
them, how I despise, hate them’ (I: 45).8 As Bruce Barker-Benfield has discovered,
in the assumed character of Meyton, Shelley offered Faber detailed advice, part of
which Faber reported, with obvious discomfort, as follows:
a sixth enormous lie consisted in his saying, that he had himself visited Palestine;
that it resembled a stone-quarry more than any thing else; and that neither angels
nor martyrs should ever convince him, contrary to the evidence of his senses,
that it had ever been a fertile land.9
6
Fairly recent exceptions which suggest that Shelley’s letters are finally being taken
more seriously can be found in: Benjamin Colbert, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and
Aesthetic Vision. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008; Daisy Hay, ‘Shelley’s Letters’, in The Oxford
Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 208–22. Reproductions of letters by Shelley and his
circle can be seen in Barker-Benfield, Shelley’s Guitar; Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C.
Denlinger, Shelley’s Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family. Oxford: Bodleian
Library, 2010. The continuing importance in this respect of Shelley and his Circle should
not be forgotten: it has printed in facsimile texts of many letters by Shelley and the
Shelley circle (many of them new), and accompanied them with responsible transcriptions
and detailed commentary. The tendency is necessarily to increase our understanding of
biographical and intellectual contexts, but other considerations are taken into account and
the resource is unique and increasingly invaluable.
7
In exploring this side of Shelley’s epistolary character, I am greatly indebted to
B.C. Barker-Benfield, ‘Hogg-Shelley Papers of 1810–12’ (details in n. 2 above). For one
suggestive example of the other side of Shelley’s youthful correspondence, see Nicholas
A. Joukovsky’s essay, ‘Robert Parker’s “Letters on Atheism”: An Early Response to
Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism’, RES 63.261 (September 2012), pp. 608–33.
8
See also I: 52 (postmarked 17 February 1811): ‘If any letter comes directed to the
Revd. Charles Meyton, it is mine. All the Bishops have the Atheism.’
9
Barker-Benfield, ‘Hogg-Shelley Papers’, p. 16.
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If he was ‘Meyton’, Shelley was also, rhymingly, ‘Peyton, which will be my nom
de guerre [and] will easily swallow up Mr. Shelley’. The assumed identity must
have pleased him since, shortly afterwards, he told Hogg, who was living in York,
‘I shall come & live near you as Mr Peyton’ (I: 118, 131).
As Frederick Jones explains it: ‘he adopted various pseudonyms, and often had
his letters posted by [Edward Fergus] Graham in London and the replies addressed
to Graham’s lodgings. The subjects at Oxford seem always to have been matters of
religious doctrine and faith, and the victims of this hoax clergymen, both eminent and
ordinary’ (I: 22 n. 2). There were other targets and other gratifying ingenuities. For
example, on 21 November 1810 he informed Graham of his latest impersonation:
‘The letter I sent t{o} be put in the Post, is a most beautiful Joke, it is from a French
girl to the king of the Methodists’ (I: 22). Again, on 13 March 1811 he wrote a
long and remarkable letter to the young poet Felicia Browne (now better known
by her married name as Felicia Hemans); this letter was signed ‘Philippe Sidney’,
a signature which carries Shelley’s own initials but is mysteriously translated into
French. As Bruce Barker-Benfield argues, it is also ‘mere cheek’ because, although
Shelley was genuinely related to the Sidney family, he has ‘tricked Felicia and
her mother into believing that they are indeed corresponding with a family of
Sidneys at an address in London’.10 The content of this closely argued letter is
also designed to be provocative; among other things, the supposed Philippe Sidney
confesses: ‘I examined the grounds upon which Theism is founded, they appeared
to me weak, thro’ deficiency of proof I became an Atheist.’11 This sentence is
doubly autobiographical, since it provides an account of intellectual positioning
which clearly applies to Percy Shelley (whatever may be said of Philippe Sidney);
even more pointedly, although the unsatisfactory nature of theism is not directly
articulated in the pamphlet, the final formulation (‘Thro’ … Atheist’) had recently
appeared on the title-page of the anonymous The Necessity of Atheism.
Shelley’s role-playing is often linked to a variety of factors or interests: the
Regency practice of ‘bamming’ (that is, hoaxing or tricking), an excess of youthful
high spirits and an impatience with conventional questions of ‘identity’. Especially,
it shapes the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, a sequence of poems
attributed to the deranged woman who had attempted to assassinate George III
(discussed elsewhere in this book by David Duff, who has much to say about
Shelley’s proclivity for the ludic, for deliberately confusing impersonation and for
provocative literary jokes and games). All these connections may be significant,
but the direct link of the Felicia Browne letter to the pamphlet and the recurrent
need to argue with clergymen and bishops also suggest that, at least for Shelley, a
process of apparent indirection may be associated with the most serious concerns.
As Hogg and other students of Shelley have pointed out, there may also be a
link here with the lessons about influencing the reading public which Shelley had
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absorbed from Dr Lind at Eton. Although there seems to have been no further
attempt at role-playing through the medium of correspondence, Shelley retained,
at least for some years, a more than usually acute sense of the power of individual
readers to influence or even alter public opinion; see, for example, the long and
carefully itemized list of influential politicians, public figures, newspaper editors
and political organizations he selected to receive copies of A Proposal for Putting
Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom (I: 533–4), or the much shorter list
of those who should automatically receive copies of all his publications (II: 118;
a catalogue of supporters which has much in common with the list of friends in
‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’). It is worth noting, too, that the Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty was published under the name of ‘Elfin Knight’ while the slightly later
review of Godwin’s Mandeville employed the initials ‘E.K’. Probably for political
or legal reasons, the author of A Proposal did not identify himself as Percy Bysshe
Shelley but chose the evasive title of ‘The Hermit of Marlow’, a name which he
retained when he published An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess
Charlotte. At the end of March 1822, when Shelley wanted Claire Clairmont to
communicate with him at Pisa, keeping the letters secret from his wife, he returned
to this kind of youthful assumption of identity when he selected the deliberately
unlikely name of ‘Joe James’ (II: 402).
III
Shelley’s early correspondence includes a number of letters to his father, whom
he usually approached with reassurances of his own obedience or sense of duty,
although a growing sense of irritation and emotional distance on both sides
becomes increasingly evident after his expulsion from Oxford. The shift can be
traced in letters to friends and contacts as the apparently genial ‘Il Padre’ of an
early letter is transformed to the more threatening caricatures of ‘old Killjoy’12 or
‘the old buck’ (I: 3, 86–7, 118). In two verse letters to Graham, written in May
and June 1811, Timothy Shelley was transformed into a caricature of a tyrannical
father, ‘eaten up with Jealousy / His brows so dark his ears so blue!’ (‘To EFG
#1’, ll. 4–5; Letters I: 86); in his son’s gleeful but vindictive imagining, the squire
now became a grotesque and joyless figure who desired ‘That an horn on his
dark frowning brow were implanted’ (‘To EFG #2’, l. 34)’.13 In one letter (later
in September 1811), Shelley asks his father with provoking directness (I: 142):
‘Father are you a Christian? [a question which Shelley has already posed only
two sentences before] judge not then lest you be judged.’ The use of the Biblical
quotation against the apparently orthodox had probably been deployed to trouble
Faber or to impose on his credulity. It now appears to become a characteristic
strategy, and the admonitory sentence from Matthew’s gospel is soon cited again
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13
See CPPBS I: 140, 144.
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in another letter (I: 146–7), in which Shelley questions Sir Timothy’s authority as a 1
head of the family who continues to believe in obedience, even though he is ‘liable 2
to be misled by passion and prejudice like others’. Shelley confirms his alienation 3
by asserting both his own superiority and the intellectual limitations of his father: 4
‘I confess it is almost natural for minds not of the highest order to value even the 5
errors whence they derive their importance.’
6
What is probably the next letter begins ‘Dear Father’ (in itself this phrasing 7
seems to indicate a cooling in relations since all previous letters had been initiated 8
by ‘My dear Father’); but even this attempt at courtesy soon breaks down into 9
a terrifying affirmation of Shelley’s hostility (‘You have treated me ill, vilely’) 10
and an almost paranoiac sense of alienation which so explicit an epistolary 11
acknowledgment can hardly have improved (I: 149):
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When I was expelled for atheism you wished I had been killed in Spain.
The desire of its consummation is very like the crime … I shall take the first
opportunity of seeing you – if you will not hear my name, I will pronounce
it. Think not I am an insect whom injuries destroy – had I money enough I
would meet you in London, & hollow in your ears Bysshe, Bysshe, Bysshe – aye
Bysshe till you’re deaf.
Sir Timothy may have been obstinate, difficult and unduly concerned with
orthodoxies, but he must have been startled by the intensity and hostility of this
communication. Immediately subsequent letters are not so theatrical, nor so
threatening, nor so extreme, but they clearly indicate the gulf between father and
son since they begin ‘My d[ea]r Sir’ and ‘Dear Sir’, an unfamilial (and unfamiliar)
mode of address only partially repaired in Shelley’s last two letters to his father
which revert, perhaps surprisingly, to the form of ‘My dear Father’.
Shelley’s correspondence with his father, which was concentrated in the
early years and apparently concluded as early as 1814, suggests something of
his personality at this relatively early stage of his life. It is dramatic (sometimes
melodramatic), argumentative, frequently self-regarding, provoking, rebellious,
confrontational, mischievous, and often difficult. Many, perhaps all, of these
characteristics can be found elsewhere in the letters of his earlier years, although
the protracted conflict with his father can be seen as providing a continuing and
troubling context for other concerns. There are letters where Shelley worries at
philosophical problems, and others (scattered throughout his career) where he
engages with political issues. Here, as elsewhere, foundations laid in England
were developed in Italy; but the intensity and range is perhaps more evident in
Shelley’s essays than in his correspondence; even if this generalization must be
qualified by his response to the royal banquet at Carlton House (I: 105–6, 110).
There are didactic letters (notably a cluster of 47 to Elizabeth Hitchener, the first
written on 5 June 1811 and the last on 18 June 1812), in which he exercises his
penchant for exploring philosophical and theological issues and for authoritative
and directive statement. Like his youthful friend Edward Fergus Graham, who
received a sequence of eight letters in 1810, followed by four in the same year
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and eight more by July of the following year, including an exuberant verse letter
(I: 86–7), Elizabeth Hitchener was the subject of a brief but intense attachment,
before she was transformed from ‘Portia’ to ‘the Brown Demon’ and banished
from the Shelley household.
There are letters to bankers, at least one correspondent who specialized in life
insurance, money-lenders, agents (the otherwise obscure William Bryant received
at least 10 brief letters within a short space of time), various ‘tradesmen’, solicitors
and lawyers. A sustained focus on this aspect of Shelley’s correspondence would
confirm the central importance of money at this stage of his career and how much
he depended on such unliterary figures; it would certainly provide a suggestive
alternative to the more conventional narrative of poetic genius. As he once told
Mary Godwin, truthfully, if unromantically (I: 419): ‘my letters are full of money,
whilst my being overflows with unbounded love, & elevated thoughts.’ On one
occasion (I: 553–5), there is even a letter (drafted by one of Shelley’s solicitors)
addressed to the Lord Chancellor, who had separated Shelley from the children
of his first marriage; and on another, long after he had moved to Italy, to the
clergyman (II: 264–5) to whose care, eventually, they had been committed. During
the years in England and later in Italy, Shelley wrote copious letters to his bankers
Brookes & Co. (35, plus 7 cheques), with whom he communicated, though briefly,
much more frequently than with friends such as Peacock or Leigh Hunt (or so
the records suggest). There are numerous letters to booksellers and publishers,
especially in the early days to John Joseph Stockdale (11) and to Peacock’s friend
Thomas Hookham (14). On at least four occasions Shelley writes to John Murray,
once offering his own poems, and three times when acting as intermediary for
Byron; on one occasion (I: 511) he complains that he had not received proofs of
the Third Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Prisoner of Chillon, which
had been entrusted to his care.
There are letters to his two wives. Several to Harriet Westbrook consider
the end of their married relationship (‘Our connection was not one of passion
& impulse. Friendship was its basis’), one unrealistically suggests that she join
Shelley and the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on tour in Switzerland, and
one unfeelingly and absurdly informs her that ‘I am in want of stockings, hanks
& Mrs. W[ollstonecraft]’s posthumous works’ (I: 389, 391–2, 400). As noted
above, many letters are directed to Mary Godwin herself (who from 30 December
1816 was Mary Shelley), marking the growth of their mutual commitment and the
points of their separation, and suggesting both his strong powers of reportage and
the depth of their shared affection.
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IV
Much of this correspondence seems to have been confined to Shelley’s English
years. Many of the Italian letters continue the concerns of the earlier period
but carry surprisingly little of that tortured and sometimes egotistical intensity
which often marks the first volume. Perhaps by the end of March 1818, and
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for all his struggles and anxieties, Shelley had achieved a clearer sense both of
his objectives and of his identity. Growing maturity, frequent switches of scene
and the liberating advantages of distance seem to have effected some dramatic
changes and significantly altered the balance of his personal connections. Many
of those to whom he had written before now disappear entirely from the record of
his correspondence or become little more than marginal figures. William Whitton
(Sir Timothy’s solicitor), his father, mother and two sisters, the Grove family,
Edward Fergus Graham and Elizabeth Hitchener had long been consigned to
epistolary oblivion; like the publishers Stockdale and Thomas Hookham and a
range of lawyers, money-lenders and ‘tradesmen’, they were not resurrected in
Italy. William Godwin had been a powerful intellectual and political influence
on the young Shelley, who treated him as an unmatchable authority (see the draft
introduction to Laon and Cythna) and even, at times, as a surrogate father; during
the English years, he had been the recipient of 41 letters, an index of his almost
unrivalled status, but now he was Shelley’s father-in-law, and grumpily confined
to another country, he only received two more. Another notable figure affected
by the move to Italy was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, shared-author of The Necessity
of Atheism, friend of both Shelleys and classically inclined lawyer. In spite of
growing differences, both temperamental and ideological, he had continued to be
one of Shelley’s closest friends while Shelley was still in England and received
76 letters; now, although his movements and sayings were sometimes relayed by
Hunt and Peacock, he received only six letters from Shelley during almost four
years.
The places of these correspondents were taken by a company which was
largely different. There was Thomas Medwin, a cousin and, like Hogg, an early
biographer; and there was Shelley’s sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, who frequently
lived in the Shelley household, and whose separate residence (mainly in Florence)
brought her 14 letters in 1821 and 7 more in Shelley’s final year. Above all, there
were John and Maria Gisborne, who singly and together received 39 letters from
Shelley; all of these letters were necessarily written in Italy since the Gisbornes and
the Shelleys were unknown to each other until they met at Livorno in May 1818.
The Gisbornes, who owe much of their enduring celebrity to their association with
Shelley, are in a special category since they were also recipients of Shelley’s fluent
and disarming verse letter, now usually known as ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’. Their
cases also demonstrate that, especially after their move to Italy, both Shelleys
sometimes communicated separately by letter with joint friends; Maria Gisborne,
for instance, was the recipient of at least 80 letters from Mary Shelley.14
Occasionally, though, an epistolary connection was continued, and sometimes
strengthened, even after Shelley moved abroad. A particularly good example of
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See Timothy Webb, ‘Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading 41
“Letter to Maria Gisborne”’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy 42
Webb (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 119–36 (pp. 121–2 on correspondence, p. 122 on 43
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letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).
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this is provided by Leigh Hunt, whom Shelley had known since 1812 and who,
together with his wife Marianne, had exchanged long visits with the Shelleys. For
whatever reason, the English record only includes four letters to Hunt himself and
a postscript to his wife; the Italian years generated 24 letters to Leigh and one to
Marianne (the same period also produced 30 letters from Mary Shelley – who for
some months after Shelley’s death shared the Hunt house at Albaro – followed by
another 23 in just over four years after Shelley’s drowning). This correspondence
was unusual in that it involved all four members of the group, although Marianne
Hunt contributed much less than the other three. Shelley entertained a particular,
and strongly reciprocated, affection for Hunt with whom he discussed poetic
matters, publication (Hunt often seems to have acted as Shelley’s agent in London),
the attractions of Italy (the Shelleys regularly tried to persuade the Hunts to visit)
and contemporary English politics (which, as editor of The Examiner, Hunt was
ideally placed to interpret). In a letter dating from the second half of November
1819 (II: 151–3), in which he also asks for news of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’,
Shelley expresses his anxieties and his temperamental preference for some kind of
viable and carefully calculated equilibrium: ‘I fear that in England things will be
carried violently by the rulers, and that they will not have learned to yield in time
to the spirit of the age. The great thing to do is to hold the balance between popular
impatience and tyrannical obstinacy; to inculcate with fervour both the right of
resistance and the duty of forbearance.’
Another regular target of Shelley’s correspondence was Thomas Love Peacock,
classicist, poet, novelist and employee of the East India Company, a close friend of
Shelley but a strikingly different personality. In 1816 Peacock had received four
letters, two of which constituted long, detailed and richly atmospheric travelogues,
a description of sailing on Lake Geneva with Byron and, from Chamonix, an account
of a mountain expedition (I: 480–88, 495–502); both of these letters, though with
significant variations from the original, eventually formed a significant element in
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), which was published by Thomas Hookham
and the Ollier brothers. Now in 1818 alone Peacock was sent 17 letters, many of
them substantial, supplemented by 5 more by the end of the following September.
Peacock in Great Marlow received a series of letters in which Shelley described
his reactions to Italian scenes and experiences with great vividness. Although
Shelley never declares any explicit intention, this concentrated letter-writing may
have been primarily intended to record his first impressions of Italy, perhaps even
(though secondarily) to serve as the foundation of a travel book. Shelley himself
said nothing to this effect but Mary Shelley asked Peacock to retain the letters so
that she could transcribe them.15 Shelley even made it clear that the letters were
not private; he expected Peacock to share them because ‘I do not like writing
twice over the same things’ (II: 66–7); as he says in a later letter to Hunt: ‘Perhaps
Peacock has shewn you some of my letters to him’ (II: 112).
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MWS Letters I: 82.
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Sometimes, as he reported to Peacock, Shelley allowed himself indulgences
which were part of the normal tourist experience:16 for instance, he enjoyed a
moonlight walk through Bologna (‘a city of Colonnades’, where ‘the effect of
moonlight is strikingly picturesque’, II: 53). A boat trip in the Bay of Naples
eventually left its traces on Ode to the West Wind. Shelley’s regular pleasures at
Rome included a delighted and contemplative routine (II: 86–7): ‘I see the radiant
Orion thro the mighty columns of the temple of Concord, & the mellow fading
light softens down the modern buildings of the Capitol the only ones that interfere
with the sublime desolation of the scene.’ His concentration on the classical past
rather than the modern was likely to be received sympathetically by Peacock17
(and their mutual friend Hogg), while the perspective through the columns of the
temple was an obvious, if gratifying, exercise in the picturesque.
Shelley reported to Peacock on his experience of other notable places: in the
earlier part of his travels, Milan, Lake Como, life at Bagni di Lucca, and Ferrara
where he encountered a penitent ‘completely enveloped in a ghost like drapery of
white flannel’, whose face was concealed by a network visor, and who ‘past rattling
his wooden box for charity’; ‘this kind of exhibition’, Shelley informs Peacock, ‘is
a striking instance of the power of the Catholic superstition over the human mind’
(II: 48). At Ferrara he also observed the tomb of Tasso (a celebrated destination
for travellers) and manuscripts of Ariosto and Tasso, who furnished the subject
for an unfinished play18 and seems to have informed the composition of ‘Julian
and Maddalo’ (‘The hand writing of Ariosto is a small, firm & pointed character
expressing as I should say a strong & keen but circumscribed energy of mind, that
of Tasso is large free & flowing except that there is a checked expression in the
midst of its flow’, II: 47). When Shelley visited Tasso’s prison, he sent Peacock
‘a piece of the wood of the very door which for seven years divided this glorious
being from the air & the light’ (II: 48); Peacock disagreed with Shelley’s sanguine
view that dungeons were no longer in use, but he ‘laid up in consecrated paper the
morsels of Tasso’s dungeon door’.19
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16
See Nicola J. Watson, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and
Victorian Britain. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006.
17
In one of his letters to Hogg (Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, vol. 1, p. 150),
Peacock admitted: ‘I think there can be little in the “bel paese” to compensate the trouble
of visiting it; still less the expence: least of all the loss of Greek incurred in travelling
from inn to inn and hearing bad Italian spoken by ugly and filthy people. I have myself no
aspirations that way and had rather sail the Vaga over Pont-y-casyllty [an aqueduct built
by Thomas Telford] than spur up my flea-bitten over the Appenines.’ Hogg’s attitudes were
even less attuned to the trials of foreign experience than those of Peacock. This letter seems
to indicate that, although Peacock enjoyed hearing from Shelley, he preferred to stay at
home and could not match the openness of his friend.
18
For a more detailed analysis, see Alan Weinberg’s chapter on the Italian verse
fragments, pp. 281–306.
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Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, vol. 1, p. 155.
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Other Italian points of reference included Venice (‘I can only compare [the
gondolas] to moths of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis’, II: 42); the
approaches to Naples, Naples itself and the changing Italian landscape, especially
its trees and vegetation (‘external nature in these delightful regions contrasts
with & compensates for the deformity & degradation of humanity’, II: 60). At
Naples he witnessed a street-assassination, which provided another instance of
that ‘barbarian ferocity’ so painfully at odds with ‘the wild beauty of the scenery’
(II: 60). There was an ascent of Vesuvius and a descent by torchlight (II: 62–3).
Shelley was troubled by the guides, but he also admitted that ‘Nothing can be
more picturesque than the gestures & physiognomies of these savage people’ and
admired the ‘fine’ ‘effect’ whenever ‘in the darkness of night they unexpectedly
begin to sing in chorus some fragment of their wild & but [sic] sweet national
music’.20 As this response suggests, Shelley’s radicalism did not prevent him
from occasionally ignoring the facts of peasant life and indulging, like so many
visitors, in the pursuit of the aesthetically gratifying. This bittersweet experience
was followed by a visit to Pompeii (II: 71–5), where the Forum was haunted by the
presence of the volcano (‘Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius rolling forth
volumes of thick white smoke whose foamlike column was sometimes darted into
the clear dark sky & fell in little streaks along the wind’, II: 73).
Like most visitors, he was impressed by many aspects of Rome, whose
inhabitants ‘seem much superior to any in Italy’ (II: 70); he was highly responsive
to many aspects of ‘this capital of the vanished world’ (II: 54) and celebrated a
number of its features including the ruined Baths of Caracalla, soon to appear in
the Preface to Prometheus Unbound (‘Never was any desolation more sublime &
lovely’, II: 84). ‘The Coliseum’, he told Peacock, ‘is unlike any work of human
hands I ever saw before’ and, like the Pantheon and many buildings at Pompeii,
was ‘open to the sky, & it was the clear & sunny weather of the end of November
in this climate when we visited it day after day’ (II: 58–9). Rome was a ‘city as
it were of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, & who survive the puny
generations which inhabit & pass over the spot which they have made sacred to
eternity’ (II: 59).
Another example of epistolary continuity is provided by Byron whom the
Shelleys had got to know well in Switzerland in 1816 and whom Shelley now
visited first in Venice and then in Ravenna; the 10 letters of the first period were
now supplemented by 19 more. Shelley provides detailed descriptions at different
stages of Byron’s Italian odyssey: his account of Byron at Venice (II: 58) is vivid
but disapproving (‘Countesses smell so of garlick that an ordinary Englishman
cannot approach them’), but by the time of his visit to Ravenna (II: 322–3, 349),
Shelley himself had mellowed and, at least according to his estimation, Byron
was ‘greatly improved in every respect’. By this stage, Shelley was much more
tolerant of Byron’s eccentricities, perhaps because Byron seemed to have settled
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the World. London: Profile Books, 2011; for Shelley’s expedition, see pp. 106–11.
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into a steady relationship (II: 324): ‘Here are two monkies, five cats, eight dogs
& ten horses – all of whom (except the horses) walk about {the} house like the
masters of it.’ In a letter to Peacock (II: 330–31) some of the details are slightly
altered and Shelley adds to the list an eagle, a crow and a falcon, concluding in a
postscript: ‘I have just met on the grand staircase five peacocks, two guinea hens,
and an Egyptian crane. I wonder who all these animals were before they were
changed into these shapes’ (an earlier reference to ‘this Circean Palace’ indicates
that he was thinking of magical transformations in the Odyssey).
In spite of these unsettling presences, and the obvious unconventionality,
Shelley was always conscious of what he regarded as his own poetic inferiority (II:
323): ‘I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may: and there is no other with
whom it is worth contending.’ Shelley suspected that his friendly persuasion and
his insistence on Byron’s poetic potential might have helped. For instance, he had
enthusiastically praised parts of Canto 1 of Don Juan (‘Dante hardly exceeds it’)
but, as he told Byron, he was also affronted by ‘the bitter mockery of our common
nature’ (II: 198) since he recognized that the poem itself provided evidence of
better instincts: ‘The power and the beauty and the wit, indeed, redeem all this
– chiefly because they belie and refute it.’ In Ravenna, as he informed his wife,
his respect for Byron’s achievement was less qualified and generously lacking in
self-reference (II: 323):
He has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan [Canto V], which
is astonishingly fine. – It sets him not above but far above all the poets of the
day: every word has the stamp of immortality … . This canto is in style, but
totally, & sustained with incredible ease & power, like the end of the second
canto: there is not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human
nature could desire to be cancelled: it fulfills in a certain degree what I have long
preached of producing something wholly new & relative to the age – and yet
surpassingly beautiful.
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This modulation from a traveller’s impressions of Ravenna and the intimate
portrait of Byron to an analysis of Don Juan may be characteristic of the apparently
unplanned structure of many letters; certainly, it is a recurrent feature of Shelley’s
letter-writing, which often moves in and out of acute literary criticism, without
formality or preamble. Shelley was determined to continue exercising his good
influence. Several months later, he wrote to Byron from Pisa to thank him for a
copy of Cantos III–V of Don Juan (II: 357–8): ‘This poem carries with it at once
the stamp of originality and a defiance of imitation. Nothing has ever been written
like it in English – nor, if I may venture to prophesy, will there be.’ Like a rigorous
tutor, he also added some criticism and claimed some credit: ‘This sort of writing
only on a great plan & perhaps in a more compact form is what I wished you to do
when I made my vows for an epic.’
The relationship with Byron troubled Shelley in other ways, which can also
be traced in the correspondence. His tact was often stretched to the limits. In his
long letter to Mary Shelley from Ravenna he reveals (II: 324) that he had spoken
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to Byron about ‘poor Hunt’ who, as usual, was in great need of money, although,
in spite of the fact that he and Byron were ‘excellent friends’, ‘something’ in him
made it impossible to ask Byron for ‘a contribution’. With an unillusioned eye to
himself as well as to Byron, he generalizes about the difficulty of personal relations:
‘The demon of mistrust & of pride lurks between two persons in our situation
poisoning the freedom of their intercourse. – This is a tax and a heavy one which
we must pay for being human.’ The paragraph concludes with two sentences which
illuminate the reflexive basis of Shelley’s psychological curiosity: ‘I hope that in
the next world these things will be better managed. – What is passing in the heart
of another rarely escapes the observation of one who is a strict anatomist of his own
–’ (the final sentence might make a suggestive epigraph to ‘Julian and Maddalo’).
Shelley also acted as intermediary between Byron and Claire Clairmont, with
whom his relations were extremely close but whose behaviour, not unlike that of
Byron, he was also prepared to analyze from a distance with sympathy edged with
epigrammatic and sometimes exasperated acuteness (II: 236): ‘poor thing, she is
very unhappy & in bad health, & she ought to be treated with as much indulgence
as possible. – The weak & the foolish are in this respect like Kings: they can do no
wrong.’ In particular, he recognized that his only rights over the young daughter
of Byron and Claire (‘little Allegra’) were derived from ‘my feelings and those of
Mary’: yet he admitted his own lack of authority when he declared to Byron that ‘I
am spared the pain of being an interlocutor in a matter over which, I believe, I have
no influence either as it regards her or you’ (II: 198). His description (previously
mentioned) of his visit to Allegra (II: 334–5), which involves some exchanges in
Italian, is peculiarly touching; Shelley records that ‘Before I went away she made
me run all over the convent like a mad thing’ and that ‘on returning Allegra began
ringing the bell which calls the nuns to assemble’ – with predictable results.
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Perhaps the most unexpected correspondence was that with Leigh Hunt’s friend
Charles Ollier, which had begun in England and was continued in Italy. With his
brother, Ollier had already published Laon and Cythna and The Revolt of Islam and
two volumes of prose. An early cause of tension was Ollier’s original reluctance
to publish Laon and Cythna, a weakness which (in Shelley’s view) would only
encourage the agents of government to arrest the parties involved, ‘as criminals
already convicted by their own fears’ (I: 579). Shelley was acutely conscious
of the dangers of a friendship with Hunt, which might involve both Ollier and
especially Shelley himself (in January of that year Hunt had demonstrated their
closeness when accompanying Shelley to the custody hearing by Lord Eldon,
while Mary Shelley’s journal records in detail the closeness of the two families
later in the year).
Yet, in spite of these anxieties and a number of suspicions, this business
connection continued after Shelley had moved to Italy. In October 1819 he relaxed
his hostility sufficiently to end a longish letter to Ollier in London with enquiries
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for the safety of Hunt and a reference to the concluding passage in John Taylor
Coleridge’s review of The Revolt of Islam (title of the revised Laon and Cythna).
Exhibiting, perhaps, that ‘taste for humour and drollery’ which he admitted that he
was acquiring (II: 123), Shelley exaggeratedly transposed this animated paragraph,
presenting himself as ‘swearing and cursing in all comic and horrid oaths, like a
French postillion on Mount Cenis’ (II: 128).21 The self-deprecatory humour and the
capacity for developing an image, in this case to comical proportions (‘pretending
not to be drowned myself when I am drowned; and, lastly, being drowned’),
is more typical of the mature Shelley and his correspondence than is usually
conceded. J.T. Coleridge’s vividly imagistic and exaggerated criticism seems to
have made a special mark on Shelley’s consciousness; he refers to it again in a
later letter to Ollier where he expresses amusement at the review’s claim that his
‘chariot-wheels’ were broken and suggests that it would be a ‘comical thing’ if an
advertisement were issued in which Mr Charters of Bond Street (Shelley’s unpaid
coachmaker, whose real name was Thomas Chartres) ‘begs to assure the public
that they [that is, the wheels], after having carried him through Italy, France, and
Switzerland, still continue in excellent repair’ (II: 163).
In a characteristic switch of tone, the same letter also addresses more
pragmatic issues: directions for publication of The Cenci (which is to be kept in a
box until the receipt of appropriate instructions); the dedication of Shelley’s play
to Hunt; and the concluding enquiry about the parcel which Hunt was supposed
to have sent, the date of posting, the name of the ship and its captain, and details
concerning the immediate despatch (‘by return of post’) of the bill of lading (II:
128). Since Shelley’s poetry has often been criticized for its weak grasp on the
actual, his competent analysis of this situation and his ability to combine attention
to detail with good-humoured self-description should be registered. A similar hardheadedness often marks his grasp of business affairs – see, for example, his detailed
instructions to Hookham (I: 350) about the despatch of books, including ‘all Kants
works’ to an address in Wales, or his directions to Ollier (I: 532–4) concerning
the distribution of A Proposal to booksellers and how copies were to be sent to
a catalogue of influential parties, including editors of specified newspapers. Four
and a half years later, a similar practicality and shrewdness informs his report to
Byron (II: 343) on renting and furnishing a palazzo at Pisa and finding additional
stables – at one point, he is even self-confidently directive (‘You come out on the
Pisa road about ten miles on the other side of Florence’). In another letter from
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Although neither of the Shelleys record this crossing in detail, Claire Clairmont
does: ‘Next Morning we begin the ascent of Mont Cenis. and Shelley sung all the way /
“Now Heaven neglected is by Men / And Gods are hung upon every tree / But not the more
for loss of them / Shall this fair world unhappy be.[”] / and asserted that the Mountains
are God’s Corps de Ballet of which the Jung fraue is Mademoiselle Milanie [celebrated
ballerina whom Shelley had admired in London]. We dine on the top of Cenis & bless
Napoleon for the passage must have been dreadful before the new Road was made’. The
Journals of Claire Clairmont 1814–1827, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 88–9.
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this time he informs Horace Smith (II: 349): ‘I have just taken the finest palace in 1
Pisa for him, and his luggage, and his horses’ and even suggests to Smith that he 2
should be prepared to travel from Paris: ‘I have marked down several houses in 3
Florence, and one especially on the Arno, a most lovely place, though they asked 4
rather more than perhaps you would have chosen to pay – yet nothing approaching 5
to an English price.’ These pragmatic characteristics are also strongly evident in 6
his letters to Leigh Hunt about the financial arrangements for the establishment of 7
The Liberal, the furnishing of his rooms in Pisa, the hiring of an Italian cook and 8
the most convenient way and time of year to sail from England to Italy (II: 344, 9
355–6, 380–81).
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This period seems to have stimulated Shelley to the writing of public letters, a
kind of proclamation or even self-advertisement which might have been thought
to have attracted a younger version of himself but which features only once
in the first volume of his correspondence. This category includes letters to the
editors of various journals, mostly not completed and usually not sent, such as
two defences of Keats (II: 130, 251–3). A lively communication to Charles Ollier,
as editor of Ollier’s Literary Miscellany (II: 272–4) required three drafts, in spite
of its shortness, and is both a critique of Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry
and an introduction to ‘A Defence of Poetry’, an essay which was intended for
publication in Ollier’s periodical and might easily have originated in the form
of a public letter. A letter of June 1821 to the editor of The Examiner publicly
disclaims Queen Mab, which had been a primary factor in Shelley’s loss of his
first two children and which had now been piratically reprinted (II: 304–5). With
whatever undeclared motivation, the author now renounces this youthful poem as
a work ‘written … with unreflecting enthusiasm’ and ‘perfectly worthless in point
of literary composition’. He even sent a copy of his letter to Ollier, asking him to
have it printed in the Morning Chronicle (II: 305).
Another, earlier, letter to The Examiner (II: 136–48) engages in detail with
the trial of the publisher Richard Carlile (some years later to publish a pirated
edition of Queen Mab), who had been fined and sentenced to three years in prison
for printing passages from Paine’s Age of Reason and for republishing Palmer’s
Principles of Nature. Shelley’s detailed and passionate account of the Carlile
affair (‘in which’, as he later told Hunt, ‘I was considerably interested’) did
not appear in print until 1880 and, with restoration of all its significant deleted
passages (except for its signature, which had been cut out), not until 1926. This
is yet another example of Hunt’s editorial caution, which was sometimes perhaps
well-intentioned, sometimes nervous of yet another prosecution, but which
often unfortunately blunted Shelley’s immediate effectiveness and significantly
damaged and distorted his reputation (compare Hunt’s tactical withholding of
‘Peter Bell the Third’, ‘England in 1819’ and ‘The Mask of Anarchy’). Hunt’s
editorial strategies and the resulting silences helped to produce an image of Shelley
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in keeping with Hunt’s own influential figuring but significantly more accepting
of conventional orthodoxies and less edged and radical than the determined and
awkward biographical and poetical reality.
The essay on Carlile is a persuasive piece of argument on the constitution
of juries (invoking, among others, Paine, Godwin, Bentham, Hume, Drummond,
Hone, Christ and Socrates); surprisingly, it does not feature in David Lee Clark’s
edition of the prose, not presumably because of its radical case, but perhaps
because it is ostensibly couched in the form of a letter. Yet to disqualify it on
such generic grounds is to ignore the fact that, as in the case of the earlier A
Letter to Lord Ellenborough (published separately as a pamphlet in 1812), Shelley
intended it as a contribution to a public debate. This was in spite, or even perhaps
because, of its pointed implication of friendly ties with Leigh Hunt (‘My dear
Friend’ at the beginning, and a further personalized address near the conclusion:
‘These, my dear Hunt, are awful times’) and its expressions of admiration for
Hunt’s task of ‘opposing the great & various resources of your accomplished mind
to the de {accidental gap in MS but presumably ‘feat of’} tyrants & impostors
who surround you’ (II: 148). Shelley’s tribute has something in common with the
praise of Hunt’s virtues in the Dedication to The Cenci (also addressed to ‘My dear
friend’), which Shelley had written a few months previously, a very public letter
in the form of a carefully calculated act of homage, which itself derives from a
heavily revised private communication. As Donald H. Reiman correctly observes:
‘In making these revisions, Shelley transformed a candid personal letter into a
graceful public dedication not open to the kind of criticism that the Quarterly
Review directed at Hunt’s Dedication of Foliage to Sir John Swinburne.’22
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VII
Many of Shelley’s Italian letters display a metaphorical capacity which is much
more than merely descriptive and demonstrates both Shelley’s imaginative powers
and an unusual faculty for selecting images which are appropriate both to the
context and to his correspondent.23 Take for example his epistolary relations
with Maria Gisborne, who had introduced him to the plays of Calderón. A good
epistolary instance of this engaging metaphorical tendency can be found in
Shelley’s use of the Gisborne dog Oscar, which is delicately appropriate to the
occasion. In a letter to Mary Shelley (itself a response to another letter), Maria
Gisborne had reported that Oscar had marked the departure of the Shelleys from
Villa Valsovano by ‘running by your side, waving his long slender tail’ and that he
‘continued for several days at dinner-time to howl piteously, and to scratch with
all his might at the door of your abandoned house’ (II: 123–4 n.). Percy Shelley
Donald H. Reiman, ‘Dedication of The Cenci to Leigh Hunt’, SC VI: 872. (The
whole text and Reiman’s commentary are printed in SC VI: 865–74.)
23
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their recipients’ (Hay, ‘Shelley’s Letters’, p. 208).
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exploits this image, not for its canine possibilities but as a courteous way of
regretting a separation (II: 124): ‘His importunate regret is however a type of ours
as regards you. Our memory – if you will accept so humble a metaphor – is forever
scratching at the door of your absence.’ As an elegant expression of regret and
an embodiment of absence, the dog scratching at the door of absence translates,
with whatever hesitation, Maria Gisborne’s original image to a more ambitious
level and reminds us how powerful Shelley can be as a poet of the intangible or
the invisible or the abstract (see, for instance, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty or Ode
to the West Wind or To a Sky-lark). In this case, Maria Gisborne’s prosaic ‘the
door of your abandoned house’ is transformed into the much more challenging,
but immediately intelligible, ‘the door of your absence’ and, of course, it is the
isolated Shelleys who remember, at least for the time being, the elusive Gisbornes,
who continue to resist all invitations to visit.
Another example occurs in a letter of 13 November 1819 addressed to both
Gisbornes; here Shelley announces that he is turning his attention to the writing of
‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, a detailed account of political history which was
not published in his lifetime but constitutes a striking prose parallel to Prometheus
Unbound. This change of direction is announced after a detailed account of a threat
to the public funds which might be damaging to the investments of John Gisborne.
Near the end of his letter, Shelley dismisses these financial concerns, modulating
to a cluster of images which evoke a rather different world and are strategically
calculated to please both John Gisborne and, presumably, his wife (II: 150):
I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature to journey across the great
sandy desert of Politics; not, you may imagine, without the hope of finding some
enchanted paradise. In all probability, I shall be overwhelmed by one of the
tempestuous columns which are forever traversing with the speed of a storm
& the confusion of a chaos that pathless wilderness. You meanwhile will be
lamenting in some happy Oasis that I do not return.
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In spite of this demonstration of ‘Calderonizing’,24 Shelley was apologetic and was
anxious not to be mistaken for somebody who paraded his poetic qualifications:
‘This’, he self-defensively told the Gisbornes (II: 150), ‘is out-Calderonizing
Muley’ (a rhetorically self-indulgent character in El principe constante).
Only a few weeks later, Shelley wrote again to Maria Gisborne and once more
celebrated the achievement of Calderón in a letter which employs the Spanish
playwright as a pretext for attempting a kind of prose-poetry which would be
recognized by both parties (II: 154):
I have been lately voyaging in a sea without my pilot, & although my sail has
often been torn, my boat become leaky, & the log lost, I have yet sailed in a kind
of way from island to island, some of craggy & mountainous magnificence, some
clothed with moss & flowers & radiant with fountains, some barren desarts. – I
have been reading Calderon without you.
See MWS Letters I: 116.
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Here again, his admiration for Calderón is gently and obliquely demonstrated by the
lengthy postscript which quotes four stanzas of eight lines each and asks, without
need of an answer, ‘Is there any thing finer in Petrarch than the 2d. stanza[?]’ So
it appears that the carefully structured concentration of images with which the
letter begins is designed as a tribute both to the poetic texture of Calderón and to
the literary judgement of the ‘amiable and accomplished’ Maria Gisborne, whom
Shelley admired for her ‘freedom from certain prejudices and the gentleness of her
manners’ (II: 105). This letter also demonstrates that liberation of the imagination
and freedom from the constraints of normality which is a recurrent element of the
verse letter and which also features in a later prose letter to both Gisbornes (II:
172) in which Shelley tells them: ‘The stage direction on the present occasion
is (exit Moonshine) & enter Wall; or rather four walls, who surround & take
prisoners the Galan & Dama –’.25 This sentence allows a switch from the world of
Shakespeare to that of Spanish drama; it is also an invitation (or at least a strongly
expressed hope) that the Gisbornes would finally condescend to leave their house
near Livorno and visit the Shelleys at Pisa. Here, as in the previous examples,
Shelley is not primarily concerned to demonstrate his own literary knowledge or
abilities except as a compliment to the tantalizingly absent Gisbornes.
These passages must stand as examples of much that is impressive in the Italian
letters. The Gisbornes seem to have provided Shelley with the necessary pretexts
for introducing into the body of his letters poetic intensities which are deliberately
self-conscious: see, for instance, his enthusiastic and imaginative response to
a ‘volcanic description of the birth of the cylinder’ by Henry Reveley, Maria
Gisborne’s son, and his teasing application of this model to the creation of the
universe (‘God sees his machine spinning round the sun & delights in its success,
& has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture’
(II: 158); or his later hope that Henry would ‘write me an adamantine letter, flowing
not like the words of Sophocles with honey, but molten brass & iron, & bristling
with wheels & teeth’ (II: 203). This tendency may have been particularly liberated
by the Gisbornes but it also can be found in letters to other correspondents: see,
for example, his wistful admission to Peacock that his memories of certain English
scenes could easily extinguish even the spectacular delights of Italian scenery
(II: 114): ‘How we prize what we despised when present! So the ghosts of our
dead associations rise & haunt us in revenge for our having let them starve, &
abandoned them to perish.’ Here the Gothic imaginings are granted force by their
psychological acuity and their intimations, however disguised and displaced, of a
darker and more troubling personal narrative.
Recurrently, and characteristically, many of these letters are informed by a
political consciousness. In January 1820, shortly after the Peterloo Massacre and
the passing of the repressive Six Acts, and only a few months after his unpublished
public letter to The Examiner, Shelley addresses Thomas Medwin in Geneva
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fantazma.
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(II: 169): ‘Perhaps you belong to the tribe of the hopeless & nothing shocks or
surprises you in politics – I have enough of unrebuked hope remaining to be
struck with horror at the proceedings in England.’ This unrebuked hope allows
him to find some consolations even in the apparent triumph of a system which he
holds in contempt: ‘Yet, I reflect, as a last consolation that oppressi{ons} which
authorize, often produce resistance’ (a text perhaps for understanding ‘The Mask
of Anarchy’, which also dates from the last months of 1819). There is also, claims
Shelley, some compensation for those who follow a poetic career, even in the face
of such discouragement: ‘These are not times in which one has much spirit for
writing Poetry; although there is a keen air in them that sharpens the wits of men
and makes them imagine vividly even in the midst of despondence’ (II: 169).
These may seem to be strange considerations to figure so strongly in what
appears to be only his second letter to his cousin, in which he advances an
invitation to stay in Italy with the Shelleys; yet even here there is no escape from
the grip of darker paradoxes since the same letter refers to Italy as ‘The Paradise
of exiles – the retreat of Pariahs’ (II: 170; the first phrase had, of course, featured
in the dialectics of ‘Julian and Maddalo’). A similar seriousness marks his letter of
27 September 1819 to his old friend Leigh Hunt, who as editor of The Examiner
was more obviously implicated in the politics of reform than Medwin. Hoping that
the Hunts will join the Shelleys in Florence, to which they were on the point of
moving, he proffers his analysis of a city which so far he only knows superficially
(II: 121): ‘I have not yet seen Florence, except as one sees the outside of the streets,
but its phisiognomy indicates it to be a city, which though the ghost of a republic,
yet possesses most amiable qualities.’ Once again, the emphasis on ghosts is a
reminder of Shelley’s predilection for the Gothic (compare his descriptions of
Rome, Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum); it also looks ahead to poems about
Pisa26 and demonstrates how much Shelley’s interpretation of cities or buildings
was affected by his reading of history, politics and literature (see, for instance, his
analysis of the Bank of Ireland and the Palace of Versailles). This letter articulates a
theory about the intimate relation between literature and politics which would later
be central to ‘A Defence of Poetry’. It celebrates Petrarch, Dante and especially
Boccaccio, ‘this most divine writer’, considering all three as ‘productions of the
vigour of the infancy of a new nation, as rivulets from the same spring as that
which fed the greatness of the republics of Florence and Pisa’ (II: 122).
Shelley’s invitation is also a delicate and implicit tribute to Hunt, who shared
his appreciation of Boccaccio and was generally regarded as responsible for
importing this literary taste into Georgian England (II: 121): ‘I wish you could
meet us there in the spring, and we could try to muster up a “lieta brigata” [happy
band] which leaving behind them the pestilence of remembered misfortunes,
might act over again the pleasures of the interlocutors in Boccaccio.’ Here again,
the literal is translated to the level of metaphor as, perhaps in tribute to the central
context of the Decameron, the plague becomes ‘the pestilence of remembered
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misfortunes’, and here, as in the letters to the Gisbornes, Shelley introduces a
writer who is specially associated with his correspondent. The phrase ‘act over
again’ is particularly suggestive; among other things, it implies a constructive
function for great literature and for the therapeutic repetitions of literary homage.
Yet, even if this invitation and the later, extended account of Boccaccio’s
virtues may seem to provide a respite, what emerges even more strongly is a
political reading of contemporary Florence which (for all its obvious pleasures and
unlike so many contemporaries) Shelley interprets as something greatly different
from a mere luststadt or a concentration of museums and galleries. This political
consciousness (or perhaps it might more justly be called ‘conscience’) never really
left Shelley and continues to appear in his letters. For instance, in March 1821 he
told Peacock (II: 276): ‘We are surrounded here in Pisa by revolutionary volcanoes,
which as yet give more light than heat: the lava has not yet reached Tuscany. But
the news in the papers will tell you far more than it is prudent for me to say; and
for this once I will observe your rule of Political Silence.’ In August 1821 he again
informed Peacock, without obvious sentimentality (II: 331): ‘the accursed cause
to the downfall of which I dedicated what powers I may have had – flourishes
like a cedar and covers England with its boughs.’ One of his last letters, written
to Horace Smith (a correspondent who seems to have elicited from him letters
which were engagingly courteous and unaffectedly frank), is clearly affected by
the grim vision which also darkened ‘The Triumph of Life’. Here Shelley admits
(II: 442) that ‘England appears to be in a desperate condition, Ireland still worse’
and provides a detailed analysis of general culpability in which morals and politics
are inextricably and fatally connected: ‘all, more or less, subdue themselves to
the element that surrounds them, & contribute to the evils they lament by the
hypocrisy that springs from them.’27 This crisis required every man to speak the
truth ‘whatever that may be’ (a characteristic blend of sceptical uncertainty and
unshakeable moral confidence): ‘if every man said what he thought, it [the system]
could not subsist a day.’ Such a possibility was, he recognized, merely idealistic
(‘You talk Utopia!’28).
In the circumstances, he could only resort to more material pleasures, yet even
they were tainted. At Lerici, just nine days before his drowning, towards the end
of his chastened letter to Horace Smith he remarked (II: 443): ‘We have some
friends on a visit to us, & my only regret is that the summer must ever pass, or
that Mary has not the same predilection for this place that I have, which would
induce me never to shift my quarters.’ This sentence is necessarily partial but
it may serve as a demonstration not only of the limitations of pleasure, and the
retrospective ironies of correspondence, but also of the inescapable way in which
even the most thoughtful and expressive letters cannot be wholly abstracted either
from the concerns of biography or from the literary intelligence which brought
them into being.
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Chapter 2
Symmetrical Forms and
Infuriate Paroxysms:
Observing the Body in Percy Shelley’s
Gothic Fiction
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Diego Saglia
His triumphant persecutor bore him into the damp cell, and chained him to the
wall. An iron chain encircled his waist; his limbs, which not even a little straw
kept from the rock, were fixed by immense staples to the flinty floor; and but
one of his hands was left at liberty, to take the scanty pittance of bread and
water which was daily allowed him … He scarcely now shuddered when the
slimy lizard crossed his naked and motionless limbs. The large earth-worms,
which twined themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite
sensations of horror.1
Such is the intolerable condition of the unfortunate Verezzi in the opening of
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s romance Zastrozzi (1810), which thus throws into high
relief its Gothic credentials from the outset: a victim enclosed in a claustrophobic
space, descriptions filled with painterly details, a crescendo of physical and mental
tortures, and a surplus of horror that eventually results in insensitivity. Through
this image, with its clear Promethean overtones, the young author conjures up
a classic Gothic scene teeming with well-established, though no less disturbing,
topoi, placing both character and readers in the midst of a web of instantly
recognizable images.
As is well known, Shelley wrote Gothic at a time when this fictional form was
reaching the point of exhaustion. In the 1810s, while other subgenres gradually
emerged as popular favourites, works of horror and terror went into a steady
decline, falling ‘from 199 Gothic titles published in the 1800s (25.6 per cent) to 89
in the 1810s (13.3 per cent), [and] waning to 6.6 per cent at its lowest in 1814’.2
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Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi, A Romance & St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A
Romance, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002, pp. 62, 63. Both
works were published anonymously, Zastrozzi with the initials PBS, and St. Irvyne as by
‘A Gentleman of Oxford’. All further references to the individual romances are drawn from
this edition and abbreviated as Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, respectively. For summaries of both
works, see Behrendt’s ‘Introduction’, pp. 22–5.
2
See Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 22.
1
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Hyperbolic, belated and adolescent, Shelley’s Gothic fiction has long been seen as
ticking all the wrong boxes. Peddling in nearly dead bodies, Zastrozzi (composed
in 1809, published in March 1810) and St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian (composed
1809–10, published in December 1810, but dated 1811 on the title-page) hardly
caused a stir in the contemporary literary scene and have been traditionally
considered, together with much of his early work, a marginal portion of his output.
Accordingly, these texts have often been dismissed as manifestations of what the
poet himself called his ‘unrestrained’ sentiments and ‘passion for the wildest and
most extravagant romances’ in his letter to William Godwin of 10 January 1812.3
Despite their persistent neglect, critics have recently started to reappraise them as
valuable combinations of a popular aesthetic and literary code with the author’s
own nascent ideological concerns. Scholars such as Tilottama Rajan, Peter Finch
and Stephen Behrendt have suggested ways of re-evaluating Shelley’s romances
as ‘“serious” experiments with the form and conventions of Gothic fiction’, and
have addressed ‘both the close relation of the early romances to Shelley’s later
work and the often surprising literary and intellectual sophistication that underlies
them’.4 This essay contributes to this ongoing reassessment by focusing on
Shelley’s Gothic narratives as thematically and structurally rich texts that hold a
crucial place in his early production. A possible key, I would like to suggest, lies
in passages such as the one quoted in the opening.
If, as Timothy Morton remarks, Shelley was ‘very actively and vigorously
concerned with re-imagining the body’ throughout his literary career, he
emphatically inaugurated his protracted inscription of the physical in his early
Gothic romances.5 As a matter of fact, fraught and problematic bodies are
distinctive appurtenances of Gothic fiction and of one of its main sources, the
literature of sensibility.6 Shelley’s models present several comparable moments
of close scrutiny of the body, most evidently Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)
and Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), where horror also emerges
through carefully detailed evocations of desired, victimized and tortured human
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Letters I: 227. Notably it was still the very young Shelley who, under the influence
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4
See Behrendt’s ‘Introduction’, in Shelley, Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, pp. 13, 12. See
also Tilottama Rajan, ‘Promethean Narrative: Overdetermined Form in Shelley’s Gothic
Fiction’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds Betty T. Bennett and Stuart
Curran. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 240–52;
and Peter Finch, ‘Monstrous Inheritance: The Sexual Politics of Genre in Shelley’s St.
Irvyne’. Keats-Shelley Journal 48 (1999), pp. 35–68.
5
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 9. In his pioneering study, Morton remarks that ‘not
enough attention has been paid to the body in the criticism of Percy Shelley’ (p. 9). Nora
Crook and Derek Guiton gave a first, ground-breaking contribution to the study of this
topic in Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. See also
Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
6
See G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 1–36.
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The Body as Spectacle
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frames.7 Based on obsessive thematic and lexical repetitions, depictions of the
body in Shelley’s Gothic romances illuminate these works as significant crucibles
of his interests and concerns at a turning point in his development as a committed
writer and intellectual. By portraying the body as a tortured or diseased structure,
Shelley’s romances reflect his interest in the medical sciences during his last
period at Eton and after he was sent down from Oxford, as well as his fascination
with revolted, exorbitant selves that question conventions and defy control. As
irrepressibly ‘paroxystic’ entities, such bodies convey rebellious and subversive
energies; at the same time, they are subjected to medical and scientific interventions
aimed at containing their excessive outbursts.
Affected, diseased and tortured human frames characterize many of Shelley’s
later works – such as Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci or ‘The Triumph of Life’ –
as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This essay, however, intentionally limits
such interpretative flashforwards in order to focus on the romances as structured
performances reflecting the author’s early adoption of unconventional intellectual
positions. More than confused reinterpretations of Gothic clichés, Shelley’s
depictions of the physical (and related psychic/spiritual) dimension emphasize his
‘knowing’ treatment of a familiar novelistic subgenre and testify to the gradual
clarification of his preoccupations as a writer and activist in the making.
The tormented body in the opening quotation to this essay is, to adapt Stephen
Bruhm’s words, a spectacularly ‘afflicted, severed, cut’ object that arrestingly
‘proclaims its primacy, its irrepressibility, its material existence’.8 The Gothic body
is ‘that which is put on excessive display’ in narratives that often privilege the act
of ‘watching a pained object’.9 In this perspective, Shelley’s narratives treat the
human or ‘superhuman’ body as a hyperbolic, repeatedly staged and obsessively
scrutinized entity. They represent it in the throes of intolerable, often mysterious
and inexplicable physical paroxysms which, in turn, induce psychic paroxysms
and consign the human subject to situations of utter incomprehension and isolation.
This state of illegibility pervades Shelley’s romances as they exuberantly run the
gamut of the puzzling and elliptical features of Gothic.
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7
On Shelley’s models for his Gothic texts, see Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘Prose Fiction:
Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, The Assassins, The Coliseum’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 193–207 (pp. 199–201).
8
Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, p. xv. More generally, on Romantic-period intersections
between literary and medical discourse, and on the relevance of the body in Romantic
poetry, see James Robert Allard, Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. Aldershot
and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007.
9
Bruhm, Gothic Bodies, p. xx.
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The Neglected Shelley
38
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Both narratives invite us to recognize familiar tropes and devices represented
in such sensational forms as to verge on the parodic. Undeniably, Shelley’s
interweaving of emphatic scenes in rapid succession reads as an amused debunking
of Gothic conventions. A sense of youthful mischievousness hovers over both
romances, which thus invest heavily in the ‘irreverent, inconsequential, and even
silly’ nature of parody.10 In the opening quotation, for instance, tragic and sublime
intensity is stretched to such an extent that it very nearly tips over into the playful
mockery of parodic rewriting. This approach, however, is inextricable from
Shelley’s recourse to parody as a way of denaturalizing cultural norms rooted in
authoritative discourse, both parodic mechanisms being ultimately in unison with
Gothic’s subversive and transgressive tendencies.11 Also in view of this doubleedged strategy, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne constantly thwart our ability to interpret
events and characters. And so the bodies they depict may be read as seemingly
straightforward instances of a well-worn Gothic convention which bear traces
of contemporary scientific and medical discourses, or alternatively as enigmatic
and opaque objects that paradoxically make visible the ambiguities pervading
Shelley’s Gothic romances.
In the opening passage from Zastrozzi, the victimized hero’s body is in full sight,
the narrative focus carefully zooming in on its details and emphasizing its sheer
materiality – its physical presence and physiological functions (as in the reference
to ‘bread and water’). Based on a deceptively simple alternation of hyperbolic
and blunt language, the depiction of Verezzi’s body transcribes the physical as
a supremely intricate structure. In this light, Shelley’s Gothic reworks the aweinspiring yet ultimately decipherable complexity of the body that had been posited
and investigated by the sciences of the Age of Reason and given philosophical
purchase by materialist thinkers such as Julien Offroy de la Mettrie in his
(scandalous and blasphemous) notion of l’homme machine from his homonymous
treatise of 1748. For La Mettrie, the human body is a mechanism composed of
actions and reactions, a physical and physiological object that invalidates any
discussion about the existence of the soul.12 This position represented one specific
culmination of a much wider-ranging cultural development that, starting from the
late seventeenth century, had brought the sciences of the human body to privilege
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Simon Dentith, Parody. London and New York: Routledge, 2000, p. 37.
On parody as criticism, see Dentith, Parody, pp. 32–8; on Gothic and humour, see
Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnick, ‘Comic Gothic’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed.
David Punter. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2012, pp. 321–34.
12
On Shelley’s links to the French materialists (d’Holbach, Cabanis and La Mettrie),
see Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early
Enlightenment. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 234. On Shelley
and La Mettrie, see Seamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England,
1789–1832. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 102–6, and Ruston, Shelley
and Vitality, p. 152.
10
11
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Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms
the ‘bare Mechanical causes of things’ and thus to invest in mainly ‘mechanistic
views of physiology’.13
Shelley’s Verezzi is a machine that continues to function, though feebly
and intermittently, even in the harshest conditions. In the opening passage, the
possibility of movement left to his hand – the single moving part of an otherwise
immobilized and passive frame – dramatically sets out the focal importance of the
entire body. Moreover, Verezzi is the site of movements or shifts from the physical
to the immaterial dimension of feelings and passions. The text carefully traces
how the contact with the slimy, slithering reptile transmits itself to Verezzi’s body
(his naked limbs, his hair), converges to the centre of perception and translates into
a psychic state (horror), to which, nevertheless, the enfeebled subject is almost
oblivious. The passage represents the physical in its external manifestations
and inner repercussions through the shift from initial sensation to feeling as
perception, the emergence of feeling as reaction and passion, and the eventual
near disappearance of both sensation and feeling. Shelley’s figuration of psychic
torments is inseparable from, and indeed subordinate to, an overwhelmingly
material body.
In the romances, it is the bodies of the protagonists, Verezzi and Wolfstein, and
those of their antagonists, Zastrozzi and Ginotti, that are the most conspicuously
spectacular and painstakingly mapped. And yet, male physical frames do not
monopolize Shelley’s Gothic discourse of the body. If the plots initially centre
on male characters, their focus soon changes to women whose bodies are as
closely examined as those of their male counterparts. In Zastrozzi, Matilda is a
figure of exceptional physical beauty, her body being repeatedly described as a
‘symmetrical form’;14 but, as the novel’s main desiring subject, she is mostly an
active, observing character. Instead, Megalena in St. Irvyne is the object of the
lustful gaze of Wolfstein, who competes for her ‘grace and loveliness’ with the
banditti chief Cavigni, ‘whose dark eye wandered wildly over [her] beauties’;
and, once again, the language conveying Wolfstein’s violent desire insists on
Megalena’s ‘most exact symmetry’.15
Unsurprisingly, Shelley’s Gothic antecedents present similar situations and
lexical features. In Lewis’s Monk, Ambrosio feasts his eyes upon the beauties of
the sleeping Antonia, ‘devouring’ ‘all the charms of the lovely Object before him
… with his eyes’.16 In Dacre’s Zofloya, Berenza gazes on Victoria ‘with the eye of
an enraptured amateur’ and lustfully contemplates a figure which ‘was symmetry
itself’.17 Collectively, these works draw on a well-established neoclassical
precedent and cultural myth founded on such aesthetic icons as the Venus de’
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13
See Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 3, 7.
39
14
Zastrozzi, p. 82.
40
15
St. Irvyne, p. 167.
16
Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson. Oxford and New York: Oxford 41
42
University Press, 1990, p. 300.
17
Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, or The Moor, ed. Kim Ian Michasiw. Oxford and New 43
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York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 76.
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Medici.18 In addition, Shelley’s ‘symmetry’ relates the attractive female body
to contemporary discourses of the physical aimed, as Paul Youngquist notes, at
the ‘cultural consolidation of a proper body’, that is one encapsulating culturally
validated notions of physical normality.19 Shelley’s definition of ‘symmetry’ as the
yardstick of an attractive norm is thus in keeping with contemporary interest in the
shape of the body, in its ‘normal’ and ‘aberrant’ manifestations, as demonstrated
by such phenomena as collections of phrenological specimens, the creation of the
Hunterian Museum and the display of extreme bodily structures like those of the
‘Irish Giant’ or the ‘Hottentot Venus’.20
That Shelley’s Gothic fiction should apply this type of normative language
to female bodies certainly deserves attention. The female physique is central to
the romances’ transformation of bodies into spectacles capable of stimulating the
curiosity of a scrutinizing audience. The narratives repeatedly examine the female
body in its segments and as a whole, for instance when the narrator summarizes
Wolfstein’s observation of Megalena’s attractive body parts in the final vision of
their ‘resistless tout ensemble’.21 Even so, we are far from a neat and unproblematic
identification of the female with a passive object of sexual desire. In Zastrozzi,
Matilda is the desiring subject and sexual predator, whereas Verezzi is endowed
with a ‘symmetrical form’.22 This inversion is evidently in unison with Matilda’s
masculine traits and the fact that, much like Dacre’s Vittoria di Loredani, she takes
on the role of the Gothic villain and persecutor. In St. Irvyne, instead, Wolfstein,
whose shape looks ‘towering and majestic’ to the infatuated Olympia, is more
usually dwarfed and rendered powerless (indeed, emasculated) by ‘the gigantic
form of Ginotti’, who in the conclusion aptly metamorphoses into an enormous
skeleton.23
If this play with physical and gender conventions reflects the tendency of
Gothic to transgress established norms, it also sustains Shelley’s representation
of bodies as deregulated entities, repeatedly unsettled by ‘contending passions’,
‘convulsions’, ‘delirium’, and ‘infuriate paroxysms’.24 Through these interacting
strategies, Shelley’s fictions give full visibility to the characters’ bodies, their
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The Neglected Shelley
18
See Kamilla Eliott, Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture
Identification, 1764–1835. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, pp. 88–9.
On the Venus de’ Medici, see Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in
Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Analysis of Beauty. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998, pp. 23–6.
19
Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis and
London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. xv.
20
See Youngquist, Monstrosities, pp. 3–27, and Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter
J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 127–48.
21
St. Irvyne, p. 168.
22
Zastrozzi, p. 79.
23
St. Irvyne, pp. 197, 193.
24
Zastrozzi, pp. 75, 93; St. Irvyne, p. 170.
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Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms
torments and pathological conditions. Represented as overwhelmingly material
objects, human frames amount to an ambivalent spectacle that inspires curiosity
and desire, as well as horror and repulsion. As fascinating organic machines
afflicted with a multiplicity of distempers, they are unstable entities undermined
by conflicting tensions and mirroring an aberrant fictional universe impervious to
the restoration of order.
Fevers, Paroxysms and the Medical Gaze
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In Shelley’s Gothic romances bodies function as targets of and tools for a variety
of controlling, corrective and therapeutic practices. Towering over and subjugating
the other characters, the enormous frames of the villains Zastrozzi and Ginotti are
instruments of domination. Alternatively, as in the cases of Verezzi and Megalena,
the human frame is an object of control through close scrutiny. Both situations
delineate scopic moments of great intensity in which the reader joins either the
subjugated characters in their awestruck contemplation of the villains’ bodies, or
the desiring subjects in their adoration of the objects of their lust. Yet Shelley’s
romances complicate further these conventional Gothic scenes by endowing the
observers’ points of view with a scientific, and specifically medical, perspective.
In Zastrozzi, Verezzi’s body is the main object of this medical gaze. The
excerpt quoted at the beginning of this essay centres on the striking image of
his emaciated limbs and the ‘immense staples’ holding them in place.25 His body
is both in full view and in perspective, in focus and scaled down, in a multiple
vision analogous to the distorted sublime vistas of Piranesi’s carceri d’invenzione
(1745–61). This detail and its suggestive dissonance throw the human frame
into relief as the converging point of the central tensions and preoccupations in
the text. Throughout the narrative Verezzi’s body falls apart, recovers and then
becomes ill again in an iterated process which the narrator carefully monitors and
transcribes through medical language. At the beginning, his frame is covered in
‘wounds’ and then debilitated by a wasting fever, the ‘ravages’ of which cause the
progressive decay of his whole frame. Even so, the outcome is positive since, as
the narrator confirms, ‘in the crisis of the fever which then occurred, his youth and
good constitution prevailed’.26 The medical terminology in this section culminates
in a pronouncement that echoes a doctor’s summary of the course of a patient’s
condition.
In this and other anatomies of diseased and affected physiques, Shelley
transposes the actual fevers, as well as the hypochondria and more general
preoccupation with illness, which became distinctive obsessions for him from
his years at Eton.27 These passages, however, also recycle a recurrent episode in
eighteenth-century and Romantic sentimental fiction in which the plot comes to
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Zastrozzi, p. 63.
Zastrozzi, pp. 64, 65.
27
See James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2008, pp. 66–7.
26
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a standstill when a character, generally the heroine, develops a life-threatening
disorder. In these cases, the most familiar of which is Marianne Dashwood’s
dangerous illness in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), authors deploy
more or less specifically medical terminology that tracks the ascending curve of
the character’s disease (usually a ‘fever’), the intervention of a physician or related
professional, the climactic ‘crisis’ and its (often positive) resolution.28 In these
episodes language functions as a probe that tests and subsequently records the
changes in the affected body; and in Shelley’s romances it is the narrator and a few
selected characters who wield this specialized language, the knowledge it implies
and the power it awards.
At the beginning of Zastrozzi the narrator notes that Verezzi’s ‘exhausted
condition’ has been caused by a ‘brain fever’. As he starts to recover, ‘[a] physician’
declares that the fever has passed, so that his ‘mind’ gradually regains ‘that firm
tone which it was wont to possess’.29 Then, in chapter 8, Shelley introduces the
figure of a second and much more effective physician in what is one of the central
episodes in an otherwise rather threadbare plot. Defining Verezzi’s frame as the
object of close and protracted medical scrutiny, this chapter revolves around the
medicalized body. As the plot comes to a halt, the body and its alternate states
of crisis (or ‘delirium’)30 and recovery are effectively the only ‘events’ in it.
Furthermore, in this long scene, which Shelley orchestrates by rehearsing the stock
fever episode of Romantic-period fiction, the obsessive focus on the human frame
is related to the equally obsessive repetition of the term ‘physician’. Praising the
work of the ‘humane physician’, the narrative carefully follows the different stages
of this character’s intervention – from his arrival, which brings relief to a worried
Matilda, to his observation of Verezzi’s symptoms and diagnosis, the onset of the
‘decisive crisis’ and eventually his prognosis and advice to ensure his patient’s
quick recovery.31 His actions prove so influential as to inspire Matilda to monitor
Verezzi’s changes through a medical routine in which she takes ‘his hand’, counts
‘pulses [that] yet beat with feverish violence’, ‘gaze[s] upon his countenance’ and
observes how ‘the hectic colour which had flushed his cheek was fled’.32
As a ‘man of penetration and judgement’33 the physician is a quasi-saintly
personification of reason and a scientifically sanctioned, and thus entirely secular,
power of good in the midst of the narrative’s torments and horrors. An idealized
depositary of medical wisdom, this character is modelled on Dr James Lind, with
whom Shelley became acquainted during his last two years at Eton, possibly when
he sought treatment for a venereal infection. An experimental ‘natural philosopher’,
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On fevers, illnesses and ‘sympathetic practitioners’ in the culture of sensibility, see 38
Candace Ward, Desire and Disorder: Fevers, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian
39
Culture. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2007.
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29
Zastrozzi, pp. 65, 66, 65, 67.
41
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Zastrozzi, p. 93.
31
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Zastrozzi, pp. 94, 95, 98.
32
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Zastrozzi, pp. 96, 98–9.
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Zastrozzi, p. 98.
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Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms
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Lind accompanied Sir Joseph Banks on the Royal Society expedition to Iceland in
1772 and corresponded with such luminaries as William Herschel and Benjamin
Franklin. Acting as an unofficial tutor, he supervised Shelley’s translation of a
considerable portion of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, and possibly introduced him to
the works of Paracelsus, as well as Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) and St Leon
(1799). He was also an early influence on Shelley’s hatred of political orthodoxy
and received authority, as he taught him to curse George III (whose personal
physician he had been) with an oath which Shelley then modified and applied to
his own father.34 Albeit indirectly, Lind influenced Shelley’s interest in a medical
career after he was expelled from Oxford, and thus laid the ground for his possible
first acquaintance with William Lawrence at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in early
1811, where Lawrence worked as John Abernethy’s demonstrator.35 As a fictional
recreation of Dr Lind, the physician in Zastrozzi embodies beneficial lay values,
as well as wielding a language that makes sense of the body and the scientific
knowledge that may heal it.36
Although its dramatis personae do not feature any doctors, St. Irvyne sets up a
comparable perspective on the body as the object of quasi-medical scrutiny. From
the outset, Shelley delineates Wolfstein as an analogue of Verezzi, that is, as the
principal target of a deliberately relentless observation, despite the fact that he is a
much less passive character. We encounter ‘his youthful figure reclined against a
jutting granite rock’.37 There follows a wild mental and physical struggle against
God and the elements. Whereas, in the earlier narrative, Verezzi is passive from
the start (he appears ‘chained to a piece of rock which remained immovable’38),
Wolfstein violently expostulates with the divinity in an apostrophe that prefigures
a number of similar outbursts in Shelley’s later works: ‘Art thou the God then,
the Creator of the universe … and sufferest thou thy creatures to become the
victims of tortures such as fate has inflicted on me?’39 Subsequently, ‘his frame …
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See Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley, p. 67.
See Ruston, Shelley and Vitality, p. 80.
36
Bieri lists further reincarnations of Dr Lind in Laon and Cythna and Athanase
(correctly ‘Prince Athanase’), Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 67–9.
37
St. Irvyne, p. 159.
38
Zastrozzi, p. 64.
39
St. Irvyne, p. 160. This passage re-echoes Zastrozzi’s and Matilda’s discussion of
divine power in chapter 9 of Zastrozzi, as well as anticipating The Necessity of Atheism
(published in February 1811). Moreover, it anticipates Prometheus’s opening apostrophe in
Prometheus Unbound (I, 1–30) and the Creature’s moving address to his creator in vol. 2,
chapter 2 of Frankenstein: ‘Remember, that I am thy creature … Will no entreaties cause
thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion’,
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 77–8. On the links between
Shelley’s Gothic romances and later works (from Prometheus Unbound to The Cenci), see
Behrendt, ‘Introduction’, in Shelley, Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, pp. 12–13. Bruhm discusses
tortured bodies in Zastrozzi (both Verezzi’s and Zastrozzi’s) as anticipations of similar
themes in The Cenci (Gothic Bodies, pp. 101–3).
34
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conquered by the conflicting passions of his soul … sank to the earth’; and finally, 1
‘his bosom throbbed with the tide of life: returning animation once more illumed
2
his eye’.40 This type of language reprises expressive patterns seen in Zastrozzi and
3
establishes similar connections between mental and physical paroxysms. The last
4
sentence, in particular, reveals Shelley’s incipient fascination with contemporary
5
scientific debates on the life principle and anticipates its later and fuller treatment
in Mary’s Frankenstein.41 In deploying medical language and the medical gaze, 6
his early romances take a materialist view of life as what allows the body-as- 7
machine to function, for instance in the reference to Verezzi’s ‘every spark of life’ 8
being ‘extinguished’.42 In addition, life is the essence of existence and identity – 9
what Zastrozzi specifically wants from Verezzi (‘His life must not be lost … I have 10
11
need of it’), or the object of Ginotti’s blasphemous aspirations to eternity.43
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Fiction as Anatomical Theatre
Whether passive or active, mutinous or temporarily submissive, Shelley’s Gothic
bodies function as textual guinea pigs placed under the multiple and criss-crossing
gaze of reader, narrator, physician and the other characters. Confined in restricted
spaces, they move restlessly around in states of anguish and pain, unable to escape
the scrutiny of their observers. In Zastrozzi, in particular, as the targets of the
physician’s scientific knowledge, these bodies inhabit a fictional dimension that is
metaphorically akin to an anatomical theatre.
Tilottama Rajan has already perceptively remarked on the theatricality of
Shelley’s early romances, stressing how this is precisely what ‘puts their credibility
under erasure’.44 In a more constructive perspective, what we may term the scopic
economy of Shelley’s Gothic romances is comparable to that of a medical and
scientific space for the study and observation of (dead) bodies. To be sure, in this
respect, the romances prefigure the obsessive anatomy of feelings and thoughts
in The Cenci (the ‘self-anatomy’ which Orsino describes as ‘a trick of this same
family / To analyse their own and other minds’),45 as well as the actual presence
of anatomical theatres in Victor Frankenstein’s preparatory studies at Ingolstadt,
the seat of the renowned Alte Anatomie building. Yet Shelley’s early fiction also
presents a wholly specific degree of complexity by interweaving literal and
metaphorical references to this space for the mise en scène of the body.
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St. Irvyne, p. 161.
The ‘vitality debate’ between Lawrence and Abernethy broke out in 1814. These
references in the romances also significantly prefigure Shelley’s fragmentary essay ‘On
Life’ (composed in 1819). On Shelley and the vitality debate, see Ruston, Shelley and
Vitality, pp. 10–15, Butler, ‘Introduction’, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, pp. xv–xxi, and
Ross Wilson, Shelley and the Apprehension of Life. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2013.
42
Zastrozzi, p. 93.
43
Zastrozzi, p. 65; St. Irvyne, p. 238.
44
‘Promethean Narrative’, p. 243.
45
II, ii, 108–10, in SPP: 162.
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Proving once again the more explicit of the two texts, Zastrozzi displays what
is perhaps the most emphatic example of this situation in its conclusion. Having
been theatrically murdered by Matilda in a scene based on Lilla’s death in Zofloya,
Julia’s body is exposed to the eyes of the judges and the public during the final trial.
Here, the novel’s exhibition of bodies reaches its climax: ‘The superior pointed to
the ground: the officials deposited their burden, and produced, to the terror-struck
eyes of the gazing multitude, Julia, the lovely Julia, covered with innumerable and
ghastly gashes.’46 This religious and forensic tableau may be described as a type of
‘ostension’, that primary theatrical device which ‘involves the showing of objects
and events … to the audience, rather than describing, explaining or defining them’.47
A feature of Classical drama with which Shelley might already have been familiar,
ostension is a distinctive component of his fictional anatomical theatre that is at
its most visible in the conclusion to Zastrozzi. Placed in full view, Julia’s body
provides the clinching piece of evidence against Matilda and Zastrozzi and brings
the proceedings of justice to a halt. As Julia’s corpse personifies the outcome of
Matilda’s impiety and Zastrozzi’s insidious ‘sophistry’,48 after its exhibition,
words become redundant rehearsals of principles and actions that are now under
everyone’s eyes. In the anatomical theatre of the Inquisition’s court of law, Julia’s
corpse de facto embodies the effects of the violence permeating the distempered
world of Shelley’s Gothic romances.
St. Irvyne similarly presents multiple ostensions of the body, starting from the
‘post mortem’ of the corpse of the banditti leader Cavigni, when a ‘robber, skilled
in surgery, opened a vein; but no blood followed the touch of the lancet’.49 Readers
are then treated to the succession of dead bodies dotting Wolfstein’s career, from
‘the murdered Olympia’ to ‘the pale corpse … of Cavigni’.50 Finally, the last chapter
depicts a ghastly mass of cadavers consisting of Megalena’s body, ‘motionless and
without life’, which Wolfstein proceeds to ‘[raise] … in his arms’ and then ‘[dash]
… convulsively on the earth’; Ginotti’s ‘figure … wasted almost to a skeleton’,
yet retaining ‘its loftiness and grandeur’, and ultimately metamorphosing into ‘a
gigantic skeleton’; and Wolfstein’s ‘[b]lackened’ corpse.51
As seen above, these inflections of the medical gaze and the anatomical theatre
relate to Shelley’s connection with Dr Lind and record the author’s early passion
for medicine.52 They also resonate with the obsessive anxiety about his own
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Zastrozzi, p. 152.
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980, p. 26.
48
Zastrozzi, p. 118.
49
St. Irvyne, p. 182.
50
St. Irvyne, p. 222.
51
St. Irvyne, pp. 251, 252.
52
See Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody, pp. 21–2; Michael Henry
Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy
Bysshe Shelley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, p. 42; Nora Crook, ‘Shelley
and the Solar Microscope’. Keats-Shelley Review 1 (1986), pp. 49–59; and Bieri, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, pp. 65–70.
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body characterizing his letters from this period. Significantly, on 1 January 1811,
Shelley wrote to Thomas Jefferson Hogg speculating on what would happen ‘were
this frame rendered eternal, were the particles which compose it both as to intellect
& matter indestructible, and then to undergo torments such as now we should
shudder to think of even in a dream … ’.53 Fraught with Promethean intimations
and a preoccupation with the Christian notion of hell, these thoughts encapsulate
some of the central themes in Shelley’s Gothic fiction: the body as a material
structure, its interpenetration of matter and spirit, the enigma of the life principle,
the possibility of immortality and unutterable physical suffering. Through such
instances of anatomic (self)scrutiny, Shelley couples his materialist conception of
the body with a fascination with eternal life that is the central theme of Godwin’s
St. Leon, one of the main inspirations for his Gothic tales, as well as underlying his
various representations of the legend of the Wandering Jew.
Indeed, it is no coincidence that his narrative poem The Wandering Jew; or,
the Victim of the Eternal Avenger, presumably written in the winter of 1809–10
and thus contemporaneous with the prose romances,54 features similar figurations
of the body. Human frames are in full view in a narrative that depicts the female
protagonist Rosa’s ‘perfect grace and symmetry’, as well as the lustful Victorio’s
‘gestures strange’, ‘varying face’, ‘rapid step’ and ‘frantic haste’ (I, 152; IV, 50; IV,
72).55 The poem also offers several episodes of paroxysms, tracing the characters’
perturbed state from the beginning, when Rosa flees from her initiation as a novice
‘shriek[ing] aloud’, ‘dash[ing] from the supporting nun’ and ‘plung[ing] amid the
crowd’ (I, 185, 186, 188).56 Paulo, the Wandering Jew, shows symptoms of an
equally troubled physical and mental condition, as he stops her frantic career by
taking her in his ‘eager grasp / In firmest yet in wildest clasp’ (I, 192–3).57 In a
reprise of the topos of the fever episode, Rosa is eventually overcome by a ‘deathlike trance’, for her ‘frame’ cannot ‘sustain, / The chill that pressed upon her brain’
(I, 238; I, 248–9).58 The plot of The Wandering Jew proceeds from (fraught) calm
to crisis and, then, a return to a relative calm announcing a new crisis. Because
of this structure and its emphatic display of disturbed bodies, the poem covers
much of the same ground as Shelley’s Gothic romances. Just like his prose fiction,
it concentrates on bodies that, in Bruhm’s words, are ‘on excessive display’ and
symptomatic of deeper thematic preoccupations. Yet the poem also highlights one
of the outstanding peculiarities of the romances, particularly how they enrich this
figuration of the physical by way of medical and scientific references and a virtual
anatomical space that are absent from The Wandering Jew.
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Letters I: 34.
The poem was possibly redrafted later in 1810 (see CPPBS I: 189–90).
55
CPPBS I: 48, 76.
56
CPPBS I: 49.
57
CPPBS I: 49.
58
CPPBS I: 51.
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Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms
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In a proleptic perspective, instead, it is in connection with Mary’s Frankenstein,
and particularly Percy’s Preface for the first edition of 1818, that the romances’
medicalized representations of bodies acquire specific resonance. The Preface
does not explicitly mention the body and its machine-like structure, nor does it
feature any overt reference to vitalism, yet it tellingly insists on the physical nature
of the pivotal episode in the plot: ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has
been supposed, by Dr [Erasmus] Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of
Germany, as not of impossible occurrence.’59 Percy’s remark about the reanimation
of a cento of dead fragments as a scientific possibility evidently draws on his and
Mary’s knowledge of medical and scientific debates. It also reactivates themes and
concerns from his early Gothic fiction, where, as seen above, animation already
plays a significant role. Taking over Mary’s voice, Percy asserts that the author
does not intend to be seen as lending credence to ‘imagination’ (here a synonym
for fantastic beliefs) and declares: ‘I have not considered myself as merely weaving
a series of supernatural terrors.’60 Setting the novel apart from ‘mere tale[s] of
spectres or enchantment’, Shelley states that, ‘however impossible as a physical
fact’ it might be, the central episode in Frankenstein ‘affords a point of view to the
imagination for the delineating of human passions’.61 The Creature’s impossible
body makes possible the psychological and moral concerns in the novel. As Shelley
rejects Gothic ghosts, he shifts his focus onto material bodies so that, though not
actually present in the 1818 Preface, the Creature’s frame tantalizingly pervades it.
Adapting and reworking the scopic scenes in Percy’s early Gothic, the Preface
defines Mary’s novel as the collected observations of a scientist/doctor piecing
together a creature in the real and symbolic space of an anatomical theatre, and
invites readers to adopt a similar stance and scrutinize the evolution and destiny
of this aberrant body.62 If, as Timothy Morton suggestively remarks, Mary’s
Frankenstein and The Last Man are ‘caught up within the same programmatic
reconfigurations of the body as found in Percy Shelley’s writing’, it is to his
Gothic fiction that we must look for some of the foundational instances of such
reconfigurations and their crucial narrative and thematic relevance.63
Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne cast bodies as sites of abnormality and transgression
where conventions are suspended or altogether abolished. The human frame
appears as the target of a ‘humane’ medical and scientific agency that should
restore it to a balanced, healthy state (a recognizably Shelleyan concern), whilst
also functioning as the pivot of a revolt against conventional codes of behaviour
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Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 3.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 3.
61
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 3.
62
On the medical gaze and anatomy in Mary’s novel, see Tim Marshall, Murdering to
Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 1995.
63
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, p. 10. See also the emphasis Shelley lays on
the Creature’s aberrant body, and on physicality in general, in the unfinished review of his
wife’s novel, probably written in early 1818 (Shelley, Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, pp. 303–5).
59
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The Neglected Shelley
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and orthodox beliefs, as in Zastrozzi’s and Matilda’s debate on divine power in 1
chapter 9 of Zastrozzi or Wolfstein’s questioning of God’s will in the opening of St. 2
Irvyne. And this is yet another instance of how Shelley’s fictions deal with Gothic 3
narrative conventions and, specifically, their oscillation between a fascination with 4
chaos and transgression, on the one hand, and a final reinstatement of order, on 5
the other.64 Shelley’s problematic bodies require the restorative intervention of 6
medicine, but cannot ultimately be returned to a stable condition and succumb 7
to their pernicious, yet irresistible, appetites and desires.65 Thus, through these 8
arresting incarnations located in the fictional anatomical theatres of Zastrozzi and 9
St. Irvyne, Shelley represents and explores forms of normality and abnormality, as 10
well as orthodoxy and rebellion against it, which will continue to resonate in his 11
writings for years to come.
12
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Bodies as Focusing Devices
Shelley’s letter to Godwin of 10 January 1812 seems to contradict the relevance
of the Gothic romances for which I have been arguing so far. There, he introduces
himself as the author of two works of fiction, which, albeit of recent publication,
are ‘quite uncharacteristic of me as now I am’; he also informs the venerable
philosopher that, although he ‘shall desire them to be sent to you’, Godwin should
‘not however consider this as any obligation to yourself to misapply your valuable
time’.66 If these are dismissive expressions, their tone is remarkably ambivalent
since they belittle and set store by the romances at one and the same time. However
‘uncharacteristic’ they may now be, Shelley still wants Godwin to receive his
works, for they mark an important stage in the progressive sharpening of his
powers and the delineation of his field of textual and intellectual intervention.
Organized through strategies of ‘calculated excess’, in Stephen Behrendt’s apt
phrase, these works revolve around obsessively scrutinized bodies that function as
structurally crucial, thematically rich and ideologically relevant features.67 Akin
to textual anatomical theatres where scientific and medical discourses resonate,
Shelley’s narratives define readers as the privileged observers of tortured figures
consummating their own self-destructions and staging forms of rebellion that
elude resolution and containment. As they encapsulate conflicting principles and
concerns, these bodies are points of convergence or, even better, focusing devices
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On this feature of Gothic, see for instance Fred Botting, Gothic. London and New
York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 6–13.
65
Remarking on these texts’ sympathetic presentation of disorder and concurrent
endorsement of order, Michael O’Neill has noted how Shelley targets ‘an audience whose
orthodox views need to be both flattered and disrupted’. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary
Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 12.
66
Letters I: 227.
67
Behrendt, ‘Introduction’, in Shelley, Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, p. 14.
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that individuate and throw into relief Shelley’s preoccupations at this moment in
his development.
Far from being escapist flights into a fanciful ‘ideal world’,68 Zastrozzi and
St. Irvyne compound a whole range of interests, passions and aspirations. As
landmarks in a field of conflicting forces of order and disorder, the shocking bodies
of their dramatis personae emphasize the imperiously physical nature of the
body with its primacy over the mind and spirit. They also invite us to explore the
power of sexual desire (Matilda’s desire for Verezzi, Wolfstein’s for Megalena de
Metastasio) and its unrestrainedly destructive effects. In particular, the romances’
physical and scopic economy questions the gender-specific nature of desire, since
Shelley’s male and female characters subvert any conventional distribution of
active and passive roles. Together with the treatment of religious tenets, these
themes illuminate the author’s budding preoccupation with forms of authority and
prescription. Finally, by way of his Gothic bodies, Shelley focuses on another set
of concerns soon to become central in his cultural and intellectual trajectory – life
and the life principle, their origins and reproduction, as well as eternal life and
physical suffering.69
Somewhere between youthful extravaganzas, parodic treatments of Gothic
and intimations of a conscious literary and intellectual commitment, Zastrozzi
and St. Irvyne are both early and transitional works in Shelley’s output. Their
irregular and, in Rajan’s term, ‘overdetermined’ structures allow us to see – as
through a focusing device or in an anatomical theatre – the gradual unfolding of
the author’s literary and scientific interests in the context of a physical economy
that emerges repeatedly in his later output and significantly informs his 1818
Preface to Frankenstein.70 In this perspective, the dysfunctional organisms at the
centre of both romances may be read as early indications of what Timothy Morton
describes as the mature Shelley’s distinctive ‘ability to model society as a body
and simultaneously as a machine’, and therefore of his redirected aspirations from
‘medical’ physician to moral and socio-political ‘therapist’.71
One may object that the romances are complicated by melodramatic hyperbole
and parody, as well as plain contradictions, as in the contrast between the praise
lavished on the doctor’s intervention and the irrational Gothic phantasmagoria of
physical and mental suffering. Yet it is precisely because of this inchoate status
that the bodies function as useful focusing devices. Paradoxically, thanks to their
physical paroxysms and irrational outbursts, they testify to a significant moment in
Shelley’s definition of his intellectual engagement and purpose as a writer. Placed
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Letters I: 228.
On materialism, physicality and immortality in Shelley, see Ruston, Shelley and
Vitality, pp. 151–6.
70
Rajan usefully suggests that the romances are relevant specifically because they
‘seem to be in excess of what they are’ (‘Promethean Narrative’, pp. 242–3).
71
Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, pp. 134–5, 9. See also Morton’s
chapter on ‘Nature and Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy
Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 185–207.
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in fictional anatomical theatres, the human frames in the romances point to a new,
and dimly perceived, world of ‘duties to perform’72 that gradually manifests itself
to the young author during the crucial years when his imaginative and ideological
interests find an appropriate form of expression in the physical and psychological
excesses of the Gothic aesthetic.
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Letters 1: 228.
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Chapter 3
Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires:
The 1810 Poetry Collections
David Duff
I
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Shelley’s career as a published poet began in 1810 with two pseudonymous
collections, the first of which has been described as ‘a practical joke from beginning
to end’1 and the second as ‘a defiant undergraduate prank’.2 Original Poetry; by
Victor and Cazire, a slim quarto published in September 1810 by the London firm
of John Joseph Stockdale, was a joint production with Shelley’s sister Elizabeth.
The joke, if such it was, consists in its multiple plagiarisms, which begin with
Elizabeth’s pseudonym ‘Cazire’ (the name of the heroine in Charlotte Dacre’s
novel, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer [1805]) and include an entire 120line poem, ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’, taken from Tales of Terror (1801), a volume
of Gothic horror ballads commonly, though probably erroneously, attributed to
M.G. Lewis. When Stockdale discovered the plagiarism, a copyright violation
and potential fraud which could have opened both publisher and authors to legal
prosecution,3 he confronted Shelley, withdrew the volume from sale and destroyed
all remaining copies, amounting to 1,480 of the very large print run of 1,500. Apart
from one poem that resurfaced in his Gothic romance St. Irvyne in December
1810 and another that he reworked two years later for his unpublished ‘Volume
of Minor Poems’, Shelley makes no further reference to Original Poetry, the text
of which did not come to light again until 1898, when a copy was located and a
facsimile printed.4 There are currently four known copies, the most recent to come
to light, in 2013, being a presentation copy given to Shelley’s cousin Thomas
Medwin which contains pencil annotations – probably Shelley’s – indicating
who wrote each of the 17 poems (though the ‘Victor’/Shelley attributions include
‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’, suggesting that even close relatives were victims of the
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James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Youth’s Unextinguished Fire,
1792–1816. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2004, p. 116.
2
CPPBS I: 241. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shelley’s poetry are
from this edition.
3
Tilar Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, pp. 70–73.
4
Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Shelley, Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire,
ed. Richard Garnett. London: J. Lane, 1898.
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deception).5 A further point of interest in the Medwin copy, now in the possession
of the Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library, is a pencilled note
on page 11, almost certainly by Shelley,6 urging secrecy about another of the
volume’s indiscretions, a passage in the second of Elizabeth’s verse epistles (‘To
Miss —— —— [Harriet Grove] From Miss ——– ——– [Elizabeth Shelley]’)
which alludes jokingly to their cousin Charlotte Grove’s rumoured liaison with
a military officer (Figure 3.1). This allusion caused great offence in the Grove
household, adding the charge of family betrayal to the scandal of the plagiarism.
Shelley’s second collection, another elegant quarto containing just six poems
and bearing the title Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; Being Poems
Found Amongst the Papers of that Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the
King in 1786. Edited by John Fitzvictor, was published by John Munday of Oxford
in November 1810, one month after Shelley went up to the University. The notion
that this publication, too, was a ‘hoax’ originated with Shelley’s college friend
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who later claimed that he found Shelley reading proofs
of some poor-quality poems and persuaded him that they would work better as
burlesques. According to Hogg, the two therefore altered the poems to make
them ‘more and more ridiculous’, cutting and pasting passages in order to give
the poems a ‘dithyrambic character’ and turn them into parodies of contemporary
radical verse. To clinch the joke, Hogg suggested that the poems be attributed to
‘Peg’ Nicholson, the ‘mad washerwoman’ who had attempted to assassinate King
George III in 1786 and been confined to Bedlam.7 The accuracy of Hogg’s account
has been disputed – he overstates his own role, while underestimating the genuine
political motive behind the collection (which, though fictitious, pays tribute to the
real Margaret Nicholson, an aggrieved domestic servant and needlewoman who
provides a mask for Shelley’s own anti-monarchical sentiments) – but biographers
and editors have accepted that the volume has an element of parody and was
intended to amuse as well as to shock. Reiman and Fraistat observe that the
mischief starts with the ‘game of misnomers in the title’ (Nicholson was still alive
in 1810 and lived for another 18 years) and takes its most controversial form in the
‘Fragment. Supposed to Be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte
Cordé’, a ‘sexually risqué schoolboy burlesque’ which includes some lines about
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The attributions largely confirm those of Reiman and Fraistat, with the exception of
the ‘Song. Hope’, marked as Victor’s, and the ‘Song. Cold, cold is the blast’, the one poem
left unassigned in the Pforzheimer copy.
6
The Pforzheimer copy also carries an inscription in ink on the title page which reads
‘Thos Medwin – a present from one of the authors’, and ink corrections to several of the
poems. In the absence of corroborating evidence, attribution cannot be certain and more
than one hand may be involved, but the balance of probability strongly favours Shelley
as the author of all the manuscript additions, the handwriting of the ‘secrecy’ note being
the most readily identifiable as his. My thanks to Elizabeth Denlinger for access to the
Pforzheimer copy, and to both her and Nora Crook for advice on the attribution.
7
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London: Moxon,
1858, vol. 1, pp. 261–9.
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Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire, page 11, with annotation 41
probably by Shelley (Medwin’s dedication copy). The footnote reads 42
‘Now for God’s sake be secret / you will understand why I / wish you 43
44
to be particularly so’.
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54
fellatio.8 Shelley’s suggestion in a letter that the lines were a late addition and ‘the
production of a friends mistress’ was probably another ruse, but there is no reason
to doubt his claim that he included them to make the book ‘sell like wildfire’.9
Two hundred and fifty copies were printed and there is anecdotal evidence that
the book achieved, temporarily, the notoriety Shelley sought among his fellow
undergraduates. However, the second edition he predicted during the initial flurry
of sales never materialized, and after his expulsion from the university four months
later he displayed no further interest in the volume. As with Original Poetry, the
book disappeared from view for many years until a copy was located and a typefacsimile published circa 1870;10 five copies of the original 1810 printing are
known to survive today.
Apart from biographical and editorial work, and a brief discussion of
Posthumous Fragments in an influential study of the fragment form,11 the two
poetry collections have not thus far received much critical attention, and their
plagiaristic, or ludic, qualities are generally seen as reasons for not taking them
seriously. A case can be made, however, for treating these collections not simply
as embarrassing pieces of juvenilia, or as spoof publications, but as committed
attempts by the young Shelley to make his mark on the literary scene of the
time, and to experiment with available poetic forms and techniques. One reason
why Shelley’s early poetry is yet to come into focus for modern readers is that
the poetics that governs them is poorly understood. That poetics was not of
Shelley’s own invention, and his deployment of it needs to be viewed against the
background of the writers who were its primary architects. This means exploring
areas of Romantic literary culture which, until recently, have been neglected by
mainstream scholarship, and registering the influence of contemporary poets such
as M.G. Lewis, Walter Scott and Thomas Moore, as well as earlier figures like
Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson.
To speak of ‘influence’ here may be misleading. As the plagiarism scandal
forcibly demonstrates, the young Shelley’s creative engagement with contemporary
balladry and song follows none of the protocols normally associated with literary
allusion and borrowing, nor can it be explained by the more complex theories of
influence developed by Harold Bloom, whose work on Shelley largely ignores
his pre-1815 poetry. Yet the techniques of assimilation and appropriation Shelley
employed were by no means uncommon: as this chapter will show, plagiarism
and forgery were themselves part of the poetics he adopted, as were the many
other forms of pastiche and parody which are characteristic of his early work. To
recognize the provenance of these techniques, and the uses to which they had been
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CPPBS I: 241, 249.
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To Edward Fergus Graham, 30 November 1810 (Letters I: 23).
40
10
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. Facsimile
reprint, ed. Richard Herne Shepherd (issued c. 1870). A second facsimile, based on 41
42
Shepherd’s, was published by H.B. Forman in 1877.
11
Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel 43
44
Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1986, pp. 139–50.
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put by other writers, is to understand, too, how the hoaxing and game-playing
found in certain of Shelley’s poems can co-exist with the more serious artistic and
political purposes evident elsewhere in the 1810 collections – sometimes in the
same poems. Moreover, although his compositional methods and literary tastes
subsequently changed radically, Shelley’s apprenticeship to this collaborative,
plagiaristic poetics left a lasting mark on his work and contributed to the more
sophisticated intertextuality of his later poetry. Shelley’s tendency to inhabit
existing genres and, through a process of imaginative and stylistic intensification,
to push them to breaking point is a recurrent feature of his work, and there is
evidence that this pattern begins in these early collections.
Another aspect of his early work whose significance this chapter will explore
is his fascination with the act of book-making. The sheer number of his publishing
projects in 1810, the year he turned 18, is indicative of this: in addition to the
two poetry collections and his two Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne,
he also submitted for publication his long poem The Wandering Jew (rejected
by Ballantyne’s of Edinburgh and then by Stockdale, and not actually published
until 1829 and 1831) and co-wrote a small book of verse with his other sister,
Hellen, which, she later recalled, was printed but ‘bought up and destroyed’.12
The following February saw the publication of his and Hogg’s The Necessity of
Atheism, the pamphlet that got them both expelled from Oxford, and in March
1811 he published his Poetical Essay on the existing State of Things (partially
co-authored with Elizabeth), a copy of which has finally come to light.13 Most of
this precocious publishing activity was made possible by his family wealth: his
grandfather Sir Bysshe funded the printing of some of his books, and his father’s
first action when accompanying Shelley to Oxford was to take him to Munday’s
and ask the publisher to indulge his son’s ‘printing freaks’14 – an action which he
doubtless came to regret.
Yet it is not simply the quantity of publications that is impressive. As his letters
and other sources demonstrate, Shelley took a keen interest in all aspects of the
publication and printing process, from editorial presentation to the selection of
fonts and formats, the setting of type, the distribution of review copies, the placing
of newspaper advertisements, and dubious – but common – marketing techniques
such as the bribing (or ‘pouching’) of reviewers to write favourable reviews or
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Letter from Hellen Shelley, quoted in Hogg, Life of Shelley, vol. 1, p. 16. For other
lost or unpublished works from this time, see Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley:
Genesis of a Radical. London: Gollancz, 1951, pp. 301–2 n. 109.
13
Text as yet unpublished; for a brief description and extracts, see H.R. Woudhuysen,
‘Shelley’s Fantastic Prank’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 July 2006. The reference to
‘prank’ is misleading: Shelley wrote this poem to defend the freedom of the press, as part
of a fund-raising campaign for the Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, imprisoned for libel for
criticizing the British government’s foreign policy. See Cameron, The Young Shelley, pp.
49–51.
14
As recalled by Munday’s partner, Henry Slatter, in an 1835 memoir quoted in
CPPBS I: 237.
12
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the publishing of spoof attacks on his work in order to draw attention to it. None 1
of these efforts resulted in commercial success – all of his publications were 2
loss-making – but Shelley was rich enough to sustain the losses, even if some of 3
the printers’ bills went unpaid, and he seems to have been more concerned with 4
creating an impact than with making a financial return. In this respect, his literary 5
apprenticeship was served on very privileged terms. While immersing himself 6
in the business of authorship, he reminded his friend and musical collaborator 7
Edward Fergus Graham that ‘we are no grub street gareteers’, and planned to make 8
this clear to his London booksellers by turning up at their premises ‘in a posse … 9
in Mr. Groves barouche & four’15 – a characteristically flamboyant gesture that 10
reveals the delight he took in shocking the establishment to which he nonetheless 11
belonged.
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II
Undoubtedly the greatest obstacle to critical appreciation of this early phase of
Shelley’s career is the persistent plagiarism.16 If the borrowing of the name Cazire
scarcely qualifies as plagiarism (the use of recycled, exotic-sounding names was a
stock technique in Gothic literature, and Dacre’s own pen-name in Confessions of
the Nun of St. Omer, ‘Rosa Matilda’, is a conflation of two names from Lewis’s The
Monk – a coded tribute rather than a theft17), the inclusion, without authorization
or attribution, of a complete long poem from Tales of Terror emphatically does.
Though none of the contemporary reviewers spotted it, it is the blatancy of this
plagiarism that has led modern commentators to pronounce it a hoax. Reiman
and Fraistat, while not rejecting this theory, make the point that without ‘Saint
Edmond’s Eve’ the collection would have lacked sufficient material for a quarto
volume, and that there are signs that printing may have begun before composition
of the poems was complete, necessitating a last-minute act of plagiarism to fill
out the pages.18 This is plausible but it hardly explains why Shelley should have
chosen for padding an easily recognizable poem from a well-known anthology
that had been reprinted as recently as 1808, nor why he chose the title Original
Poetry, as if to dare readers to discover the theft.
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To Fergus Graham, 1 April 1810 (Letters I: 6).
For recent work on the broader topic of Romantic plagiarism and forgery, see
Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property;
and Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature.
London: Picador, 2002.
17
Dacre’s novel is dedicated to Lewis, making the debt explicit; ‘Rosa Matilda’
also carries Della Cruscan resonances. See Lisa M. Wilson, ‘Female Pseudonymity in the
Romantic “Age of Personality”: The Career of Charlotte King/ Rosa Matilda/ Charlotte
Dacre’. European Romantic Review 9.3 (1998), pp. 393–420.
18
CCPBS I: 153–4, 157–9.
16
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Another possibility, not thus far considered by editors, is that Shelley was
knowingly exploiting a poetics of appropriation and fabrication which was
intrinsic to the horror ballad genre to which ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’ belongs. Several
bibliographical facts are relevant here. The first is that both the book from which
Shelley plagiarized, the anonymous Tales of Terror, and the collection to which
it was assumed to be a sequel, Lewis’s Tales of Wonder, from which Shelley also
borrowed extensively, were themselves embroiled in textual controversy. Despite
its frequent attribution to Lewis, he was probably not the editor of Tales of Terror,
nor the author of most of the poems; and Tales of Wonder, a two-volume anthology
published the previous year (though dated 1801 on the title page) by the same
publisher, Joseph Bell, was considered to have so little original material in it, and
to be so cavalier in matters of intellectual property, that it became known as ‘Tales
of Plunder’.19
Lying behind this charge is Lewis’s previous reputation as a plagiarist, and a
long-standing association, dating back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764), between Gothic literature and textual inauthenticity or fraudulence. In his
novel The Monk (1796), Lewis had raised the stakes by explicitly referring to his
‘plagiarisms’ in a prefatory ‘Advertisement’, listing several of them while admitting
that ‘many more may be found, of which I am at present totally unconscious’.20 The
‘plundering’ in Tales of Wonder took a different form, the reprinting of anthology
pieces readily available elsewhere, along with more recent works republished
without, in some cases, their author’s permission. Lewis’s inclusion of multiple
versions of certain ballads – notably Gottfried Bürger’s ‘Lenore’, which (if its
Scottish antecedents and later adaptations are counted) appears in five separate
forms – added to the impression of redundancy, highlighting the practices of
replication, historical falsification and cross-cultural trafficking that underpin the
genre. The editorial subtitles and headnotes in Tales of Wonder made the problem
of origins and authenticity even more visible, foregrounding the fact that many
of the supposed ‘originals’ are actually reworkings of other texts, and that the
‘translations’ are often at several removes from the source language.
Another controversial feature of Tales of Wonder was its juxtaposition of
straight and burlesque ballads, illustrated by the inclusion of Lewis’s self-parody
‘Giles Jollup the Grave, and the Brown Sally Green’ alongside his celebrated
Bürger imitation, ‘Alonzo the Brave, and the Fair Imogine’, both reprinted from
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57
Wordsworth’s recollection, quoted in Matthew Gregory Lewis, Tales of Wonder,
ed. Douglass H. Thomson. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2010, p. 26. Thomson’s edition
also contains selections from Tales of Terror and discusses the (still unresolved) question
of attribution.
20
Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973, p. 6. For Lewis’s shifting attitude to plagiarism, see Lisa M. Wilson, ‘“Monk”
Lewis as Literary Lion’. Romanticism on the Net 8 (1997), available at: www.erudit.org/
revue/ron/1997/v/n8/.
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The Monk.21 Walter Scott, a contributor to Tales of Wonder who also edited his
own collection, An Apology for Tales of Terror (1799), later complained that
Lewis’s ‘attempts at what is called pleasantry’ were a conspicuous failure which
had helped to destroy the credibility of the ballad form.22 Others, though, saw
the two types as symbiotically related, and indeed inseparable: the critic Francis
Jeffrey astutely defined Lewis’s characteristic style as a ‘mixture of extravagance
and jocularity’ which produced ‘a sort of farcical horror’,23 while Robert Southey,
another contributor to Tales of Wonder, remarked how ‘in general these Beelzebub
stories require a mixture of the ludicrous with the terrific, which it is difficult, if
possible, to avoid’.24 The tonal instability of the Gothic horror ballad – the capacity
for self-deflation at moments of high intensity – was one of the genre’s defining
features: a Gothic equivalent of the self-subversion techniques of Romantic irony,
as well as confirmation of the psychological truth that humour cleanses the palate
for more horror.
Tales of Terror takes this deflationary impulse even further, incorporating
a higher proportion of mock-ballads, to the point where the whole volume is
sometimes seen as a parody of Tales of Wonder. This is palpably not the case,
as is made clear by the several genuine horror ballads it contains and by its
‘Introductory Dialogue’, which offers a serious defence of ‘Imagination’s darkest
powers’ as well as a playful rebuttal of them, the mingled ‘terror and delight’
referred to in line 77 being a more accurate summary of the volume’s aesthetic
effects. It is the tonally mixed character of Tales of Terror that made it a structural
model for Original Poetry, a heterogeneous collection of songs and Gothic ballads
which encompasses an even broader tonal spectrum, and which includes its own
‘introductory dialogue’ in the form of the two verse letters by Elizabeth which
open the collection (the first includes a playful survey of contemporary literary
fashions).
The poem that Shelley chose to plagiarize from Tales of Terror exemplifies
both the tonal ambiguity of the horror ballad genre and the textual controversy
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‘Alonzo the Brave’ was published in the first edition of The Monk. ‘Giles Jollup’
was added for the much-altered fourth edition (1798); Lewis admits in a headnote that
it was inspired by a newspaper parody, lines from which he incorporates in italics into
his own, thereby foregrounding further the plagiaristic, recyclable quality of Gothic (and
mock-Gothic) writing. For the controversy caused by Lewis’s self-parody, see André
Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk: A Literary Event, 1796–1798. Paris: Librairie
Marcel Didier, 1960, p. 60.
22
‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’ (1830), quoted by Douglass H. Thomson,
‘Walter Scott and M.G. Lewis’, appended to his online edition of Scott’s Apology, available
at: www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/poetry/apology/introduction.html.
23
Review of James and Horace Smith, The Rejected Addresses. Edinburgh Review
20 (November 1812), pp. 434–51 (p. 445), quoted in Tales of Wonder, ed. Thomson, p. 30.
24
To William Taylor, [c. 3 February 1800], in The Collected Letters of Robert Southey,
Part 2: 1798–1803, eds Ian Packer and Lynda Pratt. Romantic Circles Electronic Edition,
2011, available at: www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters.
21
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of the volume from which he took it. Shelley calls it ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’, but
in the Tales this is its subtitle; the full title is ‘The Black Canon of Elmham; or,
Saint Edmond’s Eve. An Old English Ballad’. The genre label implicates the poem
immediately in the falsification of origins which was endemic to ballad-editing,
and which the fashion for Gothic had taken to new extremes. This is a modern
ballad not an ‘old’ one (as is made clear in a footnote), and the claim of Englishness
is misleading too, since, while the setting (North-Elmham, in Norwich) is English,
the style is unmistakably Germanic, the poem’s exaggerated rhetoric, crude sound
effects and melodramatic story-telling making it a classic example of the type
of sensationalist ballad associated with Bürger, Lewis and the ‘German school’.
Part of the attraction of the poem for Shelley was undoubtedly its subject matter,
involving illicit sex, cross-dressing, the violation of holy rites (the marriage of a
nun and a monk) and other extreme acts of transgression, including murder, all
performed against the background of a corrupt Catholic church – themes which
recur in Shelley’s own poems and novels, and would have had a satiric, subversive
force for him as well as a narrative appeal. The plot material, though, was also
complicit in the textual controversy, since the story is an adaptation of the tale of
the Bleeding Nun from The Monk, a tale which Lewis admits to having plagiarized
from German sources. Adding further layers of plagiarism, the poem conflates this
legend with Lewis’s pseudo-Spanish story of Don Raymond and Agnes and with
the novel’s main plot about the monk Ambrosio and his demon-lover Matilda,
borrowing for its finale – in which the ‘black canon’ is swallowed up into a marble
tomb – the conclusion of Lewis’s ballad ‘Alonzo the Brave’.
‘The Black Canon of Elmham’, in short, is a poetic distillation of the ur-text of
Gothic horror, The Monk, whose most controversial thematic and textual features it
presents in an abbreviated and concentrated form. Like Lewis’s novel, too, and like
many Gothic horror ballads, the poem, while delivering the requisite frissons, also
contains a strong undercurrent of the ludicrous, not only in its outlandish storyline
but also in bathetic phrasing as when the canon’s brow is said to be ‘gloom’d
with care’ (l. 16).25 The comically portentous epigraph, a quotation from Horace’s
Satires, ‘– Hic Niger est!’ (This man is black), underlines the tonal ambivalence,
highlighting the darkness of the poem’s theme while simultaneously mocking it
(the pretentious redundancy of the Latin reference to ‘black’, already contained
in the title, is part of the irony). The footnote to the title is in a similar vein,
arguing with mock-pedantry for the plausibility of the poem’s local geography,
while assuring the reader that ‘This tale, if it be not given with the spirit, is at
any rate versified with the irregularity of an ancient ballad’ (a parodic echo of
the description of ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ in the ‘Advertisement’ to
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Tales of Terror; With an Introductory Dialogue. 2nd edn. London: R. Faulder et al., 43
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1808, p. 105.
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Lyrical Ballads [1798] as ‘professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as
of the spirit of the elder poets’).26
In plagiarizing ‘The Black Canon’ for Original Poetry, Shelley was not,
therefore, stealing a legitimate piece of literary property from a reputable source;
he was reproducing a counterfeit ballad published anonymously in a spin-off
collection trading on the success of a previous compilation by a self-confessed
plagiarist; a poem, moreover, that, whether or not written by the notorious ‘Monk’
Lewis (as Shelley’s publisher believed), borrowed the plot of his novel and
recycled his own plagiarized material. Although Shelley disguises the source by
altering the title, modernizing the spelling and removing the paratexts that identify
the genre, the poem was of a type, part-serious, part-humorous, that embodied
the contradictions of the Gothic mode and made its fake medievalism a source
of amusement even while aiming to shock through its scandalous subject matter.
Shelley’s ‘hoax’, then, seems less an adolescent prank, or an eleventh-hour
attempt to fill some empty pages in a partially printed book, than the action of an
intelligent young author who correctly understood that inauthenticity, impropriety
and textual fraudulence were the essence of the literary mode to which he had
apprenticed himself, and who took that insight to its logical conclusion. By
plagiarizing the entire poem more or less verbatim, he outdid all previous users
of this transgressive poetics, including Lewis himself, and drew attention to the
paradoxes inherent in it by publishing the poem in a volume entitled Original
Poetry, thereby inviting discovery of his plagiarism, exactly as Lewis had done in
his ‘Advertisement’ to The Monk. The fact that Shelley appears to have executed
the plagiarism not by copying a printed text but by writing the poem down from
memory27 has a further symbolic appropriateness: his method of reproducing
this fake traditional ballad involves a parodic re-enactment of an oral mode of
transmission, just as the collaboration with his sister in the volume as a whole
involves a playful re-enactment of a communal balladic creativity. Their quasiGothic pseudonyms add another layer of falsity and paradox, ascribing ostensibly
‘original’ poems to fictitious characters whose names are traceable to contemporary
novels – in the case of ‘Cazire’, to a Gothic novel by a writer engaged in her own
game of pseudonymity and her own intertextual homage to Lewis.28 Charlotte
Dacre may, indeed, have influenced Shelley’s broader naming strategy, by using
different pseudonyms (including ‘Dacre’ itself, not her real name) for different
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27
Established by Reiman and Fraistat through an analysis of the variants: CPPBS I:
178–9.
28
‘Victor’ was a more common literary name (and pseudonym), e.g. François
Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Victor, or, The Child of the Forest (1796, trans. 1802); Sophia
King [sister of Charlotte Dacre/King], The Adventures of Victor Allen (1805); Helen St
Victor [pseud.?], The Ruins of Rigonda, or, The Homicidial Father (1808).
26
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publications, and renaming poems from her novel when reworking them for her
poetry collection, tactics Shelley emulates.29
Although the most extreme case, ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’ is by no means the only
plagiarism in Original Poetry, and other examples show how completely Shelley
has assimilated the plagiaristic, textually transgressive aspects of Gothic. ‘Ghasta;
or, The Avenging Demon!!!’ is, in many respects, a companion piece to ‘Saint
Edmond’s Eve’, a semi-serious horror ballad that follows similar conventions
and is likewise heavily indebted to Lewis. The plot, a complicated revenge story
involving a medieval warrior, his jilted lover (now a succuba), a stranger who
turns out to be the Wandering Jew, and the eponymous chief of the avenging
demons, is based, once again, on the story of the Bleeding Nun from The Monk.
It is from this source, too, that Shelley takes the wording of the revenant’s curse,
‘Thou are mine and I am thine’, a formula repeated several times (as in the novel),
foreshadowing the sinister denouement. The verse form of the poem, a variant
of the traditional ballad quatrain, is that of Lewis’s ‘The Sword of Angantyr’, a
‘Runic’ ballad (based ultimately on an Icelandic saga) from Tales of Wonder which
is echoed elsewhere in Original Poetry. Unsurprisingly, ‘Ghasta’ acknowledges
none of these debts, but instead includes a Lewisesque headnote stating that ‘The
idea of the following tale was taken from a few unconnected German Stanzas’,
a pseudo-acknowledgment that is so far from the truth as to qualify as another
piece of editorial hoaxing. The triple exclamation mark of the subtitle confirms
the comic intent, signalling the mixture of extravagance and jocularity which, as
Jeffrey noted, had become the hallmark of the Gothic horror ballad.
Nothing prepares us, however, for the inspired piece of plagiarism that opens
the poem, an omen-laden quatrain lifted not from Lewis, nor from a German
source, but from the English master-forger Thomas Chatterton. The lines are from
the ‘Mynstrelles Songe’ in Aella, a ‘tragycal enterlude’ fictitiously ascribed to the
fifteenth-century poet-priest Thomas Rowley:
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Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge,
In the briered delle belowe;
Harke! the dethe-owle loude dothe synge,
To the nyghte-mares as heie goe; (ll. 865–8)30
29
Her real name was Charlotte King. After disguising herself as ‘Rosa Matilda’ in her
early newspaper verse and her first novel, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), she
adopted the new pseudonym ‘Charlotte Dacre’ for her poetry collection, Hours of Solitude
(also 1805), and for later novels such as Zofloya (1806) and The Libertine (1807). The
opening poem in Hours, ‘The Triumph of Pleasure’, is a renamed version of ‘The Dangers
of Love’, a lyric by the heroine Cazire woven into the plot of Confessions. Its amended title
is echoed in Shelley’s ‘Fragment, or the Triumph of Conscience’, a strongly Dacre-esque
poem from Original Poetry recycled (without a title) in St. Irvyne. For Dacre’s naming
strategy and her general influence on Shelley, see Wilson, ‘Female Pseudonymity’.
30
Thomas Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas
Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century. 2nd edn. London: T. Payne, 1777, p. 137.
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Modernized and adjusted by Shelley (as if to highlight their fake archaism),
Chatterton’s lines become:
Hark! the owlet flaps her wing,
In the pathless dell beneath,
Hark! night ravens loudly sing,
Tidings of despair and death. – (ll. 1–4)
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For a raven, Shelley substitutes an owl; for a ‘dethe-owl’, ‘night ravens’; and
instead of a ‘briered’ dell, he gives us a ‘pathless’ one. The verbal changes may
be an attempt by Shelley to disguise his source or to make the lines his own.
What is important is that he has invoked Chatterton at all, recognized him as the
presiding spirit of Gothic and the éminence grise of the poetics of inauthenticity.31
The plagiarized lines both initiate and encapsulate the story of ‘Ghasta’, a tale
that gives grim fulfilment to the premonition they voice. But they also epitomize
the horror ballad genre as a whole, a darkness-visible world where worst fears are
confirmed and ‘nyghte-mares’ become starkly literal, as in the midnight ghost-rides
in ‘Lenore’ and ‘Alonzo the Brave’ or (the other sense of the word ‘nightmare’) the
nocturnal visitations of the succuba in ‘Ghasta’, whose ‘coldest touch congealed
my soul – / Cold as the finger of the dead’ (ll. 118–19).
If ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’ takes the plagiaristic tendencies of Gothic to their
logical extreme and ‘Ghasta’ reveals its tutelary deity, Shelley’s distinctive handling
of the mode can be traced further through his deployment of a single Gothic
motif derived from another master-forger, James Macpherson. Macpherson’s
contribution to Gothic rests in part on a wildly imaginative idea expressed in the
‘Song of the Six Bards’ from ‘Croma’, one of the ‘Ossian’ poems: ‘Ghosts ride on
the storm to-night. Sweet is their voice between the squalls of wind. Their songs
are of other worlds.’32 As Macpherson explains elsewhere in a footnote, this motif
is based on a popular superstition in the north of Scotland that storms were raised
by the ghosts of the deceased, ‘who transport themselves, in that manner, from one
place to another’.33
Not by chance, this piece of local folklore, or Macpherson’s literary rendition
of it, took the fancy of another young poet brought up in the north of Scotland,
Byron, who repeats it both in his formal imitation of Macpherson, ‘The Death
of Calmar and Orla’, and in his autobiographical lyric ‘Lachin y Gair’. In the
latter, the ghost-rider motif becomes a symbol of Byron’s own sense of place and
tradition:
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Hogg notes how Shelley ‘would often exult in the successful forgeries of Chatterton
and Ireland’, demonstrating his ‘sly relish of a practical joke’, especially of a literary kind
(Life of Shelley, vol. 1, p. 263).
32
James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill,
with an introduction by Fiona Stafford. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996,
p. 190.
33
Macpherson’s footnote to ‘Conlath and Cuthóna’, in Poems of Ossian, p. 443 n. 9.
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‘Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?’
Surely the soul of the hero rejoices,
And rides on the wind, o’er his own Highland vale: (ll. 17–20)34
Byron’s lines, with their Ossianic underpinnings, in turn caught the attention of
the young Shelley, who expanded them into a 16-line lyric he included in St.
Irvyne. Within the plot of the novel, the lyric is spontaneously composed by the
imprisoned Megalena as she reflects on the probable death of her missing father:
Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the blast,
When o’er the dark ether the tempest is swelling,
And on eddying whirlwind the thunder-peal past? (ll. 1–4)35
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That Shelley should rework and recontextualize Byron’s lines in this way is
another illustration of the recyclable quality of Gothic writing, an expressive
mode which operates at times as a kind of collective creativity, subordinating
individual authorship to a collaborative poetics which makes common property
of its imaginative materials. This may, indeed, have been part of the attraction of
Gothic for Shelley, foreshadowing in the sphere of popular culture his theory of
the ‘great poem’ to which all poets across time contribute.36 Plagiarism is the limit
case of this collaborative poetics, but the St. Irvyne lyric is not strictly speaking
plagiarized, as Reiman and Fraistat state,37 because on this occasion Shelley
identifies his source, scrupulously acknowledging in a footnote that the poem is
‘Taken almost word for word from the poem of Lachin y Gair in Byron’s Hours
of Idleness, Newark, 1807, p. 130. – Ed’.38 In fact, only the first two lines are
taken verbatim, but the rest of the poem is an elaboration of them, with certain
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Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1980–93, vol. 1, p. 103.
35
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi, A Romance; St. Irvyne: or, The Rosicrucian:
A Romance, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002, p. 174.
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‘A Defence of Poetry’ (SPP: 522). For commentary on this seminal Shelleyan
idea, see my Romanticism and the Uses of Genre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009,
pp. 195–7.
37
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38
Behrendt, ed., Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, p. 174 n. 1. Later in St. Irvyne, Shelley
incorporates into another of his inset poems (‘Song. How swiftly through heaven’s
wide expanse’) two lines from Byron’s ‘Stanzas. I would I were a careless child’, an
autobiographical lyric added to Hours of Idleness for its expanded and retitled edition,
Poems, Original and Translated. Newark: S. and J. Ridge, 1808. Shelley’s footnote (p.
212 n.) misattributes the lines to Hours of Idleness, but the borrowings confirm that he was
familiar with both versions of Byron’s collection, an important detail overlooked by editors.
34
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other details being supplied by Byron’s other Ossianic imitations and possibly by
Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian itself – a book we know Shelley possessed.39
Comparing the St. Irvyne lyric with these earlier texts, what is also notable is
Shelley’s amplification of his source material, both in Gérard Genette’s sense of
a thematic and stylistic expansion,40 and in a more literal, acoustic sense. Shelley
has, as it were, turned up the volume on this Ossianic motif: in Macpherson’s
‘Croma’, the ghosts of the dead speak in the wind, and their voice is a ‘sweet’
one; in Byron’s poem, the voices rise in the gale, but they are voices of rejoicing.
Shelley’s ghost-voices, by contrast, both rise and yell, their ‘murmurs of death’
echoed by the ‘howling’ winds of line 9 and the whirlwind that ‘roars’ in line 13.
Once established in Shelley’s poetic vocabulary, the yelling-ghosts motif recurs
with remarkable frequency. In ‘Ghasta’, for example, there is both the avenging
demon himself, ‘Yelling dreadful o’er the heath’, and a chorus of subsidiary ghosts
singing ‘Tidings of despair and death!’ (ll. 157–60), a reprise of the opening stanza.
In ‘Revenge’, another Gothic horror ballad featuring a ghost-ride through the sky,
there are the ‘fierce yelling fiends’ who exult as the hero’s bride is dragged into
Hades (ll. 53–6). In ‘Fragment, or the Triumph of Conscience’, the final poem in
Original Poetry, it is the Chattertonian ‘night-ravens’ who are ‘yelling’: here, the
playful exaggeration that produces the tautology ‘bodingly presaged destruction
and woe!’ (ll. 4–5) acts as an ironizing device, making the motif self-consciously
literary and parodic. The ‘loud yell … on the rising blast’ in ‘Saint Edmond’s Eve’
(ll. 91–2) is another semi-parodic deployment, a likely model for Shelley’s.
In Posthumous Fragments, to which the concluding ‘Fragment’ in Original
Poetry forms a bridge, the ghostly ‘shrieks’ and ‘yells’ multiply, not only in
properly Gothic contexts but also in political poems such as ‘Ambition, power and
avarice’, where they serve to symbolize the call for revenge from dead victims of
oppression. Another figurative application of the motif is in poems of psychological
torment such as ‘Despair’ and the fragment ‘Yes! all is past’, the latter wholly built
around the image of ‘unearthly howling’, now an emblem of mental derangement
(furthering the Margaret Nicholson theme, though probably also drawing on
personal trauma). The ghostly cacophony reaches its climax in ‘The Spectral
Horseman’, the penultimate poem in Posthumous Fragments and Shelley’s final
exercise in the hyper-Gothic mode. For this farewell to the genre, Shelley was
determined, as Matthews and Everest observe, ‘to pack as many miscellaneous
gothicisms into it’, from as many different cultures, as he could manage.41 These
include, among others, the Scottish banshee, the Faustus legend, the supernatural
huntsman, the phantom rider, the Wandering Jew, and the dragon killed by the
legendary Irish hero Cuchullin. The result is sheer burlesque, an exuberant medley
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PS I: 125.
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illustrative not only of Shelley’s extensive reading in the literature of Gothic but
also of an imaginative desire to saturate himself so completely in the conventions
of the genre as to obliterate it. The technique, not quite captured in Genette’s
typology of textual transformations, is the opposite of the logician’s reductio ad
absurdum but is, rather, an ampflicatio ad absurdum, a multiplication of premises
that exposes no less decisively the paradox of ‘farcical horror’ which, in its
decadent phase at least, is the contradictory essence of Gothic.
Once again, though, it is the acoustic sense of amplificatio that best describes
what is happening here, because ‘The Spectral Horseman’ is built around the sounds
of Gothic rather than its visual images, and the sound is at maximum volume.
The poem begins and ends with Shelley’s favourite Gothic motif, a ghostly shriek
heard on the ‘fitful blast of the wind’ (l. 3). ‘What was that shriek … ?’ the speaker
asks, and the rest of the poem is a search for the answer, an inquiry which takes
the form of a ghoulish identity parade in which, one by one, the Gothic menagerie
perform their ‘shriek’, or ‘moan’, or ‘howl’, or ‘yell’, and the speaker considers
whether that was the sound he had heard. The correct answer, of course, does not
matter, because the point of this parade is simply to put the conventions of Gothic
on display. Special mention, though, should be made of the ‘yelling vampire
reeking with gore’ (l. 13), not because he is the source of the mysterious shriek (he
is not) but because the detail of a vampire who yells contrasts so strikingly with
the vampires we are now familiar with. In this noisy version of Gothic, it is not the
hidden fangs, nor the sepulchral charms, of the vampire that compel attention, it is
the raucous voice. For all its imaginative extravagance, Shelley’s poem assumes
an ironic distance from its material, assembling the stock materials of Gothic in a
controlled display of excess that marks the point at which his deployment of the
mode collapses into absurdity.
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III
Shelley’s early attraction to Gothic and the mark that it left on his work have
long been recognized by critics, even if the precise nature of the attraction and of
its effects has often eluded explanation. By contrast, his youthful immersion in
the culture of minstrelsy and song, though equally formative, has passed almost
totally unremarked. The origins of the Romantic song revival and the cult of the
minstrel, like the ballad revival with which they are closely connected, lie in the
1760s with the publication of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765), David Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1769) and other influential
anthologies, but it was in the early 1800s that minstrelsy and song became a
dominant presence in Romanticism, when Walter Scott turned aside from Gothic
horror ballads to produce his more ‘respectable’ anthology Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border (1802–03) and the first of his hugely successful verse romances,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). The equivalent moment in the popularization
of Irish song was the first number of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808),
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which established a new form of song anchored in older traditions but attuned
to modern sensibilities and musical tonalities. As the craze for Germanic horror
ballads subsided, and the new species of ‘lyrical ballad’ introduced by Wordsworth
and Coleridge struggled to establish its popular appeal, it was the narrative poems
of Scott, the lyric songs of Moore and, more generally, what Erik Simpson calls
the ‘minstrel mode’42 that occupied the centre ground of British literary culture,
for roughly 10 years from 1802.
These were exactly the years in which Shelley served his poetic apprenticeship,
and the 1810 collections are crucially shaped by this contemporary literature,
with its distinctive forms, textures and national resonances. Shelley signals his
engagement with it by taking as his epigraph for Original Poetry three lines
from The Lay of the Last Minstrel. If Shelley’s implicit self-characterization as a
doomed latter-day bard (the quoted lines read: ‘Call it not vain: – they do not err,
/ Who say, that, when the Poet dies, / Mute Nature mourns her worshipper’43) sits
somewhat uneasily alongside his Gothic pseudonym ‘Victor’ and other features of
the collection, there are many other allusions to Scott’s poems, here as elsewhere
in Shelley’s early writings, which confirm his imaginative and technical influence.
An even stronger influence is Moore’s Irish Melodies, and it is no coincidence
that 11 of the 17 poems in Original Poetry are explicitly labelled ‘Song’, nor
that the word ‘Melody’ (a musical term which Moore turned into the name of a
type of poetry) enters into the title of one of the Posthumous Fragments, ‘Melody
to a Scene of Former Times’, a poem containing many verbal echoes of Moore.
These are not actual songs, however, but what Terence Hoagwood calls ‘pseudosongs’, poems which refer to or imitate music without actually supplying it.
Ubiquitous in the Romantic period, the pseudo-song is a genre which shares with
the Gothic horror ballad a large element of inauthenticity and, in Hoagwood’s
phrase, a ‘kaleidoscopic intertextuality’ involving every kind of appropriation,
replication and forgery.44 That Shelley should bring together these two ersatz
genres in so determined a fashion suggests, once again, that their transgressive
textual characteristics are precisely what attracted him, making possible forms of
expression, including political expression, that more authentic traditions and more
tightly policed genres might preclude.
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Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in
British, Irish, and American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 1–26.
See also Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic
Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; and Kirsteen McCue, ‘The Culture
of Song’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2016.
43
CPPBS I: 3, quoting the opening lines of Canto 5 of Scott’s Lay.
44
Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 35. For a similarly sceptical appraisal of ‘actual’ song
in this period, see Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacturing of British ‘Folksong’ 1700
to the Present Day. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985.
42
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Shelley’s interest in contemporary song was not, in fact, purely verbal. We know
from his correspondence that he experimented in this period with the writing of real
songs, offering several of his poems to be set to music by Edward Fergus Graham,
or by Graham’s teacher, the distinguished Austrian musician Joseph Wölfl, then
living in London.45 Shelley may also have collaborated with Graham on the writing
of an opera, and one of his letters playfully imagines them combining forces, ‘thou
… as the bard of old’ with ‘an harp of fire’ and ‘I as the poet of other times’ with ‘a
pen of honey’, in order to combat the tyranny of kings (the same letter contains his
translation of the ‘Marseillaise’, later included in his ‘Minor Poems’ collection).46
However, none of the musical settings survives, and the songs in Original Poetry
are all, in Hoagwood’s term, ‘simulacra’. Two of them, one by Elizabeth, the other
by Shelley, have an added element of fabrication in that they present themselves
as, respectively, ‘Translated from the Italian’ and ‘Translated from the German’,
though neither is, these being examples of yet another fashionable genre, pseudotranslation. Elizabeth’s ‘Italian’ song, indeed, adds a third layer of fabrication
by incorporating a plagiarized stanza from the once-popular but now forgotten
English Lyricks of William Smyth, a minor Cambridge don.47 The switching of
national provenance (‘Italian’ for ‘English’), like the plagiarism and the false claim
of translation, is part of the collaborative game-playing, but the Europeanization
of the source material suggests a resistance, characteristic of the 1810 collections,
to the English insularity of which Smyth’s poems are a product, even if Elizabeth’s
tame continuation of the borrowed passage does not sustain this challenge.
Shelley’s ‘Song. Translated from the German’ is more openly transgressive,
his choice of German (a language he probably did not understand at the time) as
his putative source signalling, as in the headnote to ‘Ghasta’, his wish to exploit
the controversy surrounding German literary imports which dates back to the
1790s. Part erotic lyric, part Lewisesque revenge fantasy, this characteristically
hybrid composition makes explicit the connection hinted at by conservative
literary reviewers between Germanic ‘horror-breeding Bards’ and revolutionary
politics.48 With its ‘dire dagger’ and decree of vengeance for some unspecified
crime, the poem opens in high Gothic mode, but promptly politicizes its revenge
theme, calling for a young hero to ‘defend the firm cause of justice and truth’ and
‘give up the oppressor to judgment and Hell’ (ll. 6, 8). In the final stanzas, the
poem then modulates into a sexual idiom, depicting a passionate reunion between
the hero and his mistress in which ‘The rewards of the brave are the transports of
love’ (l. 16).
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Jessica K. Quillin, Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism. Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012, pp. 8–10.
46
To Graham, ?19 June 1811 (Letters I: 106).
47
William Smyth, English Lyricks. Enlarged edn. 2 vols. London, 1806, vol. 2, p. 40.
48
Anti-Jacobin Review 8 (March 1801), quoted in Tales of Wonder, ed. Thompson, p.
289. For the controversy over German imports, see Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism
and Continental Influences: Writing in an Age of Europhobia. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004.
45
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Most of the other songs in Original Poetry have a more obviously personal
content, and editors and commentators have generally offered biographical
readings, connecting the poems to Shelley’s relationship with Harriet Grove. The
song that stands out as having a more complex, and impersonal, frame of reference
is ‘The Irishman’s Song’. Dated ‘October 1809’, this is Shelley’s first political
poem on a specific theme, his adoption of an Irish persona signalling, even at
the very outset of his career, his desire to challenge parochial Englishness and
awaken cosmopolitan sympathies. Cameron traces Shelley’s early interest in Irish
political affairs to his father’s and grandfather’s Whiggish support for Catholic
Emancipation and to the influence of the radical M.P. Sir Francis Burdett,49 but the
inspiration of ‘The Irishman’s Song’ is as much literary as political. The poem’s
metre and rhyme scheme, its plaintive tone, the conventionalized lament for
Ireland’s fallen heroes, the desolate landscape with ruined buildings, the use of
the mythological name ‘Erin’, the symbol of the harp (now mute), the pledge that
the Irish cause must never be forgotten, even the mode of address (a collective
‘we’ addressing the personified Irish nation in an extended apostrophe) are all
modelled directly on Moore’s Irish Melodies. Shelley reproduces, too, the strange
temporality of the Irish Melodies – suspended between an unspecified present and
an equally vague past, but suffused with the sufferings of both – and also their
distinctive intertextuality, which centres on recurring allusions to Macpherson’s
Ossian, the pseudo-ancient, pseudo-Gaelic prose poems which underlie so much
of the ‘national’ poetry and song of the period (in this case, one of the clearest
echoes is of the ubi sunt sequence in the ‘Bards’ Song’ in ‘Croma’: ‘Where are our
chiefs of old? Where our kings of mighty name?’).50
Shelley, though, offers not a mere replication of Moore’s style, but a calculated
intensification of it. The first stanza reworks the decaying-stars imagery of Moore’s
‘How oft has the Benshee cried’,51 but gives it, as Reiman and Fraistat note,52 a
more cosmic, apocalyptic sweep:
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The stars may dissolve, and the fountain of light
May sink into ne’er ending chaos and night,
Our mansions must fall, and earth vanish away,
But thy courage, O Erin! may never decay. (ll. 1–4)53
As in Moore’s poem, the dissolving stars emblematize Ireland’s decline, but rather
than simply lamenting, Shelley assigns a political reason for it, the fallen mansions
of line 3 hinting at the English government’s scorched-earth policy in the post-
Cameron, The Young Shelley, p. 46.
Poems of Ossian, p. 192.
51
A Selection of Irish Melodies, with Symphonies and Accompaniments by Sir
John Stevenson Mus.Doc. and Characteristic Words by Thomas Moore Esq. 2nd number.
London: J. Power, 1808, p. 67.
52
CPPBS I: 174.
53
In the Pforzheimer copy, the ambiguous ‘may’ of line 4 is altered to ‘shall’.
49
50
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1798 reprisals. The second stanza extends the anti-colonial theme, surveying
the ‘wide wasted ruin’ that Ireland has become, a land where the corpses of its
heroes ‘lie stretched on the plain’ and its foes ‘ride in triumph throughout our
domain’, like the horsemen of the Apocalypse. In the third stanza Shelley invokes
the symbol of the ‘dead’ harp, but immediately interrupts its silence with the
‘clangour of spears’, a ‘war note’ announced by ‘the dread yell of Sloghan’ (ll.
11–12). Interestingly, this last detail is drawn not from the Irish Melodies but from
The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in one of whose battle scenes Scott had revived
the ancient Scots word slogan (from Gaelic sluagh-ghaim, ‘war-cry’). Shelley
echoes Scott’s phrasing54 but gives the motif a modern application, to announce an
imminent present-day conflict. The poem turns from elegiac lament into rebellious
prophecy as the Irishman’s song becomes itself a battle-cry, calling for retribution
against the unnamed oppressor (here, England or the Protestant overlord) for the
sufferings inflicted on his countrymen.
The last stanza moves more fully into fantasy mode, developing the revenge
theme in an increasingly violent and macabre scenario. The apocalyptic undertones
of Shelley’s revolutionary song are given a startling new twist as he imagines the
slaughtered Irish heroes rising from their graves and forming a ghostly chorus
chanting for revenge:
Ah! where are the heroes! triumphant in death,
Convulsed they recline on the blood-sprinkled heath,
Or the yelling ghosts ride on the blast that sweeps by,
And ‘my countrymen! vengeance!’ incessantly cry. (ll. 13–16)
To articulate his fantasy of revenge, Shelley turns again to the language of Gothic,
this time in an altogether serious register: here, once more, are the convulsing
corpses and ‘yelling ghosts’ of the horror ballads, but they are now ghosts with
a political mission, their message spelt out in the bloodthirsty slogan of the final
line, with its chilling revision of the traditional Irish rallying cry, Erin go brach
(Ireland for ever!).
Just how far the poem has travelled from the benign pastiche with which it
began can be gauged by recalling the well-known passage in Moore’s ‘Prefatory
Letter’ (1810) where he describes Irish music as ‘the truest of all comments upon
our history’:
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The tone of defiance, succeeded by the languor of despondency – a burst of
turbulence dying away into softness – the sorrows of one moment lost in the
levity of the next – and all that romantic mixture of mirth and sadness, which is
naturally produced by the efforts of a lively temperament to shake off, or forget,
54
‘And heard the slogan’s deadly yell’: Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A
Poem. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805, p. 13 (Canto 1, stanza vii).
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the wrongs which lie upon it, – such are the features of our history and character,
which we find strongly and faithfully reflected in our music … .55
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Nothing could be more different from the emotional trajectory outlined here than
the one enacted in Shelley’s ‘Irishman’s Song’, which excludes the indulgent mirth
and reverses the flow of feeling, beginning in despondency or pathos and ending in
a tone of defiance so strident that the poem modulates into a completely different
idiom, drawn not from Irish folksong or Scottish border romance but from the
German horror ballad. In Hoagwood’s terms, this takes the ‘artistry of simulation’56
to a new level, producing a confection of literary idioms that has nothing to do
with music but is illustrative of Shelley’s syncretic verbal imagination, and of the
powerful uses to which he could put it, even at this early stage in his career.
Politically speaking, the conflation of historical commentary with Gothic
balladry produces a lethal cocktail, and the eruptive violence of the poem does
not bode well for Shelley’s future intervention in the political affairs of Ireland
(William Godwin found even his far more moderate Address to the Irish People of
1812 dangerously inflammatory, liable ‘to light again the flames of rebellion and
war’57). Yet, for all its lack of restraint and the admixture of personal fantasy which
is a recurrent feature of Shelley’s early political verse, the poem does, nonetheless,
register an aspect of Irish political sentiment that is missing from Moore’s Irish
Melodies. In the eyes of many Irish republicans, Moore’s songs, which were
intended mainly for an English audience, offered a sanitized, sentimental and
ultimately defeatist response to the catastrophe of the 1798 rebellion against
British rule and to the centuries of colonial oppression which preceded it.58 By
contrast, Shelley’s ventriloquized ‘Irishman’s Song’, while lacking the lyric grace
of the best of the Irish Melodies, uses the language of Gothic to capture the horror
of the Irish situation, an historical trauma so great as to generate not only grief but
also vindictive anger of a kind that finds expression in other ‘Irish Jacobin Gothic’
writing of this period.59
None of the personal songs in Original Poetry has the emotional force and
complexity of ‘The Irishman’s Song’, and it was not until his visit to Dublin in
spring 1812 that Shelley was again to write lyric poems on Irish themes (the most
important of these, ‘The Tombs’ and ‘On Robert Emmet’s Tomb’, have interesting
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‘A Prefatory Letter to The Marchioness Dowager of D[onegall]’, in A Selection of
Irish Melodies. 3rd number. London: J. Power, 1810, p. 1.
56
Hoagwood, From Song to Print, p. 140.
57
Letter to Shelley, 4 March 1812, in Collected Novels and Memoirs of William
Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp. 8 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992, vol. 1, p. 70.
58
The political complications of Moore’s legacy are discussed by Leith Davis, Music,
Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity 1724–1874.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006, chs 6 and 7.
59
See Niall Gillespie, ‘Irish Jacobin Gothic, c.1796–1825’, in Irish Gothics: Genres,
Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, eds Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 58–73.
55
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points of connection with ‘The Irishman’s Song’, though they eschew the Gothic
possibilities of their graveyard setting and adopt a more measured, meditative
tone).60 There is one poem in the Posthumous Fragments volume, however,
which effects an even bolder juxtaposition of genres and styles, and in which
political emotion finds more daring expression, the ‘Fragment. Supposed to be
an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé’. This is the rhetorical
centrepiece of the Posthumous Fragments collection, the poem that relates most
closely to the Margaret Nicholson theme and the one on which Shelley pinned
most of his hopes of commercial success. It is also the one text that bears out,
to some degree, Hogg’s bizarre account of the composition process,61 in that its
fragmentary and ‘dithyrambic’ quality – involving abrupt metrical shifts, sudden
switches of tone and register, and odd typographical features such as the use
of multiple rows of asterisks for missing lines – may be the result of deliberate
cutting and splicing.
Hogg falsifies, though, the character of the poem when he describes it simply as
a practical joke and claims that its purpose was ‘to ridicule the strange mixture of
sentimentality with the murderous fury of revolutionists, that was so prevalent in
the compositions of the day’.62 Though burlesque is one of its registers, the blend
of sexual eroticism and revolutionary violence that lies at the heart of the poem
is a calculated act of taboo-breaking consistent with the shock tactics of the 1810
collections, and with some of Shelley’s later poetry. Like the ‘Song, Translated
from the German’ in Original Poetry, whose ‘extatic confusion’ of sexual and
political desire it takes to a new level of explicitness, the ‘Epithalamium’ uses
genre-mixing and intertextual collage not to scramble but to sharpen its ideological
message (an early example of the ‘rough-mixing’ technique practised in some of
his later poetry63).
Shelley’s title invokes the Classical tradition of the epithalamium (from Greek
epi-thalamos, ‘at the bridal chamber’), a type of ceremonial love poetry which
in its most literal form involved a nuptial song to be sung outside the room in
which a bride and bridegroom – often of royal or aristocratic lineage – were
consummating their marriage. Particularly popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the genre ranged from relatively decorous celebrations of the marriage
ceremony such as Spenser’s Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596) to
semi-pornographic poems like the Epithalamium of the Dutch neo-Latin writer
Johannes Secundus (1511–36), which seems to have served as Shelley’s primary
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60
For the circumstances of his 1812 Dublin visit, the first of two, see Timothy Webb,
‘“A Noble Field”: Shelley’s Irish Expedition and the Lessons of the French Revolution’, in
Robespierre & Co., ed. Nadia Minerva. 3 vols. Bologna: Edizione Analisi, 1990, vol. 2, pp.
553–76; and Paul O’Brien, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland. London: Redwords, 1992.
61
See above, p. 52.
62
Hogg, Life of Shelley, vol. 1, pp. 267, 265.
63
For the distinction between ‘rough-mixing’ and ‘smooth-mixing’, and some other
Shelleyan examples, see my Romanticism and the Uses of Genre, pp. 176–200.
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model.64 This important source has been overlooked by editors, but Shelley’s
controversial description of oral sex has been traced to another well-known piece
of Renaissance erotica, the anonymous ‘Fragment. To Lydia’ usually attributed to
Cornelius Gallus, a translation of which had been published alongside Secundus’s
Epithalamium in John Nott’s popular parallel-text edition of Secundus’s Basia,
or Kisses.65 In fact, the provenance of this passage is more interesting still,
Shelley’s notorious ‘sucking’ lines being a mosaic of translated phrases from
Secundus and Gallus together with phrasing from Thomas Moore’s poem ‘The
Kiss’, itself a reworking of Nott’s Gallus.66 This more recent source, though also
missed by editors, is particularly significant, because it was Moore who led the
way for Shelley’s generation in the adaptation of Classical erotic verse for modern
readers, first in his Odes of Anacreon (1800), then in his best-selling collection
The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. (1801), which includes ‘The
Kiss’, and again in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806). Moore’s lead proved
crucial for Byron, who later claimed that he knew the ‘Thomas Little’ poems by
heart by the age of 15 (in 1803), and told its author that ‘all the mischief I have
ever done, or sung, was owing to that confounded book of yours’.67 The literary
impact on Shelley was comparable, and his early poetry is as full of echoes of
Moore’s libertine poems as it is of the Irish Melodies, their racy lyricism and art
of sexual innuendo providing him with yet another way of shocking bourgeois
sensibilities. Like Moore, too, Shelley conceals his authorship of the Posthumous
Fragments through an elaborate pseudonymity involving the posthumous editing
of an unpublished poet.68 In Shelley’s case, there are further layers of disguise,
since the real Margaret Nicholson (who had written poems in Bedlam, at least one
of which survives69) was not in fact dead, and the name of her fictitious nephew
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[John Nott, trans.], Kisses: A Poetical Translation of the Basia of Joannes Secundus
Nicolaïus. With the Original Latin, and an Essay on his Life and Writings. And the
Epithalamium Newly Translated. 2nd edn. London: J. Bew, 1778. It is this new translation
of the Epithalamium, rather than the more coy one Nott included in the first edition of 1775,
that Shelley echoes. By 1810, there were numerous other editions of Nott’s book.
65
See previous note. Shelley’s use of the ‘Lydia’ fragment was first detected by Nora
Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986, pp. 42–3. Nott reassigns the fragment to Maximianus Gallus.
66
[Thomas Moore], The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq. London: J.
Carpenter, 1801, p. 43.
67
To Thomas Moore, 9 June 1820, in Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A.
Marchand. 12 vols. London: Murray, 1973–82, vol. 7, p. 117. See Jeffrey W. Vail, The
Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001, pp. 14–40.
68
Moore’s naming strategy and its aesthetic and commercial motivations are analysed
by Justin Tonra, ‘Masks of Refinement: Pseudonym, Paratext, and Authorship in the Early
Poetry of Thomas Moore’. European Romantic Review 25.5 (2014), pp. 551–73.
69
Included in a letter of petition to the King and Prince of Wales, now in the
Pforzheimer Collection (CPPBS I: 239).
64
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and editor, ‘John Fitzvictor’, is a veiled allusion to Shelley’s previous pseudonym
in Original Poetry (the ‘Fitz’ prefix meaning ‘son of’).
This fictive paratextuality carries over into the title of the poem in question,
a ‘Fragment’ which is ‘Supposed to be an Epithalamium’ rather than necessarily
being one, an editorial rubric that echoes the title of Chatterton’s Poems, Supposed
to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth
Century, thus invoking once again the literary tradition of pseudonymity and
forgery. Chatterton’s telescoping of time may also have provided a hint for one of
Shelley’s boldest strokes, the idea of a celestial union between François Ravaillac,
the assassin of Henry IV of France in 1610, and Charlotte Corday (or Cordé, the
less common spelling Shelley uses70), a Girondin sympathizer who, at the height
of the French Revolution in July 1793, murdered the Jacobin journalist and despot
Jean-Paul Marat.71 Though the political resonances of this imaginary love match
are complex (and Shelley adds a further complication by adopting the anglicized
form of Ravaillac’s first name, ‘Francis’, making him sound like an English
gentleman72), the fact that the poem shows the would-be English regicide Margaret
Nicholson fantasizing in a dream-vision about the post-mortem bliss of two French
assassins from different centuries brings together sex, politics and history in a way
that radically disrupts the conventions of the epithalamium, replacing aristocratic
eulogy with revolutionary martyrology and converting Secundus’s matrimonial
erotica into something more comprehensively provocative. The metaphysical
conceit of ‘Congenial minds’ who ‘seek their kindred soul’ across the gulf of time
(ll. 42–3) provides a perfect metaphor for Shelley’s sense of an unextinguishable
tradition of which he too is part, an idea aptly couched in recycled phrasing from
Moore’s ‘The Grecian Girl’s Dream of the Blessed Islands’ (from Epistles, Odes,
and Other Poems) – a model for the poem’s dream-vision and a key source for
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Precedents for this spelling include Robert Southey’s poem ‘July Thirteenth.
Charlotte Cordé Executed for Putting Marat to Death’, published in the Morning Post in
1798, and James Gillray’s cartoon, ‘The Heroic Charlotte la Cordé, upon her Trial, at the
bar of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris’ (1793).
71
For contemporary interest in Corday, a figure who in Shelley’s female martyrology
prefigures Beatrice Cenci, see Adriana Craciun, ‘The New Cordays: Helen Craik and
British Representations of Charlotte Corday, 1793–1800’, in Rebellious Hearts: British
Women Writers and the French Revolution, eds A. Craciun and Kari E. Lokke. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 193–232.
72
This anglicization may derive from The Trial of Francis Ravaillac, appended to
Charlotte Lennox’s much-reprinted translation of the Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune,
Duke of Sully, Prime Minister of Henry the Great. 3 vols. London: A. Millar, 1756, or from
the account of Ravaillac’s trial and execution in W.H. Dilworth’s The Royal Assassins.
London: W. Anderson, 1759, a set of biographical sketches intended ‘for the improvement
and entertainment of the British youth of both sexes’. Shelley’s poem subverts the tradition
of condemnation, imaginatively resurrecting and celebrating Ravaillac.
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Shelley’s lifelong interest in the theme of paradise.73 Nicholson’s dream, though,
also has a nightmare aspect: the kingless heaven where ‘pleasures … never can
cloy’ is set against a hell where ‘despots’ are consigned to ‘the avenging deep’ (ll.
34, 13), making Shelley’s ‘Epithalamium’ a quasi-apocalyptic poem, the first and
most bizarre in a long line of eschatological prophecies that includes Queen Mab,
Laon and Cythna and Prometheus Unbound, all of which project a future state of
bliss from which tyrants are forcibly excluded.
Other devices add to the generic disruption and collage. The dream-vision
proper does not begin until line 24, the opening section of the poem consisting
instead of a storm scene which involves yet another deployment of the Gothic
motif of the ghostly ‘yell’ (l. 10). The unidentified yell, indeed, provides one
of the poem’s main unifying themes, since Shelley returns to this same motif
in his closing lines, revealing that the sound in question is the death-cry of his
protagonists’ victims:
Bu t t wa t is sweeter to revenge’s e ar
Than the fell tyrant’s last expiring yell?
Yes, than love’s sweetest blisses ’tis more dear
To drink the floatings of a despots knell.
I wake – ’tis done – ’tis o’er. * *
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * (ll. 109–15)
Whether or not the typographical misalignment that produced the obscene word
‘twat’ in the original printing of line 109 was another piece of mischief-making on
Shelley’s part (as Reiman and Fraistat conjecture74), the poem’s ending makes clear
that its ultimate message is a political one. Even as he spells this out, however,
Shelley engages in intertextual trickery and subversion. The lines about it being
‘sweeter than revenge’s ear’ to ‘drink the floatings of a despot’s knell’, with their
blunt vindication of tyrannicide, are largely borrowed from Walter Scott’s ballad
‘Cadyow Castle’ (from Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border), a safely historical poem
by an author whose political views were the opposite of Shelley’s. The Shandyesque
asterisks that form the last two and a half lines are a final act of corrective
intertextuality: in Shelley’s parodic reworking, Sterne’s famous innuendo device
becomes ironically redundant, since this outspoken poem has left nothing to the
imagination, and the dream-vision by now is already ‘o’er’ and ‘done’.
One last aspect of the poem’s form that deserves comment is its musical
dimension – a conventional feature of epithalamia given new visibility here through
the use of capitalized subheadings such as ‘Chorus of Spirits’ and ‘Symphony’
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The echoes are noted in PS I: 118–22. For Moore’s broader influence on Shelley,
see Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley and His Contemporaries’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe, with Madeleine Callaghan.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 513–29 (pp. 518–21).
74
CPPBS I: 254–5.
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Harps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires
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(the latter term used in its early sense, now rare, of an instrumental interlude in
a vocal composition, as in Stevenson’s settings of the Irish Melodies).75 Editors
plausibly connect this element with Shelley’s collaboration with Fergus Graham,
suggesting that the antiphonal songs of Charlotte and Francis may have grown
out of his experiments in the writing of operatic lyrics.76 As elsewhere in the 1810
collections, though, Shelley provides a simulacrum of music rather than actual
music, and the unheard melodies merely throw into relief the steamy love-talk
and death-cries which are the poem’s dominant sounds. The overall effect of this
auditory layering is not, as in ‘The Spectral Horseman’, burlesque, but something
more disquieting. Shelley’s parody of the conventional wedding-song, and of
the social and religious values it encodes, reinforces rather than undermines the
poem’s libertarian theme, making this a more powerful political statement than the
overtly polemical poem (‘Ambition, power, and avarice’) that precedes it. In its
shifting tonality, its promiscuous intertextuality and its audacious experimentation
with form and genre, the ‘Epithalamium’ is Shelley’s most artistically complex
poem to date, and his most purposeful deployment of the poetics of inauthenticity.
IV
Far from being mere pranks or spoofs, then, Original Poetry and Posthumous
Fragments represent a vital stage in Shelley’s literary development, reflecting
a fascinating but under-explored phase in the broader culture of Romanticism.
His next poetry collection, the unpublished ‘Volume of Minor Poems’ of 1813,
looks in many ways like a repudiation of the artistic values that govern the 1810
collections. Although prepared for press when he was just 20, the ‘Minor Poems’
collection was intended to be a retrospective review of his emotional and creative
life, published under his own name and assembling representative poems from
his past and present in order to provide a Wordsworthian ‘picture of the mind’ at
the different stages of his development.77 Yet, although he includes several other
poems from 1809–10, there is almost nothing from Original Poetry or Posthumous
Fragments, as if Shelley were editing these out of the narrative of his life and
indicating that they were not representative of his output at that date.
There is one exception, however, and it puts matters in a somewhat different
light. The poem which begins ‘Cold, cold is the blast when December is howling’,
dated ‘July 1810’ and entitled ‘Song’ in Original Poetry, is reworked for the
‘Minor Poems’ and assigned a new date of ‘1808’, a date which now also forms
its title.78 For a volume that professes to be an authentic autobiographical record,
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See the title cited in note 51 above.
CPPBS I: 252.
77
See my ‘“The Casket of my Unknown Mind”: The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems’,
in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate,
2009, pp. 41–68 (pp. 61–2).
78
CPPBS I: 11–13; CPPBS II: 112–14.
76
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this re-dating and re-titling constitute a significant falsification, as do the many
small verbal changes that Shelley makes to the poem. There is an irony, too, in
his choosing this particular poem as a picture of his mental state in 1808 because
we know that in November 1810 he had transcribed it for Hogg and pretended
it was by Elizabeth in an attempt to promote an intimacy between them.79 This
piece of reverse plagiarism or forgery – attributing to someone else a composition
that was really by him – suggests that this poem, rather than being a simple act of
self-portraiture, was inescapably implicated in the poetics of inauthenticity. It was
implicated, too, in the poetics of Gothic, as may be inferred from the very first line,
since when the ‘blasts’ are ‘howling’ (for the ‘Minor Poems’ they are pluralized),
we can be certain that ghosts are not far behind. And indeed they make their
appearance in the final stanza, alongside those familiar props, a ‘yelling’ tempest, a
‘storm-blasted yew’ and a desolate grave. To note the recurrence of these motifs is
not to doubt the sincerity of Shelley’s rejection in 1813 of ‘fashionable literature’,
as he now disparagingly calls it, nor his desire, after entering into correspondence
with William Godwin, to draw a line under his ‘votary of Romance’ phase (a
reference to his Gothic novels rather than his engagement with verse romance,
which was on-going and would shortly result in Queen Mab).80 But the literary
experiments of 1810 – an adventure in writing and book-making involving every
kind of transgression, textual, political and legal – had a formative effect on his
work, the traces of which he could never fully erase.
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For the version presented to Hogg, reprinted in his Life of Shelley, see CPPBS II: 41
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114–15. The false attribution to Elizabeth is discussed in CPPBS I: 166.
80
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(Letters I: 348; 227).
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Chapter 4
The Notes to Queen Mab and
Shelley’s Spinozism
Timothy Morton
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This essay considers the notes to Queen Mab as a sequence unto themselves.
The poem after all is called Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes. So
richly allusive and so replete with citations are these notes that most scholars have
helpfully waded through their apparatus, providing notes to the notes, in effect.
Not many have looked at them directly, and almost none have considered them as
a complete sequence.
Reading the notes as a coherent text produces all kinds of resonances, a dance
of thinking which Shelley orchestrated by deliberately placing them at the end of
the edition he oversaw. I suggest we look at them almost as a separate work, well
worth reading on their own, even without reference to the poem they shadow and
enrich with vast, strange and terrifying depths and incisive political passion.
From the first paragraph of Note 1 on the speed of light (and its wavelike and
particle-like qualities), to the last, concerning vegetarianism, the notes still seem
to have been written in our future and to have been beamed back into the present.
Shelley’s hypothesis in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that ‘We want the creative faculty to
imagine that which we know’ is given a run for its money here, demonstrating the
‘knowledge’ on the basis of which Queen Mab does the ‘imagining’.1 And what
knowledge. Extraordinarily, Shelley was only 19 when he started writing Queen
Mab and 21 when he published it. He wrote the 17 notes after the main body of the
text, from December 1812 onwards. To write the notes last is to suggest ongoing
conversations and thoughts in progress.
By adding notes to an already vast and complex poem, Shelley joins poets
such as Robert Southey and Erasmus Darwin, whose Botanic Garden is furnished
with ‘Philosophical Notes’. Indeed, the full subtitle (‘A Poem. With Philosophical
Notes’) is almost identical to Shelley’s, the only difference being Shelley’s calling
the poem, not the notes, ‘Philosophical’.2 The length of such poems and their
annotation resists the iconographic, monolithic readings that are easy to teach in
schools and universities. Such readings rely on short, highly metaphorical, vivid
poems that can be read in the span of an hour. Shelley’s text thought-provokingly
resists fixating on single, vivid images and instead encourages colossal leaps of
thought and grand sweeps of imagery. The imagination at work is Neoplatonic
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SPP: 530.
The Botanic Garden; a Poem, in Two Parts. London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1790–91.
2
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or Kantian, zooming far, far out into the Universe and away from the supposed
singularity of the present moment. This zoom provides the place from which one
could move the Earth, as the epigraph from Archimedes puts it.3
As a separate work, we may read the notes not as part of the poem, but rather
as coordinated with the poem. The coordination of poetry and notes is a stunning
example of constructivist form. Constructivism, associated with revolutionary
Soviet art, may also apply to one strand of Romantic and post-Romantic poetic
practice, in particular practice having to do with avant-garde attempts to change
society through art. Constructivism views the poem as a mental architecture, a
construct, an open scaffolding for thinking. It is supposed to elude our grasp, to be
bigger than us – hence the use of long lineation (think of Whitman) and long forms,
such as blank verse paragraphs, and annotation. We cannot take in constructivist
form all at once, a syndrome that opens our cognitive powers. The poem becomes
a sort of operating software for politics. It might not tell you exactly what to
think (though Queen Mab is very much in the business of telling you so); rather it
shows you how to think. It performs the Copernican spadework of wrenching our
localized, embedded, imprisoned mind into a vaster, more unsettling frame.
Shelley’s disorientation tactic announces itself as such, like Kant’s selfproclaimed ‘Copernican’ revolution in Critique of Pure Reason.4 But in a
significant way it is more Copernican than Kant, who restricts philosophy to the
correlation between human and world. Shelley resolutely tries to push human
thinking outside its oppressive bonds, outside human domination of nonhumans,
outside Earth, even outside the Solar System.
The constructivist frame undermines so-called common sense. The Neoplatonic
quality of Queen Mab – the fairy Mab whisks the soul of the sleeping Ianthe away
to the brilliant edge of the Universe in a magical spacecraft, about as far away
from the world of earthbound shadows as possible – is an objective correlative
for the constructivist form of the poem at large. The otherworldly psychedelic
imagery is curiously congruent with the poem’s scientific and rationalist view.
It serves a function in a world where common sense tells you to join the Church
and King mob and destroy Joseph Priestley’s house. Common sense, which in
Humean fashion Shelley calls custom, has a lot to answer for. (On this theme,
Shelley’s notes on feminism and vegetarianism are of especial interest.) In the age
of Galileo and Copernicus, common sense informed one that the Sun revolved
around Earth once a day. Now consider the astonishing impact of Note 1: ‘Light
consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous
minute particles repelled in all directions from the luminous body.’5 Shelley evenhandedly allows the competing theories of Newton (corpuscular) and Huygens-
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4
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. Boston and 42
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5
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
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Fresnel (wave). The speed of light, while not yet known in the Einsteinian sense,
evokes a defamiliarizing temporality and spatiality.
The Romantic period was the heyday of what David Simpson calls ‘the
encyclopedic long poem’, a lost genre that has ‘geopolitical’ valences.6 Charlotte
Smith’s Beachy Head provides a startling counter to the contemplative blank verse
in a sequence of notes that offer Latin names for plants and numerous accounts of
historical interest on places and features explored in the poem. Robert Southey’s
Thalaba, of which Shelley was a fan, sets a precedent for the disturbing, mindopening use of extensive notes. Peacock’s Palmyra (1806) and The Genius of the
Thames (1810) are also precedents with which Shelley was familiar. The long
annotated poem disrupts the absorption and fixation poetry might generate.7 Queen
Mab’s blank verse is the most open form possible before Whitman and Mallarmé,
since five (in the sense of five stresses per line) is the lowest prime number that is
not immediately tight and symmetrical to the human ear. But the notes expand this
already open form. Eyes and fingers must move and work across pages or up and
down a single page to piece the text together. As Simpson writes:
What is a footnote? Above all … it is a demand or an invitation to lift our eyes
off the page, to disturb the contemplative spell that good poetry weaves around
us as we read, and to look outside a main text … for significant information. It
is … having to do with the movements of the body and the persistence of the
attention span, a technique of estrangement even as it can promise to render
something more familiar and more assured in its pedigree or provenance. It
sends us elsewhere, without really settling in advance what we will find when
we go there. It threatens the uncanny even as it may actually deliver nothing
more alarming than a title and a page number.8
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Shelley employs the still more drastic form of endnotes. Placing the notes at the
end of the official edition, he compels the reader to operate the text, to splay it
open, to shuffle back and forth, to dismantle the potentially hypnotic power of
rhythm and rhyme. It is a miniature exercise in liberation. Reading becomes an
act of encounter and participation, an act that Shelley would have known to be
political on many levels.
This is a republican (small r) aesthetic with which Henry James was also
familiar. By operating the complex machine of the annotated poem, readers are
not simply educating themselves. They are participating in creation, a fact that
any maker of hypertext or interactive CDs and DVDs knows. The text becomes an
open-ended object the reader must orchestrate, more like architecture than poetry.
One has to stroll through it, unable to take the structure in as a whole at any one
6
David Simpson, ‘Small Print’ (unpublished work in progress).
See Lawrence Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’. Critical Inquiry 3.4 (Summer 1977),
pp. 609–55; Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999.
8
Simpson, ‘Small Print’.
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moment. Some of Shelley’s notes themselves have notes, such as the seventeenth
and final note on vegetarianism. These notes-within-notes provide yet another
dimension of hypertextual openness.
Throughout his authorized edition of Queen Mab, Shelley places indicator
hands, eight in all. These hands, as Neil Fraistat has argued, send the reader on
a number of puzzling and at times hilarious wild-goose chases, since in the days
of dangerous radical publication, indicator hands often anonymously referred to
another compositor’s work. With the fake hands, Shelley deflects attention from
himself, but also draws attention to the radical underground and to the political
oppression that creates the need for an underground.9 Shelley knows that the notes
present a sort of machine for thinking, and the hands exist to entice and vex a
thoughtful reader. They introduce a layer of play. Despite the obvious playfulness
of the title, the wicked humour of Queen Mab is often missed.
Precisely because poems are written in shifting, liquid figurative language,
they contain reserves of meaning and pleasure that might not yet have occurred
to us. Why else read poems, anyway? Shelley’s genius was to make the poem and
its notes into a message in a bottle from a future, more enlightened age. The welleducated person whom Shelley imagined reading it, perhaps a young adult, would
eventually reach the notes and rediscover the poem’s meanings in a nitty gritty,
scientifically detailed way. The poem would have prepared her or him by opening
up the mind and making it receptive to new information. Thus the poem is always
reaching into the future, whether it is the rather proximate future of the moment at
which the reader comes to the endnotes, or the final utopia glimpsed in the closing
ninth section, or indeed the future of more mundane political projects that might
seek to embody some of the poem’s revolutionary energy on Earth, as per the
instructions in Part IX: ‘O happy Earth! Reality of heaven!’ (IX, 1).
The forward-flowing torrent of prose keeps on pouring out of the end of the
text, defying closure. There are 17 notes, with addenda in Latin and Greek, and
they stand alone as polished essays in their own right. Note 17 (on vegetarianism)
and Note 13 (on atheism) were published separately and slightly differently as A
Vindication of Natural Diet and The Necessity of Atheism, the former around the
time of the poem’s publication, the latter published in 1811 (the circumstances of
its publication famously resulting in Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford). Scholars
argue that Shelley’s later work was more developed or mature, somehow, and by
implication or explicitly relegate Queen Mab (let alone the notes) to the place
given it in the Oxford Standard Authors edition – juvenilia.10
Who, on average, changes that much between the ages of 19 and 30 (when
Shelley drowned)? The brilliance of Shelley’s first masterpiece ensured that its
tropes and topics were elaborated and repeated throughout his all too brief life. The
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Wordsworth Circle 33 (2002), pp. 33–6.
10
The definitive refutation of this category has been given by Timothy Webb, in 43
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‘Shelley’s Editorial Due’. Text 16 (2006), pp. 207–8.
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
later work is perhaps more delicately nuanced. But everything in the later work
is here, from carefully worked-out literary topics to sequences of philosophical
thinking on a variety of themes that would preoccupy Shelley for the rest of his
life: the physical Universe and the human place in it, politics and the state, gender
and sexuality, God and religion, diet and ethics. And over all hangs the spectre of
Spinoza.
Shelley’s Spinozism
Co
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Fully to understand Shelley’s materialism and atheism, and politics, is to
engage with his deep intuition that Spinoza was the one single most important
philosopher of the modern age. Shelley’s allegiance puts in perspective his rather
uncompromising remarks about Judaism, which some interpret as anti-Semitism.
As Rachel Goldstein writes concerning Spinoza, ‘what can be more characteristic
of a Jewish thinker than to use the Jewish experience as a conduit to universality?’11
It was indeed Spinoza whose work inaugurated the radical Enlightenment, the
somewhat underground, often risky and even life-threatening world of texts,
friendships and communities that sought freedom from oppressive ideologies
such as monarchism and theism, both upgraded but still basically hailing from
the Bronze Age. Jonathan Israel has charted the long history of engagements with
Spinoza, from the more theistic thought of Leibniz (also present in Queen Mab) to
the materialism of Holbach (present as well).12
It is to Spinoza that the finely tuned poetry speaks when it tells of the Universe
from a perspective vast enough to see it as something like a gigantic substance,
infinitesimally variegated and colourful, rippling with life and energy. To see the
Universe like this is to begin to see it, as Spinoza himself might write, sub specie
aeternitatis, with a due sense of its ‘necessity’ (one of the poem’s favourite terms).13
Spinoza receives special treatment in the notes, including direct citation. There is
strong evidence that Shelley maintained his interest in Spinoza throughout his life,
translating him not only in 1817, but also in 1820, and again in 1821.14 Shelley’s
excitement about Spinoza equalled his enthusiasm for Plato.
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Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.
New York: Random House, 2009, p. 178.
12
In Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. See also Charly Coleman, ‘Spinoza’s Ghost’
in The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014, pp. 125–58. This book, which discusses the link
between Holbach and Spinoza, questions Israel’s formulation of a ‘radical’ Enlightenment,
suggesting that matters were more complex than he suggests.
13
Spinoza uses the phrase in Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley. London: Penguin, 2005,
p. xii.
14
MS Journals: 182–4, 383 n. 1.
11
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Co
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What we are dealing with in Shelley’s Spinozism is becoming more
widespread as science begins fully to grasp the implications of quantum theory
and relativity, and materialisms of all kinds (Marxism included) begin a long
and difficult process of backing away from the mechanistic Newtonian view of
matter as little solid ping pong ball–like objects, externally related to one another
in an absolute spacetime, a box with uniform sides. Shelley’s Spinozism is an
expanded materialism that finds little difference between matter and information:
‘the minutest atom comprehends / A world of loves and hatreds’ (IV, 145–6). Thus
there appears a flowing welter of energies and forms at the edge of the Universe –
how strangely like the microwave background radiation that modern instruments
can now analyze are these ‘glittering billows’ and ‘light and crimson mists’ (II,
44, 47).
So many Spinozan terms, so little time – harmony, necessity, superstition
for instance – but ‘necessity’ is the one term that makes itself most prominently
felt. Take a look at Mont Blanc, with its extraordinary opening: ‘The everlasting
universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves’ (ll. 1–2).
Notice how ‘things’ and ‘mind’ interpenetrate, for in a Spinozist universe, there is
no fundamental difference. Notice also the ‘flow’ and the rolling, evidently ways
for Shelley to pay homage to Wordsworth’s pantheist (and thus Spinozist) passage
in Tintern Abbey (‘A motion and a spirit … [that] rolls through all things’, ll.
100–102). Steven Shaviro has recently reclaimed Mont Blanc for a speculative,
Spinozist realism that shows how much nonhuman entities possess an agency and
a sentience that is all their own.15 Marjorie Levinson’s groundbreaking essay on
Spinoza in Romanticism demonstrates how influential he was in the Romantic
period in general.16
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Notes 1 and 2
The first two notes concern the speed of light and ‘The plurality of worlds’: ‘the
indefinite immensity of the Universe is a most awful subject of contemplation.’17
Without warning, the notes eject us from Earth and put us close to Sirius, which
‘is supposed to be at least 54, 224, 000, 000, 000 miles from the earth’.18 The
mathematical real is upon us. Such a vast number is rather humiliating. Infinity
in a sense is easier than this very large finitude. This is a Spinozan universe,
an ‘infinite machine’ of ‘Millions and millions of suns’ that extends far beyond
Steven Shaviro, ‘The Universe of Things’, in Object-Oriented Ontology, eds Levi
Bryant and Ian Bogost (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming). Also available at shaviro.
com.
16
‘A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza’. Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (Winter
2007), pp. 367–408.
17
CPPBS II: 239.
18
CPPBS II: 240.
15
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Note 3
Co
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the human realm.19 If it exists (the neuter deliberately evokes the impersonality
Shelley and Spinoza see in the concept of god), the god of such a universe – the
god that for Spinoza is the universe as such – cannot be a local deity, an old man
with a beard or a petty vindictive tyrant. Impersonality does not mean the universe
is insensible. It means that the guiding forces of the universe are not human. Hence
Shelley’s harsh words on ‘the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews’ and
the ‘miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor’: against scientific
‘knowledge of the stars’, claims to universality based on ethnicity ring hollow.20
The extraordinary sentence, ‘the work of his fingers have borne witness against
him’, evokes the self-contradictoriness of God, as if it were constantly undoing
what it had woven, and had forged botched creations. As if God’s fingers were
acting independently of its mind – which would of course be impossible if God
were omnipotent. The sentence is allusive to the Bible (‘borne witness against’
rings Biblical) but to no passage in particular, as if Shelley were adding his own
serpentine, gnostic apocryphon to the Bible’s normative text.
The evocative language about light lays competing theories side by side,
perhaps through the influence of the well-written entry on light in volume 4 of
William Nicholson’s Encyclopedia.21 We saw earlier that for Newton, light is a
corpuscular particle, while for Huygens and Fresnel, it appears as a wave. Shelley’s
reluctance to choose between these theories now looks insightful.
Given the hollowness of human power against this vast backdrop, Note 3 assaults
it through ridicule. Soldiery is mocked as the policing of state authority: ‘a soldier
is, of all the descriptions of men, the most completely a machine.’22 Soldiers are
puppets of power, swaggering with the force of external authority, absurd and
menacing at the same time.23 The harmonious operation of the machinery of the
Universe puts the machinery of the state to shame. In quick succession human
society becomes a mummery (the travesty of religion), a puppet show, and then,
as if to perform something like mummery or puppetry, an allegorical dialogue in
verse between Falsehood and Vice closes out the third note. Shelley meshes his
prose with a quotation from Godwin.
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19
CPPBS II: 240.
CPPBS II: 240.
21
William Nicholson, The British Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Sciences;
Comprising an Accurate and Popular View of the Present Improved State of Human
Knowledge. 6 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809, vol. 4, pp. 1–15.
22
CPPBS II: 241.
23
CPPBS II: 241.
20
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Notes 4 and 5
Co
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The fourth note is a straight quotation from Ecclesiastes, one of the most
contemplative texts of Judaeo-Christian scripture. Is this one of the works of
God’s ‘fingers’ that Shelley so deftly indexes in the prior note? (And on that point,
we might wonder whether the typographical fingers to nowhere that pepper the
first edition of Queen Mab allude mockingly to the nonexistent or incompetent
fingers of God.)
Shelley seems to have excerpted this text precisely for what it fails to say –
that God is a person, or unique to humans, or to a certain group of humans. The
quotation is about impermanence, and could be found in any number of religions,
including nontheistic Buddhism. There are no people in the quotation, unless
‘generation’ is taken figuratively to mean a cohort of related human families. The
final image of rivers running to the ocean is a suitably Spinozan, monistic image
of a single source, ‘the place whence the rivers come’.24 Shelley erases pampered
human individuality and uniqueness.
Note 5 continues this theme, quoting from The Iliad about human generations
as myriad leaves growing from and falling from trees. Notes 4 and 5 perform a
cross-cultural syncretic reading of the vanity of human wishes (as Ecclesiastes
and Samuel Johnson put it); a decisive placement of the human amidst vast
physical phenomena (biology and the water cycle); a deliberate, persistent elision
of polytheistic and monotheistic sources; and an elegiac emphasis on human
mortality. This final emphasis is one way Shelley can signal his radical atheism.
For him, there is no transcendent being that escapes death and impermanence.25
Shelley’s choice of Homer displays his subtle understanding of the importance
of the Greek verb phuein (from which English derives words such as physics): in
context this means something like ‘emergence’ or ‘arising’ – quite a Spinozan way
of thinking about birth and death, arising from and falling back into something,
like the water cycle in the previous note. The ‘leaves on a tree’ and ‘rivers into the
ocean’ images are repeated in this part of the poem in which the emotions are said
to ‘variegate the eternal universe’ – like the colours of a leaf (IV, 150). A certain
ecological imagination is at work here. The thorough immanence of Shelley’s
materialism allows him to be a panpsychist, to claim in all honesty that ‘Every
grain / Is sentient both in unity and part’ (IV, 143–4). Alfred North Whitehead, a
fan of Mont Blanc, advocated a form of panpsychism, and this view is beginning
to be taken seriously again, having been seen as absurd in the twentieth century,
the era of the death of metaphysics.
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24
CPPBS II: 246.
Shelley here anticipates the recent arguments in Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism:
Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
25
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Note 6
Co
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Vast imagery that sees body and mind as a single continuum, like leaves on a
tree, is brought into sharp philosophical focus in Note 6. The note is a quotation
from Lucretius that acidly underscores the line in the poem about ‘The mob of
peasants, nobles, priests, and kings’ (V, 58). Lucretius transmitted the teachings of
Democritus and Epicurus to Latin readers, keeping alive a tradition of materialism
that ran underground until Shelley’s beloved Holbach and others revived it in
the French Enlightenment.26 In the quotation, Lucretius describes the pleasures
of philosophy, which he holds capable of rescuing us from the stormy waves of
mortal suffering and strife.
The imagery of seeing a storm at sea from afar resonates with the oceanic and
emergence imagery of the preceding two notes, and with the cosmic viewpoint of
Mab and Ianthe. At the same time, the quotation talks to the poem that at this point
is busy depicting feudal oppression as a kind of turbulence, a ‘mob’ that the note
reads as a violent storm. By moving from the poem to the note, the reader performs
what the quotation promises concerning philosophy – reaching out beyond human
antagonism towards a safe harbour in which to reflect on it, just like Mab and
Ianthe. Yet by talking to the previous notes, the quotation also contributes to the
imagery of monism and emergent life, the ocean of stars that constitute the Milky
Way making humans appear as tiny ripples on its surface: ‘That which appears
only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking from heaven, is in effect composed
of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illuminating
numbers of planets that revolve around them.’27
As well as balancing the frenzied mob back in the poem, the Lucretius quotation
in Note 6 provides a breather. Such multilayered contrapuntal effects stem from
Shelley’s embrace of a hypertextual form in which we can read in at least two
dimensions simultaneously: up and down (into and out of the poem) and back and
forth (between the notes). And what a good guess about exoplanets. Twenty-firstcentury astronomy is now able to confirm what Shelley posited with the aid of a bit
of Milton and some spiritual-political pluck. Only Milton’s Raphael had spoken
so explicitly in English verse on the existence of planets beyond the Solar System
(Paradise Lost VII, 617–25; VIII, 40–158). Giordano Bruno, a possible source for
Shelley’s thinking along with Spinoza, was after all burned at the stake for such
statements, and although the source deployed here is more explicit than the verse,
Nicholson’s Encyclopedia was able to dampen the intensity of the thought, which
the pulsation of poetry can only make more vivid.28 In all this internationalism, and
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26
See Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997, pp. 412–17.
27
CPPBS II: 240.
28
See Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 163: both Spinoza and Bruno are likely candidates
for thinking about (intelligent) life on other planets.
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indeed interplanetary-ism, we glimpse some reasons why Shelley’s relationship
with mainstream ‘Englishness’ has been so vexed.
Notes 7–10
Co
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These notes are concerned with social issues: labour, religion, marriage. Shelley’s
overarching emphasis in this sequence is on unnaturalness or distortion. Workers
are exploited unfairly; religion drives you mad; marriage binds together the
unloving. Shelley cleaves to Godwinian anarchism in his critique of institutions on
the basis of their unjust restrictions on human freedom. His argument is empiricist.
Not all people are empirically equal: ‘I will not insult common sense by insisting
on the doctrine of the natural equality of man.’29 The doctrine is transcendental:
people have inalienable equality simply from being people, not because of their
empirical qualities. Shelley’s rejection of the doctrine accords with his monist
materialism: ability is a matter of more and less, not of kind but of degree. Workers
are over-worked, not structurally, fundamentally exploited. For a physical problem
Shelley offers an empirical solution: make everyone work two hours a day.30
The way religion can drive a person crazy is also an empirical matter: ‘every
physician’ will have access to a case ‘parallel’ to the one he discusses, of ‘a lady
of considerable accomplishments … whom the Christian religion has goaded to
incurable insanity’ (Note 8).31 Lucretius warns the reader in Latin that the threat of
death and hell will drive people to betray their parents, friends and country.
Religion, marriage and habits of labour – I hesitate to say class since Shelley
studiously avoids the word – are seen as vast presences that loom over people.
Prostitution is seen as a social symptom, a scapegoat profession that is the flip
side of rigid marriage laws. The digression on the ‘state of society’ and the
‘morality’ of religion interweaves these elements into the argument (Note 9).32 The
backwardness of modern society is measured against the Lucretian eudaemonism
of ‘happiness, the sole end of the science of ethics’. We recall the injunction to
Ianthe, ‘Learn to make others happy’ (II, 64), an injunction whose lack of gender
specificity is surely congruent with the pro-feminism of this note.
In accord with the disorienting vastness of Queen Mab, Note 10 propels us
again from the immediate human sphere into the far future. Laplace, Cabanis and
Bailly provide Shelley with a curious form of geological utopianism, a sort of
secular account of fall and redemption. The Earth will gradually cease to tilt on
its axis, and this will accord with ‘the progress of the intellect’ or ‘the moral and
physical improvement of the human species’. Shelley cites evidence of changing
terrestrial climates, such as ‘Bones of animals peculiar to the torrid zone … found
in the north of Siberia’ and evidence of climate change in Britain, Germany and
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CPPBS II: 249.
CPPBS II: 250–51.
31
CPPBS II: 251.
32
CPPBS II: 252.
30
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
France (they were ‘much colder than at present’).33 Whatever we may now think
of this theory, it is evident that this note is another performance of displacement,
of opening up human coexistence to the vast objects and processes in which it
unfolds. (Contemporary global warming theory does allow for shifts in the axis of
Earth – though not all for the good.)
Note 11
Co
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Note 11 jumps from macro to micro, as Shelley quotes Holbach’s Système de la
nature.34 Holbach uses atomic turbulence as an analogy for revolution. Holbach
is playing with Spinozan necessity. For Spinoza, randomness is only a sort of
perspective trick. There is no true randomness, only higher levels of order. It is a
complex order, filled with material ‘turbulence’ as the poetry to which this note
is affixed puts it (VI, 171–3). But it is an order nonetheless, one with which old
thinking and old hierarchies cannot deal. Revolutionary action is seen by analogy
as the Lucretian swirling of dust particles (‘un tourbillon de poussière’), a perfectly
regular function of matter. If we could only see it sub specie aeternitatis, we would
see that the fervid boiling of mobs and executions and war has as much necessity
and logic to it as a square peg fitting into a square hole. Thus Shelley brilliantly
intertwines the two major themes of the notes to Queen Mab: human society and
cosmological order.
The employment of French in this note, as elsewhere Shelley uses Greek and
Latin, serves to make multilingualism analogous to cosmic displacement. The
reader is forced to dissolve the barriers of her or his parochialism.
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Note 12
Thus we proceed smoothly to Note 12, which explores the notion of necessity
on which cosmological order depends. Shelley can now reference ‘the moral and
material universe’ in one breath. The phrase works, since by this point those two
terms have become coordinated: a Spinozan mingling. This passage, for instance,
could have come straight from Spinoza’s Ethics:
The conviction which all feel, that a viper is a poisonous animal, and that a
tyger is constrained, by the inevitable condition of his existence, to devour men,
does not induce us to avoid them less sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in
destroying them: but he would surely be of a hard heart, who, meeting with a
serpent on a desart island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury,
should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessitarian is inconsequent to his
own principles, if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the compassion which he
feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of injuring him: he looks with
33
CPPBS, II: 256.
CPPBS II: 257–8.
34
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an elevated and dreadless composure upon the links of the universal chain …
whilst cowardice, curiosity and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to
the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and rejected the
delusions of free-will.35
Co
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The enmity we feel towards ‘dangerous’ animals is contextual, not an inevitable
result of some intrinsic nature. The more one knows that reality is a contextual affair,
the more one can be open and compassionate. Since there is no transcendental,
metaphysical evil, only confusion and suffering, one can love one’s enemies as
the New Testament enjoins, without what Shelley would have considered to be
superstitious beliefs. An Islamic story concludes the note, presenting us, within
an Abrahamic religion, with a ‘fifty thousand years’ span of time before Adam
was created to sin. How, asks Adam, can Moses (his interlocutor) accuse him of
sinning of his own accord? The stage is set for Note 13, in which Shelley brings
out the heavy guns of atheism. Shelley is implicating God in the sin of Adam and
the birth of ‘evil’, insofar as it can be said to exist, which for a Spinozan only
means confusion rather than some ontological condition.
‘The delusions of free-will’: it is a striking phrase, and a Spinozan one. Shelley
replaces free will with ‘motives’, which sounds much more like the impelling force
of Spinoza’s conatus: for Spinoza, a term that means striving and that sometimes
indicates what we mean by desire, such that rigid distinctions between living and
nonliving, sentient and nonsentient, seem to waver. One of the delusions of free
will is that only humans have something like it. Conatus, by contrast, is in effect in
spoons and tigers and galaxies as much as in humans. The freedom of the free will
is, sub specie aeternitatis, a ‘delusion’. By no means does this suggest that there is
no will at all, or that everything is pre-programmed. It is simply that from a wide
enough perspective, there are not free agents acting on unfree ones, but instead a
push–pull of forces in a vast system.
The free will problem also relates to Shelley’s Humean thoughts about
empathy and imagination, modulated through Dugald Stewart.36 In this sense, free
will is overrated: we make ethical decisions because we feel along with those who
suffer, not because we decide to condescend to help them from the VIP lounge
of absolute freedom. Shelley’s hymn to necessity in the poem is to a female, not
a patriarch: ‘Necessity! thou mother of the world!’ (VI, 199). The material bond
between mother and child speaks to this lack of condescension. Necessity is as
it were the world’s matrix (‘mother’) in whose substance we all find ourselves,
without metaphysical hierarchies.
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Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. London: Strahan,
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
Note 13
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With cosmic vastness, the first paragraph of Note 13 picks up on the implications
of the previous note: ‘This negation [of theism] must be understood solely to affect
a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe,
remains unshaken.’37 Spinoza lives. Indeed, Shelley appends a rich slice of his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus at the end of a group of citations (Holbach, Pliny).
Note 13 is substantially The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley’s refusal to
answer questions about it got him expelled from Oxford after he had displayed
it prominently in the bookstore and sent it to the university authorities. Shelley
begins his argument with epistemology. Instead of looking at the existence of God,
we should first study the nature of belief. How and in what sense do we believe in
God? The weaponry of Kantianism – its ‘Copernican’ turn towards the mind and
away from supposed things in themselves – is brought to bear. Kant provides the
deep reason for Hume’s demolishing of causality theories. Hume had argued that
what reason has to go on in thinking cause and effect is only statistical correlation.
The underlying reason for that, argued Kant, was that we only know phenomena,
not things in themselves. In this sense, belief in a god is simply a phenomenon,
one that bears no necessary relation to an actual god. In preparing for the essay,
Shelley probably filtered Kant through William Drummond and Dugald Stewart.38
The appendices, added for the notes to Queen Mab and consisting of Holbach,
Pliny and Spinoza, back up this line of thinking with less recent authorities.
It would be tempting to read these appendices as a historical return to the
source of radical Enlightenment, Spinoza himself. Spinoza’s Latin leaves us where
we began, with a divine universe (or only a universe, without divinity, depending
on how one reads it). Shelley’s Spinoza argues that God is wheeled on like a deus
ex machina to make sense of those parts of the universe that humans fail yet to
understand.39 Since ‘the power of nature is the power of God’, to bring in God to
explain things only means ‘we are unacquainted with [their] natural cause’, which
is precisely and paradoxically ‘the power of God’.40 One hardly notices the teasing
sleight of hand with which God’s status is radically diminished here – God just is
reality, so there is no need for (separate, gendered) God.
The Spinozan theme sounds at several points in the note, but perhaps nowhere
as resoundingly as in the second reason for questioning evidence for the existence
of a deity: ‘whatever is not eternal must have had a cause … it is necessary to
prove that [the universe] was created: until this is clearly demonstrated, we may
reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design
before we can infer a designer.’41 The sureness with which Shelley breaks the
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CPPBS II: 263.
William Drummond, Academical Questions. London: Cadell and Davies, 1805;
Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind.
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CPPBS II: 277.
40
CPPBS II: 277, my translation.
41
CPPBS II: 265.
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Note 14
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argument from design down to Creationism is remarkable, a point not lost in an 1
age of atheist biology (Richard Dawkins) that regularly presses on the notion of 2
design. Hume is equally in play with Spinoza: Hume’s posthumous work moves 3
towards similar conclusions concerning atheism and design.
4
The arc-like structure of Note 13, with its feet in Spinoza, announces that it’s 5
something very special in the sequence: the very zenith of the notes considered 6
as a through-composed form. All the previous ones can be read as steps towards 7
this atheist climax. The subsequent notes are the wind-down, concluding with the 8
eminently practical yet political activism of vegetarianism – a fascinating way to 9
exit. Since we begin with the speed of light and the vast Universe, and end with 10
the human stomach and human appetite, it is as if we come back to Earth, as does 11
the character Ianthe in the final part of Queen Mab.
12
Into this stately and harmonious form, in which the cosmic and the corporeal
are so seamlessly linked, shambles the figure of the Wandering Jew (Note 14).
The Wandering Jew preoccupied Shelley, who had written a poem entitled The
Wandering Jew (composed in 1810, published 1829). The very note seems out of
joint, as does the text that Shelley uses: he tells us at the end that it is a ‘fragment’
and a ‘translation’, moreover of ‘part of some German work, whose title I have
vainly endeavoured to discover’.42 The very body of the text is haphazard and
broken. Shelley emphasizes the physical condition of the original: ‘I picked it
up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincolns-Inn fields.’43 (This allows him to
omit the story’s close, in which Ahasuerus is reconciled with God.) It is as if the
text itself is the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to eternal life for driving Jesus
away on his walk to crucifixion. This is eternal life, but not as we would wish it.
The Wandering Jew and the ‘dirty and torn’ book fall inside and outside of the
poem and the notes, liminal figures like dirty scapegoats. (Shelley is referring to
an English translation of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Der ewige Jude.)
The note on Ahasuerus, as Shelley and others call the Wandering Jew, and the
Wandering Jew’s narrative itself, seem like a human stain on the brightly polished,
infinite and infinitesimal machine that is Queen Mab and its notes. Like an
oppressive regime, the text reduces the Wandering Jew to what Giorgio Agamben
calls ‘bare life’, a being deemed outside the law, waiting for destruction at the
hands of the state.44 If there is anti-Semitism in Shelley’s text then surely it is
here, more so than in the earlier ‘God of the Jews’ note (2).45 The ultimate object
of sadism is a body that can magically survive fire and slaughter, like a cartoon
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CPPBS II: 283.
CPPBS II: 283.
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Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
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CPPBS II: 240.
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
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character. The Wandering Jew, invented at the height of a wave of pogroms in the
thirteenth century, is one such body.
But Shelley uses the anti-Semitism of the story to indict Abrahamic theism
altogether. Christian hegemony sentenced Ahasuerus (and the Jews for which
he stands) to eternal diaspora. Ahasuerus tells the tyrants of the Earth (‘Nero …
Christiern … Muley Ismail’) that they are ‘bloodhound[s]’.46 The Wandering
Jew pronounces the judgment of the abject and wretched of the Earth upon its
oppressors. He is attacked with ‘arrows and spears … The Saracen’s flaming
sword … lightnings of battle … The mine, bit with destructive power … I fell
on heaps of smoking limbs, but was only singed’.47 Shelley the vegetarian has a
curious appetite for carnage, and Note 14 gives us a taste of the final note, with its
lazar houses and butchery.
Ahasuerus’s indictment of power mirrors his indictment in the poem. It is the
first and only time in the notes in which we encounter a first-person narrative.
Things return somewhat to normal with the ‘establishing shot’ of Note 15, in
which Shelley takes aim at the Bible, the book on whose basis the Wandering Jew
was concocted. There is a strangely seamless dovetail between the tattered copy
of the story that Shelley ‘picked … up’ in the final paragraph of Note 14, and the
first paragraph of the next note, which begins: ‘A book is put into our hands when
children, called the Bible … .’48 The adult Shelley stumbles across an anti-Semitic
myth, based on stories in the Bible; the child Shelley has a founding myth of
Abrahamic religion thrust into his hands. These unplanned encounters with dirty
books of lies and hate differ so from the clean-as-a-whistle scientific register of the
other notes, illuminated by starlight and decorated with atomic structures. At the
beginning of Note 14 we don’t know that we are reading a quoted text: ‘Ahasuerus
the Jew crept forth from the dark cave … .’49 The mini-arc that happens between
Notes 14 and 15 involves a process of disillusionment, of realizing that we are
being duped by religious texts that we find placed into our susceptible child-hands.
This is Shelley doing a Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason), and doing it with
characteristic intensity.
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Note 15
A defamiliarization occurs in the muddy puddle of time between Notes 14 and
15, in which the Bible is made strange: ‘The belief in all that the Bible contains,
is called Christianity.’50 Shelley splits Jesus into enlightened reformer (the actual
Jesus) and tool of despotism (the Christian version). Shelley uses the argument
that modern atheists have honed since: ‘Either the Christian religion is true, or
46
CPPBS II: 282.
CPPBS II: 280–81.
48
CPPBS II: 284.
49
CPPBS II: 278.
50
CPPBS II: 284.
47
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it is false: if true, it comes from God, and its authenticity can admit of doubt
and dispute no further than its omnipotent author is willing to allow.’51 Hume is
brought to bear upon miracles: it is easier to believe that a miraculous story is a
lie than that the laws of physics have been broken.52 Locke is brought to bear on
enthusiasm: pity the fool who sacrifices his reason for revelation, since he thus
‘puts out the Light of both’ (to quote Locke).53
It is hard to do justice to this note, so rich and so intense is its attack on
Christianity from every possible angle – historical, philosophical, political. We
could linger on Shelley’s elegant explanation for the ossification of Christianity
into dogma: the addition of Plato and Aristotle, which beefed up Christianity in the
Middle Ages.54 We could trace Shelley’s powerful arguments against miracles and
prophecy and prayer. We could marvel at the belittling comparison of Christianity
to the religion of ‘The Mahometan … the Indian … the Hottentot … the Negro
… the Mexican’ with their various devotional practices in apparently descending
order: to die ‘fighting for his prophet’, to kill oneself ‘at the chariot-wheels of
Brahma’, to worship an insect, or a bunch of feathers, or to sacrifice ‘human
victims!’55 The coup de grâce is a Latin poem by Claudian on the Virgin Birth,
which a disgusted Shelley decries as self-refuting in its total absurdity.56
It is also difficult not to observe the rage that contemporary writers such as
Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris all perform, with admittedly a far less deft and
magical style than Shelley’s. Maybe this is hardly fair: the other side is committing
genocide and sexual abuse, while the atheists are mocked for being opposed to
that side. It would be easy to dismiss Note 15 as a classic example of adolescent
ranting; or to ignore such things, like Matthew Arnold, and kick Shelley upstairs
into the impotent heaven of ineffectual angels. But we can safely say this: both
this note and the final one (the vegetarian one) fall within what is now recognized
as a style, a genre, a mode of atheist or vegetarian prose composition. We would
hardly accuse Dawkins of adolescent fury. Since Dawkins can get away with it,
why not Shelley – unless we hold one of the first exponents to a strangely different
standard. Shelley is touching a live wire, yet he does not do so alone. Paine, Godwin
and Hume at least are precedents for Shelley’s anti-religious incandescence and
mordant wit. Scholarship should give him the benefit of the doubt.
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CCPBS II: 288.
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CCPBS II: 290.
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CPPBS II: 292–3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed.
41
Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, IV.19 §4 (p. 698).
54
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55
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56
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CPPBS II: 293.
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The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism
Note 16
Note 17
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Note 16 returns to the Spinozist radical Enlightenment. The theme of the
experiential nature of time is just right for the penultimate note. This is especially
so since the final one enjoins us to live our lives ethically: while we have time we
should act in the best possible way. The effect is not unlike the first line of John
Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ – ‘Imagine there’s no heaven’.57 The chilling realism of the line
immediately compels us to think about how we would spend life down on Earth.
The Universe is not the same for everyone, since different minds experience time
differently, a fact that is now gathering biological weight as it becomes clear how
small mammals and insects inhabit different kinds of temporality than humans.58
Shelley adds, in Godwinian perfectibilist mode, that humans might experience
eternity in time by a ‘future improvement of [the mind’s] sensibility’.59 Thus
the Neoplatonic realm of forms is brought into contact with the Earth. We can
experience eternity here and now, at least in theory. Shelley is trying to land the
spacecraft of Queen Mab softly back on Earth, without damaging its cosmic cargo.
And down to Earth we come in Note 17, with its passionate and reasoned defence
of vegetarianism. Shelley published this one separately too as A Vindication
of Natural Diet, but the note has all kinds of extras, especially in closing. The
emphasis is on the ethics and politics of diet, an emerging theme in the late
eighteenth century, as earlier work of mine has shown.60 It is about what Greeks
called diaitia or what we call culture – a way of life, not just what not to eat. We
know from Shelley’s annotations to his beloved copy of Joseph Ritson’s An Essay
on Abstinence from Animal Food that these were the dominant themes, though
health is inextricably interlinked with them.61
This is typical of a Spinozan, for whom the body expresses the virtues of the
mind. (For a Spinozan, the Fall story was not a story about evil, but something
like how God should have put a health warning on the apple.) It is also typical of
a republican, for whom one’s private life should reflect one’s public convictions,
and vice versa (the notion of integrity). Note again that Shelley was as Spinozist as
he was Platonist: a fascinating combination, since Plato is the ultimate philosopher
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John Lennon, ‘Imagine’, Imagine. Apple, 1971.
Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans; with A Theory
of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil, introduction by Dorion Sagan, afterword by Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
59
CPPBS II: 294.
60
For instance, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
61
Timothy Morton, ‘Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of Romantic
Vegetarianism’. Romanticism 12.1 (2006), pp. 52–61.
57
58
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of transcendence for whom no physical or aesthetic form is a perfect embodiment
of the Ideas, which remain forever beyond access; while Spinoza is the ultimate
philosopher of immanence, for whom outside the One that is either Nature or God
(deus sive natura), there is not even nothing.
These powerful ancestors must have pulled him in radically different directions,
though one could read Shelley’s career as an increasingly successful attempt to
integrate the philosophies. By the time we get to ‘A Defence of Poetry’, Shelley
has synthesized the two insofar as he can assert that poetry is both the ‘root’ of
physical reality, embodying its immanent material form, and at the same time its
‘blossom’, expressing a not-yet-arrived utopia whose transcendence is not quite
otherworldly, but rather futural, an earthly ideal in whose name it is compulsory to
break the chains of oppression.
With all that carnage and leprosy Note 17 recapitulates the others, even the
‘abject’ ones. Revolution is there: Shelley declares, with his tongue firmly not in
his cheek, that the excesses of the Terror would have been avoided had Robespierre
abstained from animal food, the embodiment of humanity’s insensitivity to
nonhumans.62 Enlightenment philosophy and science are there. Given empirically
discoverable historical lines from meat factories to car factories to death camps
in the twentieth century, the statement seems less absurd the further scholarship
advances towards understanding the links between human-on-human and humanon-nonhuman violence.
Note 17 ends with injunctions against meat and alcohol – direct orders rather
than arguments: prescriptive, not descriptive language, a fitting end for a didactic
poem. We might be apt to see this as ridiculous: all those hundreds of lines of verse
and prose just to close with an advert for vegetarianism? But this would be grossly
to underestimate the force of vegetarianism in this historical moment, and the
way in which it weaves together the themes of which this underrated and complex
didactic poem consists.
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Chapter 5
‘His left hand held the lyre’:
Shelley’s Narrative Fiction Fragments
Stephen C. Behrendt
Introduction: Real and Virtual Tales
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John Milton attributed his prose writings to ‘my left hand’, whose productions
he distinguished from those which he associated with the Poet’s ‘soaring in the
high region of his fancies’, identifying them instead with ‘the cool element of
prose’.1 Scholars have occasionally regarded Shelley’s very considerable prose
oeuvre in analogous fashion, its intellectual brilliance notwithstanding. While
prose works like ‘A Defence of Poetry’ are undisputed masterpieces, critical
response to Shelley’s narrative prose fiction in particular has always been mixed.
Overshadowed by the great poetry that followed his early Gothic romances,
Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, his early attempts at fiction and the fragmentary prose
narratives he wrote during the rest of his life hover at the margins of the Shelley
canon. Scholarly commentary has been scarce and, until relatively recently, largely
dismissive; while the romances have generated some discussion, little has been
written about the fragments.2 Nevertheless – and this would have tickled Shelley
immensely – Zastrozzi made a splash in popular culture during the final quarter of
the twentieth century when in 1977 the Toronto Free Theatre company premiered
Canadian playwright George F. Walker’s adaptation, Zastrozzi: The Master of
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The quotation in my title is from ‘Hymn to Mercury’ (Shelley’s translation of Homer’s
Hymn to Hermes), l. 560.
1
John Milton, The Prose of John Milton, ed. J. Max Patrick. Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Doubleday, 1967, p. 107; The Reason of Church-Government Urg’d against Prelaty
(1641), Book II.
2
Some notable recent studies include Timothy Clark, ‘Shelley’s “The Coliseum” and
the Sublime’. Durham University Journal 85 (1993), pp. 225–35; Bryan Shelley, Shelley
and Scripture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 1–14; Kevin Binfield, ‘“May
they be divided never”: Ethics, History, and the Rhetorical Imagination in Shelley’s “The
Coliseum”’. Keats-Shelley Journal 46 (1997), pp. 125–47; Cian Duffy, ‘Revolution or
Reaction? Shelley’s Assassins and the Politics of Necessity’. Keats-Shelley Journal 52
(2003), pp. 77–93 and Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005, pp. 51–61, 125–47, 163–73. See also Charles Robinson, Shelley
and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976; Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Shelley’s Fiction: The “Stream of Fate”’. Keats-Shelley
Journal 30 (1981), pp. 78–99.
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Discipline. Rendered as a sado-masochistic psychological thriller set in Europe
in 1893, Walker’s play features an obsessive Dostoyevskian Zastrozzi, a criminal
mastermind who, goaded on by a whip-toting Matilda, relentlessly pursues a
hapless Verezzi, whom Walker transforms into a religiously infatuated painter
in this brutal commentary on both fin-de-siècle and more contemporary values.3
Not to be outdone, Britain’s commercial Channel 4 television subsequently
commissioned from Channel Four Films its own four-part miniseries written and
directed by David G. Hopkins, with music by the prolific Martin Kiszko. Zastrozzi
– A Romance appeared on the screen in 1986.4 Hopkins turned Shelley’s text, to
whose plot, characters and spirit both writers remained remarkably faithful, into
a vehicle for scathing social, political and moral commentary on contemporary
society.
I have written elsewhere about Shelley’s prose fiction (especially Zastrozzi
and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian5), and scholars including Jerrold Hogle,
Tilottama Rajan and Diane Long Hoeveler have glimpsed in these adolescent
works intimations of principles and procedures that we associate with the ‘later’
Shelley. Since Diego Saglia discusses the two early romances in another essay
in this collection, I shall examine here those several works that are definably
fragmentary in nature: ‘The Assassins’ (1814–15/16), ‘The Coliseum’ (1818), and
‘Una Favola’ (1821–22).6 Although Shelley’s poetry and prose are both notable
for ‘the narrative experimentation that marks every phase of his career’,7 I argue
that Shelley appears finally to have found the vehicle of prose fiction too limiting
for the manner of story-telling that most interested him. In effect, when it comes
to his prose fiction (as opposed to his narrative verse) I agree with Diane Long
Hoeveler’s opinion that ‘Shelley was far less interested in character development,
convincing plot, and actions than he was in the play of language, imagery, and
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Performed in a variety of academic and commercial theatres over some thirty-plus
years, Walker’s play reached the stage of the prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival in
Ontario in 2009, to generally positive reviews.
4
The mini-series was subsequently repackaged in the United States by Boston’s
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5
Stephen C. Behrendt, ‘Introduction’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi, A Romance;
St. Irvyne: or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt. Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview Press, 2002, pp. 9–53. Quotations follow this edition.
6
‘A True Story’, a semi-autobiographical narrative published in Leigh Hunt’s
Indicator in 1820, was attributed to Shelley by Walter Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work.
2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1927, vol. 1, pp. 5–7. The tale’s attribution remains
uncertain and its importance questionable, despite its apparent connections with the themes
of ‘Una Favola’ and the details of an 1816 poem (‘The Sunset’) which Mary Shelley says
‘was written in the spring of the year, while still residing at Bishopsgate’; PW III: 35.
7
Jack Donovan, ‘The storyteller’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed.
Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 85–103 (p. 85).
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symbolism in itself’,8 and that he subsequently invested more heavily in the
vehicle of verse. Still, the extant fragments of prose fiction reveal the skill with
which Shelley constructed and manipulated complex verbal textures in prose no
less than in verse. That the fragments are not numerous and are, as narratives, just
as ‘unfinished’ as poems like the early ‘Henry and Louisa’ or the later ‘Prince
Athanase’, ‘Mazenghi’ or ‘Ginevra’ lends them a sort of intermediate status that is
nevertheless instructive, both about how these works do their business and about
what Shelley may have intended for them as tales. Still, given the amount of poetry
(and intellectual prose) that Shelley left unfinished, such works are probably best
regarded as experimental, having within them the seeds that bore fruit elsewhere.
There is, however, one prose work that the modern technological age might
call ‘virtual’: ‘Hubert Cauvin’, the Godwinian novel of ideas on which Shelley
was working before he and Harriet Shelley set off for Ireland in 1812. All traces
of Shelley’s draft have vanished. Moreover, after referring to the novel in late
January 1812, Shelley, who often recycled his materials,9 never mentioned it again
in any extant letter, journal or recorded conversation.
So what became of ‘Hubert Cauvin’? Shelley wrote Elizabeth Hitchener on
2 January 1812 that he had completed ‘about 200 pages’ of this ‘tale in which I
design to exhibit the cause of the failure of the French Revolution, and the state
of morals and opinions in France during the latter years of its monarchy’.10 Two
hundred pages is a substantial manuscript,11 which suggests that he had already
invested considerable time in the project. Writing to William Godwin eight days
later, and slyly alluding to the full title of Godwin’s famous Political Justice,
Shelley called his tale ‘an inquiry into the causes of the failure of the French
revolution to benefit mankind’.12 How different in nature it must have been from
his Gothic romances is suggested by his declaration to Hitchener that while ‘some
of the leading passions of the human mind will of course have a place in its fabric’
there would be none of their inflamed sexuality: ‘I design to exclude the sexual
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Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘Prose Fiction: Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, The Assassins, The
Coliseum’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and
Anthony Howe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 193–207 (p. 206).
9
Phyllis Zimmerman claims that Shelley furnished his friends with novels and
other fiction to help establish them in writing careers; Shelley’s Fiction. Los Angeles:
Darami Press, 1998. See also Charles Robinson’s essay in this volume regarding Percy’s
contributions to Frankenstein.
10
Letters I: 218.
11
For instance, the fair-copy manuscript pages of ‘The Assassins’, mostly in Mary
Shelley’s hand, typically contain from 30 to 45 tightly written lines, or approximately 270
to 400 words per page. Shelley’s letters from the period, on the other hand, generally run
to about 20 lines per page, and his larger handwriting translates to roughly 200 words per
page. Even conservatively, then, a 200-page ‘Hubert Cauvin’ in Shelley’s own hand might
have comprised between 40,000 and 50,000 words. A modern double-spaced typescript of
that length would comprise some 120 to 150 pages.
12
Letters I: 229; my emphases.
8
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passion & think the keenest satire on its intemperance will be complete silence
on the subject.’13 Shelley explained that his unseen tale exhibited ‘expediency[,]
insincerity, mystery’, which he specifically (albeit obtusely) says do not provide
even ‘the remotest occasions of violence and blood in the French revolution’,
despite their association with every occurrence of ‘vice and misery’.14 Perhaps
Shelley regarded ‘expediency’, ‘insincerity’, and ‘mystery’ as the sources (or the
causes) of the revolution’s failure ‘to benefit mankind’ that he had told Godwin
was his novel’s principal subject.
Shelley intended that ‘Hubert Cauvin’ ‘be printed cheaply’, like his Address
to the Irish People and unlike the collection of poems he envisioned (the Esdaile
Notebook poems) and the volume of prose essays (‘my metaphysics’), both of
which he wanted printed ‘expensively’, so that money might be ‘squeezed out of
the rich’.15 Shelley’s plan for an inexpensive edition indicates that he was aiming
his ‘novel’ (as he now called it) at a mass audience like that which patronized the
circulating libraries where he had encountered many of the Gothic romances, often
in cheap popular chapbook formats, that had fascinated him earlier. Shelley’s scanty
references to ‘Hubert Cauvin’ date from this brief period while he and Harriet were
in Keswick, where he had visited (and been underwhelmed by) Southey. Perhaps,
like the precious box of Mary Shelley’s papers and manuscripts that was left
behind when she, Shelley and Claire Clairmont left the Hôtel de Vienne in Paris in
1814 for Switzerland,16 Shelley’s novel was simply lost in transit. It seems unlike
him to have dropped entirely a project in which he had invested so much writing
time; if his interest was waning, however, or if the circumstances he found in
Ireland were more compelling (or unsettling) by comparison, or if he simply found
himself unable to pay the cost of printing a long novel, then the ‘disappearance’ of
the manuscript might have provided a convenient excuse for abandoning ‘Hubert
Cauvin’, which he might have concluded was not worth rewriting in light of his
brief but energetic involvement in revolutionary Irish politics.
One thing seems certain: ‘Hubert Cauvin’ was to be a cautionary tale about
the dangers of violent social change. He wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener: ‘I desire to
establish on a lasting basis the happiness of human-kind. Popular insurrections and
revolutions I look upon with discountenance; if such things must be I will take the
side of the People, but my reasonings shall endeavor to ward it from the hearts of
the Rulers of the Earth, deeply as I detest them.’17 While Shelley’s comment would
seem to overestimate his personal capacity for reforming, almost singlehandedly,
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13
Letters I: 218. James Bieri observes that Shelley apparently retained no such
reservations when it came to Laon and Cythna (1817), in which ‘the sexual passion’ is
‘audaciously featured’ in the poem’s text and texture. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. 2
vols. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004, vol. 1, p. 221.
14
Letters I: 223.
15
Letters I: 235.
16
Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York:
Methuen, 1988, p. 23.
17
Letters I: 221.
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an unsatisfactory world, this seemingly exaggerated – but no less firm – self-belief
remained a part of Shelley’s intellectual make-up throughout his life. At the same
time, Shelley’s comment also signals his ambivalence about the capacity of ‘the
Rulers of the Earth’ for redemption. Even the oppressors, Shelley hints, ought to
be spared if possible in the interest of some general good in which even they might
participate, a sentiment that recurs later in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’. The
vehicle for producing change, it seems, is what Shelley calls ‘my reasonings’,
by which we may understand not just his logical argument for change but also
his tale itself. Throughout his career, but especially early on, Shelley envisioned
his works in somewhat eighteenth-century fashion as seductively subversive
polemics capable of circumventing conventional objections and censorships while
still accomplishing their salutary purposes. It is a strategy he later associates with
Jesus in particular (in ‘On Christianity’, c. 1817) and with other antinomian freethinkers like Socrates and Cicero.
‘The Assassins’: A Fragment of a Romance
Whatever his reasons for abandoning ‘Hubert Cauvin’, Shelley did not abandon
the vehicle of prose fiction, but returned to it in 1814 in ‘The Assassins’, begun
in August at Lake Lucerne with Mary and Claire and then dropped, apparently, in
September before being resumed briefly about a year later or possibly in 1816.18
The Assassins: A Fragment of a Romance (the title Mary Shelley later gave it)
is a utopian narrative grounded in Godwinian principles and illustrating how
altruistic individual personal and collective self-regulation furnishes a mechanism
for effective government, an ideal that Shelley seems never to have abandoned.
Among several possible influences, E.B. Murray suggests as particularly likely
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Abbé Augustin Barruel’s
Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, the latter of which the Shelleys
had been re-reading on 23 and 25 August 1814.19 Barruel’s influential anti-Jacobin
work portrayed the French Revolution as the culmination of a vast subversive
conspiracy (in which the Illuminati were prominent) to overthrow the monarchy
and its associated aristocratic society. Hugh Roberts speculates that, despite
any misgivings about Barruel’s anti-Jacobin paranoia, Shelley would have been
attracted by Barruel’s explanation of ‘how an intellectual class can work to
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Prose I: 384–5, Weinberg, BSM XXII (2): 21.
Prose I: 385. See Murray’s extensive editorial commentary (pp. 384–90) and textual
notes (pp. 541–5). The Shelleys read from an English translation by R. Clifford entitled
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98). See MS Journals I: 18–19.
Shelley already knew Barruel well enough in 1812 to tell Elizabeth Hitchener that although
the Memoirs is ‘worth reading’ it is also ‘half filled with the vilest and most unsupported
falsehoods’ (Letters I: 264). See Hugh Roberts, ‘Setting Minds Afloat: Shelley and Barruel
in Ireland’, in A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle’s Utopian Project, ed. Darby Lewes.
Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003, pp. 1–17.
18
19
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prepare the ground for massive social, political, and cultural change’, particularly
by systematically delegitimizing the principles upon which the existing cultural
order rests.20 For Shelley this could mean both a campaign ‘on the ground’, like
the one he tried to instigate in Ireland, and another waged in print, to which he
increasingly committed himself.
The breakaway Christian sect of the Assassins in Shelley’s ‘Romance’,21
having abandoned Jerusalem at the time of the Roman siege that destroyed that
city (now considered the signal event that split Christianity from Judaism and
reflected later in Shelley’s ‘Arch of Titus’), has established in the wilderness of
Lebanon a ‘utopian republic’22 of peace and mutual benevolence. Shelley implies
that they have prospered for six centuries by rejecting complex socio-political
machinations like those that Barruel associates with the French Revolution,
which had devolved into the bloody Reign of Terror and the subsequent horrors
of international Napoleonic imperialism. As Shelley explains in his second
paragraph, ‘acknowledging no laws but those of God they modelled their conduct
towards their fellow men by the conclusions of their individual judgement on the
practical application of these laws’.23 This ‘unostentatious community of good and
happy men’ who are ‘attached from principle to peace’24 is penetrated in the third
chapter when the young Albedir encounters a mangled man impaled on a broken
cedar branch and beset by a ravenous serpent. This sufferer appears to be another
version of the Wandering Jew (Ahasuerus) figure who appears in Queen Mab and
elsewhere in Shelley’s early writings (and later in Hellas) and who may represent an
effort on Shelley’s part to reconcile Judaic and Christian traditions humanistically
while denigrating them theologically. This figure’s ambivalent nature is revealed
through an initial Promethean (and Zastrozzian) outburst of violent rhetoric that is
succeeded by the apparently loving manner in which he interacts with Albedir, his
mate Khaled and their young children, who in the final passage of the manuscript
are playing happily with ‘their favourite snake’.25 Indeed, the conspicuous absence
of any explicit Satan or Devil figure from Shelley’s scene moves the edenic world
of the sect he is depicting away from the outlines of Christian Manichaeism and
toward those of Gnosticism.
Shelley’s tale breaks off here without further hints about its resolution. Mary
Shelley later wrote in her note to Prometheus Unbound: ‘[t]he prominent feature
of Shelley’s theory of the destiny of the human species was, that evil is not
inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled. …
Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and
there would be none.’26 It is not that simple, of course, as they both knew, for such
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20
Roberts, ‘Setting Minds Afloat’, p. 7.
The word is Mary Shelley’s, MS Journals I: 19.
22
Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, p. 56.
23
‘The Assassins’, in Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, ed. Behrendt, Appendix A, p. 254.
24
‘The Assassins’, p. 255.
25
‘The Assassins’, p. 268.
26
‘Note on the Prometheus Unbound’, PW II: 133.
21
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intellectual millennialism requires the stated and enacted conviction not just of
the utopian dreamers but rather of everyone: as soon as anyone opts out, the entire
enterprise begins to collapse. On the other hand, the meliorist in Shelley never
relinquished the conviction that individuals and institutions alike are susceptible
of reform. While one might imagine the stranger’s mixed essence gradually
poisoning the paradisal arrangement (rendering the snake poisonous, the gentle
parents acrimonious, the children belligerent, the entire community polluted and
doomed), one might equally imagine the virtuous communal principles of the
Assassin community reflected in the benign family instead exerting a remedial,
restorative effect upon the stranger. As it is, Shelley’s tale does neither. Indeed,
Cian Duffy claims that by the point the tale breaks off ‘Shelley had backed himself
into a political corner’ where it was impossible to reconcile or resolve the political
and intellectual impasse between ‘quietism and revolution’.27 Many of these
elements of Shelley’s tale reappear four years later in the setting, situation and
even ‘characters’ (including the snake and eagle) with which Shelley furnishes
the opening dream-vision of Laon and Cythna, which may be profitably read as
a redeployment of textual and thematic materials introduced in ‘The Assassins’.
Reading ‘The Assassins’ is an exercise in readerly absorption; the careful
and deliberate texturing of Shelley’s language in the first two chapters produces
an aesthetic effect analogous to that at which composers of musical tone poems
frequently aim. The descriptive passages are densely, even luxuriously, written in
the sort of ‘painterly’ fashion frequently associated with Ann Radcliffe’s novels.
They exhibit the lavish piling-up of images and modifying clauses that typify
early poems like ‘Mont Blanc’ and Alastor, in which this rich texture is integral
to the design of the narrative it simultaneously supports and advances. To this
fabric of lush description Shelley counterposes the rhetorically and imagistically
violent prose of the third chapter, which introduces both the wounded stranger and
the idyllic household into which he is taken. Shelley’s third chapter particularly
exploits conventional Gothic hyperbole in the stranger’s defiant exclamations
and in the unexpectedly lurid descriptive details, both of which Shelley revised
extensively, as the manuscript reveals. Of course, Shelley’s tale does not reduce
neatly into mere high-contrast juxtapositions, owing in part to a narrative (or
narratorial) voice best described as that of a partisan moral commentator whose
Godwinian bias in favour of enlightened self-government is readily apparent. The
tale also reveals a strong moral echo of Spinoza, whose works Shelley had ordered
from Thomas Hookham in 1813, and whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(1670) expressed that philosopher’s conviction that Nature is the power of God
made manifest to the natural senses of humans, which would seem to make God’s
divine power co-equal with Nature, His essence.28 The rhetorical structure of
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Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, p. 60.
28
MS Journals I: 182. Beginning in 1817, Shelley more than once resumed translating 41
this treatise. See also Merle A. Williams, ‘Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: 42
Aspects of Shelley’s Philosophical and Religious Prose’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds 43
44
Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 199–219 (p. 209).
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‘The Assassins’ anticipates that of ‘Julian and Maddalo’, in which the two central
characters’ voices are mediated by a comparatively subjective speaker whose
prose preface frames the poem as a sceptical debate, a rhetorical form of which
Shelley was always fond. Like that poem, too, this early ‘fragment’ concludes
without resolving the issues it introduces. The Romantic ‘fragment’ was of course
a familiar device for engaging its readers in its completion by following out the
author’s embedded hints and suggestions, as happens for instance in Coleridge’s
‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’, where what the poet declares to be a ‘fragment’
proves to be ‘complete’ by virtue of its very incompleteness (‘Kubla Khan’) or
contains enough iconographic and other information to enable the reader to project
an (unwritten) denouement (‘Christabel’). ‘The Assassins’, however, is simply a
fragment, an editorial construct that Shelley neither completed nor attempted to
publish.
‘The Assassins’ was undeniably intended as a vehicle for Shelley’s moral,
political and philosophical opinions. Richard Holmes, who also reads the tale
‘seriously’, observes that ‘with its grim and fantastic gothic imagery, and its fiery,
energetic, hate-filled language, it brings Shelley one step further towards his best
political poetry’.29 The stranger’s first speech anticipates the exoteric poems of
1819: ‘The great Tyrant is baffled even in success … Joy! Joy to his tortured foe!
Triumph to the worm whom he tramples under his feet! … Thou createst … ’tis
mine to ruin and destroy … design … execute … I was thy slave … I am thine
equal and thy foe’.30 The Promethean defiance of oppression and brutality here (and
in both Queen Mab and the early political prose, and again, later, in Prometheus
Unbound) is a Byronic touch, but the touch is cautionary, warning against the
dangerous potential for inciting or enacting violence upon others that is initially
moderated and mitigated by the influence of Albedir’s family but which remains
latent. Like St. Irvyne in particular, ‘The Assassins’ stages a contest between an
idealized selfless (and therefore redemptive) love and a dynamic but inherently
dangerous passion that seems incapable of definition except in relation to some
projected, spectral other. Nowhere is this apparently irreconcilable contradiction
between virtue and violence clearer than in a passage near the end of Chapter Two:
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No Assassin would submissively temporize with vice, and in cold charity
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and the ruiner. The wretch whom nations tremblingly adore would expiate in his
31
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throttling grasp a thousand licensed and venerable crimes.
37
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does not manage to work out even a tentative resolution in ‘The Assassins’, he does 39
at least dramatize the conflict. That may in fact have been all that he considered 40
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Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975, p. 246.
30
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‘The Assassins’, p. 262.
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necessary for him from a frankly experimental fragment at this formative moment
in his literary career.
Alan Weinberg has insightfully discussed the manuscripts of ‘The Assassins’
and what they reveal about Shelley’s process, tracing in the fair-copy manuscript
the evolution of Shelley’s subject matter and his process of composition and
revision.32 Percy apparently dictated ‘The Assassins’ to Mary, whose immediate
manuscript copy was corrected and revised in a process of collaborative authorship33
that anticipates the process by which the 1816 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and,
later, Mary’s Frankenstein subsequently evolved. The manuscript pages reveal
a complex creative process involving a ‘constant practice of revision, including
fair copying and spurts of redrafting, indicating the writer’s struggle to articulate
his thoughts, his readiness to express volatile ideas in the heat of the moment,
which, through the process of modification and correction, arrive at a provisional
intelligibility and coherence’.34 This ‘vehement style’,35 which characterizes
Shelley’s exoteric poems of 1819 and the strident though classically modulated
rhetoric of the Ode to Liberty (1820), is audible already in the conclusion of
the preface to Alastor. In Shelley’s dramatic works, too, like The Cenci and
Swellfoot the Tyrant, vehement rhetoric reflects volatile thought. Indeed, this
volatility suggests the verbal, emotional and intellectual pyrotechnics of the Sturm
und Drang movement in Germany that had produced works like Schiller’s Die
Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), a work that Shelley very likely knew from one of its
English translations from the 1790s and which casts interesting light on works as
seemingly different as Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, on one hand, and The Cenci, on
the other. Beatrice’s tormented speech in Act III of The Cenci, for example, echoes
both that genre and Shelley’s own prose romances:
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What are the words which you would have me speak?
I, who can feign no image in my mind
Of that which has transformed me. I, whose thought
Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up
In its own formless horror. Of all words,
32
Alan Weinberg, ‘Making Space for the Conditional: Some Reflections on Shelley
Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library’ (‘The First Ernest Pereira Lecture’). The English
Academy Review 13 (December 1996), pp. 121–39. See also Weinberg’s meticulous
transcription and editorial commentary on both ‘The Assassins’ and ‘The Coliseum’ in BSM
XXII (2): 21.
33
Weinberg, ‘Making Space for the Conditional’, p. 124, and BSM XXII (2): 21. In
the latter Weinberg observes that in the manuscript ‘Composition, dictation, transcription,
and revision interact in a fluid process that indicates the Shelleys’ mutual interest in the
narrative’ (21). According to Weinberg, Shelley returned to the 1814 draft after a year,
generating four more pages of fair copy, from which combined manuscript Mary produced
the edited (and expurgated) version she published in her 1840 edition of her husband’s
prose (22).
34
Weinberg, ‘Making Space for the Conditional’, p. 127.
35
Weinberg, p. 128.
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That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery: if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die,
And left it, as I must, without a name.
Death! Death! Our law and our religion call thee
A punishment and a reward … Oh, which
Have I deserved?36 (The Cenci, III, i, 107–19)
‘The Coliseum’
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Beatrice Cenci is trapped in an existential endgame, her seemingly heroic idealism
checked at every turn by the dearth of viable options. Like both Beatrice and the
stymied characters we encounter in ‘The Assassins’, Shelley faced a comparable
endgame; in the prose fragments he simply left the conflict unresolved although
he never abandoned the crisis of conscience at its heart, as later works like The
Cenci prove.
‘The Coliseum’ is Shelley’s last significant prose narrative fragment composed
in English. He began ‘his tale of the Coliseum’ on 25 November 1818, after he
and Mary had been in Rome for a week.37 The brief, simple action unfolds in a
setting that recalls Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. An old, blind man and his
daughter Helen enter the Coliseum on ‘the feast of Passover’, which coincides
with ‘the great feast of the Resurrection’,38 a layering of Roman-Christian and
Judaic backgrounds that is reminiscent of ‘The Assassins’ and that cannot be
merely coincidental. There they meet an emaciated youth in whom, Shelley’s
cousin Thomas Medwin tells us, Shelley ‘meant to have idealised himself’.39
Possessed of ‘exquisite grace’ despite his condition, the young man combines in
his appearance ‘a timid expression of womanish tenderness and hesitation’ with
‘the abstracted and fearless character that predominated in his form and gestures’.40
He appears at first glance to be another of the seemingly androgynous figures in
whom Shelley repeatedly epitomizes that quintessential selfless and self-reflecting
‘Love’ about which he wrote in poetry and prose alike,41 although he turns out to
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SPP: 166.
MS Journals I: 239. This is the only mention of the tale in her journals.
38
‘The Coliseum’, in Zastrozzi & St. Irvyne, ed. Behrendt, Appendix B, pp. 270–71.
39
Medwin published part of the tale in the Athenaeum in September 1832 and
reprinted it in his Shelley Papers (1833). Medwin’s words are quoted from The Complete
Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. The ‘Julian Edition’.
10 vols. London: Ernest Benn, 1926–30, vol. 6, p. 372 n.
40
‘The Coliseum’, pp. 271–2.
41
See especially his essay, ‘On Love’, written in late July 1818, several months
before ‘The Coliseum’. The idealized love relationship figures in the poetry as early as
Alastor (1816) and is particularly central to Epipsychidion (1820–21).
37
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‘His left hand held the lyre’
be both an imperfect and an incomplete representative. Perhaps alarmed by the
youth’s ambiguous sexuality, the Roman citizens avoid him, referring to him as
Il Diavolo di Bruto, a name that reflects Shelley’s fondness for real or ostensibly
diabolic figures. More pointedly, the name may be Shelley’s reference to the
ominous ghost of Caesar that appears to Brutus on the eve of his defeat at Philippi,
and whose apparition is also remarked by Plutarch and Shakespeare alike.42
When he recognizes that the old man is blind, the younger man falls silent
and listens as Helen describes to her father the present deteriorating state of the
Coliseum, that luogo celebrato famously memorialized earlier in 1818 by Byron
in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, whose tone and spirit Shelley had
found distasteful. While both Robinson and Duffy discuss the two poets’ use of
the same Roman site, Duffy emphasizes that both poets are responding to the
Coliseum specifically as a ruin.43 Duffy’s point is that Shelley treats the site
as an instance of the architectural sublime, which makes it an analogue to the
sublime natural environment Shelley describes in ‘The Assassins’ and which,
Duffy plausibly argues, exerts an inevitable and unavoidable salutary influence
upon everyone who resides there. The Coliseum’s sublime grandeur, which the
old man’s daughter describes to his sightless eyes (and which he must therefore
‘imagine’ into existence) and with which the young man has also already grown
familiar, is in Duffy’s opinion ‘intended to challenge and revise the reactionary
public “record” of Italy’s most famous ruin, to replace Byron’s historically
pessimistic “code” with a progressive, melioristic interpretation of the “awful”
ruins of power’.44
In Shelley’s tale, the crumbling Coliseum demonstrates how ‘grand human
artifacts are assimilated to their natural surroundings’45 as Nature gradually
restores an organic harmony to this massive but troublingly ambiguous monument
to human violence and cruelty, on one hand, and the ‘majestic records of the
powers of [humanity’s] kind’,46 on the other. Interestingly, both the old man and his
daughter Helen replicate this ‘naturalizing’ of the architecture in their descriptions
of the scene, which develop analogies with natural features and phenomena,
overcoding them with the rhetoric of the sublime. This analogizing culminates in
Helen’s description of the structure as
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a nursling of man’s art, abandoned by his care, and transformed by the
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In Julius Caesar, IV, iii, 279, the ghost calls himself ‘Thy evil spirit, Brutus’ in a
39
scene based upon Plutarch’s account in his Life of Brutus.
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pp. 163–4.
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Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, p. 164.
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Weinberg, BSM XXII (2): 18–19.
46
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‘The Coliseum’, p. 276
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Even the clouds, intercepted by its craggy summit, feed its eternal fountains
with their rain.47
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Not the gloomy record of civilization’s dark and deteriorating condition over which
Byron broods in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in other words, the Coliseum is for
Shelley (and for his speakers here) something else entirely. It is both a physical
and a symbolic icon of the self-renovating nature of human achievement itself,
a reminder of the ‘natural’ greatness that is inherent in humanity and to which
Nature repeatedly points.
Just after the tale’s midpoint the old man interrupts the narrative with a
passionate philosophical discourse on the nature of love. It is the tale’s longest
paragraph, perhaps betraying Shelley’s primary didactic interest by reprising
his practice in Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne and ‘The Assassins’ of devoting markedly
longer paragraphs to crucial philosophical declarations. The speech is in some
respects an initially ‘private’ reflection (the old man is blind) that proceeds from
the (necessarily imaginative) contemplation of a monumental historical artefact.
In another utopian vision of how human integration might be achieved, the
old man explains that human experience comprises two ‘circles’: one of these
includes ‘all things which feel’, while the other excludes them. He explains that,
for every individual, ‘public and private happiness consist in diminishing the
circumference [of the circle] which includes those resembling himself, until they
become one with him, and he with them’. While we do this, he continues, we
simultaneously ‘enter into the meditations, designs and destinies of something
beyond ourselves’, absenting ourselves from our private selves and participating
in a mutual interchange with the whole universe of sentient beings. This process
of sympathetic interchange of self and other, he declares, ‘is Love’, ‘the religion of
eternity, whose votaries have been exiled from among the multitude of mankind’.48
Exiles of this sort – paradoxical victims of their own best impulses – are precisely
the sort that Shelley had already figured in the sect of the Assassins.
It is not entirely clear where Shelley may have intended to take his narrative,
which breaks off much sooner than ‘The Assassins’ does. Indeed, Duffy attributes
Shelley’s decision to abandon the project to the tale’s ‘central dilemma’, which
is the apparently irreconcilable tension between ‘a revolutionary and a gradualist
interpretation of the ruin’, a dilemma Shelley would confront again in Prometheus
Unbound in weighing the relative merits of cataclysmic alterations of power
structures (as happened in the French Revolution), on one hand, and less precipitous
ones (like the more measured pace of reform he advocates in ‘A Philosophical
View of Reform’), on the other.49 In other words, according to Duffy, Shelley was
unable in ‘The Coliseum’ to reconcile his wish for the sudden and presumably
violent superseding of the old, broken state of affairs (as had occurred with the
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‘The Coliseum’, p. 274.
‘The Coliseum’, p. 275.
49
Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, pp. 164–6.
48
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‘His left hand held the lyre’
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French Revolution) with the gradualist and non-violent philosophical revolution
he embraces in those two great later works.
This is not to suggest, however, that Shelley shrank from deliberate
indeterminacy, which he recognized as a thoroughly ‘modern’ epistemological
tension. Another ostracized ‘stranger’, like the wounded visitor in ‘The Assassins’,
the young man begins to explain to the elder the reasons for his essentially unsocial
behaviour, which he credits to what he perceives as the intolerance of others
for his own ‘meditations’, by which we are apparently to understand his ideas
or principles, both intellectual and moral. Ironically, he seems not to recognize
his own complicity in his exclusion, to which he has at least partly contributed.
Sensing that the blind man and Helen are kindred spirits, the sort of ‘intelligent
and affectionate beings’ for whose company he has longed, the young man hints
that he will explain to them ‘the cause of the dress I wear, and the difference
which I perceive between my language and manners, and those with whom I have
intercourse’.50 Clearly, he is mired in the very circle of exclusion about which the
old man has just spoken, and these narrative hints dropped at the fragment’s end
suggest that Shelley had in mind a parable whose outlines would be much like
those of his own life and which might be seen to voice (even unconsciously) his
anxiety about his own contributions to his status as a pariah.
One of Shelley’s recurrent themes is the public world’s perennial hostility
to pacifist utopian thinkers (like the old man here) who preach the mutual
interdependence of all things and beings, including the works of man (art) and
God (nature). Kevin Binfield argues that in ‘The Coliseum’ Shelley provides an
alternative to Byron’s gloomy vision of humanity’s downward spiral, offering
instead a redemptive vision grounded in ‘an awareness of the life beyond the
narrow circle of self, maintained in the relationship between the blind father
and his daughter’.51 The rectitude of the old man’s (and Shelley’s) conviction
of the power of the instinctive and intuitive community Shelley sketches in
‘The Assassins’ is demonstrated toward the fragment’s end. The blind man’s
passionate counsel corresponds to Shelley’s own frequent admonitions about the
need for selfless communion with others and the importance of repudiating the
inevitably destructive (and self-destructive) conduct grounded in exaggerated selfimportance. Ironically, the young man’s scanty hints about his own experience
suggest that he has unfortunately acquired too thin a skin, too great a sense of selfimportance (perhaps rooted in a repressed selfish motive like revenge), to enable
him to interact as effectively with others as do exemplary androgynous figures with
whom Shelley seems to associate him. Hence the social (and spiritual) isolation
that prompts his solitary habitation of ruins and other melancholy sites. Indeed,
this psychological and social profile recalls that of the well-meaning and idealistic
but fatally narcissistic young solitary who pines away during his anti-social – but
not revengeful – eremitic quest in Alastor (1816). The fragmentary ‘Coliseum’
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50
‘The Coliseum’, p. 278.
Binfield, ‘“May they be divided never”’, p. 129.
51
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resonates with a curious and pervasive irony that underscores its philosophical
and narrative irresolution alike: the old seer is blind, his seemingly naïve young
daughter is possessed of remarkable transformative vision, and the young man’s
potential for salutary human interaction is undercut by his mocking soubriquet of
Il Diavolo del Bruto.
Duffy sees ambiguities elsewhere, as for instance in the old man’s apostrophe
to the Coliseum, to whose implicit contradictions, Duffy claims, Shelley alerts
us through his own ‘tellingly contradictory’ footnote to the apostrophe. That
footnote, he says, ‘advocates a purely aesthetic – that is a wholly depoliticized
– response to the ruin, an aesthetic response which effectively elides both the
amphitheatre’s historical function and the process of its ruination’.52 Perhaps
there is less of a contradiction here than Duffy believes, though. ‘The Coliseum’
may stand as Shelley’s ‘test case’ concerning the viability of reading a man-made
architectural structure in terms of the purely ‘natural’ structure of Nature itself.
Shelley is indeed ‘answering’ Byron here, but he is also attempting to separate the
purely physical artefact from the secular and spiritual uses to which it had been put
in its ‘own’ (historical) time, in the intervening years, and in Shelley’s historical
‘present’. The ruination of the physical structure that is contemporaneous with its
gradual encroachment – and reclamation – by Nature is reminiscent of the statue
of Ozymandias (a figuration, like the Coliseum, of imperial power), and furnishes
a philosophical object lesson about the necessary humility and selflessness with
which individuals must approach others in the melioristic utopia for which Shelley
yearns. Like the wounded stranger in ‘The Assassins’ and Il Diavolo del Bruto
in ‘The Coliseum’, Shelley may have believed Byron and other pessimistic
misanthropes had much to learn from Nature’s difficult but universally evident
ways, which opinion informs Mont Blanc as well.
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‘Una Favola’
Shelley’s last prose narrative fragment,53 the untitled allegorical tale known as
‘Una Favola’, dates from 1821–22 and complements in prose his examination
of the theme of ideal love in Epipsychidion, composed early in 1821. It is
Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime, p. 168. There is some uncertainty
about the footnote. Medwin omitted it when he published ‘The Coliseum’ in the Shelley
Papers (1833), and Jack Donovan questions whether it was intended for ‘The Coliseum’ at
all; see the edition of Shelley’s work he is preparing for Penguin Press.
53
I have excluded from this essay ‘The Elysian Fields’, subtitled ‘A Lucianic
Fragment’ by H. Buxton Forman when he published it in 1879. ‘The Elysian Fields’ is
a politico-philosophical ‘letter’ composed probably in 1815 or 1816 in the guise of an
unidentified Whiggish fictional speaker (Forman suggested Charles James Fox) and
apparently directed to Princess Charlotte Augusta, daughter of the Prince of Wales (then
Prince Regent) and presumptive heir to the British throne. The brief work is ‘fiction’ only
in the sense of its having a fictive author and setting.
52
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indebted, according to Timothy Webb, to Dante and especially to Petrarch’s
Trionfi, a principal model for ‘The Triumph of Life’,54 left unfinished at his death
and marking the culmination of Shelley’s increasing interest in late medieval
allegorical models of life like Dante’s and Petrarch’s. ‘Una Favola’ is an example
of what is frequently called the ‘problematic’ fable, a variety of this didactic genre
that typically ‘feature[s] moral dilemmas or enigmatic presentation’ and that may
include ‘unreliable or playful narration, verbal ambiguity, abstruse metaphors, and
symbolism’.55 It is widely assumed that this fragment, which Shelley composed
not in English but rather in halting Italian that is ‘full of errors in grammar and
spelling’, seems subsequently to have been ‘improved’ (in Italian) by Richard
Garnett and then translated into English by him.56 The original may have been
written for Teresa Emilia Viviani, to whom Epipsychidion is addressed and for
whom Shelley was at the time also translating passages from his own poetry. He
may have intended simply an exercise in Italian composition, or perhaps he hoped
to impress Emilia with the conspicuous ardency of his infatuation.57 ‘Una Favola’
is, both in the original faulty Italian and in its English renditions, essentially a
prose poem that demonstrates Shelley’s continuing experimentation with genre
and with the intersections of verse and prose. Indeed, as Jack Donovan observes,
Shelley routinely and intentionally crosses traditional generic boundaries among
narrative, dramatic and lyric verse ‘in order to consider the specific working of
narrative in any one of them or across them all’, which in turn reinforces Shelley’s
conviction that all poetry is in fact ‘original imaginative composition whether in
verse or in prose’.58 James Bieri suggests from both its descriptive details and its
(auto)biographical intimations that Shelley’s fable reflects his personal experience
as an Etonian. In this view, Bieri seconds the earlier proposition by Nora Crook
and Derek Guiton that the work constitutes Shelley’s veiled account of an early
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Timothy Webb. The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation. Oxford:
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55
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds Roland Greene et al. 4th
edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 476. See also Annabel Patterson, whose
socio-political assessment of the fable tradition concludes that especially in post-Aesopian
fables like La Fontaine’s widely popular ones (1668), ‘social and political analysis was
frequently conducted … in a symbolic vocabulary’, a point clearly relevant to Shelley’s
writing in ‘Una Favola’ and elsewhere. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political
History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 42.
56
For the detailed textual history of Shelley’s tale, which involves several fragmentary
drafts and copies, see Parks C. Hunter, ‘Textual Differences in the Drafts of Shelley’s “Una
Favola”’. Studies in Romanticism 6.1 (Autumn 1966), pp. 58–64. Working from Shelley’s
faulty original draft, Richard Garnett produced both the editorially ‘improved’ Italian text
and its English translation, publishing them in his Relics of Shelley (London: Edward Moxon,
1862). They were reprinted in Harry Buxton Forman’s eight-volume edition of Shelley’s
poetry and prose (1880) and again in Ingpen and Peck’s ‘Julian’ edition (1926–30).
57
See Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 604 n. 91.
58
Donovan, ‘The storyteller’, p. 86.
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disillusioning sexual relationship, perhaps with Harriet Grove, in which he may
have contracted venereal disease.59
But ‘Una Favola’ also reinscribes and refines an allegorical plot line that
features repeatedly in Shelley’s writing: the dangerous pursuit of an impossibly
idealized beloved who comprises the individual’s perfect counterpart – what
Shelley calls ‘this soul out of my soul’ in Epipsychidion (l. 238) – a pursuit whose
fulfilment produces what he describes there as ‘one / Spirit within two frames,
… / One passion in twin-hearts’ (ll. 573–5). The utter elusiveness of this ideal
is of course what marks it as the pearl of incomparable value. That the quest
pursued by the youth in ‘Una Favola’ recalls those of both Alastor’s young poet
and Epipsychidion’s poet-persona (as well as Prince Athanase) underscores its
persistence in Shelley’s thinking. The edenic garden setting is likewise familiar
from these and other poems, including The Sensitive-Plant (1820), in which a
female figure combines the roles played in ‘Una Favola’ by Life and Death in
animating and then apparently abandoning the living forms with which that poem’s
garden is replete.60 Like The Sensitive-Plant, too, ‘Una Favola’ revolves around an
apparent alteration in external phenomena that both originates in and reflects the
youth’s internal changes. Significantly, only after the presiding allegorical figure
of Love (whom Shelley tellingly casts as male, in keeping with Italian tradition61)
leaves the scene at the instigation of the female figure of Life do the ‘great troop
of female forms’ who had initially accompanied Love and who are now ‘released
from his government’ reveal themselves as repulsive ‘mocking and threatening’
ones.62 Disillusioned, the youth turns to Life’s sister, Death, whose rejection of
his adulation makes her hateful to him – which turn of events, paradoxically,
leaves her attracted to him. Distraught, he discovers a third female figure behind
him, weeping compassionately, with whom he is now joined with Life’s dubious
blessing. The manuscript breaks off in mid-sentence with a hint that the couple’s
torment will be irreconcilable, and that neither can trust Life or Life’s designs. This
ambivalent, noncommittal mid-sentence ‘ending’ suggests that Shelley recognized
that he had once again reached an artistic (or creative) impasse, a formal dilemma
for whose evidently complex, challenging solution the conventional linear prose
narrative apparently offered no attractive or practicable options.
Like his poems, Shelley’s prose fragments reflect his unwavering commitment
to human ‘communion’ as an antidote to the world’s hostilities. This lesson is
as relevant at the circumference of the circle (the broader social and political
historical community of humanity) as it is at its centre (the individual and his or her
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Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986;
esp. pp. 36–7, 150–53.
60
See also Richard Cronin’s essay elsewhere in this volume.
61
In this, as Alan Weinberg has suggested in correspondence, Shelley follows the
precedents of Dante in the Vita Nova and the Convivio and of Petrarch in the Canzoniere,
both of whom Shelley imitates.
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Complete Works (‘Julian’ edn), vol. 6, pp. 283–4.
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intellectual and spiritual self). At every stage of both external and internal history,
Shelley repeatedly contends, individuals possess the capacity – the potential
– for that redemptive human dignity that is the reward of selfless benevolence
and expansiveness of spirit. At the same time, though, as Shelley demonstrably
appreciates, this ideal objective is ultimately unrealizable in its fullness in the
flawed mortal world without encountering serious – often fatal – consequences.63 In
his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821) Shelley praises the enlightened human communion
that characterizes, for one example, the self-sacrificing gestures Shelley admired
(in the ‘Defence’ and elsewhere, like his essay ‘On Christianity’) in the figures of
Socrates, Cicero and Jesus, neatly conflating the Classical and the Judaeo-Christian
traditions. In the ‘Defence’ he writes that ‘the great secret of morals is Love; or a
going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own’.64 This community of
sympathy is the ideal toward which Shelley repeatedly points his readers, whether
by providing demonstrations of its consummation (as in Prometheus Unbound)
or by showing the (more predictably) disastrous consequences of the failure of
community.
Shelley’s Turn from Narrative Prose Fiction
Some thirty years ago Jerrold Hogle responded to critical sniping about
Shelley’s nearly indistinguishable characters, ‘repetitious’ and obsessive prose,
‘nonsensical’ plotting and a virtual absence of ‘linear cohesion’ in his prose
fiction by proposing that Shelley was in fact exploring an alternative notion of
narrative.65 Hogle discovers in Shelley’s prose fiction a common thread with
The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, Frankenstein, Zofloya and St. Leon in their
exploration of alternative structures that pit the sequentiality of conventional linear
narrative against narratives of ‘circularity’. Indeed, Shelley hints at narrative’s
potential as a ‘prismatic and many-sided mirror’ in describing, in ‘A Defence of
Poetry’, how the imagination interreflects the diverse ‘rays of human nature’.66
Shelley had suggested such prismatic circularity already in ‘On Life’ (1819) in
describing the nature of all human life and being: ‘Each is at once the centre and
the circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which
all things are contained.’ This condition (whose geometrical metaphors suggest
that Shelley has ancient Greek thought in mind), Shelley observes, is incompatible
with conventional notions of ‘transience and decay’; it is a condition of ‘existing
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63
The point is strikingly made in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’. Shelley argues
that ’That equality in possessions which Jesus Christ so passionately taught is a moral rather
than a political truth and is such as social institutions cannot without mischief inflexibly
secure’ (Complete Works [‘Julian’ edn], vol. 7, p. 42).
64
‘A Defence of Poetry’, SPP: 517.
65
Hogle, ‘Shelley’s Fiction’, pp. 78–9.
66
Hogle, ‘Shelley’s Fiction’, p. 82.
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but in the future and the past’, of ‘being, not what he is, but what he has been and
shall be’.67
The conception of time (and therefore of ‘narrative’) that Shelley articulates
here is Blakean in its insistence on the imaginative annihilation of empirically
structured ‘time’. In Blake’s epic prophecies like Milton and Jerusalem, moments
of historical time that are ostensibly widely separated are reported as transpiring
virtually simultaneously, in a moment of ‘visionary time’ that is equivalent to ‘the
pulsation of the artery’. Indeed, in Milton Blake declares that
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Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery
Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years.
For in this Period the Poet[’]s Work is Done: and all the Great
Events of Time start forth & are conceivd in such a Period
Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery.
(Milton, plate 28, ll. 62–3; plate 29, ll. 1–3) 68
In the manner of typological grand-style history painters whose works furnished
his models (for poems no less than for pictures), Blake ‘stages’ events that
collapse narrative time into ‘moments’ like these, allowing him to assemble
in individual scenes widely diverse and ahistorical characters, events and
iconographic associations that restructure ‘time’ (including narrative time) around
inner significances (or significations) rather than external empirical details. Even
before Hogle’s study, David Halliburton had insightfully suggested (without
entirely following through on his own suggestion) that the distance from the prose
fiction to Prometheus Unbound ‘is really not such a long step’.69 But Hogle went
beyond analogous surface features among works to deeper structures, concluding
that Shelley turns associated, progressive and for the most part causally related
incidents into ‘versions of the same event’, indicating by calculatedly repetitious
language their essential sameness. These prismatically reflected iterations of
the same basic moment therefore appear both ‘superimposed on each other’
and ‘converging on each other’, an effect that conventional narrative is largely
incapable of producing, as ‘The Triumph of Life’ amply demonstrates.70
Several decades ago Shelley’s writings became attractive to poststructuralist
theorists, in part because they are so often as much about themselves as they are
about their ostensible subject matter. Shelley’s works frequently illustrate what
they purport to ‘tell’, generating in the process a metatextual commentary on
the interrelated processes of composition and reading (including cognition). The
embedded intellectual and philosophical principles are disclosed to the perceptive
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The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. Rev. edn.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
69
David Halliburton, ‘Shelley’s Gothic Novels’. Keats-Shelley Journal 16 (1967),
pp. 39–49 (p. 49).
70
Hogle, ‘Shelley’s Fiction’, p. 95.
67
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reader both through their ‘content’ and by means of the formal ‘container’ in
which they are packaged. Many of Shelley’s works are ‘performances’ in the
sense that they stage for us – in the medium of print – their author’s struggle to
work out the possibilities and limitations of various poetic and prose-narrative
forms, and indeed of genres themselves. Like Hogle, Tilottama Rajan has (more
recently) taken Shelley’s prose narratives ‘seriously’ because, as she writes, ‘their
seriousness is indicated by the way in which they seem to be in excess of what
they are’, and because Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne in particular ‘do not so much
convey a content as they suggest the form that such a content might take’.71 Rajan,
too, recognizes that conspicuous performativity to which I have already alluded,
suggesting that their ‘flamboyantly dramatic’ character and their total unreality
situate both of Shelley’s Gothic romances within the category of ‘hyperrealism’.
Their performativity, she argues, constitutes ‘the condition of possibility for our
rewriting them in the theater of our own minds’.72 Rajan observes a comparable
performativity (perhaps also verging on the flamboyant) operating in works of
acknowledged ‘greatness’ like Prometheus Unbound, where the doubling of
characters, settings and incidents offers an (albeit more sophisticated) analogue to
Shelley’s practice in the prose narratives.
Why did Shelley stop writing prose fiction, then? First, it is not clear that he
actually did stop. When we recall that he drowned at the age of 30, we are reminded
that his was a brief life that had not yet achieved what today might be called its
‘career trajectory’. He was not done writing, in other words, and his recurrent
fitful efforts in narrative prose fiction, even within a year of his death, suggest
that Shelley had not made a definitive break with the genre, that he stood ready
to use the form whenever he felt that circumstances required it.73 And then there
is the question of the earlier and ‘now-lost’ ‘Fragment of a Ghost Story’, which
Mary Shelley claimed he had begun in July 1816 as part of the famous ghost story
competition among the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori.74 There is also the vexed
question of how fairly to assess Percy’s very considerable contributions to the
composition of Frankenstein, which collaborative authorship Charles Robinson
discusses in his essay in this volume. Moreover, as literary history demonstrates,
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Tilottama Rajan, ‘Promethean Narrative: Overdetermined Form in Shelley’s Gothic
Fiction’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds Betty T. Bennett and Stuart
Curran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 240–52; 320–21.
72
Rajan, ‘Promethean Narrative’, p. 321.
73
‘The Arch of Titus’, for example, reveals the beginnings of an embedded narrative
that is thematically related to ‘The Coliseum’. See Nora Crook’s discussion of this fragment
in Chapter 13, ‘Shelley, Jews and the Land of Promise’.
74
Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, [vol. 1], p. 377. Mary Shelley mentions
in the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein that Shelley ‘commenced’ a prose tale ‘founded
on the experiences of his early life’, Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Text, eds D.L.
Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. 2nd edn. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1999, p. 355.
Given that no manuscript is known, his tale may have been more talk than text, perhaps an
improvisational ‘talk-through’ that he never actually committed to paper.
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the novel was at the time of Shelley’s death experiencing a remarkable growth,
both in the numbers of volumes written and published and in the numbers of
readers that authors might address, especially as literacy expanded throughout the
kingdom. One thing we know with certainty about Shelley: for his entire short
life he eagerly embraced a stunning array of literary genres and forms, producing
a constellation of diverse works calculated – indeed deliberately crafted – to his
expectations about readers both actual and virtual, and about both their literary
tastes and their cultural and ideological ‘flash-points’ or ‘trigger mechanisms’.75 It
is not at all unreasonable to conclude that Shelley might have returned to narrative
prose fiction, both for its appropriateness for addressing particular designated
audiences and for its growing financial reward.
At the same time, though, as I have suggested here, Shelley the creative artist
seems to have grown impatient with the limitations and impediments that came
with composition in narrative prose, even when it was intellectually and artistically
rich and highly nuanced. In light of the imaginative sweep that characterized his
poetic vision and his thought processes alike, almost from the start, narrative as
mere ‘story’ was probably too confining, especially given a large and diverse
audience that was either unable or unwilling to wrestle with the sort of narrative
complexities that fascinated him. The greatest liability of narrative, after all, is the
sheer linearity it imposes upon the content. No matter how one arranges, disrupts
or reshuffles the narrative details, author and reader alike must proceed through
the text in strictly linear fashion. To use a visual and spatial analogy, I suggest that
Shelley grew increasingly interested in constructing complex narrative structures
requiring their reader to superimpose one element upon another in various
and flexible combinations and then to approach the stack vertically rather than
horizontally, looking ‘through’ layers that are fashioned as ‘semi-transparent’ in
order to facilitate such three-dimensional consideration. In a real sense, Shelley
seems to have been working to move beyond ‘mere’ representation in his art and in
the direction of a more overtly interventional mode that would place increasingly
greater demands upon his audiences.
Shelley’s later prose narrative fragments suggest that he was also moving
away from the sort of plots that we find in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, in which
surface ‘action’ carries the burden of engaging the reader, rather in the way that
medieval allegorical fables figurally embed their moral and intellectual import (or
signification) within the dramatization itself. The combination of fiction, essay and
vision in those fragments suggests instead the quasi-allegorical discursiveness of
works like Volney’s Ruins of Empire, the idealized history of the French Revolution
in which a dispirited ‘traveller’ is reinvigorated by a ‘Genius’ who tells him a long
tale of political and cultural evolution that culminates in a bloodless revolution
that empowers the masses against their oppressors, whom they subsequently
defeat. The Ruins, whose contents the Shelleys knew well and used in their own
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I have written about this matter at length in Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: 43
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University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
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‘His left hand held the lyre’
works,76 provides a model for Laon and Cythna, most obviously, but its influence
is strongly evident already as early as Queen Mab in the manipulation of vantage
points and the overall account of history. And, later, the utopian socio-political
revisionism of The Ruins informs works as diverse as Prometheus Unbound and
The Mask of Anarchy. Narratives of this sort, which employ ‘story lines’ as the
merest scaffolding upon which to construct social, political or philosophical
commentary, suggest the sort of narratives that works like ‘The Assassins’ and
‘The Coliseum’ aspired to be.
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The Ruins as early as Shelley’s Oxford years, while Mary Shelley writes in the De Lacey 42
section of Frankenstein that Felix instructed Safie from this book. (This might be PBS’s 43
44
interpolation.) See Cameron, Golden Years, p. 621 n. 12.
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Chapter 6
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
1
Charles E. Robinson
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein may be judged one of the most
‘neglected’ or, more precisely, most ‘overlooked’ of Percy Bysshe Shelley texts,
PBS2 having written over 4,000 (and probably over 5,000) of the novel’s 72,000
words. His many words and phrases and occasional sentences and extended
passages, scattered through the text of the novel, are contextualized by his other
compositions in prose and poetry written between mid-June 1816 (when MWS
began her story of Frankenstein) and November/December 1817 (when the novel
was finally printed after the corrections and additions were made in the proofs
and revises). In effect, we should be able to hear in Frankenstein echoes of PBS’s
works from Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Mont Blanc (written June and July
In this essay, I have attempted to offer new discoveries about or perspectives on
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s contributions to the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s
Frankenstein. For my earlier judgments on the collaboration between the two Shelleys,
consult the following: ‘Texts in Search of an Editor: Reflections on The Frankenstein
Notebooks and on Editorial Authority’, in Textual Studies and the Common Reader: Essays
on Editing Novels and Novelists, ed. Alexander Pettit. Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2000, pp. 91–110 – rpt. in Textual Editing and Criticism: An Introduction, ed. Erick Kelemen.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008, pp. 363–83; ‘Introduction’ and ‘Frankenstein
Chronology’, in The Frankenstein Notebooks, MYR IX (1&2): xxv–cx – hereafter cited
as Frankenstein Notebooks; ‘Introduction’, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus:
The Original Two-Volume Novel of 1816–1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts,
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (with Percy Bysshe Shelley). Oxford: Bodleian Library,
2008; New York: Vintage Books, 2009, pp. 16–37 – hereafter cited by the title on the cover,
Original Frankenstein; ‘Collaboration and Ventriloquism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’,
in La Questione Romantica (Mary Shelley Special Issue in Memory of Betty T. Bennett).
Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2009, pp. 29–39 (containing some of the same illustrations of
Percy Shelley’s contributions to Frankenstein that are found in this present essay). For
other perspectives, consult Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her
Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988, pp. 219–24; and Nora Crook, ‘Did Mary Shelley
Write Frankenstein? Or Did Percy Shelley Spoil It?’, in A Milestone of Shelleyan Scholarly
Pursuits in Japan: Essays Commemorating the 15th Anniversary of the Founding of Japan
Shelley Studies Center, ed. Tatsuo Tokoo et al., Publication of the Japan Shelley Studies
Center. Tokyo: Eihosha, 2007, pp. 3–18.
2
Hereafter PBS and MWS will be used to denominate the two Shelleys.
1
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1816) through History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (this collaborative work published in
November 1817) and Laon and Cythna (published in December 1817) – and even
from his Alastor volume (published in February 1816).3
That PBS contributed to Frankenstein should not surprise most students of
the English Romantics, but the degree of his involvement will surprise many. Not
only did he counsel MWS on the story and edit numerous passages in the text,
but he also wrote the Preface for the 1818 edition as well as a review of it, these
two additional documents totalling nearly 1,500 words of PBS’s critical prose that
nicely frame the novel and influence our interpretation of it. In the Preface (written
by PBS as if he were MWS), he refers to the events in mid-June 1816 when he, Lord
Byron and John William Polidori (with MWS and presumably Claire Clairmont
nearby) discussed philosophical doctrines on the principle of life. MWS and her
‘Two other friends’ (Byron and PBS himself, the ‘two friends [who afterwards]
left [MWS] on a journey among the Alps’) ‘crowded around a blazing wood fire’
at Byron’s Villa Diodati, read ‘some German stories of ghosts’, and then ‘agreed to
write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence’.4 Their story-telling
ultimately led to MWS’s Frankenstein and Byron’s and Polidori’s vampire stories.
PBS’s story, if ever finished, is not extant.
PBS’s various contributions to the production of Frankenstein are made
evident by the following chronology:5
15 June–21 June 1816: PBS may have discussed MWS’s tale as she began to
develop it.
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These echoes result from PBS’s specific and separate contributions to what is
essentially MWS’s novel (as evidenced by the nature of his corrections in the manuscripts
and by the biographical records of the Shelleys and their associates). That is to say, I do not
subscribe to the arguments of the four individuals who believe that MWS was merely the
amanuensis for PBS’s novel Frankenstein (some of which arguments extend to PBS writing
most of MWS’s fiction). See Selwyn Jones, unpublished manuscript; Phyllis Zimmerman,
Shelley’s Fiction. Los Angeles: Darami Press, 1998; John Lauritsen, The Man Who Wrote
Frankenstein. Dorchester, Mass.: Pagan Press, 2007; and Scott Douglas de Hart, Shelley
Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein’s True Creator. Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House,
2013.
4
Original Frankenstein, p. 433. For a convenient reprinting of PBS’s Preface and
review together (and for quotations from both texts in this essay), see pp. 432–6.
5
For additional information (including sources of quotations) about the Shelleys’
collaboration that is outlined in this chronology, consult ‘Frankenstein Chronology’
in Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. lxxvi–cx (or the same ‘Chronology’ online at http://
shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein/frankenstein-chronology). Otherwise, the
reader may consult the original sources for most of this information: for PBS, Letters and
Prose; for MWS, MS Journals and MWS Letters and MWS’s ‘Introduction’ to the revised
one-volume edition of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn
and Richard Bentley, 1831, pp. v–xii.
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22 June–30 June 1816: PBS toured Lake Geneva with Byron and, on 23 June, 1
wrote into his Notebook Diary a 60-word passage about the river Drance that 2
MWS would later copy nearly verbatim into the Draft of her novel (401/216).6 3
July–August 1816: PBS most likely discussed with MWS her tale during 4
this period, and his descriptions of their excursion to Chamouni on 21–27 July 5
(in a letter to Peacock, possibly transcribed by MWS on 23 July) influenced her 6
descriptions of Victor Frankenstein’s journey to the Valley of Chamouni); PBS did 7
in fact ‘talk about [her] story’ with MWS on 21 August, at the very least offering 8
his ‘incitement’ that she continue and urging her to expand a shorter, possibly 9
novella-length tale, into the novel as we have it now.7
10
September 1816–17 April 1817: PBS acted as editor by making corrections or 11
additions on nearly every page of the Draft of the novel, the manuscript evidence 12
suggesting that he made his comments not on one reading near the end of the 13
process but on separate readings of individual chapters as MWS continued to draft 14
the novel; on 26 October 1816 he noted in MWS’s Journal that she ‘writes her 15
book’.
16
3 January–9 April 1817: Sometime between these dates, more likely in March/ 17
April than in January/February, PBS objected to MWS’s plot in which Victor 18
Frankenstein’s father Alphonse had suggested to Victor that he accompany Henry 19
Clerval to England, PBS’s objection and counter-suggestion communicated by the 20
following marginal note in the Draft: ‘I think the journey to England ought to be 21
Victor’s proposal. – that he ought to go for the purpose of collecting knowledge, for 22
the formation of a female. He ought to lead his father to this in the conversations 23
– the conversation commences right enough’ (see 250, n. 82); MWS accepted the 24
advice and sometime between 9 and 17 April inserted an important passage about 25
Victor ‘obtaining [his] father’s consent’ (174/359), cancelled two and a half pages 26
of the original Draft, and then drafted four and a quarter substitute pages.8
27
April 1817: PBS by this time assisted MWS in doing the marginal computations 28
in the Draft by which they restructured the 33 chapters of the two-volume Draft 29
into the 23 chapters of a three-volume Fair Copy that became the basis for the 30
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Quotations from the text of the Draft will be taken from Original Frankenstein 34
and followed by page numbers in my text (but without p. or pp.). The reader will at times 35
encounter a double page number (e.g., 347/161), indicating that a quotation may be 36
consulted in the MWS version (printed second in order) and/or in the MWS/PBS version
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(printed first) of the Draft.
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7
MWS explained in her Introduction to the 1831 Frankenstein that ‘At first [she]
39
thought but of a few pages – of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develope the idea at
greater length’ (p. xi). For my conjecture that MWS added the frame tale and the innermost 40
tale about Safie’s education to increase the length of her story, see ‘Hypothetically 41
42
Reconstructing an Ur-Text of Frankenstein’, Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. lx–lxii.
8
For additional information on these changes, see Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. xlii, 43
44
lxxxv, 416–41.
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three-volume first edition (which Shelley initiated this structural change we do not
know, but PBS made most of the computations).9
18 April–13 May 1817: PBS witnessed MWS making the Fair Copy of the
novel and, on or around 10–14 May, he embellished MWS’s prose as he himself
transcribed the conclusion of the Draft into the last 12 and ¾ pages of the Fair
Copy (that transcription may have been what MWS referred to in her Journal when
she recorded on 14 May that ‘S … corrects F’).
May–August 1817: PBS assisted MWS by submitting the novel (‘which has
been consigned to my care by a friend’ – see PBS to Charles Ollier on 3 August)
to various publishers, including John Murray, Charles Ollier, and Lackington and
Company, the last of these accepting the novel for publication; and on 22 August
PBS informed Lackington that ‘As to any mere inaccuracies of language [he]
should feel [him]self authorized to amend them when revising proofs’.
September 1817: As if he were MWS, PBS wrote the Preface to the 1818 first
edition (the 1818 Preface dated September by MWS in the 1831 edition), but he
had not received proofs of that Preface by 28 November. (Because of similarities
in the phrasing of the Preface and the review PBS wrote for the novel, it is possible
that he also wrote the review at the same time.10)
24 September 1817: By this date, proofs of Frankenstein were being sent to
the Shelleys, and PBS received from MWS ‘carte blanche’ to make ‘alterations’
to remove ‘some abruptnesses’ in part of the initial proofs supplied by Lackington
(MWS having been occupied by caring for her daughter Clara, born just three
weeks earlier).11
For a chart that shows the restructuring, see Original Frankenstein, p. 30. For more
on the mathematical computations, see Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. lxiii–lxv.
10
PBS’s anonymous review was not published during his lifetime. It was first
published as Shelley’s by Thomas Medwin in The Athenæum: Journal of English and
Foreign Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 10 November 1832, p. 730 – rpt. verbatim
in Thomas Medwin, Memoir of Percy Bysshe Shelley; and Original Poems and Papers by
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Now First Collected. London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1833, pp.
165–70. For a version of the review that takes into account manuscript evidence, see Prose
I: 282–4, together with commentary and collations on pp. 489–92, 533, 565.
11
The most likely alteration PBS made to the early proofs is an addition to the
beginning of Draft Volume I, Chapter 2 (for which no Fair Copy manuscript is extant).
In the Draft MWS had written (with PBS correcting) that ‘Those events which materially
influence our future destinies are often caused by slight or derive thier [a characteristic PBS
misspelling] origin from a trivial occurences’ (259/63; see also Frankenstein Notebooks, pp.
16–17). However, by the first edition, the passage has been altered to ‘ … I must not omit
to record those events which led, by insensible steps to my after tale of misery: for when I
would account to myself for the birth of that passion … I find it arise, like a mountain river,
from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; … it became the torrent which, in its course,
has swept away all my hopes and joys’ (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 3 vols.
London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818, vol. 3, pp. 50–51 – hereafter
1818). Although it is possible that these changes were made in the Fair Copy rather than the
proofs, either way the river imagery here suggests PBS as the author and recalls his 1817
9
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23 October 1817: PBS in London wrote to the publisher Lackington that he had 1
‘paid considerable attention to the correction of such few instances of baldness of 2
style as necessarily occur in the production of a very young writer’, and he asked 3
that the proofs be directed to Marlow to which he was returning, suggesting that 4
he had been the one correcting proofs in London.
5
28 October 1817: PBS from Marlow wrote to Lackington and informed him 6
of ‘considerable alterations’ that were made to the proofs of what are most likely 7
the first two gatherings of Volume III of the first edition, one of these alterations 8
(adding a substantial passage about Henry Clerval, for which see below) probably 9
made by PBS.
10
2 January 1818: In a letter to Walter Scott accompanying the three-volume 11
novel of Frankenstein that had been published on 1 January, PBS indicated that 12
his ‘own share in [the volumes] consists simply in having superintended them 13
through the press during the Author’s absence’, this phrasing suggesting that PBS 14
had a major part in correcting the proofs. PBS’s ‘own share’, as the outline above 15
suggests, was considerably more than just correcting the proofs: his discussions 16
on the nature of life apparently influenced MWS’s dream that inspired the novel; 17
his prose (and his poetry) appeared in the text; he advised MWS about the length 18
and direction of her narrative a number of times (indeed, MWS wrote in 1831 19
that PBS was responsible for ‘the form in which [the novel] was presented to 20
the world’); he enhanced the concluding scenes of the novel by rewriting many 21
of MWS’s sentences into the Fair Copy; he revised some or possibly most of 22
the proofs and oversaw two substantial additions in the revises; and, as we shall 23
see, he contributed 4,000–5,000 of his own words to the novel, some of which 24
are printed below in an attempt to demonstrate the extent and the nature of his 25
involvement with the novel.
26
Many of the words that PBS contributed to Frankenstein resulted from his 27
corrections to MWS’s diction and syntax in the Draft, and his words are made 28
typographically visible in my two previous editions: The Frankenstein Notebooks 29
(1996), a photofacsimile and type facsimile edition of both the Draft and Fair 30
Copy of the novel (accompanied by a diplomatic edition or literal transcript 31
of 1818);12 and The Original Frankenstein (2008; 2009), an edition that prints 32
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remarks in the draft notebook for Laon and Cythna about a person giving ‘a faithful history 34
of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollection’, about men beholding ‘thier own 35
recollections … thier shadowy hopes & fears’, about thought being ‘like a river whose rapid 36
& perpetual stream flows outwards’ from the ‘caverns of the mind’ (see Tokoo, BSM XIII: 37
164–5). Moreover, the ‘insensible’ in the passage above may be another signature PBS
38
word, not used by MWS in Frankenstein but certainly used once by PBS when he changed
39
MWS’s ‘my eyes were shut’ to ‘my eyes were insensible’ (274/79).
12
The Garland 1996 edition, MYR IX (1&2), is now partly available as the first 40
offering in the Shelley-Godwin Archive (see http://shelleygodwinarchive.org). This TEI- 41
based version of The Frankenstein Notebooks offers photo facsimiles of the Draft and Fair 42
Copy and TEI-encoded diplomatic transcriptions of each manuscript page (but without the 43
lineation achieved in the printed edition). Although this TEI version does not yet reproduce 44
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two texts of the novel based on the Draft, in the first of which PBS’s words are
contradistinguished from MWS’s by being set in italics (the other text removes
all of PBS’s interventions in the Draft and restores MWS’s original words that
PBS had cancelled). Most of his interventions reveal that he was a good editor. As
his Preface and his review of the novel suggest, MWS was an inexperienced and
young writer who benefited from most of his editorial corrections and suggestions,
many of which were stylistic:
4]
5]
6]
PBS added or corrected punctuation and capitalization;
he corrected misspellings: e.g., changing ‘igmmatic’ to ‘enigmatic’ (330/136);
he corrected errors in fact: e.g., instructing MWS to change ‘Lord Chancellor
Bacon’ to ‘Friar [Roger] Bacon’ (184 and 251, n. 95); and changing her
‘above two centuries before’ (which had initially been ‘above a century
before’) to the more correct ‘above a century and a half before’ (369/183);13
he frequently changed ‘that’ to ‘which’ to introduce restrictive clauses (see,
e.g., 345/159);
he corrected grammar: e.g., changing an incorrect nominative ‘he’ to the
objective ‘him’ (347/161 and 349/164); or changing ‘school where I studied’
to ‘school in which I had studied’ (340/154);14
he added or deleted words to make a phrase more meaningful or graceful
or exact: e.g., MWS’s ‘I determined to remain that night at Secheron. The
night was very fine’ became ‘I determined to remain that night at Secheron, a
village half a league to the eastward of the city. The sky was serene’ (295/99);
her ‘surrounded by ice still in imminent danger’ became ‘surrounded by
mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict’
(420/235); her ‘he said on one of these’ became ‘was legible in one of these
inscriptions’ (412/227); and her ‘you will feel the misery of cold & frost but I
shall not for cold is sweeter to me than heat’ became ‘you will feel the misery
of cold and frost to which I am impassive’ (412/227);
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the accompanying literal transcript of 1818 and the footnotes from the 1996 Frankenstein
Notebooks, it can run complex searches on the text of the Draft and Fair Copy – and can
enlarge each page image to facilitate study of the differences between MWS’s and PBS’s
hands. Most of the introductory front matter and all of my ‘Frankenstein Chronology’ are
also made available in this TEI version that is produced by MITH (The Maryland Institute
for Technology in the Humanities).
13
For both of these changes that concern the years after Charles I collected his
forces in Oxford, consult Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. 458–9: PBS’s change placed the
action of Frankenstein in the 1790s, a decade confirmed by other chronological hints in the
narrative. See ‘Other Numbers and the Dates in The Frankenstein Notebooks’, Frankenstein
Notebooks, pp. lxv–lxvi.
14
PBS in many ways acted as modern-day copy editor – e.g., he also eliminated
prepositions at the end of clauses: MWS’s ‘replace those whom fate has deprived us of’
became PBS’s ‘replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived’ (398/213); and
MWS’s ‘By the Sacred earth I kneel on’ became PBS’s ‘By the sacred earth on which I
kneel’ (409/224).
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
8]
9]
10]
11]
12]
13]
he often cancelled the wordy ‘And’ or ‘But’ that MWS used to connect her 1
narrative sentences; in doing so, he sometimes changed her coordination to 2
a more complex subordination, introducing causal and other relationships to
3
events or ideas: e.g., changing ‘&’ to ‘whilst’ (328/134), ‘whilst’ also being
4
one of his signature words;15
5
he reduced wordiness or simplified syntax: e.g., changing the subordinate
6
clause ‘while we were there’ to the grammatically simpler phrase ‘during our
7
stay’ (368/183);
8
he improved MWS’s unparallel constructions: e.g., her ‘some bat, or the
9
harsh and interrupted croaking of the frogs’ became his ‘some bat, or the
10
frogs, whose harsh and interrupted croaking’ (310/115); and her ‘found on
11
the trees or lying on the ground’ became his ‘found hanging on the trees or
12
lying on the ground’ (322/128);
13
he used more specific nouns, especially adding a noun after MWS’s potentially
14
vague ‘this’: e.g., her ‘This obtained’ became his ‘This deficiency obtained’
15
(325/131); her ‘concealed this by an appearance’ became his ‘concealed
16
my feelings under an appearance’ (399/214); and her ‘after this’ became his
17
‘after the arrival of Elizabeth’s letter’ (397/212);
18
he used adjectives to intensify meaning: e.g., MWS’s ‘pain & misery’ became
19
his ‘this insupportable misery’ (347/161);
20
he transformed mere description (Victor’s ‘cheek was pale’) into narrative
21
(Victor’s ‘cheek had grown pale’) (273/78);
22
he intensified Victor’s emotional torment (and sometimes redirected the
reader from the past to the future): e.g., MWS’s Victor remarked on ‘those 23
cares and fears … which I had forgotten while on the water’, but PBS’s 24
Victor remarked on ‘those cares and fears … which soon were to clasp me 25
26
and cling to me for ever’ (401/216);
he used more precise or emphatic diction: e.g., her ‘chemical machines’ 27
became his ‘chemical instruments’ (270/74); her just-created monster 28
‘muttered some words’ whereas his ‘muttered some inarticulate sounds’ 29
(277/82); her ‘hut’ became his ‘hovel’ (326/132) and her ‘house’ became 30
his ‘retreat’ (327/133); ‘with the men of that country’ became ‘with the 31
philosophers of that country’ (361/176); and ‘remorse took away every hope’ 32
became ‘remorse extinguished every hope’ (311/115), the word ‘extinguish’ 33
being added by PBS in six additional places (see 68, 113, 118, 169, 197, 217). 34
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15
In addition to PBS revealing his voice in the novel by using ‘which’ (rather than 38
MWS’s ‘that’) to introduce restrictive clauses, he was more likely to use ‘whilst’ rather than
39
‘while’ (see 62, 68, 79, 129, 134; see also 74 for the one time he penned ‘while’), whereas
40
MWS wrote the word ‘whilst’ only once in the extant Draft (see 178; she used the word
‘while’ dozens of times). PBS again wrote the word ‘whilst’ three times in his concluding 41
section of the Fair Copy of the novel (Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. 758–9, 762–3, 764–5), 42
but only the last of these was retained in 1818. All told, the word ‘whilst’ appeared 11 times 43
44
in 1818, two of these probably resulting from PBS’s correcting proofs.
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Some of the most significant changes that PBS made to the text were his
removing of MWS’s colloquial phrasings, which he made more formal and/or
more Latinate – and, in the process, usually more specific and/or intense – but at a
sacrifice of a voice that might have been more in keeping with the character of the
speaker. Note the following changes from MWS’s to PBS’s phrasings:
2]
3]
4]
5]
6]
7]
8]
Victor’s ‘should go to the university’ became ‘should become a student at the
University’ (263/67);
Victor’s remark about entering a sick chamber ‘before it was safe’ became
entering a sick chamber ‘before the danger of infection was past’ (263/67);
Victor’s ‘I had plenty of leisure’ became ‘I had sufficient leisure’ (266/70);
Victor’s ‘He began his lecture with a kind of history of chemistry’ became ‘He
began his lecture by a recapitulation of the history of chemistry’ (267/72);
the monster’s ‘a great deal of wood’ became ‘a great quantity of wood’
(324/130);
De Lacey’s ‘my children are out’ became ‘my children are from home’
(344/158);
Robert Walton’s remark that Victor’s dream reveries were ‘peculiarly
interresting [sic]’ became ‘almost as imposing and interesting as truth’
(417/232);
in speaking of his mother’s death, MWS’s Victor lamented that ‘the
brightness of a loved eye can have faded’, which PBS changed to ‘can have
been extinguished’ (264/68), further emphasizing the finality of death.
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PBS also made a few substantial additions to the novel, developing and
deepening MWS’s ideas on matters domestic, scientific, political and metaphysical.
Each of these additions, which reveal that PBS could preserve and add to MWS’s
narrative (rather than replace it with something of his own liking), is important
enough to record here in full (with PBS’s words again identified by italics).
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1]
In Draft Volume I, Chapter 1, PBS’s Victor deepened our understanding of the
psychological differences between himself and Elizabeth: ‘Every one adored
Elizabeth. If the servants had any request to make, it was always through
her intercession. We were strangers to any species of disunion or dispute.
For, although there was a great dissimilitude in our characters, yet there was
an harmony in that very dissimilitude. I was more calm and philosophical
than my companion. Yet I was not so mild or yielding. My application was
of longer endurance, but it was not so severe whilst it endured. I delighted
in investigating the facts relating to the actual world – she busied herself
in following the aerial creations of the poets. The world was to me a secret
which I desired to discover – to her it was a vacancy which she sought to
people with imaginations of her own’ (62).16
16
The conclusion to this passage recalls PBS’s final lines to his poem Mont Blanc: ‘If
to the human mind’s imaginings, / Silence and solitude were vacancy?’
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
3]
In Draft Volume I, Chapter 4, PBS added two passages to suggest more of 1
Victor’s reflections on the ways that modern scientific study at the University 2
of Ingolstadt had taken the magic out of the pioneer science of Agrippa and 3
Paracelsus, with PBS’s Victor (and his Professor Waldman) nevertheless 4
asserting the value of all scientific learning: ‘But now the scene was changed: 5
the ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those 6
visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required 7
to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur, for realities of little worth … 8
. [Waldman] heard my little narration concerning my studies with attention 9
and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without 10
the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said that “these were men 11
to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of 12
the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, 13
to give new names and arrange in connected classifications the facts which 14
they to a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The 15
labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever failed 16
in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind”’ (71, 72–3).
17
In Draft Volume I, Chapter 8, PBS’s Elizabeth reminded MWS and the readers 18
of the novel that Geneva was more republican and egalitarian than France or 19
England: ‘My aunt observed this and, when Justine was twelve years old, 20
prevailed on her mother to allow her to live at our house. The republican 21
institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than 22
those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround it. Hence there 23
is less distinction between the classes into which human beings have been 24
divided: and the lower orders, being neither so poor nor so despised, are 25
more refined and moral. A servant at Geneva does not mean the same thing 26
as a servant in France or England – Justine was thus received into our family 27
to learn the duties of a servant, which in our fortunate country does not 28
include a sacrifice of the dignity of a human being’ (89).
29
In Draft Volume I, Chapter 15, MWS described the Frankensteins’ journey 30
to the Valley of Chamouni in terms that echoed PBS’s descriptions of the 31
Shelley party’s own journey to the Valley of Chamouni in July 1816 that are 32
recorded in his letter of 22 July–2 August to Thomas Love Peacock.17 In the 33
midst of one such description of Mont Blanc and Montanvert, PBS’s Victor 34
further echoed that letter by juxtaposing the sea of ice with the icy summits 35
that seem to unite Heaven and Ocean with a metaphysics and epistemology 36
that also recall his poem Mont Blanc: ‘From that side where I now stood, 37
Montanvert was exactly opposite at the distance of a league, and above it 38
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17
See Letters I: 495–502; also see that letter in the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ 40
Tour. London: T. Hookham, Jun., and C. and J. Ollier, 1817, pp. 140–72. A productive 41
essay could be written on the Shelleys’ collaborations in both Frankenstein and History of 42
a Six Weeks’ Tour, the latter published on 6 November 1817, exactly eight weeks before 43
44
Frankenstein was published on 1 January 1818.
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rose Mont Blanc in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing
on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of
ice, wound among its dependant mountains whose aerial summits hung over
its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in sunlight over the clouds.
My heart, which before was sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy.
I exclaimed – “Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander and do not rest in your
narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness or take me as your companion
away from the joys of life”’ (121–2).
Co
py
In addition to these interpolations by PBS into the text of MWS’s Frankenstein,
MWS herself directly inserted two of PBS’s previously written texts (a prose
extract from his 1816 journal; and two poetry stanzas from the Alastor volume)
into her novel. The journal extract that she copied repeats his imagery that speaks
to his epistemological concerns and to the ontological interrelations between
Heaven and Ocean – in this case the Alps and river and lake as described by
Victor during his and Elizabeth’s excursion to Evian on their wedding night (Draft
Volume II, Chapter 16). As the parallel passage in the footnote demonstrates,
MWS was transcribing a text taken directly from PBS’s journal entry during his
journey with Byron on 23 June 1816 at the same spot:
we passed by the river Drance & observed its path through the chasm of the
mountains & the glens of the lower hills. The Alps here come closer to the lake
& we approached the amphitheatre of mountains that forms its eastern boundary.
The spire of Evian shone under the woods that surrounded it & the range of
mountain above mountain which overhung it. (401; see also 216)18
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The number of times and the ways in which MWS and/or PBS copied this particular
passage between June and October 1816, which are outlined in the entry for 23
June 1816 in the ‘Frankenstein Chronology’, speak to the complex interrelations
of the collaborative texts produced by the two Shelleys at this time.19
PBS’s poetical extract that MWS imported into Frankenstein, which appears
in Draft Volume I, Chapter 15 (together with the description of the ascent
of Montanvert, for which see above), is a quotation of eight lines from PBS’s
‘Mutability’ that had appeared in the Alastor volume, published in February 1816:
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Compare PBS’s Geneva Diary entry for 23 June 1816: ‘I/We could observe its [the
river Drance’s] path thro the chasm of the mountains & the glens of the lower hills, until
The mountains here came closer to the lake, & we could see the eastern boundary enclose
its waters so that & we approached the amphitheatre which of mountains which forms
its eastern boundary. The spire of Evian shone in/under the woods that surrounded & the
range of mountain above mountain which overhung it’ (see Erkelenz, BSM XI: 126–7 – or
Frankenstein Notebooks, p. 561 and n.). It is worth noting here the collaborations between
the two Shelleys in 1816 involved PBS occasionally writing passages in MWS’s Journal
(see MS Journals I: 110–42).
19
See Frankenstein Notebooks, p. lxxix; also see PBS’s letter to Peacock of 17 July
1816 in SC VII: 25–49, especially p. 29 for the river Drance.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
We rest, A dream has power to poison sleep
We rise one wandering thought pollutes the day
We feel conceive, or reason – laugh or weep
Embrace fond woe or cast our cares away
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It is the same – for be it joy or sorrow
The path of its departure still is free
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Mans yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow
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Nought may endure but mutability. (316; see also 121)20
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Such lines, here represented as they appear in the Draft manuscript, not only 10
epitomize Victor’s ‘necessary’ (316/121) condition that made him subject to the 11
vicissitudes of human nature and to inevitable melancholy and grief, but they 12
also anticipate the manner in which mutability is figured in PBS’s Mont Blanc. 13
Moreover, these lines may be related to Victor’s rejection of the monster (the 14
‘dream’ that ‘poison[s] sleep’ and ‘pollutes the day’), whose narrative begins the 15
following chapter, Draft Volume II, Chapter 1.
16
The monster is not just a ‘dream’; he is a flesh-and-blood being whose 17
namelessness forces the reader to define the monster’s character and his relationship 18
to Victor – and thereby to confront the central moral issues of Frankenstein. In 19
my teaching and writing, I have always called Victor’s creation a ‘monster’ (the 20
word used 35 times in the Draft to denote the creature: 24 times by Victor, 5 by 21
the monster himself, 3 by Walton, 2 by William, and 1 by the magistrate). No 22
other denomination (e.g., in frequency of use, ‘fiend’ or ‘wretch’ or ‘creature’ or 23
‘dæmon’ or ‘devil’) is used as much as the word ‘monster’ in the Draft (or in the 24
1818 edition, in which the word appears 32 times). But my choice of the word 25
‘monster’, in the absence of any proper name for him, signifies that he was a 26
callous murderer, whereas Betty Bennett, with whom I edited The Mary Shelley 27
Reader, always insisted that the creation be called ‘creature’, thereby removing 28
the stigma of ‘monster’ and suggesting that he was not morally responsible for 29
these murders, having been driven to the deeds by his creator Victor. In effect, 30
Bennett was taking the lead provided by PBS himself, who called the creature a 31
‘Being’, a word PBS used five times in his review of Frankenstein. The first of 32
these references makes clear that PBS wanted us to read MWS’s narrative with a 33
particular moral point of view:
34
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Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering
36
and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow
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20
The lineation and punctuation of this extract of the third and fourth stanzas of
39
‘Mutability’ follow the Draft manuscript (Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. 250–51), which
40
differs from the way the poem is printed in 1818 or printed in Alastor; or, The Spirit of
Solitude: and Other Poems. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1816, pp. 59–60 – or even 41
printed in Original Frankenstein. MWS later in Draft Volume II, Chapter 6, adapts one of 42
PBS’s lines from this fourth stanza when she describes the effects of the monster’s reading 43
44
of The Sorrows of Werter: ‘The path of my departure was free’ (153).
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irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the
children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of
the book consists; and it is perhaps the most important, and of the most universal
application, of any moral that can be enforced by example. Treat a person ill, and
he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; – let one being be selected,
for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind – divide him, a social being, from
society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations – malevolence and
selfishness. (435, my bold)
Co
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PBS universalized these moral lessons about the novel’s fictional ‘Being’ by
reference to any real ‘being’ or ‘a social being’ who has been victimized by his
fellow beings.
PBS in this review clarified his reading of the novel by calling the creature
‘Being’ in four additional places: ‘The Being in “Frankenstein” is, no doubt, a
tremendous creature’; ‘The scene between the Being and the blind De Lacey in
the cottage, is one of the most profound and extraordinary instances of pathos
that we ever recollect’; ‘The encounter and argument between Frankenstein and
the Being on the sea of ice, almost approaches, in effect, to the expostulations of
Caleb Williams with Falkland’; ‘The scene in the cabin of Walton’s ship – the
more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the Being’s speech over the dead
body of his victim – is an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power, which
we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom been surpassed’ (435–6, my
bold). In each of these passages that underlines what MWS had accomplished,
PBS studiously avoided the name of ‘monster’ or ‘dæmon’ or ‘devil’ – as well as
any enumeration or mention of any specific ‘crimes and malevolence’; indeed,
PBS wanted the reader to be sympathetic towards this ‘wicked’ Being.
That sympathy for the Being is increased by the changes that PBS made in the
Draft and in the Fair Copy of the novel. Consider his additions to MWS’s prose
that described the ‘reward of [the monster’s] benevolence’ when he was shot after
saving a young girl from drowning. In each addition, here again represented by
italics, PBS made the Being a more sympathetic creature (or, at least, a character
expecting more sympathy): ‘I now writhed under the miserable pain of my a
wound which shattered the flesh and bone. … My sufferings were augmented
also by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My
daily prayers vows rose for revenge – a deep and deadly revenge, such as would
alone compensate for the horrors of my situation outrages and the anguish I had
endured. … all joy was but a mockery to me, which insulted my desolate state’
(351–2/166).21 By these revisions, PBS did not change MWS’s portrayal of the
Being as a victim, but he clearly made that victimhood all the more emphatic. In
so doing, PBS also emphasized Victor’s responsibility: MWS had the Being blame
Victor for his raging passion: ‘you are the cause’; but PBS’s ‘you are the sole cause
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For the manuscript evidence of these changes, see Frankenstein Notebooks, pp.
21
390–93.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
1]
Co
py
of its excesses’ (355/170) made Victor more of the villain and the Being more of 1
the victim.22
2
PBS’s preference for the neutral word ‘being’ is also apparent in the Draft of 3
the novel: ‘I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make him the being of a 4
gigantic stature’ (77/273); ‘Unable to endure the aspect of the creature being I 5
had created’ (81/277); ‘I considered the wretch being whom I had cast in among 6
mankind and endowed with the will and the power to effect purposes of horror, 7
such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my vampire, my 8
own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy all who were dear to me’ 9
(101/297); ‘A creature being, whom I myself had created’ (101/297). Some of 10
these changes merely avoided awkward repetitions (MWS twice wrote ‘creature 11
… created’), but PBS also seems to have used the word in order to emphasize 12
the common denominator between the created ‘being’ and the human beings 13
who bedevilled him. To that end, PBS altered MWS’s version of the creature’s 14
desire for justice from Victor: ‘But on you only had I any claim, and from you I 15
determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from your fellow 16
creatures any other being that wore the human form’ (164/350).
17
In like manner, PBS revealed his presence in MWS’s novel by his special 18
use of the word ‘series’ (twice linked with ‘being’ and sometimes suggesting an 19
inevitable or necessary sequence of items, whether material or immaterial). Note 20
his use of this particular word (in bold below) in the Draft and Fair Copy of the 21
novel as well as in his Preface to and review of the novel.
22
23
The monster in Draft Volume II, Chapter 6, explained to Victor that he had
24
found the ‘papers’ of his scientific and personal journals: ‘Every thing is
25
related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole
26
detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set
27
in view; the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is
28
given in language which painted your own horrors and has rendered mine
29
ineffaceable’ (155/341), PBS’s additions again creating further sympathy for
30
the monster by explaining the cause of his rage.
31
2] Victor in Draft Volume II, Chapter 14, during his imprisonment in Ireland
32
remarked that ‘The whole series of my life appeared as a dream. I sometimes
33
doubted if indeed it was not all true, but it never presented itself to my mind
34
with the force of reality’ (201/386).
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3–4]The monster in PBS’s embellishments to the conclusion of the Fair Copy
36
of Volume III explained to Walton that ‘the miserable series of my being is
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It should be emphasized here that PBS explores rather than excuses the Being’s
39
wickedness. In many ways, the Monster is like the victimized Beatrice Cenci, for whom,
40
nevertheless, ‘Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes’. To continue the
analogy using the text of PBS’s Preface to The Cenci (1819), ‘It is in the restless and 41
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of [the Being], yet feel that 42
[he] has done what needs justification … that the dramatic character of what [he] did and 43
44
suffered, consists’ (PS II: 730–31).
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wound to its close’23 and that ‘Neither yours nor any mans death is needed
to consummate the series of my being’,24 these two instances, which became
part of the first edition, also using the word ‘being’ in its universalist sense.
5–6]Further evidence of this signature word may be found in PBS’s Preface
to the novel: ‘I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of
supernatural terrors’ (432). Moreover, his review of the novel confirms his
partiality for the word: ‘We debate with ourselves in wonder, as we read
[the novel], what could have been the series of thoughts – what could have
been the peculiar experiences that awakened them – which conduced, in the
author’s mind, to the astonishing combinations of motives and incidents, and
the startling catastrophe, which compose this tale’ (434).25
Co
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By isolating ‘series’ as a word peculiar to PBS, we are able to hear PBS in one of
the extended sections of Frankenstein for which no manuscript is extant, namely
the first four introductory letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville
(together with the first part of Chapter 1). At the end of Letter IV to his sister,
Walton does not ‘doubt that my tale conveys in its series internal evidence of
the truth of the events of which it is composed’ (58). Because MWS did not use
the word ‘series’ in this manner, it is very likely that PBS contributed most or all
of this sentence to the novel. How much more PBS wrote of these introductory
Walton letters is impossible, without further evidence, to determine – but he may
have been responsible for (or directly influenced) much of it.
PBS’s diction suggests that he might have had a hand in the other section of the
novel for which no manuscript is extant: namely, Volume II, half of Chapter 3 and
all of Chapter 4, the section beginning with the monster’s inability to understand
spoken and written words: ‘I did not even understand the sounds for which they
[words on a page] stood as signs’ (139). This section of the novel deals with the
monster learning the ‘science’ (139) and the ‘art of language’ (141) – and the
‘science of letters’ (144) as it was taught to Safie. How much PBS contributed
to this section for which the manuscript is missing we may never know, but it
contains his signature word ‘whilst’: ‘My days were spent in close attention, that
I might more speedily master the language; and I may boast that I improved more
rapidly than the Arabian, who understood very little, and conversed in broken
accents, whilst I comprehended and could imitate almost every word that was
spoken’ (144, my bold). PBS’s presence in this section of the novel may also
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Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. 754–5; 812.
Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. 768–9; 816. MWS had written in the Draft: ‘It needs
23
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not yours or any mans death to consumate it [my work]’ (see Frankenstein Notebooks, p.
816, for the comparison of the two texts).
25
At the same time, PBS used the word ‘series’ in his Preface to The Revolt of
Islam (published 8 December 1817): ‘Such is the series of delineations of which the Poem
consists’ (CPPBS III: 114); and in his letter to Godwin of 11 December 1817: ‘My Poem
was produced by a series of thoughts which filled my mind with an unbounded & sustained
enthusiasm’ (Letters I: 577).
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
be evident in the words that are used nowhere else in Frankenstein, such as 1
‘arbiters’, ‘declamatory’, ‘degeneration’, ‘exhortations’, ‘hapless’, ‘hemisphere’, 2
‘lichen’, ‘mortification’, ‘nocturnal’, ‘radiance’ (although MWS used ‘radiant’ 3
twice), ‘sallies’, ‘scion’, ‘stealth’, ‘transparent’, ‘unsullied’, and ‘vagabond’ (138– 4
46).26 Although MWS may have written some of these words or may even have 5
written the PBS-like sentence about ‘the division of property, of immense wealth 6
and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood’ (145), PBS most likely 7
contributed the monster’s expression of the star-flower metaphor, which is almost 8
a cliché in PBS’s poetry:
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Elsewhere in this section for which no manuscript is extant, either MWS or 17
PBS had the monster twice interrogate his own nature: ‘And what was I? Of my 18
creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant’ (145–6); ‘I had never yet seen a 19
being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The 20
question again recurred, to be answered only with groans’ (147). The word ‘being’ 21
in this second illustration suggests that PBS may have written this sentence; but 22
we know for a fact that, two chapters later (Draft Volume II, Chapter 6), PBS did 23
extend the monster’s question of ‘What was I’, thus: ‘My person was hideous, and 24
my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I 25
come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was 26
unable to solve them’ (339/153). PBS’s added questions about whence and whither 27
recall his sceptical inquiry in his recent poetry, especially Alastor, in which the 28
Poet asked: ‘O stream! / Whose source is inaccessibly profound, / Whither do thy 29
mysterious waters tend? / Thou imagest my life’ (ll. 502–5).28
30
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(55), also for which there is no extant manuscript.
33
27
For the star-flower imagery in PBS poems written during the same period as 34
Frankenstein, see ‘the parasites, / Starred with ten thousand blossoms’ (Alastor, ll. 439–40); 35
‘With strange and star-bright flowers’ (Laon and Cythna, XII: xviii); ‘flowers burst forth 36
like starry beams’ (‘Athanase’, Detached Passages (b) l. 9); ‘Then I … saw strange flowers, 37
/ And the stars methought grew unlike ours’ (Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue, ll.
38
1201–2; quotations from PBS’s poetry are taken from PS I–II). The star-flower imagery
39
becomes central to the symbolism of two later poems, The Sensitive-Plant and Adonais.
28
These questions also anticipate the frequent inquiries about ‘whence’ and ‘whither’ 40
in PBS’s ‘The Triumph of Life’ (1822), especially Rousseau’s ‘Shew whence I came, and 41
where I am, and why –’ (l. 398Shew whence I came, and where I am, and whyShew whence 42
I came, and where I am, and why—Shew whence I came, and where I am, and why— in 43
44
SPP: 495).
Co
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In the meanwhile also the black ground was covered with herbage, and the green
banks interspersed with innumerable flowers, sweet to the scent and the eyes,
stars of pale radiance among the moonlight woods; the sun became warmer, the
nights clear and balmy; and my nocturnal rambles were an extreme pleasure
to me, although they were considerably shortened by the late setting and early
rising of the sun. (144)27
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Co
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PBS’s additional questions about whence and whither do not alter MWS’s
representation of the monster’s attempt to define himself, but they do deepen the
novel’s inquiry into the metaphysical (and physical) causes of life and death: ‘I
paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiæ of causation as exemplified in the
change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness
a sudden light broke in upon me’ (271/75–6).29 In his inquiries, PBS occasionally
offered more secular phrasing for MWS’s suggestions of a Christian cosmology
or teleology: for example, changing the monster’s ‘prayers … for revenge’ to
‘vows … for revenge’ (352/166). Death for PBS was an impenetrable mystery
that could not be solved by such glib names as ‘God, and ghosts, and Heaven’
(Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, l. 27); accordingly, after MWS’s Victor reflected on
his mother’s death with ‘we must … bless God if nothing worse happens’, PBS
offered the following revision: ‘we must … learn to think ourselves fortunate,
whilst one remains whom the spoiler [Death] has not seized’ (264/68). This change
makes the point less theological and more metaphysical, more in keeping with
PBS’s other reflections on the mystery of life as defined by the impenetrability of
death. PBS made other such changes in the Draft: MWS’s Victor was intent on the
destruction of the monster ‘as a task enjoined by heaven’, but PBS’s Victor added
a parallel construction, ‘as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was
unconscious’ (412/227); whereas MWS’s Walton reported that Victor’s dreams
about the dead Clerval and Elizabeth ‘were not the creations of his fancy but the
real beings that he beheld and conversed with’, PBS’s Walton reported instead that
these ‘real beings [did] visit him from the regions of a remoter world’ (417/232).30
That ‘remoter’ world was addressed in an apostrophe to the dead Clerval that
is not in the Draft, but that was added to proofs of the novel, almost certainly by
PBS, just two months prior to the publication of the first edition on 1 January
1818.31 Victor, after recalling his and Clerval’s trip down the Rhine and being
reminded of Clerval’s ‘wild and enthusiastic imagination [that] was chastened by
the sensibility of his heart’, lamented Clerval’s death:
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The Neglected Shelley
29
I here correct the mistranscription in Original Frankenstein in which I mistakenly
represented ‘minutiæ of causation’ as PBS’s addition to the text. He did marginally pen the
phrase but only to replace what he had cancelled in MWS’s clause.
30
Again, PBS’s phrasing here recalls lines from his Mont Blanc: ‘Some say that
gleams of a remoter world / Visit the soul in sleep’; also compare ‘voice from some sublimer
world’ in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.
31
This important addition to the text of Frankenstein was one of two substantial
changes in proofs that PBS sent to Lackington on 28 October 1817 (for evidence of these
changes, see Original Frankenstein, p. 250, nn. 85 and 89; and ‘Frankenstein Chronology’
for 20 and 28 October 1817, Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. xc–xci). The other substitution,
most likely written by MWS, contained a description of John Hampden’s monument that
was based on MWS’s visit there on 20 October 1817.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
And where does he now exist? Is this gentle and lovely being lost for ever? Has
this mind so replete with ideas, imaginations fanciful and magnificent … has this
mind perished? Does it now only exist in my memory?32
Co
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1
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3
These questions about the existence of the body and mind after death that were 4
added in the late October proofs echo PBS’s earlier changes at the conclusion of 5
the novel in April and May 1817. On the final page of the Draft, MWS’s monster 6
promised to ascend his funeral pile triumphantly with a hope that ‘the flame that 7
consumes my body will give rest & blessings to my mind’. PBS, apparently 8
dissatisfied with a phrasing that might suggest a Christian afterlife, revised the 9
sentence to conclude that the consuming flame ‘will give enjoyment or tranquillity 10
to my mind’ (429/244). But even that intervention seems not to have satisfied PBS: 11
in fair-copying the last 12 and ¾ pages of the Draft (the final scene of the novel 12
that is published in the last 16 pages of the 1818 first edition), he made a number 13
of substantive changes to again emphasize the finality of death. Consider the 14
following changes from MWS’s Draft to PBS’s Fair Copy: Walton’s description 15
that Victor’s ‘eyes closed’ became ‘eyes closed forever’; Walton’s remark on ‘the 16
death of this glorious creature [Victor Frankenstein]’ was changed to ‘the untimely 17
extinction of this glorious spirit’; the monster’s ‘when I die’ was changed to ‘when 18
I shall be no more’. In each of these revisions, PBS (as he had done in Alastor) 19
emphasized death to the exclusion of any Christian afterlife. That finality of death 20
or, at least, the uncertainty about death is also emphasized in PBS’s addition to 21
the monster’s final words as he proposed to ascend his funeral pile and ‘exult in 22
the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away. 23
My ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; 24
or if it thinks will surely not think thus. Adieu’.33 As an afterthought in the proofs, 25
26
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1818 vol. 3, pp. 18–19. These questions recall PBS’s reflections on the death of
28
the Poet in Alastor (see especially the concluding lines, 703–20). Even if PBS was the
one, as is likely, who asked these questions about Clerval, MWS could have been the one 29
who answered them in the very next sentence: ‘No, it is not thus; your form so divinely 30
wrought, and beaming with beauty, has decayed, but your spirit still visits and consoles 31
your unhappy friend.’ In fairness to both Shelleys, it is impossible to determine, without 32
further evidence, who was responsible for this late change in the text of the novel. However, 33
the word ‘imaginations’ (meaning not the faculty of the mind but the product of that faculty) 34
in this quotation seems to be another PBS signature word: compare his other uses of the 35
word in the Draft: ‘it was a vacancy which she sought to people with imaginations of her 36
own’ (62); ‘I learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom’ (154); ‘would 37
he not accompany me to England? This imagination was dreadful in itself’ (177); ‘with
38
the first imagination of danger’ (237). See also PBS’s Fair Copy of the final scene: ‘the
39
heart in which the imagination of it was concieved [sic]’ (Frankenstein Notebooks, pp.
768–9, 815) and his second sentence of the Preface to the novel (432). MWS used the word 40
‘imaginations’ only once in this way (‘Filled with dreary imaginations’ [363]), and she 41
42
could have learned that use from PBS.
33
See ‘Appendix A: Parallel Texts of Draft and Extant Fair Copy’, Frankenstein 43
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Notebooks, pp. 810, l. 36; 811, ll. 1–3; 816, l. 18; 817, ll. 20–24.
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apparently realizing that the monster’s final word of ‘Adieu’ was not in keeping
with the uncertainty about the monster’s life after death, either MWS or PBS
replaced PBS’s ‘Adieu’ with ‘Farewell’ so that 1818 ends without the monster
pointing himself ‘To God’.34
PBS’s own last words about Frankenstein were voiced in the anonymous
review that he wrote for his wife’s anonymously published novel. In that review,
not published until 1832, he defined the novel’s subjects and themes, much as he
had done in his Preface to the first edition in which he had used almost identical
phrasing about MWS’s (and his) achievements. In the review, he insisted that
Frankenstein dealt with ‘the working of passion out of passion’ and the ‘elementary
feelings of the human mind’ (compare the ‘delineating of human passions’ and the
‘elementary principles of human nature’ in the Preface); with ‘domestic manners’
(compare ‘domestic affection’ in the Preface); with ‘moral sensibility’ (compare
‘moral tendencies’ in the Preface); and with ‘original goodness’ (compare ‘the
excellence of universal virtue’ in the Preface).35 As we have seen, PBS not only
found but also, by his revisions, focused or extended these psychological and
moral and metaphysical elements in the novel – and hence his review (and his
Preface), at least in part, commented on his own contributions to the novel.
That MWS published Frankenstein anonymously, that PBS was responsible
for portions of that novel, that PBS impersonated MWS in writing the anonymous
Preface to the 1818 edition, and that PBS wrote a review of that novel on which
he collaborated – all of these circumstances point to a set of voices that need
to be disentangled as we attempt to understand not only the novel but also the
circumstances of the Shelleys’ collaboration that led to its publication. The final
sentence of the review itself 36 suggests the complications of the mixed voices
involved in the phenomenon we call Frankenstein. PBS wrote that ‘The scene in
the cabin of Walton’s ship – the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the
Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim – is an exhibition of intellectual
and imaginative power, which we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom
been surpassed’ (436). PBS’s praise for MWS’s genius here (and elsewhere in the
review) seems to be heartfelt and merited, even though any reader of this review in
1832 (which Medwin published as PBS’s) would have sensed a disingenuousness
in a husband who had anonymously praised the work of his wife. But a critical
reader in the twenty-first century will recognize that PBS is here praising MWS
for a ‘scene’ and a ‘speech’ that were heavily rewritten by PBS himself: nearly
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34
Vol. 3, p. 192. In his letters, PBS many times used the word ‘Adieu’ in its secular
meaning of ‘Farewell’, without suggesting any kind of Christian teleology or eschatology;
in fact, in an 1810 letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he used the word (ironically?) twice
to embrace Voltaire’s attack on Christianity: ‘Adieu. – Ecrasez l’infame ecrasez l’impie
in which endeavour your most sincere friend will join his every power, his every feeble
resourse [sic] – Adieu’ (Letters I: 29).
35
See the Preface and the review in Original Frankenstein, pp. 432–6.
36
Cited on pp. 127–8 above to illustrate PBS’s use of ‘Being’.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein
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one-third of the words in this conclusion to the novel (beginning with Walton’s 1
exclamatory ‘Great God’ in his letter to his sister) were written by PBS as he 2
fair-copied and embellished the final pages of MWS’s Draft. I suspect that PBS 3
recognized his own self-interest in this review: he was praising not only his 4
wife’s accomplishments but also his own ‘intellectual and imaginative power’ 5
that contributed to the collaborative achievement known as Mary Shelley’s 6
Frankenstein.
7
One final word on this collaboration, the nature of which is complicated by 8
what I have elsewhere called the ‘ventriloquism’37 within this novel: that is, in its 9
narrative point of view and in its collaborative composition. As we increase our 10
understanding of the frame tale, we realize that there is an editorial fluidity inside 11
the narrative. We initially judge that the novel is filtered through Robert Walton’s 12
consciousness or point of view: he tells us (and his sister Margaret Saville) the 13
story of encountering Victor Frankenstein who then tells us his story and that of 14
the monster, who tells us the stories of the De Laceys and Safie. And our judgment 15
is confirmed when we encounter Walton’s statement to his sister that he will 16
‘record, as nearly as possible in [Victor’s] own words, what he has related during 17
the day’, the voice, as it were, ‘from his own lips’ (58). We seem on fairly secure 18
interpretative ground until we read later in the text that Victor discovered Walton’s 19
record of these words and that Victor ‘himself corrected and augmented them 20
in many places, … principally in giving the life and spirit of the conversations 21
he held with his enemy’, for he did not wish ‘that a mutilated [account of these 22
words] should go down to posterity’ (232/417). So whose narrative are we reading? 23
Possibly Margaret’s version of certainly Walton’s version (certainly corrected by 24
Victor) of Victor’s version of the monster’s version of his own and the De Lacey 25
and Safie narratives. And whose novel are we reading? At least once, in the last 26
16 pages of the 1818 edition for which PBS fair-copied the Draft (PBS’s changes 27
retained in MWS’s re-copying of his Fair Copy38), we are reading PBS’s and/ 28
or MWS’s revises of the proofs of MWS’s Fair Copy of PBS’s embellished Fair 29
Copy of MWS’s Draft (which already contained some of PBS’s revisions) of the 30
text at the end of the novel. It is very easy to get lost in the fun house of different 31
characters’ voices in this text – and in the Shelleys’ collaborative voices.
32
To ask again: whose novel are we reading? Although we know that PBS, like 33
Victor, ‘corrected and augmented’ MWS’s text, all of the evidence presented in this 34
essay, both from the manuscript itself and from the Shelleys’ letters and journals 35
(as well as from the records of their contemporaries) leads us to conclude that it is 36
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See n. 1 above for ‘Collaboration and Ventriloquism in Mary Shelley’s 40
41
Frankenstein’.
38
For this complicated sequence of events (MWS recopying PBS’s Fair Copy of 42
MWS’s Draft), see Frankenstein Notebooks, pp. xlvii, lxii–lxiii, lxxxv–lxxxvii (especially 43
44
the entry for [?10–13] May 1817), and 774–7.
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MWS’s novel with corrections and additions by PBS.39 Are there more ‘neglected’
PBS texts still to be uncovered in Frankenstein? Probably, and I have suggested a
few in this essay, especially in those places for which we lack extant manuscript
evidence and in which we can detect PBS’s ‘signature’ words and phrases. And
even the possibility of an earlier ur-text suggests that the collaboration between
the two Shelleys may have been more extensive than outlined in this essay. But
lacking that ur-text and having an extant Draft and Fair Copy (and 1818 text)
that reveals the youthful (and in some cases immature) voice of MWS (by 1823
she herself complained that the first edition’s first two chapters had ‘tame and illarranged’ incidents and ‘childish’ language40), we cannot but conclude that MWS
wrote Frankenstein, a novel that in many ways benefited from PBS’s editing and a
novel that evidences their collaborative and sometimes blended voices.
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I wish to emphasize this point with this note because the Wikipedia entry on PBS
has for a number of years misrepresented my previous arguments about the collaboration
between the two Shelleys. The title page of my 2008/2009 Original Frankenstein does
NOT proclaim PBS as ‘co-author’ of Frankenstein – nor does my Introduction; instead, I
purposefully subordinated PBS to MWS on the title page by using a ‘with’ and parentheses
and a smaller font to represent PBS’s involvement in their collaboration:
39
by
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(with Percy Bysshe Shelley).
If an analogy is needed, PBS’s relation to the text of the novel may be compared to a
dissertation director’s relation to a PhD student’s dissertation: no director who contributed
4,000–5,000 words to a text of 72,000 words would claim to be (or should be claimed to
be) a ‘co-author’ of that text.
40
As quoted in Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (with
variant readings, an Introduction, and Notes), ed. James Rieger. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press (Phoenix Edition), 1982, p. 43 n. This important edition (initially published
in the Library of Literature, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1974) was the first
not only to print the ‘Collation of the Texts of 1818 and 1831’ but also to record MWS’s
autograph corrections to and comments on the first edition in the so-called ‘Thomas’ copy
of 1818, housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library (STC 16799).
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Chapter 7
Shelley’s Second Kingdom:
Rosalind and Helen and ‘Mazenghi’
Jack Donovan
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Now of that second Kingdom I will speak
In which the human mind is cleansed and made
Worthy to climb the Heavens.
(Shelley’s translation of Dante, Purgatorio I, 4–6).1
I
Published in April 1819, Shelley’s first book of verse to appear since the removal
to Italy a year earlier, Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems
was preceded by an ‘Advertisement’ which makes a decidedly inauspicious
prelude to the Italian phase of his career. Readers are forewarned that the titlepoem is ‘not an attempt in the highest style of poetry’, aiming only to amuse the
imagination by inspiring a pleasing melancholy which might prepare the mind for
‘more important impressions’.2 There follows an elementary aesthetic rationale
for the poem’s chosen mode – narrative of sentiment – which is part apologia,
part guide for an appropriate response to the example in question. Story, style,
anticipated effect on readers, we are informed, have all been generated by feelings
the author has himself experienced; and as feelings are in their nature variable and
resistant to control, a text composed under their sway will naturally manifest in
the tenor and ordering of its parts, and down to the particulars of its versification,
traces of its origin in the spontaneous movements of its author’s affective life. The
resulting formal ‘irregularity’, though it may offend against strict poetic canons,
at least guarantees authenticity of expression. Self-deprecating and somewhat
cryptic, the Advertisement nonetheless distinctly affirms the poem’s character as
a species of sentimental autobiography, a feature that is a principal concern of the
present essay.
This frank exercise in the lowering of expectations, which is dated 20
December 1818 from Naples, formalizes Shelley’s earlier estimate of the poem
in his letters home of the preceding summer. From Bagni di Lucca on 16 August
he had announced to Peacock the completion of his ‘little poem … Its structure
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1
PS III: 346.
References to Rosalind and Helen are to PS II: 266–305.
2
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The Neglected Shelley
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is slight and aëry; its subject ideal’.3 And the same day, to his publisher Charles
Ollier, he had doubted finding readers for the
little poem, which I took advantage of ten days of dubious inspiration to finish
… if it have little merit it has as much as it aspires to.4
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Shelley’s display of authorial candour as to the poem’s status, aims, value and
prospects reaches only so far; he maintains a conspicuous silence on the sources
of both characters and story. The ‘ideal melancholy’ and ‘imaginations’ of the
Advertisement and the assurance that the subject is ‘ideal’ (i.e. imaginary) in the
letter to Peacock in fact mask the substantial indebtedness of Rosalind and Helen
to actual persons and events in the Shelleys’ private and public lives from their
elopement in summer 1814 through the early weeks of their residence in Italy,
which began on 30 March 1818.
The poem’s composition is itself closely implicated with these individuals and
events. It appears to have been written over about two years, at irregular intervals.5
Begun, possibly, as early as summer 1816 in Switzerland, the ‘Modern Eclogue’
was taken up again in autumn 1817 and soon left aside. Evidently returned to
later that autumn and in the early weeks of 1818, the completed portion had been
enlarged sufficiently by 19 February to make up a manuscript which could be
sent to the printer pending an imminent conclusion. It would appear to be the
proofs of as much of the poem as was then completed, though not concluded, that
Shelley requests Peacock to revise in a letter from Milan in April. Between then
and the letter of 16 August 1818 a conclusion was added. It remains possible that
passages were composed at other moments in the summer 1816–summer 1818
period. Precisely how much of the poem was written in one country or the other is
not clear, though the concluding movement (ll. 1240–318) seems almost certain to
have been composed in Italy.
Rosalind and Helen’s ample and intricate biographical dimension originates in
attachments formed by Mary when she was 14 and 15 years old.6 During two visits
to Scotland between summer 1812 and spring 1814 she formed a close friendship
with Isabel, youngest daughter of her father’s friend William Baxter, a radical
dissenter. Together the girls visited on three occasions in nearby Newburgh, Fife,
the family of Isabel’s oldest sister Margaret and her husband David Booth, a
brewer and autodidact of prodigious learning and imposing demeanour. Following
Margaret’s untimely death, Booth took Isabel as his second wife in 1814 although
she was nearly 30 years younger than him. Scottish law deemed their marriage
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Letters II: 29
Letters II: 31.
5
The principal references are: Letters II: 4, 29, 31, 94, 387, 396; MWS Letters I: 43,
65; MS Journals I: 194, 223; PW III: 159–60; BSM XI: xv–xxxi; PS II: 266–9.
6
Frankenstein, eds James Kinsley and M.K. Joseph. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980, pp. v–vi.
4
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Shelley’s Second Kingdom
illegal, indeed technically incestuous.7 Under the terms of an Act of 1567, which
founded its authority in the book of Leviticus 18: 6–17, Isabel, though unrelated
to Booth by blood, was regarded as his sister by affinity on account of his prior
marriage to Margaret. Their union therefore fell within the legally prohibited
degrees of kinship for partners in wedlock. (Such a marriage was not then an
offence in English Common Law although it was contrary to the Canon Law of
the Church of England – advertized as such on the final page of the Book of
Common Prayer – which had exercised effective legal control of matrimony since
the Marriage Act of 1753.) In consequence, Isabel and David Booth and William
Baxter were expelled from the Dundee congregation of Glasites, an exclusive
Calvinist sect which exercised a close control over the social lives of its members.8
On Mary’s side complicated and even more scandalous domestic arrangements
also date from the year 1814 when she eloped with the already-married Shelley in
July. Subsequently, Mary’s attempt to renew her correspondence with Isabel was
rebuffed. David Booth opposed any resumption of their intercourse, disapproving
of Mary’s alliance with a married man and resenting the offence and distress their
irregular union continued to cause Godwin, who was his friend as well as Baxter’s.
Even following Mary’s marriage to Shelley in December 1817 her attempts to
resume contact with Isabel were rejected. A different tack was then taken: through
William Baxter, who had come to think his son-in-law Booth an ‘ill-tempered and
jealous’ husband and Isabel unhappy in the marriage,9 the Shelleys invited Isabel
to go with them to Italy. Isabel, for her part, wished ‘very much to accompany
them’ provided her husband concurred with her father’s favourable opinion of
Shelley and Mary.10
Opportunities for David Booth to form his opinion soon arose.11 In November
1817, Baxter and the Booths were invited to meet Shelley, Mary and Claire,
together with Godwin. Clearly the Shelleys, with Godwin’s help, were making
a final attempt to repair the three years’ rift between Mary and Isabel in the hope
that it might issue in a period of intimacy in Italy which would allow them to reestablish their friendship in the absence of the disapproving Booth. A vivid and
detailed account of the two gatherings is rendered in the letters of Shelley, Booth
and Baxter. On the first evening Shelley read aloud the just-completed Preface
to Laon and Cythna (and perhaps some of the poem). In the circumstances this
was at the least an undiplomatic, not to say a provocative, gesture. The resonant
preliminary formulation of the work’s ethical foundation – ‘Love is celebrated
everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world’ – might well
have been construed by those present as authorizing freedom of erotic exchange
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7
Scottish Law Commission, The Law of Incest in Scotland. Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s
39
Stationery Office, 1981, pp. 1–3.
40
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SC II: 558–9.
41
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MWS Letters I: 41.
10
42
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11
This and the following paragraph draw upon documents and commentary in SC V: 43
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332–42; 371–94.
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between individuals.12 And if Shelley’s reading included the final paragraph of the
Preface in which the incest between the brother and sister of the title is qualified
as a ‘crime’ only of ‘convention’, Booth can hardly have failed to see in this the
author’s self-justification for his own rumoured position in respect of Mary and
Claire (see below), as well as taking Shelley’s sentiments – liberal and tolerant as
they were – as an unwarranted allusion to his own marital situation.
The social benefits and disadvantages of matrimony were strenuously debated
by Shelley and Booth; Shelley’s loss of the custody of his two children by Harriet
because of his critical opinions on marriage as an institution was also aired. Writing
to Baxter on 30 December Shelley as well as admits he had lost the argument with
the older man as far as the social utility of marriage was concerned, while insisting
that the right conduct of individuals in particular cases is not to be determined
by the application of abstract ethical canons but should be governed by natural
sentiment:
[Booth’s] keen & subtle mind, deficient in those elementary feelings which
are the principles of all moral reasoning, is better fitted for the detection of
error than the establishment of truth … In matters of abstract speculation we
can readily recur to the first principles on which our opinions rest … But in the
complicated relations of private life, it is a practice difficult, dangerous, & rare,
to appeal to an elementary principle.13
As for David Booth, he came away from the two encounters fortified in his
conviction that the Shelleys’ society could only be harmful in its influence and
was unsuitable for Isabel. His account of the meetings in a long letter to her
reveals his persuasion that, having married Mary, Shelley’s principled opposition
to marriage was hypocritical; that Shelley was sexually intimate with Claire as
well as with Mary; that Alba, Claire’s daughter by Byron, was Shelley’s child;
and that Shelley’s flagrant display of opinions outrageous to prevailing morality
irrespective of consequences could only be regarded as a symptom of the insanity
that Baxter had earlier imputed to him from reports of his behaviour and that Isabel
herself felt she had discerned in her reading of Alastor. Her wish to visit Italy in
such company must now appear a ‘foolish dream’.14 William Baxter, evidently
under his son-in-law’s direction, now altered his mind yet again, writing to Shelley
that henceforth he wished all intimacy between his own family and the Shelleys to
cease. And cease it did, apart from an exchange of letters (and possibly a meeting)
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PS II: 47.
SC V: 383; Letters I: 588. The historian of philosophy, Robert Blakey, noted Booth’s
‘captious and disingenuous mode of arguing and thinking’ and his (then) thoroughgoing
scepticism in matters of religion in a report of a conversation they had in 1832: Memoirs of
Dr Robert Blakey. London: Trübner, 1879, pp. 75–7.
14
SC V: 391.
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between Mary and Isabel in early March, until Mary’s return to England in 1823
after Shelley’s death.15
Such was the impasse that the Baxters and Booths on one side and the Shelley
household on the other had reached at the end of November 1817 – around the
time that Shelley appears to have returned to composing Rosalind and Helen. Ever
since Dowden’s biography of Shelley the accepted view has been that the features
of Mary and Isabel, Shelley and Booth are recognizable in the four principal
characters of the poem.16 (Rosalind retains the name Isabel in the surviving lines of
the draft.)17 Some commentators have judged, not without reason, that the pressure
of personal lives is only too palpable in the poem; that, had their details been
better assimilated, the whole would have had a more coherent texture and shape.18
It is true that one can sense Shelley’s aim to resolve in fiction what had proved
intractable in life: repair the shortcomings of the actual, conclude unfinished
business, find occasion to rehearse cherished themes, even settle scores. While
such an enterprise carries risks, it also has the potential to generate the animation
of writing that draws on intensely lived experience. But the challenge Shelley
faced in incorporating biographical details into Rosalind and Helen can perhaps be
more usefully conceived in the terms of his letter reporting his debate on marriage
with Booth in November 1817 – as an opposition between abstract moral logic
and those ‘elementary feelings which are the principles of all moral reasoning’. In
order to quicken the affective power of the latter Shelley elaborates a narrative of
personal adversity and affliction directly appealing to sentiment.
The two episodes involving incest in Rosalind and Helen (ll. 146–66, 276–
314) may serve as primary examples. Their presence elicited the most extreme
reaction from early reviewers, one of them (published in several periodicals)
exasperated at what he took to be an attempt to raise a frisson by what had become
a hackneyed theme of the ‘new school’ of poets, evidently intending Byron and
Leigh Hunt. The review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, more generous and
more appreciative of Shelley’s powers, nonetheless also wondered at the inclusion
of ‘two stories of this sort – altogether gratuitous – and, as far as we can discover,
illustrative of nothing’, going on to deplore the effect of ‘degrading and brutifying
humanity’ by representing such ‘unnatural wickedness’ within a narrative ‘of real
human life’.19
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MWS Letters I: 60–61, 380; MS Journals I: 458.
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, 1886, vol.
2, pp. 130–31.
17
Erkelenz, BSM XI, provides a facsimile of the draft: pp. 3–9, 13–49, 63, 65–77.
18
For example: SC V: 506–7; Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of
the Poet in Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 160.
19
Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary
Critics. Durham: Duke University Press, 1938; rpt New York: Octagon Books, 1966, pp.
153–64. The Blackwood’s review is attributed to J.G. Lockhart by Alan Lang Strout, A
Bibliography of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine Volumes I through XVIII 1817–25.
Library Bulletin No. 5. Lubbock: Texas Technical College, 1959, p. 53.
15
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On the face of it, the reviewer has a point: the place of the two narratives of
incest in the larger thematic economy of the poem is not immediately evident.
Clearly enough, they owe much to the experiences of the Shelleys and Booths,
and it is worth calling attention to how peculiar these experiences were. Each
of the two families had suffered in its different way from prejudices attaching
to a construction of ‘incest’ founded in religious tradition and arbitrary in its
proscriptions. The Shelley-Mary-Claire ménage à trois had been the subject
of scandalous rumours which seemed to be borne out by the presence in the
household of Claire’s daughter Alba. This presumed sexual promiscuity, which
had notoriously been styled a ‘league of incest’ – and was held by some to involve
Byron as well – derived its ‘incestuous’ character from the same prohibition of
marriage or sexual intimacy between brother and sister-in-law as had caused
David and Isabel Booth and William Baxter to be expelled from their religious
sect. So Shelley was not simply aiming at sensational horror or gratuitous outrage
in including the two episodes in question. He was certainly taking up a theme that
had become fashionable in recent poetry but employing it so as to address issues of
large social import.20 To that end he modifies actual circumstances and assimilates
them to a literary medium that significantly alters their impact.
Although the pair of contrasted couples in Rosalind and Helen display evident
similarities to their ‘originals’, they were clearly not intended to be received as
individual portraits. In the behaviour of Rosalind’s nameless despotic husband,
for example, Medwin claimed to recognize Sir Timothy Shelley’s fits of tyrannical
severity towards his children;21 while the fictional spouse’s narrowness of mind,
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20
John Donovan, ‘Rosalind and Helen: Pastoral, Exile, Memory’. Romanticism 4.2
(1998), pp. 241–73 (pp. 253–4); Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, chapter V. Rosalind and Helen has attracted little
commentary. Recent criticism includes: Anthony Howe, ‘Shelley’s “Familiar Style”’, in
The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 311–15; Teddi Chichester Bonca, Shelley’s
Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice and Sorority. New York: State University of New
York Press, 1999, pp. 79–124; Stuart Peterfreund, Shelley Among Others. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 181–200. Earlier assessments include Mary Shelley’s
Note on the poem in PW; Leigh Hunt’s review in The Examiner 593 (9 May 1819), pp.
302–3; Hunt’s and other contemporary reviews are given in Shelley: The Critical Heritage,
ed. James E. Barcus. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 144–62;
H. Buxton Forman, ‘Introduction’ to Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other
Poems. London: Reeves and Turner, 1888; R.D. Havens, ‘Rosalind and Helen’, JEGP 30
(1931), pp. 218–22; K.N. Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1974, pp. 252–5.
21
Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1913, pp. 102–3.
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malevolence and consuming desire for gold do not seem to have counted among
David Booth’s vices. Apart from managing a brewery, he had worked as a
schoolmaster and pursued the uncertain rewards of the literary marketplace as a
scholar and professional writer on an extensive range of subjects. The enlivening
and entertaining qualities of his conversation were recognized by Shelley himself.22
It is perhaps not stretching the comparison too far to suggest that Godwin’s chilling
domestic influence on his children and relentless soliciting of funds from Shelley
might have contributed something to the character as well. As for Helen’s husband
Lionel, his ‘great wealth and lineage high’ (l. 614), his country estate, his return
home from three years abroad ‘stricken deep / With some disease of mind’ (ll.
741–2), his liberal politics and the satirical verses he writes (though their anticlerical attack is characteristically Shelleyan) suggest Byron, as they did to one
author of a widely-disseminated review.23 As for Lionel’s imprisonment, it finds
its equivalent not in Shelley’s own life, but, to take an obvious instance from
his circle, in Leigh Hunt’s two years’ sentence for slandering the Prince Regent.
Strategic adjustments to source material such as these broaden the scope and
impact of the personal relations that formed the poem’s first matter, following a
procedure, familiar enough, that Shelley was to adopt later in the year in ‘Julian
and Maddalo’. In Rosalind and Helen the additions and modifications in respect
of actual persons serve to conjoin them and their actions to familiar Shelleyan
themes: the baleful duopoly of gold and oppression, the league of interest between
religion and political power, the persecution that afflicts those who challenge
established regimes. Such variations and amplifications are common literary
practices. Rosalind and Helen’s surprises, its undoubted strangeness and the
challenge it sets its readers lie elsewhere: in its construction as a generic hybrid, in
the ordering of the series of narratives that set its direction and development, in its
mixture of styles. These closely interrelated features of the poem function to shape
and specify its major thematic concerns, as I shall try to show.
The most striking of these features is the thoroughgoing feminine perspective
it adopts. In this regard it is intriguing to notice a peculiar and out-of-the-way
literary work that Shelley may have had in mind when composing the poem.
Between Mary’s first attempt to resume contact with Isabel in 1814 and the second
in 1817 David Booth had published the collection Eura and Zephyra, A Classical
Tale: with Poetical Pieces.24 The bulk of Booth’s original verses in the volume are
unremarkable exercises in conventional style and sentiments. But the prose tale
of the title is an oddity that arrests the attention. Cast as a miniature theogony, it
relates the birth and deeds of the two minor deities Eura, daughter of a Naiad by
the east wind Eurus, and adopted child of Juno; and Zephyra, daughter of the west
wind Zephyrus and the nymph Flora. By a decree of Destiny Eura becomes the
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SC V: 383; Letters I: 588.
23
42
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24
London: Gale and Fenner, 1816. Page references in the text are to the second 43
44
edition with additions (London: Saunders and Otley, 1832).
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‘Evil Genius of Mankind’, the embodiment of an unruly female principle which by
its agency in women’s minds ‘shall prove the torment of the human race’ (p. 31).
This ordained role she carries out by provoking women to claim for themselves
an authority to which the narrowness of their experience allows them no title. For
the ‘education and habits of woman must forever keep her behind the other sex
in the pursuit of knowledge’ (pp. 32–3). Zephyra, on the contrary, personifies the
goodness and wisdom that are possible for woman when she remains within her
proper maternal and domestic sphere. The contrast with Rosalind and Helen is
intriguing and suggestive. Each title links the names of two female characters:
Booth’s allegorical figures enforce a narrowly conservative view of the nature
and status of women as the intellectually inferior sex; Shelley’s female friends,
bearing common names, and actors in a largely realistic narrative, recover such
happiness and equilibrium as is possible after having been wronged in a world
ordered according to masculine structures of politics and law. There is no record of
Shelley or Mary having read Eura and Zephyra though they might have heard of
it. As for Booth, holding such an opinion on the role of women, he can hardly have
refrained from acting on it in the course of his two marriages,25 perhaps even put it
forward in the discussion on marriage with the Shelleys and Godwin.
Whether or not Shelley was specifically goaded to respond to these convictions
in Rosalind and Helen, he adopts the point of view of the women characters who
between them narrate the poem’s principal events retrospectively, the fictional
present being allotted to an anonymous narrator. In relation to the personal
experiences that initially suggested the eclogue, this is Shelley’s pivotal artistic
decision, subjecting as it does the account of the two marriages that substantially
constitute the friends’ conversation to an exclusively feminine outlook. The two
episodes involving incest, which were regarded as offensive and misplaced by
reviewers, and whose tenor could not be inferred from biographical sources alone,
offer an occasion to examine the implications of this privileging of the feminine
mind and sensibility.
The first, which aims to realize imaginatively the place of narration on the shore
of Lake Como as a refuge where sympathetic exchange can operate, is presented
in an intricate narrative form that calls for close attention. We learn that tradition
has attached to the spot a macabre and unsettling story which evidently needs to be
told and assimilated before the women can open their confidences. This traditional
tale is delivered by a ‘speaker’, identified only as such but evidently a native of
the vicinity, who has acquainted Helen with a local legend concerning a ‘hellish
shape’ that regularly appears at midnight leading
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40
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41
When the fiend would change to a lady fair. (ll. 151–4)
42
25
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Shelley’s Second Kingdom
The haunting by this enigmatic group is then accounted for by the ‘speaker’ as
the residual manifestation of ‘a monstrous curse’, the incest of a brother and sister
which was ‘solemnized’ in this their secret meeting-place. For their crime the
sister and her child were pursued there and murdered by an outraged mob while
the brother, at the instigation of a priest, was burned in the market-place to gain
God’s favour. Strategically inset as prelude to the women’s personal narratives,
the ‘speaker’s’ report both invites exegesis and eludes any decisive interpretation.
The relation that is alleged by this obviously credulous and superstitious informant
between the ghostly apparitions and their tragic antecedents is presented as, at
the least, doubtful. The connection he makes between the two – between actual
events and their spectral afterlife – is anything but compelling on the basis of the
narrative details he provides; while his reaction of mixed abhorrence and pious
vindictiveness is challenged by Helen’s compassionate response.26 She finds in
the fate of the murdered parents and child an occasion not of revulsion but of
sympathetic identification, a benevolent exercise of the moral imagination towards
an act traditionally held to be abominable and polluting – as against the savagery
of mass bigotry and religious superstition.
Rather than offering a lesson in the imponderables of interpretation, the incest
episode in Rosalind’s autobiography is constructed so as to foreground narrative
irony. While she and her betrothed are standing at the altar her father arrives
unexpectedly from abroad to reveal that they are siblings, each of them his child
by a different mother. Apparently spared from the imminent catastrophe of an
incestuous union, the bridegroom dies of shock and Rosalind is forced to enter
into a marriage of necessity which proves to be a prison-house of loveless tyranny
from which she and her children escape only on the death of her husband, the
conditions of whose will deprive her of her children and condemn her to a life
of wandering. The complex ironies of the situation emerge from a reversal of
readers’ expectations and a revision of literary tradition. The recognition scene
that delivers knowledge of kinship too late to prevent catastrophe in Oedipus the
King, to take that paradigmatic example, in Rosalind and Helen supplies similar
information, and apparently in good time, only to result in personal calamity and
eventual exile, as in Sophocles’s tragedy.27
Refashioning such as this is Shelley’s characteristic procedure in Rosalind
and Helen. He carries it through largely by adapting traditional literary matter to
the poem’s dominant mode, a sentimental realism deployed with the critical edge
of such feminist works of the 1790s as Mary Wollstonecraft’s novels Mary and
Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman – combined with the plangent recollections of
Southey’s English Eclogues and Botany Bay Eclogues. In the English Eclogues
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The passage in question has elicited different readings; see Nora Crook and Derek
Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 41
42
161–3; Donovan, ‘Rosalind and Helen: Pastoral, Exile, Memory’, pp. 248–50.
27
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44
her in September 1818: MS Journals I: 178, 226–7.
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a variety of country folk converse on the tragic events of their locality against
a background of hardship, poverty and warfare; the dramatic exchanges of the
Botany Bay poems take place between transported convicts who recall their
lives in England, its unequal laws and brutal conditions of military service, with
regret and resignation. Rosalind and Helen seems clearly indebted to both Mary
Wollstonecraft and Southey in its insistence on the suffering occasioned, to women
in particular, by the established social injustices of law and custom. It sets itself off
from each of them by the nature of the narrative conclusion it introduces.
The women’s reconciliation passes through successive stages for which the
telling of that part of the life-history of each that has been unknown to the other
– their marriages – lays the groundwork. Immediately following that, the poem
moves to its end in two phases. The first involves the repossession of a common
home, later to be shared by Helen’s son and Rosalind’s daughter who, we are
told, will marry – following the precedent of pastoral narrative, Shakespeare’s in
particular, in which children are endowed with the power to repair the calamities
of their parents’ lives. Here too Shelley proceeds by nicely calculated revision, in
this case of one of Wordsworth’s lyrics written in 1802, published without title in
1807, but later entitled ‘The Emigrant Mother’.28 In Wordsworth’s poem a French
emigrée in England during the French revolution pays daily visits to the cottage of
farm labourers where she addresses endearments and regrets to their baby, a girl
who reminds her of her own infant son left behind in France. Fondly imagining
the child to be hers and sister to her son, she sheds tears which fall upon its face
while denying the common superstition that these will prove unlucky for the child.
Shelley would appear to have adopted from Wordsworth the figure of the exiled
mother whose tears fall as token of maternal affection upon the child of another.
The restoration of a complete life-history to each of the friends is consecrated
by a blending of identity as Rosalind’s tears fall upon the face of Helen’s son (ll.
1270–74) and wake him as their common child in an act of ritual rebirth.
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III
A passage of ‘The Emigrant Mother’ (ll. 56–64) was cited as an example of
‘disharmony in style’ by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria which Shelley
read in December 1817.29 His remark in a letter to Peacock of April 1819 as
Rosalind and Helen was printing – ‘The concluding lines are natural’ – suggests
that he had taken warning from Coleridge’s strictures in adopting the distinctly
Wordsworthian idiom of the narrative voice that delivers the closing movement
of the poem (ll. 1240–314). Its ‘natural’ effects are achieved by exchanging the
28
Wordsworth’s Poems of 1807, ed. Alun R. Jones. London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.
117–19.
29
Biographia Literaria, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 7. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp.
123–4; MS Journals: 186.
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largely octosyllabic verse of Helen’s tale for an iambic pentameter with deftly
varied stresses, an irregular pattern of rhymes, and a tone modulating from the
relaxed to the formal as the matter and the scene shift from the ordinary to the
elevated. Wordsworthian too is the domestic tableau sketched in ll. 1255–74, set
in a cottage on the shore of a wooded lake, from which the developing calm and
resignation of the characters move towards a consolatory resolution in which their
inner lives and the natural landscape grow into images of one another.
Into this tranquil and solemn movement Shelley introduces symbolic elements
deriving from Dante, in particular the Purgatorio. For both the Shelleys the
Purgatorio had a personal connection with Lake Como where the scene of
Rosalind and Helen is laid and whose rocky and wooded shores and surrounding
mountains are evoked in the opening lines of the concluding passage (ll. 1240–
54). This was the first Italian landscape to impress them with its combined beauty
and grandeur after their passage of the Alps at the end of March 1818, just as
the Purgatorio and Tasso’s pastoral drama Aminta were the first Italian literature
that Shelley read in Italy. From Milan he and Mary travelled to Como and thence
sailed to the Tremezzina district on the lake’s western shore where they spent
10 and 11 April searching for a house they might take for the summer, a plan
that was never realized. A week later Shelley sent a lyrical description of the
lake and its spectacular setting in a letter to Peacock. It was in the period (11–19
April) between leaving the Tremezzina and writing to Peacock that he read the
Purgatorio.30 Mary appears to be recalling this association between text and place
when in summer 1840 she revisited Italy for the first time in 17 years to make a
stay of eight weeks in the Tremezzina with her son Percy Florence and two of his
friends. The meditative letters dealing with their life at Cadenabbia on the lake
shore in her Rambles in Germany and Italy reveal that Dante’s Purgatorio and
Paradiso were her books of choice, consolatory companions for her inner struggle
with tragic memories of both Italy and England. She writes of the peace and
resignation she managed at intervals to attain, her evening reveries overlooking
the lake, her affectionate concern for her son, the prospect of ‘the constellations
as they hang above the mountain ridges’ (as in Rosalind and Helen, ll. 1298–304).
These, together with the pervasive melancholy of recognizing afresh how much
of her life had been lost with the loss of her husband, make it seem as if she were
inhabiting the persona of the fictional Helen which she had originally inspired.31
Shelley particularly admired the passage in Purgatorio II, 1–51 in which the
souls of the dead are carried to purgatory in a boat piloted by an angel with outspread
wings, as well as that other in Canto XXVIII (lines 1–51 of which he translated)
describing Dante’s meeting with the figure of Matilda as she gathers flowers in the
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31
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earthly paradise.32 Mary will have remembered reading the Purgatorio together
with Shelley in August 1819 at a time of great personal distress following the
death of their son William two months previously.33 A quarter of a century later
she recalled these favourite passages of his, adding her own (which he will have
shared), ‘The Angels guarding Purgatory from infernal spirits – the whole tone of
hope’.34 Taken as a sequence, the scenes they especially valued map in outline the
complete narrative of Dante’s canticle, its beginning, middle and end – the passage
of the souls by boat, the divinely-guided ascent of Mount Purgatory, the attainment
of the earthly paradise. In its progression from sea to land, shore to mountain-top,
motion to rest, the Purgatorio’s fable of penitence constructs an exemplary union
of topography with spiritual significance and moral value – each soul passing from
the uncertainty and apprehension of displacement, through arduous gradations of
chastisement (in its etymological sense of ‘making pure’) to a true understanding
of its past, the mental condition of liberation from it.
Shelley’s variation on this master-pattern provides the conclusion of Rosalind
and Helen (ll. 1240–318) with both its narrative logic and an important point
of reference for its symbolic details.35 Beginning on the lake shore, ‘where red
morning through the woods / Is burning o’er the dew’ (recollecting Purgatorio
II, 13–14; I, 121–9), it finishes on an Alpine cliff to the north, above which a
constellation presides – as so often in Dante. In the Purgatorio such a pattern of
stars invariably functions as celestial emblem of a spiritual reality which indicates
the significance of the scene below. The Purgatorio begins under such a symbolic
constellation (I, 19–24) while the seven stars of another, Ursa Minor, are invoked
in the description of the pageant in Canto XXX, 1–6. The ‘charioteers of Arctos’
that Shelley imagines circling the point of Rosalind’s pyramidal tomb resists
precise interpretation because it is not possible to determine unequivocally the
constellation to which it refers. He may intend Ursa Major, the Great Bear (the
Greek word Arctos = bear), the seven brightest stars of which form Charles’s Wain
and might have suggested the wheeling motion Shelley attributes to it. Or Arctos
may be an abbreviated form of Arcturus (from the Greek ‘bear guardian’), the
brightest star in the constellation Boötes – variously known as the Waggoner or
the Herdsman – and which, situated close to Ursa Major, was traditionally viewed
as driving the bear round the pole.36 In either case, the import of this, Rosalind and
Helen’s grand concluding image, lies less in any mythical associations it might
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Letters II: 112; PS III: 478–84. The passage from the Purgatorio is considered in
detail by Alan Weinberg, ‘Shelley and the Italian Tradition’, in The Oxford Handbook of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013, pp. 444–59 (pp. 452–3).
33
MS Journals: 294–5.
34
MWS Letters III: 160.
35
The concluding passage is examined in detail in Donovan, ‘Rosalind and Helen:
Pastoral, Exile, Memory’, pp. 259–69.
36
C.D. Locock, ed., The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. London: Methuen,
1911, p. 585, prefers Boötes; PS II: 305 Ursa Major.
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suggest than in the boundary it defines. The household on the lake shore where the
two friends regain the youthful happiness they enjoyed before their estrangement
domesticates that prototype in the Purgatorio which allows the soul of the penitent
to recover its prelapsarian innocence in the earthly paradise, purgatory’s highest
level, from which humanity was excluded by the sin of Adam and Eve. As with
the souls in purgatory, it is the reordering of their memories, accomplished by
living through the most painful of their past experiences in acts of sympathetic
reconciliation, which necessarily precedes their recovered innocence. This renewal
also proceeds according to a Dantean paradigm. The pilgrim Dante is directed by
Matilda to drink first from Lethe, then Eunoè (XXVIII, 121–32), opposite sides of
a stream whose waters erase the memory of sin and restore that of good actions.
After this ultimate regulation of his mind, he becomes in the final line of the
Purgatorio ‘puro e disposto a salire a le stelle’ (‘Pure and made apt for mounting
to the stars’ in Cary’s translation)37 – that is, fitted for the ascent to Heaven he will
undertake in the Paradiso. For Dante both Hell and Heaven are absolute states to
which there is entrance but no exit, while purgatory is transitional, functioning
only as a preparation for Heaven, without which it would have no reason to
exist. Inasmuch as Rosalind and Helen adapts major elements of the purgatorial
narrative, its ending stands out as significantly incomplete, despite tentatively
gesturing at a succeeding condition. Earlier in the poem Rosalind, following a
speculation of her deceased lover, had mused upon an afterlife among the winds,
snows and storms and under the stars and lightnings of an Alpine summit visible
from the lake shore:
Who knows, if one were buried there,
But these things might our spirits make,
Amid the all-surrounding air,
Their own eternity partake? (ll. 555–8)
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149
To this tentative, and notably secular, supposition on a form of posthumous
existence Shelley adds another in the last three lines of the poem:
And know, that if love die not in the dead
As in the living, none of mortal kind
Are blessed, as now Helen and Rosalind. (ll. 1316–18)
Each of the possibilities invoked – a continuation of life through natural
sublimation, a perpetuation of identity in the love of immortal spirits – Shelley is
careful to qualify as an hypothesis of desire, and no more.38 The significance of
37
Dante, The Divine Comedy: The Vision of Dante, trans. Henry Cary, ed. Ralph Pite.
London: J.M. Dent, 1994, p. 241.
38
Shelley considers the question of posthumous existence in the prose essay ‘A
Future State’ which appears to date from late 1818–early 1819 (Jones, BSM XV: 176) and
is available in Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (1954, corr. 1966). London: Fourth
Estate, 1988, pp. 175–8 – where it is incorrectly dated 1812.
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closing Rosalind and Helen thus in conjectural mode is also clarified in relation to
the Purgatorio, the theological and moral basis of which is that the ascent of the
penitential mountain brings a gradual increase of sanctity which expands the soul’s
capacity to love, fitting it at last to share the eternity of Divine Love. The poem’s
final three lines address this Dantean faith so as to end on a calculated ambiguity.
The authoritative voice that is dramatically assumed (‘And know … ’) first lays
down an indemonstrable condition, then states the conclusion that would follow if
it were true. So that, logically considered, the poem’s conclusion is inconclusive,
and conspicuously so. Rhetorically, the lines are more affirmative. By virtue of
their position, the final line and a half, speculating that the two friends may now
enjoy a beatitude that is not accessible to mortals, acquire a force that challenges
their prior qualification. In ‘none of mortal kind / Are blessed, as now Helen and
Rosalind’ readers would also notice a revisionary allusion to the Angel’s words
to the Virgin Mary in Luke 1: 28, ‘blessed art thou among women’. The poem’s
last word is thus its ultimate transformation of a religious idea, a redefinition of
beatitude as potentially emerging from suffering endured, recalled and shared in
this life rather than conferred by an inscrutable decree of the divine will.
IV
It is surprising on a review of Rosalind and Helen to reckon the number of deaths
it includes, in particular those of the four characters originally inspired by actual
individuals, all of whom were alive when the poem was sent to England for
publication. Shelley’s decision to end their lives in fiction invites some enquiry.
Only Helen lives to old age; the other three die prematurely, each death being
likened to the destruction of a plant by pest or disease (ll. 432, 695–8, 1292–4). In
addition, the deaths of the women’s spouses are presented as a direct consequence
of the lives they’ve lived: miserly fears have sapped the vitality of Rosalind’s
husband; Lionel is cut off when his hopes are destroyed by post-revolutionary
reaction. Though their moral natures are poles apart, the physical death of each
results from exhaustion of spirit. Not so Rosalind. She ‘died ere her time’ because
‘when the living stem / Is cankered in its heart, the tree must fall’ (ll. 1292–4). No
other cause is offered in explanation. We may infer that debilitating sorrow has
shortened her life, or that she suffers from an unnamed infirmity. In either case,
hers remains a summary dismissal.
Rosalind’s life is peculiar from another perspective, too: the circumstances it
shares with Shelley’s. She is deprived of her children on accusations of adultery
and irreligion, as he was. Counting her symbolic relation to Helen’s son, she has
four children, as Shelley did at the time of completing the poem, two of whom
remain in England, as his children by Harriet did. On being reminded of home by
Helen’s cottage in the English style,
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dim memory
Disturbed poor Rosalind: she stood as one
Whose mind is where his body cannot be. (ll. 1261–3)
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Her disorientation is that which Shelley himself experienced in the early months
of his Italian residence and which he describes vividly in the letter to Peacock
that includes the account of his and Mary’s visit to Lake Como.39 Perhaps the
most suggestive connection is that the ‘pyramid of lasting ice’ that is Rosalind’s
tomb and the memorial ceremonies that Helen and their children annually
perform at it (ll. 1298–311) allude to the tributes paid to dead English poets by
living ones: the ‘star-ypointing pyramid’ of Milton’s sonnet ‘On Shakespeare’,
and the compensatory emblem of unfulfilled literary promise represented by the
unfading amaranth flowers (l. 1308) which had been awarded by Spenser to Sir
Philip Sidney in The Faerie Queene (III, vi, 45) and by Milton to Edward King in
Lycidas (l. 149).40
These links between author and character bring forward two additional
peculiarities of a poem which is not without its share of them. Shelley appears
to have divided those of his personal experiences that served as original material
for the narrative between two characters, one male and one female. Lionel, poet
and political activist, in each of these roles an idealized part-sketch of Shelley
himself, dies when the love that is, we are told, his vital principle (ll. 621–5)
is frustrated and his hope destroyed by political reaction, denying him a social
outlet for either of these virtues (ll. 764–79). Rosalind resembles her author in the
infamy he had acquired, unjustly he felt, for offences against religious orthodoxy
and conventional sexual morality and for which she is deprived of her children, as
he had been. After an initial struggle with the divided consciousness of the exile,
she is compensated by finding in a reconstituted family the sober content that he
himself might hope for in the domestic sphere. Her funerary monument on an
Alpine summit at Italy’s northern gateway, taken together with Lionel’s death,
would represent Shelley’s farewell to a literary career of unrealized potential, but
also a token of fame hoped for and as yet unachieved.
In portraying Rosalind as innocent of offences that she, and the poet himself,
had been accused of, and which in any case he regarded as acts of liberation from
the deadening weight of custom, Shelley confronts his readers with a paradox: the
character whose story appears most influenced by the narrative trajectory of the
Purgatorio bears no burden of guilt. Variations on a figure that must pass through
a period of exile and suffering to expiate a transgression, thereby fully realizing
his capacity for good, occur in Shelley’s poetry both before and after Rosalind
and Helen. Laon and Prometheus are pre-eminent examples. But a figure who is
insistently represented as innocent yet subjected to an ordeal of penitential exile
occurs only in the period of just less than a year following the Shelleys’ arrival
in Italy at the end of March 1818 during which the uncompleted Rosalind and
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Letters II: 6–7; see also II: 26–7.
40
The amaranths in Rosalind and Helen (ll. 1307–11) seem also to recall those of 43
44
Paradise Lost III, 360–64.
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Helen was finished and the narrative poem ‘Mazenghi’, which offers a revealing
comparison with it, written and left incomplete.41
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Shelley found in Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge a
few sentences recounting a dramatic exploit accomplished at the beginning of the
fifteenth century by Pierre Marenghi (as Sismondi gives the name) while banished
from his native Florence under pain of death. From the shore near Pisa, Marenghi
caught sight of a vessel laden with supplies for the relief of the city, then under
siege by Florentine troops. Swimming out to the ship while holding aloft a lighted
torch, he managed to set fire to the prow despite being wounded by the arrows
of the Pisan sailors. The ship was consumed by the blaze and he was recalled
with honour to Florence.42 Shelley will have recognized in this historical sketch
the contours of a prototypical narrative of virtuous exile. The Roman statesman
Marcus Furius Camillus who (tradition held) had gone into banishment after an
unjust accusation against him, yet answered a summons to lead Rome to victory
against the besieging Gauls in 387–86 B.C. Camillus went on to have a long career
distinguished for moderation and probity in public office, frequently in the face of
political intrigue and popular discontent, and was celebrated as the second founder
of Rome after Romulus. Shelley refers to him as ‘that most perfect & virtuous of
men’ in a letter of 23 March 1819 and styles him ‘Saintly Camillus’ in ‘Ode to
Liberty’ l. 98.43
Sismondi says nothing of Marenghi’s crime or of his period of banishment, nor
does he provide the Florentine with an inner life, leaving Shelley with complete
licence to imagine all these. His inventions furnish a summary account with both an
elementary political rationale and a richly intriguing personal dimension. He first
credits Mazenghi (Shelley alters the name thus) with an unspecified ‘high and holy
deed’ in the service of liberty for which the ungrateful Florentines expel him from
the city and threaten with death any who might offer him so much as a cup of water
(ll. 66–77). Then, he devotes more than half the poem (ll. 78–170) to Mazenghi’s
exile. This, like that of Rosalind and Helen on the shores of Lake Como, is centred
on an actual Italian landscape which is evoked in detail, the Maremma Pisana, a
malarial swamp near both Pisa and Livorno. The Shelleys visited Pisa on 7 and 8
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In PP: 259 (Posthumous Poems, 1824) Mary Shelley dates ‘Mazenghi’ ‘Naples
1818’ where the Shelleys spent the months of December 1818 and January–February 1819;
PS II: 352–3 prefers May 1818. The December–February range seems the more likely. See
p. 154 below. See also Alan Weinberg’s essay on ‘Italian Verse Fragments’, Chapter 14,
p. 286). References are to PS II: 352–61.
42
J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge. 16
vols. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1818, vol. 8, pp. 142–3.
43
Livy, History of Rome V, xxxii, 8–9; xlvi, 4–8; xlix, 7; Plutarch, Life of Camillus,
passim.
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May 1818, and stayed in Livorno from 9 May to 11 June; and they will have been
reminded of the Maremma when they crossed the infamous Pontine marshes in
November on their way from Rome to Naples.44
Like Rosalind and Helen’s exile, too, Mazenghi’s is a purgatorial ordeal,
though completed in a location which, synonymous with disease and death, had
traditionally been imagined as infernal.45 So much is clear from a comparison
with the moral geography established by Dante in the Commedia, in which
marshes and swamps are invariably represented as places of spiritual suffering and
punishment.46 Perhaps the defining analogy of this type occurs in Inferno XXIX,
40–51 in the final valley of the ninth circle of Hell where the sowers of schism
and discord, together with the givers of scandal and falsifiers, are condemned to
grotesque bodily mutilations as appropriate sanction for creating social, political
and religious division. To convey in their full horror the torments the fraudsters
must undergo Dante invokes three notoriously pestilential locations:
Qual dolor fora, se de li spedali
di Valdichiana tra ’l luglio e ’l settembre,
e di Maremma e di Sardigna, i mali
fossero in una fossa tutti ’nsembre:
tal era quivi, e tal puzzo n’usciva
qual suol venir de le marcite membre. (ll. 46–51)
(‘As the pain would be if the diseases from the hospitals of Valdichiana between
July and September, and from Maremma and Sardinia, were all gathered in a ditch,
giving off a stench like that from putrefying limbs’ – my translation.) Shelley may
have recalled these passages when in April 1818, reading the Purgatorio, he came
upon a character at the end of Canto V who addresses the Pilgrim:
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ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma:
salsi colui che ’nnanellata pria
disposando m’avea con la sua gemma (ll. 133–6)
(‘remember me, I am Pia; Siena made me, Maremma unmade me; he knows that
who, wedding me, gave me his ring and jewel’ – my translation.) The death of Pia,
a Sienese noblewoman who was the object of her husband’s implacable jealousy,
was commonly attributed to the malignant atmosphere of the place in which he
had forcibly confined her. Reviewing a new commentary on Dante together with
Cary’s translation of the Commedia in the February 1818 issue of the Edinburgh
Review, Ugo Foscolo wrote:
MWS Letters I: 83; MS Journals I: 240.
A popular rhyme warned against staying long in the Maremma lest one leave
one’s skin there (Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 158. Entry for 23 July 1820).
46
Graphic examples occur in Inferno VII, 106; VIII, 63; and XXV, 16–21.
44
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Her husband brought her into the Maremma, which, then as now, was a district
destructive to health … He patiently waited till the pestilential air should destroy
… this young lady. In a few months she died.47
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The Edinburgh Review for February 1818 was published in May. Peacock sent a
copy to the Shelleys in a parcel of books in late June; they did not receive it until
the end of January 1819, in Naples, though Shelley might have seen Foscolo’s
review before then, in Venice for example, where in October he and Mary were
able to read the Quarterly Review for January 1818.48 And it seems likely that
‘Mazenghi’ was composed as late as January–February 1819, as BSM III suggests
(p. xv), a possibility that gains support from the Shelleys’ reading of both the
Inferno and Sismondi during these months.49
So, when he chose the Maremma as theatre for the decisive phase of Mazenghi’s
exile from Florence, Shelley was adopting a place that literary tradition had
invested with a sinister moral dimension in the likeness of its malignant physical
one. The task he sets himself is thus revisionary, and not only in respect of
location. Exemplary public chastisement of criminals (labouring in the street in
chains) and a sinner (begging in a penitential garment) was for both the Shelleys
a troubling spectacle in their early travels in Italy in 1818.50 Self-imposed penance
was equally repugnant to Shelley. From Bologna, he sent Peacock a description
of a picture of St Bruno in the desert by Guercino in which the monk appears as
‘an animated mummy’.51 The image of the Christian hermit’s morbid asceticism
as well as the public exhibition of prisoners condemned to punitive labour were
quite recent observations when Shelley came to elaborate Mazenghi’s experience
of exile in a ‘desart’ which had long served as a defining emblem of sin as disease.
As Shelley devises it, Mazenghi’s interval in the Maremma is far removed from
either imposed punishment or fanatical austerity. Instead the exile is made to
undergo, in clearly demarcated stages, a comprehensive remaking of the self
whose foundation is sympathetic integration with his natural surroundings. In the
process he discovers not the morbidity but the vitality of the Maremma, inuring
himself to the hardships of an initially inhospitable environment, then learning to
live in communal exchange with the native creatures of the marshland, to feed on
wild berries and roots, to recognize the beauty of his surroundings, to reaffirm his
dedication to Liberty in response to the sublimity of distant mountains, to expand
his mental scope by contemplation of the heavens. This schooling in the ways and
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Edinburgh Review 58 (February 1818), pp. 453–74 (p. 459). Shelley may have
remembered Pia’s fate when he included in Cenci’s curse on his daughter Beatrice: ‘Heaven,
rain upon her head / The blistering drops of the Maremma’s dew’ (The Cenci IV, i, 130–31).
48
The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky. 2 vols Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2001, vol. 1, pp. 128, 130. Letters II: 65–6, 76; MWS Letters I: 85, 87;
MS Journals I: 233.
49
MS Journals I: 246–9.
50
MWS Letters I: 67; Letters II: 48.
51
Letters II: 52, and see PS III: 11–12.
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appearances of nature nourishes inner powers which both cheer his solitude and
fit him to cope with visitations of memory’s ‘deepening shade’ (l. 153). Further,
such an eminently Wordsworthian course of psychic healing in and by nature
removes any inward obstacle to recovering integrity of self and eventually returns
Mazenghi to thoughts of ‘his own kind’ (l. 168). Not, however, before his season
in the Maremma is broken in upon by sight of a ship. This is not Sismondi’s vessel
carrying supplies to Pisa. Shelley has transformed the ship in his source into a
decidedly Coleridgean vision, a black phantom in full sail outlined against the
orange and crimson of sunset, which quickens Mazenghi’s wonder, reminds him
of his own social past and prompts the reader to recall the two cardinal episodes
in The Ancient Mariner that are appropriated here – the appearance of the spectreship and the Mariner’s blessing of the water-snakes (1805 text: ll. 165–78, 266–
85). As refashioned by Shelley into a single incident, they turn Mazenghi’s mind
at last to humanity and his native country, so completing his moral rehabilitation.52
Shelley renders the ship with anthropomorphic detail (it appears to ‘walk’, then
to be ‘striding’); and as the ‘dark ghost of the unburied even’ (l. 166) it makes a
suggestive emblem of what remains unresolved in Mazenghi’s mind in relation
to his former life. The two uncompleted stanzas that precede and follow the one
in which the ship appears (ll. 162–7) evidently introduce the final phase of his
personal evolution, though without deciding it. Both the troubling agitation of
mind that is the lot of the committed reformer (ll. 157–61) and the philanthropy
and patriotism that motivate him (ll. 168–70) are invoked but not developed.
Shelley’s narrative breaks off at this point; he imagines no heroic feat and no
triumphant return for Mazenghi. The secular anchorite is denied the reward of the
civic crown that Sismondi’s account had bestowed on him.
Any attempt to assess Shelley’s intentions in respect of a conclusion to
Mazenghi’s story is complicated by the state of the manuscript, which is clearly
unfinished. Several stanzas lack words, phrases, even a line or more, while the
narrative of exile ends abruptly in mid-stanza (l. 170). There follows a blank page
in the notebook in which Shelley drafted the poem; on the next page is a fair draft
of a six-line stanza in the metre of ‘Mazenghi’ and in a variant (ababaa) of its
rhyme-pattern (ababcc).53 Whether Shelley intended this stanza as a conclusion
to the poem or as an independent lyric (Mary Shelley published it as such in the
1839 PW) in the style of ‘Mazenghi’ is impossible to determine confidently.54 He
might have left the blank page to accommodate a transition between the end of the
narrative and an ultimate stanza offering a definitive commentary on the poem’s
major concerns, or the gap might signal their separate status. In any case, as the
fragment stands, Mazenghi’s moral evolution finishes not as public rehabilitation
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An episode inspired by The Ancient Mariner performs a similar psychic function in
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44
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but as spiritual reconstruction, the terms of which had been set out in the first
stanza where he is exhibited as morally exemplary for having overcome pride
and the impulse to revenge. Whatever its intended status, the stanza adopts the
authoritative and generalizing tone of a conclusion which is not without bearing
on ‘Mazenghi’. Making no specific reflection on the circumstances of the
protagonist’s history, it consigns ‘wealth and dominion’ to ‘the great sea of human
right and wrong’. From this temporal flux only love endures because, in another
Dantean appropriation – qualified possibly to allow for Mazenghi’s intervention
in a treacherous war that entailed loss of liberty for Pisa and contributed to its
continuing decline – ‘love, though misdirected, is among / The things which are
immortal’ (ll. 174–5).
The resolution of Mazenghi’s story shows interesting similarities to Rosalind’s.
Each confirms through the ordeal of exile the innocence of one who has been
unjustly accused. Each character must confront and purge the deadening weight of
memory to prepare for reintegration to family or to the larger human community.
Each gestures at the power of the central Dantean faith in the endurance of love,
as symbolized in a human monument – Rosalind’s tomb, Mazenghi’s legend and
‘urn’ (l. 6). In time the narrative of each acquires the contours of secular sanctity:
Mazenghi’s afterlife shapes him as an exemplar of civic virtue on the classical
model; the annual pilgrimage to Rosalind’s tomb honours heroic suffering in the
domestic sphere while indirectly hinting at the eminence of renown only partially
achieved. The intimate relevance of these two life-stories to Shelley himself at the
critical juncture of his individual history and career as a poet that is marked by the
removal to Italy in spring 1818 is clear enough. Family tragedy, personal infamy,
legal sanction, the rarity of any sympathetic response to his poetry – were so many
bitter remnants of his past. In the early months in Italy memories of his life in
England combine with his immediate response to Italian landscape, art and social
practice, as well as his reading in Italian literature and history, to create a theatre
for redemptive narratives in which the weight of these personal preoccupations is
clearly to be discerned. The central assertion on which the stories are founded –
the capacity of love to overcome time and clarify history – furnishes them with a
transcendent dimension opening, with due circumspection, towards the future. We
may sense in that assertion the author’s act of faith in chapters yet to be written.
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Chapter 8
Shelley’s Work in Progress:
‘Athanase: A Fragment’ and the
Unfinished Draft of ‘Prince Athanase’
Alan M. Weinberg
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Although seminal in its representation of a Shelleyan prototype, ‘Prince Athanase’
(as the work has been traditionally called) has over the years received sparse critical
attention, being largely used as a resource by biographers keen to extrapolate from
its poetic idealism clues about Shelley’s life as a poet, or his self-image.1 It is
generally noted that the work instances the Shelleyan blueprint of the isolated,
aggrieved, highly sensitive intellectual or poet-figure in quest of his ideal which
recurs in many compositions.2 Its comparative neglect might be attributed to its
uncertain status as a fragment that, lacking assurance in its use of terza rima,
fails to develop the narrative convincingly and appears to break down into several
further fragments until discarded by the poet. When the work was first published
by Mary Shelley in Posthumous Poems (1824) there was a disjunction between
its first 124 lines, presented integrally in the earlier main part of the anthology,
and entitled ‘Prince Athanase: A Fragment.’, and several incomplete or cancelled
passages presented towards the end of the volume in a section called ‘Fragments’,
and grouped together under the title ‘Prince Athanase Part II’.3 While any sense of
narrative continuity was lost, the publication had the virtue of giving precedence
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The most important critical contributions are: James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism
of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (1949). New York: Octagon Books,
1969, pp. 48–54, 224–9, passim (links with Plato); Donald H. Reiman, ‘Shelley as
Athanase’, in SC VII: 110–62 (1986; diplomatic transcript of ‘Athanase: A Fragment’ and
commentary); Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 166–74; and Kelvin Everest, ed., ‘Athanase’. KeatsShelley Review 7.1 (1992), pp. 62–84 (edition of text with commentary, mostly repeated
as headnote in PS II: 311–28). Reiman’s discussion is heavily biographical, and its
speculations, reliant on debatable dating, recur in James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A
Biography (Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822). Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2005, pp. 145–7.
2
Most famously in Alastor (1816), but also notably in figures such as Laon (Laon and
Cythna), Lionel (Rosalind and Helen), the maniac (‘Julian and Maddalo’), Rousseau (‘The
Triumph of Life’), and in the personae of ‘The Retrospect’ (1812), Epipsychidion, Adonais
and ‘Una favola’.
3
See PP: 103–10; 249–56.
1
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in its major section to those 124 lines of ‘Press Copy’ which Shelley had himself
overseen for publication, and which he had sent to Ollier in December 1819, in the
hope that it would be published with ‘Julian and Maddalo’, an intention that did
not materialize for either poem.4
While editors since C.D. Locock in 19035 were able to fine-tune Mary Shelley’s
editing and to accurately represent more of the MS draft (which is located in the
notebook Bod. MS Shelley e. 4, fols 83v–68v rev.),6 the distinction between
Press Copy and MS draft, a few sections of which are in intermediate fair copy
– or between what was prepared by the poet for publication and what lacked that
preparation – remained obscure owing to the disappearance of the Press Copy
Manuscript. Attempts were made, notably by Neville Rogers, to establish a degree
of narrative continuity among the several ‘fragments’, but at the expense of
confusing the two versions of the text. With the rediscovery of the Press Copy (SC
VII, item 582) and the transcription of it by Donald Reiman (SC VII: 132–42),
with extensive commentary, the way was laid open to reinstate the Press Copy
as a poem in its own right – a poem to which Shelley gave the title ‘Athanase: A
Fragment’ – distinct from the incomplete though lengthier draft which the poet
provided with alternative titles, ‘Pandemos and Urania’ and ‘Prince Athanase’
(the latter repeated just above the first tercet on f. 82v). Throughout his finely
detailed commentary, Reiman correctly treats the Press Copy as an integral work,
and makes almost no reference to the MS draft, which is by implication considered
a subsidiary document, like any other draft.7 However, his determination to date
composition of the work to the period July 1818 to November 1819 conflicts both
with Posthumous Poems, where ‘Part I’ is dated December 1817 and ‘Part II’
Marlow 1817, and with references in the extended MS draft that reflect the first
month of residence in Italy (March–April 1818). James Notopoulos provides
strong evidence that ‘Prince Athanase’ emerged out of Shelley’s reading of the
Symposium and Peacock’s Platonic fable, Rhododaphne, at Marlow in late 1817,8
though it is possible that Shelley only began the work on arrival in Italy.9 Whatever
the exact date of composition, the fragment is like Rosalind and Helen a work of
transition, expressing concerns which Shelley carried over from England to Italy.
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See SC 554, VI: 1100–104. Both parts, still clearly demarcated, were subsequently
placed together in PW II (1839): 39–54. This further obscured the Press Copy, which Mary
Shelley no longer had in her possession. Unless otherwise specified, all references to SC
are to vol. VII.
5
An Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1903, pp. 50–60.
6
For facsimile, transcription and brief commentary, see Dawson, BSM III: 333–274
rev., xiv–xv, 356–7.
7
Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution, p. 169, usefully observes the distinction,
limiting his brief analysis to the ‘Press Copy’.
8
The Platonism of Shelley, pp. 48–54.
9
A well-reasoned estimate of the dating is given in PS II: 311–12. See also Dawson,
BSM III: xiv–xv.
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Ironically, in what might be considered the most authoritative edition of
the poem to date, that in PS II (earlier published in Keats-Shelley Review), the
distinction to which I am here drawing attention is not upheld. The work is retitled
Athanase: A Fragment, as if it were the shortened poem; but it is presented as
a combination of Press Copy (including line 124 [SC l. 13610] which Shelley
added to round off the piece) and a newly edited version of the largely rough
draft, resulting in over 300 lines of verse, incorporating some alternate or detached
passages.11 The conflation of different kinds of text reverts to a once popular
editorial practice and unfortunately confuses two different kinds of fragment, the
one a literary fiction that Shelley was fond of using from the outset of his career,12
and the other the incomplete draft in MS Shelley e. 4. There are then, it needs to be
emphasized, two distinct works in question, a literary ‘fragment’ which is a poem
in itself (comprising 41 terza rima stanzas and a concluding line) and a longer
draft fragment in terza rima which is essentially provisional and incomplete.13
The approach outlined here correlates with la critique génétique, which places
emphasis on the genesis and process of composition, through its various stages,
and on the importance of the different layers of textual production. The concern is
not limited to the final product, the established text; more broadly it encompasses
the coming into being or making of that text (which is itself provisional), its
emergence from and reconstitution of preparatory material which has its own
importance. Faithful at all times to textuality, the approach respects the aesthetic
conditions of writing as well as the nature of the text at hand, and teases out their
significance. In the succeeding sections of this chapter, I will first be examining
an artefact or end-product intended for publication, ‘Athanase: A Fragment’, and
subsequently (in the second part) I shall be looking at the material from which
it derived, and the extended passages which were drafted but never published –
or prepared for publication – by the author. These two approaches maintain the
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SC is numbered 1–136 inclusive of the author’s prose note and interlineations. All
references to PS are to vol. II, unless otherwise indicated.
11
Earlier in 1975, Neville Rogers had obscured distinctions among fragments and
cancellations, numbering lines consecutively 1–317. See The Complete Poetical Works of
Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, vol. 2 (1814–17), pp. 277–91.
Shelley’s numbering of terzinas following line 123 indicates continuity of the draft up to
line 197 but is not a justification for the conflation of texts attempted in PS II (as is argued
in the headnote, p. 312).
12
The designation appears in the title of several works, such as ‘Fragment; or the
Triumph of Conscience’ in Original Poems of Victor & Cazire; ‘Fragment. Supposed To Be
an Epithalamium … ’, in The Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson; ‘The Daemon
of the World: A Fragment’, in Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude: And Other Poems.
13
The draft in fact comprises a number of fragments. The ‘fragment’ is arguably the
exemplary romantic form. See Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 7: ‘Incompleteness, fragmentation,
and ruin – ständige Unganzheit – not only receive a special emphasis in Romanticism but
also in a certain perspective seem actually to define that phenomenon.’
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integrity of the two versions – which might be said to exist on different planes
of composition – though they also point to their relatedness. What they reveal is
Shelley’s deployment and nuanced consciousness of fragmentation – as a fictional
device, as a resource of that fiction, and as a fluid domain of experiment and
creativity.
A. ‘Athanase: A Fragment’
Cued to the title, and appearing prominently at the head of Shelley’s transcript of
lines 1–124 – the Press Copy sent to Ollier – is the following note:
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The Author was pursuing a fuller developement of the ideal character of
Athanase, when it struck him that in an attempt at extreme refinement & analysis,
his conceptions might be betrayed into the assuming a morbid character. – The
reader will judge whether he is a loser or gainer by this diffidence. – (SC 4–7,
1–2)14
This note provides an apparently factual basis for the use of ‘fragment’ in Shelley’s
title. There is more to the ‘fragment’ than the reader is given to know, and the
question is whether the reader would want a fuller development of Athanase than
the poet has chosen to reveal. That would seem to indicate that some tendency
towards morbidity in the ‘fragment’ itself is really the issue to which Shelley is
directing his reader. He certainly doesn’t wish to intensify that tendency – the
reader would not gain by it – but already it might be such that it could not sustain
further treatment. As it happens – and we know this from the MS draft which
is now accessible to us in scholarly editions and transcripts – the narrative, as
it progresses beyond line 124, actually becomes less oppressive or ‘morbid’ in
that it is less singularly focused on Athanase’s state of mind, less claustrophobic.
We receive an account of the enriching friendship between the serene old man,
Zonoras, and his gifted protégé, Prince Athanase, and there are pointers towards
an elucidation of the strange grief which besets the protagonist who – as Shelley
readily implies – is nevertheless an idealization of virtue.
It appears that the threat of morbidity in writing excluded from the ‘fragment’
is a ruse, which induces the reader to accept or at least accommodate the
oppressiveness of Athanase’s grief in the ‘fragment’.15 The text from which
the ‘fragment’ has apparently been severed exists (as we know today) but is
fictionalized, and this transfers itself back to the publishable fragment, which
appears in turn to be a fictional construct that allows the poet to explore his subject
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In the discussion of ‘Athanase: A Fragment’, primary reference is to the transcribed
Press Copy (SC) with line numbers following. An accompanying reference, in square
brackets, is to the recently edited text (PS). For reproduction of the texts, see SC VII: 132–
42 and PS II: 314–19.
15
Timothy Clark rightly observes that Shelley’s note ‘need not be taken at face value’
(Embodying Revolution, p. 168).
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Shelley’s Work in Progress
Unexplained Grief
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without feeling obliged to fill in the empty spaces, or to develop his subject beyond
a certain point – to search in other words for answers (answers which he may not
have or may not wish to reveal). In his preparatory remarks Shelley seals off his
abbreviated text, the term ‘A Fragment’ in the title above it serving to reinforce
the insulation. The further events of the draft are in a sense out of bounds, and
frankly irrelevant. The frame of reference of the ‘fragment’ debars knowledge of
the protagonist or indeed anything else external to it.16 Moreover, nothing else is
known of him: he is a unique and original figure who has no prior characterization
and whose relationship to the poet or his poetry is internalized and not made
explicit.17 In Athanase we appear to see many of the elements of Shelley’s ideal
self (with some self-pity superadded), but idealization itself – whether or not it be
personally based – is in keeping with the fictional construct, being a very definite
fabrication, a refinement of the imagination quite distinct in character from the
poet’s personal life. The hermetic nature of the fragment – divorced as it were
from the broader scope of the MS draft – lends itself to idealization, a fact which
may have some bearing on the failed development of the draft (as we shall see
later). The more narrativized and embodied the picture of Athanase, the more
threateningly circumscribed (or compromised) is the ideal.
As has been intimated above, separation and isolation are the conditions of
fragmentation that close off Athanase’s grief from whatever may be its cause. The
focus of attention in ‘Athanase: A Fragment’ as, in a sense, a severed text, is not
therefore on any determination to explain, elucidate or interpret the protagonist’s
grief, which may indeed have lain behind Shelley’s personal impulse to compose
the piece, and which finds some measure of expression later in the MS draft, as we
shall observe. The text repeatedly, almost obsessively, comes round to the same
point from which it begins, showing that it is hemmed in, unable to venture beyond
the boundaries of its own fragmentation. Moreover, the variety of innovative
descriptions of grief – each instance a startling and disturbing image – points to its
infinite and unreachable depths.
The ‘restless griefs’ that beset Athanase, ‘withering up his prime’ (SC 10, 11
[PS 3, 4]), are mentioned immediately in the first tercet, marking themselves as
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16
In Marjorie Levinson’s categorization, this poem is a deliberate fragment in
which irresolution is ‘the precise and uniquely appropriate expression of its doctrine’, The
Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1986, p. 50.
17
In accordance with the Shelleyan blueprint mentioned earlier, correspondences
between Athanase, the Poet in Alastor, Laon in Laon and Cythna, and Lionel in Rosalind
and Helen (to name the most obvious), exist quite separately on the plane of intertextuality.
In this regard, Athanase is a distinct instance of the prototype, fashioned experimentally
according to specific conditions laid out for this character, and does not fit into a mould
already designed for him, which would therefore explain his actions.
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an idée fixe recurring throughout the ‘fragment’. In the seventh tercet, the ‘Sorrow
deep & shadowy & unknown’ (SC 26 [PS 19]) picks up the thread, even as the
narrator wonders helplessly what sorrow it could be. Other lines touch on this
theme, leading to a pause and the question: ‘What sadness made that vernal spirit
sere?’ (SC 67 [PS 57]), or later, ‘What was this grief which ne’er in other minds
/ A mirror found, he knew not – none could know –’ (SC 86–7 [PS 75–6]). The
different shades of distress identify a state which none can name. Athanase’s solitary
incomprehension is accompanied by his need to disguise from the perception of
others ‘the grief within that burned’ (SC 90 [PS 79]). While the narrator is privy
to Athanase’s state of mind, he has no superior knowledge that might assist the
reader, who is left stranded, unable to arrive at a satisfactory cause. This collapsing
of space between narrator and protagonist intensifies the solipsistic circle that
seems to fence in the protagonist’s state of mind. It distances or displaces the
friends who, in the closing passages of the ‘Fragment’ (SC 102–20 [PS 90–108])
offer their contrasting opinions on the cause of Athanase’s plight: that it is
madness, recollection of a far happier antenatal life, the supremacy given to love
which invokes ‘God’s displeasure’, or an ‘obscure dream’ which extinguishes joy.
These very disparate views, though possibly well meant, are merely speculative,
and might be compared to the similarly inefficacious speculation regarding the
madman (a companion in woe who seems better to understand his condition)
in ‘Julian and Maddalo’. Ironically, each assumption intertextually reinscribes
a phase in the Alastor-poet’s quest for self-fulfilment18 while reference to the
primacy of love points to an ideal that, similarly to his predecessor, may well
reflect Athanase’s unhappiness, though it doesn’t necessarily determine it. His is a
separate case, and may not be at the mercy of his precursor’s plight. The reference
signals a Platonic influence – that of the Symposium – whose development later in
the draft is, through deliberate fragmentation, excluded here.
Though Athanase still respects this talk, Socratically ‘Question[ing] &
canvas[sing] it with subtlest wit’, as a philosopher would, he is galled by its failure
to assist him, and seemingly further cut off from his friends by ‘this converse vain
& cold’19 (SC 128, 131 [PS 116, 119]). There is an absence of understanding that
might lead Athanase towards self-knowledge and towards the needful articulation
of his state of mind that is answered in an ‘other’ – an absence that, in the MS draft,
is at least partially filled by his older mentor Zonoras (an exemplary father figure).
The idea that there is a readily assignable or definitive cause of grief is itself an
oppression, indicating the glibness of those who cannot come to terms with the
inexplicable20 – with that ‘degree zero’ of meaning which resists the tyranny of
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Noted by Barry John Capella, Shelley’s Quest Poems. PhD Dissertation. City
University of New York, 1980, pp. 104–8.
19
Cf. ‘– but the cold world shall not know’, the last inconclusive words of ‘Julian
and Maddalo’.
20
The link with Hamlet is apparent. In the context of inordinate grief and the
simplistic explanations at the court, his admission – ‘I have that within which passeth show’
(I, ii, 85) – might yet be said to exceed his own understanding. The dropping of ‘Prince’
18
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language and conceptualization. No such glibness is allowed the reader of the
poem, as if the weight of suffering must, to do it justice, be registered as such.
With the monotonous insistence of a suffocating dead end, underlining the failure
of reason and absence of any relief from a condition without a name and without
a cure, the ‘Fragment’ concludes fatally:
For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit
Upon his being; a snake, which fold by fold
Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend
Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold
And so his grief remained – let it remain – untold. (SC 132–6 [PS 120–24])
Co
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A late addition (inserted in the MS draft in preparation for the Press Copy), the
extra fourth line ends the fragment with a circumscribing couplet (and quatrain)
– sealed as it were by the closed rhyme ‘hold … untold’ – silencing the dark
future even while announcing it. What is projected beyond the fragment – an
unmitigated grief – is abruptly short-circuited, ensuring that the poem contains
– one might say ‘locks away’– its own mystery. Other works of the period do
likewise. Notably, as John V. Murphy observes, ‘Shelley’s general inclination is
to leave us with unanswered questions and feelings of doubt and ambiguity’.21
He ruffles complacency and inspires imaginative conjecture and puzzlement that
draws the reader into the vortex of the work’s ‘incompletion’. This characteristic
in Shelley points to a more deliberate use of ‘fragmentation’ or incompletion than
meets the eye, or than Shelley has always been given credit for.
The Paradox of Grief and Virtue
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163
A tenet of Shelley’s thinking, apparent even in his earliest compositions, is the
disinterestedness of virtue.22 Whatever is virtuous is practised for its own sake
alone. In his fragmentary essay ‘On Christianity’, likewise drafted (and in the same
notebook as ‘Prince Athanase’) in late 1817 or early in 1818, Shelley provides a
deconstruction of Christ’s blessing, that ‘the pure in heart … shall see God’. He
remarks:
for the title of the fragment underplays the allusion to Hamlet, which might otherwise have
seemed too obvious. It also further removes Athanase from any rootedness in time and
space. For an imaginative account of Shelley’s interest in Hamlet, see ‘Byron and Shelley
on the Character of Hamlet’. The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 29. 2 (1 July
1830), pp. 327–36: authorship attributed to Thomas Medwin.
21
The Dark Angel: Gothic Elements in Shelley’s Works. Cranberry, N.J.: Associated
University Presses, 1975, p. 110.
22
Cf. ‘The essence of virtue is disinterestedness’, Proposals for an Association of
Philanthropists (1812), Prose I: 50.
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164
What! after death shall their awakened eyes behold the King of Heaven, shall
they stand in awe before the golden throne on which he sits, and gaze upon
the venerable countenance of the paternal Monarch. Is this the reward of
the virtuous and the pure? These are the idle dreams of the visionary or the
pernicious representations of imposters who have fabricated from the very
materials of wisdom a cloak for their own dwarfish and imbecile conceptions.
Jesus Christ has said no more than the most excellent philosophers have felt and
expressed – that virtue is its own reward.23
Co
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It is notable that in the early part of ‘Athanase: A Fragment’, Shelley immediately
establishes the protagonist’s virtue and underscores his disinterestedness. His
‘soul’ ‘wedded [to] Wisdom’ (SC 39 [PS 31]), Athanase is transparent in speaking
‘What he dared do or think’ (SC 53 [PS 44]) – a fearless activist by temperament
– and divides equally, among ‘the poor & wise / His riches & his cares’ (SC 49–50
[PS 41–2]). There is no suggestion in Athanase of the least interested motive that
might compromise his actions. Indeed we have it on record:
For none than he a purer heart could have
Or that loved good more for itself alone … . (SC 23–4 [PS 16–17])
The parallel with the prose commentary ‘On Christianity’ is plain: Athanase
embodies the Christian idea in its de-theologized Socratic form, as Shelley
translates it. In so doing, he emulates Christ without being burdened by divine
signification. In fact Athanase is unafraid of the distorted Christian fable which
posits the terrors of Hell. In this regard he is ‘Philosophy’s accepted guest’ (SC
22 [PS 15]), a phrase implying the independent love of truth characteristic of
Plato’s banquet (Symposium). As with the participants in that dialogue, Athanase
‘owned no higher law / Than love, love calm, steadfast, invincible / By mortal
fear or supernatural awe’ (SC 107–9 [PS 95–7]). In his characterization of ‘Jesus
Christ’ (as he is fond of calling him), Shelley celebrates, above all, the man of
complete virtue – of disinterested love – whose divinity is an open question, not
an indisputable fact. Athanase is certainly an idealization, but then, so (on this
account) is Christ. The conception alone of such a person is remarkable, stripped
of the superstition which from the very beginning has disguised his true nature.
To be regarded as wholly beneficial, dedication to virtue might, one imagines,
entail an inward contentment, in so far as, by its very nature, it reflects some benign
presence or purpose in the world to which one is aligned or connected. Shelley
seems to allude to this in the essay, by indicating that virtue, in Christ’s teaching,
is in harmony with a principle of good (God) pervading the universe. But pleasure
brings some personal or ulterior motive into account, and it is this that Shelley will
not allow in his depiction of Athanase – as if he were putting the Christian and
Platonic ideal to the test. We now understand why the emphasis is relentlessly on
misery, on an internal and unquenchable sorrow endured by Athanase – himself
tormented by his mind and heart – and not on some personal benefit. Any advantage
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Prose I: 250–51. Cf. draft in Shelley Bod. MS Shelley e. 4, f. 10r.
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to Athanase will call his virtue into question, whereas paradoxically, the idea of
his suffering and wasting away in spite of his generous acts is consistent with his
idealization: that is, it confirms his virtue. A similar logic prevails with regard to
the depiction of Christ who, because eminently virtuous, is (in the words of Isaiah
become Christian prophecy) ‘a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief’ (Isaiah 53:
3), and destined to die young. The groundwork is being laid for the conception
of Prometheus who suffers ceaseless torment because he is the benefactor of
mankind. His misery is ultimately vindicated by his resistance to compromise,
and by the intervention of Asia, his soul-mate. Yet in the ‘Fragment’ the paradox
remains, and it is this, it seems to me, that Shelley, ever the philosophical poet, is
exploring here, in the manner of a negative dialectician. This necessarily puts to
one side the question of the source of Athanase’s misery, and makes it a distractor
– at least in the ‘deliberate fragment’. Possibly his elevated conception of love
defeats him but there is no indication why this should be so. His name (A-thanase
= immortal) points to a ‘thirst for immortality’ (Preface to Hellas) that is perhaps
insatiable and tragic, as is the case with the Alastor-poet. Even so, speculation on
this flimsy basis must lead nowhere in the ‘Fragment’. An explanation of the cause
of Athanase’s state of mind of whatever kind would neutralize the paradox and
not sustain it. It would nullify the argument and cheapen the idealization (which
is itself deliberate). That there is no positive outcome or resolution represents
for Shelley the point of resistance to ideology and empiricism. As in existential
drama, Shelley juxtaposes extreme states, and by playing the one off against the
other, understands their compatibility on the one hand, and irreconcilability on the
other: unresolvable and unwanted misery proves Athanase’s acts to be selfless as
well as conflictual, incongruous or even absurd.
We observe the dialectical alternation of sorrow and virtue throughout the
‘Fragment’, and this is especially pronounced in a line which seems to echo
the gospels: ‘He loved, & laboured for his kind in grief’ (SC 34 [PS 26]). An
unbreachable divide between virtue and happiness corresponds to the situation
of the maniac in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ (a poem overtly dialectical in conception
and structure). The maniac’s misery is incontestable, the consequence of
disappointment in love,24 but, like Athanase, he retains his idealism by refusing to
become vindictive or proud. He is thus, in this sense, incorruptible. In madness,
he cohabits simultaneously the two worlds of faith and disappointment in
humanity, experiencing as it were both ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. The terms of reference
in this poem are Dantean, made explicit in sustained allusions to the Inferno.25
‘Athanase: A Fragment’ anticipates ‘Julian and Maddalo’ in its signalling of a
Dantean presence, most noticeably in the adoption of terza rima, Shelley’s first
major attempt in this form, and simulation of the Dantean canto in its length and
Co
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To preserve its integrity as companion poem, the ‘Fragment’ represses any 41
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suggestion of personal disappointment that might be intimated in the draft.
25
For further comment on the Dantean reference in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, see Alan 43
44
Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience. London: Macmillan, 1991, pp. 59–66.
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The Neglected Shelley
166
Co
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final closing rhyme.26 Although Shelley’s stanzas tend not to form composite
units of meaning, as in Dante, their rather halting progression – reinforced by
erratic pauses within the stanza, seldom end-stopped, and given over mostly to
characterization rather than narrative line – serves another purpose in dislocating
the assured sense of an ordered and meaningful verse structure that in Dante’s epic
poem is analogous to a gradually comprehensible universe. Taking its cue from the
very brief as well as sonic assertion, ‘He knew not’, the impressively controlled
31-line sentence27 (SC 68–101 [PS 58–89]) – anchored by a clausal sequence in
‘Though [repeated to hold together the protracted thought] … But … So … For’,
and propelled forward by enjambments and unstopped terzinas, each opening out
to the next – traverses a path leading but to a cul de sac that halts any progression
with reiteration of ‘he knew not’, ‘He knew not’ (SC 87, 90 [PS 76, 79]), finally
sealing this impasse with the idea of an ‘adamantine veil’ drawn ‘Between his heart
& mind’ (SC 99–100 [PS 87–8]). Shelley’s lucid and spare, uncluttered phrasing,
tending towards a slightly archaic and therefore distancing simplicity, suited to
an idealized portrait, belies an absence of the comprehensible in ‘Athanase’. This
fragment, re-conceived as an hermetic fictional construct (which actually has been
extracted from a longer series of fragments), presents in isolation the prototype
of an unresolvable internalized conflict which draws the domains of ‘heaven’ and
‘hell’ inwards (the at once good and unhappy soul) and collapses them into each
other.
B. ‘Prince Athanase’ (MS Shelley e. 4, fols 83v–68v rev.)
The Draft
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Restored to the MS draft from which it derives, the lines constituting ‘Athanase:
A Fragment’ appear in a rougher state and are but the prelude to an extended
analepsis – recall of the younger Athanase under the tutelage of Zonoras, and
prolepsis – intimations of a quest for later fulfilment in love. The narrative is
dialectically projected into the past (origin) and the as yet unrealized future
(destination) in the manner of an epic, and is therefore much broader in scope.28
The draft provides every indication of a work in progress, of a manuscript that
is unsure of its direction and that, over a period of possibly several months of
composition twice retraces its steps, only to break down into a further series of
26
Importantly Shelley closes off his ‘fragment’ whereas Dante’s alternate rhyme
announces a pause in the narrative.
27
PS converts Shelley’s semi-colon at SC 101 to a full stop to mark the grammatical
close of the sentence. In the Press Copy, however, there is no formal end stop for 52 lines
(SC 68–120).
28
The sequential pattern of present-past-future is a Shelleyan trademark, discernible
in such diverse mythopoeic works as Queen Mab, Alastor, Laon and Cythna, Prometheus
Unbound and Epipsychidion, all of which incorporate a quest motif.
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Co
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smaller disconnected fragments. Finally the draft serves as the basis for the Press
Copy, abridged, lightly revised and corrected for publication, which was realized
posthumously. Distinct from the Press Copy, the less finished draft is also less
accommodating, as when Prince Athanase is described as ‘wasting’ (f. 80v: 3a)29
(rather than the gentler ‘failing’ of the revision [SC 69]), or when, in the late
insert of a closing line, ‘& must remain [ … ] untold’ (f. 78r: 7) contrasts with
the Press Copy’s finally revised ‘let it remain – untold’ (SC 136 [PS 124]) which
calls for, rather than insists on, compliance with the narrator’s will. Prefacing the
commencement of the draft, a provisional title, ‘Pandemos and Urania’, appearing
at the base of f. 83r together with ‘Prince Athanase’ below it, points to a Platonic
contrast between earthly and celestial love,30 given the briefest indication in two
notes at the top of the folio and the one preceding (f. 83v). These refer to a lady in
disguise met in a ship and a lady who answers to the prince’s soul only in death.31
The material with which the draft eventually finds itself in company, in MS
Shelley e. 4, much of it similarly incomplete, dates from late 1817 continuing into
the Italian period and certainly extending to late 1819, when the Press Copy of
‘Athanase: A Fragment’ was prepared from the MS draft. ‘Prince Athanase’ (or
‘Pandemos and Urania’) and the fragmentary essay, ‘On Christianity’, are written
from opposite ends of the notebook, and were perhaps begun at much the same
time.32 Eventually ‘Prince Athanase’ or the last fragment associated with it is met
(on f. 68v) by the draft of the translation of Euripides’s Cyclops which, filling
in pages left blank or mostly blank, was written in the opposite direction, after
‘Mazenghi’ and the Virgil translations, and probably at Naples in the early months
of 1819.33 The now congested notebook seems to signal the final abandonment of
the ‘Prince Athanase’ draft and any attempt to find an appropriate scaffolding or
superstructure to resurrect the crumbling narrative.
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29
In the MS draft, ‘wasting’ replaces the even harsher ‘withering’, which is scored
through.
30
Shelley draws on Peacock’s Neoplatonic distinction in Rhododaphne (I, 14 and
n. 1). In the Symposium, Pausanias identifies Pandemos with heterosexual and Urania
exclusively with homosexual love, the latter being considered far more elevated, and
dedicated to the pursuit of virtue. The relationship between Athanase and Zonoras derives
from the latter model, though understating any trace of sexual interest. In his revisionist
essay, ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks relative to the subject of Love’
(July 1818), intended to show the Greeks ‘precisely as they were’ (text, Notopoulos, The
Platonism of Shelley, p. 407), Shelley identifies male refinement, albeit premised on female
slavery, as a standard for conditions of greater equality between the sexes, thus indicating
his broader categorization of ‘Uranian’ love.
31
See PS II: 313 for citation of Shelley’s prose notes and Mary Shelley’s probable
adoption of these for her assumed synopsis of the story in PW III: 46 (1839). Some details
in her very brief note, such as Athanase’s search ‘through the world’ for ‘the One who he
may love’ (my italics) seem superadded and should not be accepted uncritically.
32
Murray’s approximate date for the essay is ‘?Mid– to? late 1817’. See Prose I: 459.
33
See Maria Schoina’s essay (Chapter 9).
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A Cancelled Sequence
Co
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Despite its fragmentation and very uncertain progress – factors which (as I said
earlier), probably account for the work’s neglect – it is possible to trace some
sense of development that radically alters the impression of closure (however
mysterious) that Shelley strengthened in the Press Copy of lines 1–124. While
Poems of Shelley II continues the first narrative sequence to line 197 (PS) in
accordance with the MS draft, the placing thereafter of a cancelled sequence
(correctly designated and signalled as ‘following line 129’34 but not scored through
on the page as Shelley had done) does not register at once the process by which
Shelley composed but then rejected it, in favour of a less digressive structure.
Zonoras, immediately introduced at line 125 as his ‘beloved friend’ (f. 78r: 8)
(the type of serene aged companion based, like the hermit in Laon and Cythna,
on Shelley’s admired friend and mentor at Eton, Dr James Lind), offered Shelley
the opportunity to shift attention away from Prince Athanase, lighten to a degree
the oppressive mood, and by means of reflection on Zonoras’s solitary, nomadic
and exilic past – a time leading up to his sudden arrival at the child prince’s
lodgings – bring him into relation with Greece and its implied ancestry, establish
the pattern of the exemplary, isolated sage, and advance an element of ‘story’ that
has up to this point barely got off the ground. In this passage, Zonoras provides
a foretaste of the education best suited to his protégé. But the passage goes too
far in the opposite direction, becoming over-engaged with Zonoras’s wisdom –
his eventual ‘calm’ and ‘majestical’ aspect (f. 76v: 8) in despite of adversity and
old age – at the expense of the prince’s anticipated dilemma; and in just 34 lines
(PS), rather too intricately condenses several turns in the narrative, encompassing
Zonoras’s hermit-like self-education, wanderings (in the face of conquest) and
homecoming. The type-casting of Zonoras at the outset as a surviving mariner –
‘one who finds / A fertile island in the barren sea’ (f. 77v: 2–3) – echoes the selfreflexive Petrarchan image-cluster that recurs in other poems written in the first
year in Italy.35 This stabilizing image united with a favourite citation from Paine
– ‘The mind becomes that which it contemplates’ (f. 77v: 8)36 – points to qualities
of resilience and self-transcendence that might later be instructive for the tutor’s
student but might elude him – and so might diminish the prince’s exemplary
character or inner conflict. The grief of Athanase’s mother on discovering his
father’s death does at least reinstate the note of overwhelming misery – the news
‘Smote Struck her body & soul as with a slow swift disease mortal blight’ (f. 76v:
1/1a), but there is nothing exceptional about it and, taking place too soon in this
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PS II: 323.
Cf. Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills (ll. 1–4ff.; October 1818) and
‘Mazenghi’ (l. 32ff.; December 1818–January 1819).
36
Cf. ‘Mazenghi’ (l. 144), Prometheus Unbound (I: 450). Cf. also ‘The Coliseum’ in
Stephen Behrendt, ed., Zastrozzi, A Romance & St Irvyne: or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance.
Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002, p. 275.
35
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biographical flashback to have any weight (Athanase is then just three years old),
is understandably abandoned, along with the rest of the passage.
A First (Revised) Sequence
Co
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As always in composition, a false start or digression has its uses, in the present
instance directing Shelley back to f. 78r: 12, ‘Shone like the reflex of a thousand
[ … ] minds’ (PS 129),37 the second line of an incomplete tercet, and alerting him
to the need to develop the relationship between companions, so that the prince
remains centre stage, and his mentor’s qualities are not celebrated in themselves
(as is the case in the cancelled passage), but as they impact on himself. Shelley’s
idea, it seems, was to find a way back to Prince Athanase’s present condition (as
described in lines 1–123 [PS; f. 82v: 1–f. 78r: 6]) by illustrating both the excellence
of his education under Zonoras’s guidance – Socratic in its dialectical interaction
between sage and gifted disciple and in its chaste representation of ‘celestial
love’38 – and its inefficacy in that, virtuous though it be, it leaves Athanase’s
misery untouched, if it doesn’t actually promote it by prompting awareness of
some unrealizable ideal. There is a consistency in the argument that is all the
more forceful, in that not even foundational insight mutually shared in admiring
friendship across the spectrum of age,39 and in fine natural Mediterranean settings,
and indeed put to great advantage by the disciple – since ‘The youth [ … ] soon
outran / The His teachers & did teach with native skill / Strange truths & new to
that experienced man’ (f. 76r: 11–14) – can offset what Prince Athanase himself
calls his ‘strange load’ (f. 74v: 9). He is left without recourse as the nightingale,
representing nature’s self-delight and power to soothe the distraught sufferer, is
impotent in the case of one whose sense of alienation remains oppressive, both
exacting and perplexing. The paradox outlined in the opening verses is strongly
reinforced, even as the poem breaks free of its insistent earlier confinement
(solidified in the Press Copy ‘Fragment’), encompassing a larger time-scale, and
spatially anchoring itself in an iconic Grecian landscape and in the formative
experience of Prince Athanase and his guide.
While the Press Copy ‘Fragment’ makes no allowance for a resolution,
establishing thereby its own mystique and interest sufficient to itself – the eventual
‘final’ outcome of a process of composition – by contrast the source MS draft,
committed to narrative progression, eventually seeks out the unfulfilment or ‘lack’
in the protagonist that ‘virtue’ (as it is represented earlier) cannot alone satisfy.
That ‘seeking’ is the motive force that drives the poem forward, keeping open
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37
An ellipsis within square brackets signals my omission of words, in many instances
cancelled, in the MS draft.
38
Socrates exemplifies the lover who, transcending sexuality, is in intellectual pursuit
of beauty. The ladder of love (scala amoris) reincorporates previous claims (for example,
of Pausanias) at a higher level.
39
The ‘A’ of Athanase and ‘Z’ of Zonoras symbolically representing two ends of the
spectrum.
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Co
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possibilities for development. (The poem’s ‘desire’ corresponds as well to the
reader’s thirst for elucidation.) This is evident both in the Platonic title and ‘plot’,
which suggest a choice between opposite embodiments or emanations of love, and
in what remains of the narrative, which in its first attempt at clarification breaks
off at f. 73v: 9 (see PS 197). Zonoras, acting now in the more defined role of guide
that seems in part modelled on Virgil’s assistance to the Dante-pilgrim at the outset
of Inferno, apprehends the gloom that overcomes Prince Athanase and recalls their
reading of Plato’s Symposium (‘the story of the feast’, f. 73v: 1) together a year
previously. This recollection signals a revitalization of antiquity and its modern
Greek re-enactment. The lingering effect of ‘Platos page words of light’ (f. 74r:
12b) drawn into analogy with lingering moonlight, both as the moon sets and as
it rises, conveys the reflected illumination (philosophy of love) which teacher and
disciple shared in their contemplation of Plato’s dialogue. The sense that Agathon
and Diotima had become intimate presences actualizes their philosophy: this is
identified by Zonoras as the knowledge of ‘love divine’, a phrase that, assimilating
Agathon’s divine ‘Eros’ into ‘celestial love’ (Urania Aphrodite), points forward to
the outcome of the narrative just as it abruptly, though emphatically, aborts it, as
if the insight had an importance of its own beyond further illustration. Zonoras
appears to have identified the absence which is the root cause of the youth’s
misery. He has the Platonic credentials to do so, unlike Athanase’s other friends.
But in glossing over the divergence in opinion between Agathon and Diotima,
and the dialectical victory of the latter in the Socratic dialogue (ladder of ascent),40
Zonoras seems in part to confuse the issue, especially as Diotima will claim that
love (eros) is ultimately a desire for the ideal form (love for the divine) – as we
see internalized in Alastor – and not the ideal itself, which is what Agathon and
Zonoras suggest.41 In Diotima’s elucidation, Eros is a daemon,42 neither mortal
nor immortal, and not a god. As a medium, love conducts towards that state of
transcendence to which the name ‘Athanase’ might seem directed. Together with
doubt regarding the nature or status of ‘divine love’, its freedom from self-interest
is yet to be demonstrated. These were concerns that confronted Dante, specifically
in the Purgatorio and Paradiso, and Shelley in several later works, but are here left
in abeyance, unresolved.43 Fragmentation at a decisive point of transition – which
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A victory acknowledged and reinforced in a fragment connected with Epipsychidion.
See Goslee, BSM XVIII: 194–5; PS IV: 183.
41
Diotima explains, ‘“That which does the loving” is striving to reach “that which
is worthy of love”’, Suzanne Stern-Gillet, ‘Poets and Other Makers: Agathon’s Speech in
Context’. Dionysius 26 (December 2008), pp. 9–27 (p. 19). Diotima departs from and also
redefines Agathon’s argument.
42
The ‘alastor’ is of course an avenging daemon by contrast with the ‘daemon of
the world’ (an opposition underlined in the Alastor volume, 1816 [see CPPBS III: 3–66]).
Shelley was particularly interested in Socrates’s daemon who guides his thoughts and might
be considered a divine messenger. See Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, pp. 159–60,
passim.
43
Like the Symposium, Dante’s poem traces a love ascent.
40
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Shelley’s Work in Progress
is possibly deliberate – lays bare the complexity of representation and withholds
that striving towards resolution that might compromise the issues at stake.
An Alternative Sequence
Co
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The succeeding ‘Alternative Sequence’ (so described by Everest and Matthews),44
written back-to-front in MS Shelley e. 4, f. 71v–f. 72r rev., reduces ll. 125–97 (PS)
to a much briefer section of just 28 consecutive lines.45 There is no cancellation of
the earlier sequence, but it is possibly superseded by the later redaction. Shelley’s
reworking shows his meticulous revision of the draft, in the direction of increasing
fluency, conciseness and relevance. Moreover, it is possibly the most elegant
passage in the poem, and is written out in MS as fair copy, with few cancellations
or revisions – presenting an advanced editing of the six tercets that were retained
(deftly welding l. 135 to l. 129 to complete another tercet). Condensation heightens
intensity, and brings out the irregular interweaving of lines and stanzas that will
become a trademark of Shelley’s handling of terza rima.
In the section drawn from the earlier sequence (f. 71v [PS Alternative
Sequence 1–18]), distracting details regarding Zonoras’s receptivity to Truth are
excised and subsequent episodes are wholly omitted. The bond between friends
who, paradoxically, ‘mark the extremes of lifes discordant span’ (f. 71v: 19) is
now in sharp relief. A vast difference in age and experience, it is to be understood,
is no obstacle to powerful communion. Yet while the old man’s insight inspires the
youth to outreach him, his serenity, by virtue of the disparity, necessarily eludes his
pupil. The remaining tercets and one further unfinished line (PS 19–28)46 entirely
replace the subsequent tercets of the earlier sequence (PS 148–97). The prince’s
plight is suddenly and effectively reintroduced – now indicated as having arisen at
a singular moment of maturation, the imagery pointing both to sickness (‘blight’
damaging ‘the green / Leaves of his opening manhood’, f. 72r: 2a, 1a/1–2) and
to a process rooted tragically in the destructive element of nature. Supportive of
each other, youth and age subvert the barrier of authority and dominion – always
the sign in Shelley of oppression. But their perspectives, given the moderation
that comes with age, remain prototypically and inevitably divided. In this regard
Zonoras’s serenity might reflect both his advocacy of Platonic love and some
degree of compromise with necessity, the acceptance of earthly limits.
The narrative seems too strictly curtailed to match the gradual unfolding of the
introduction.47 Nevertheless, in the concluding tercets a moment of clarity seems
to resolve the poem’s enigma and then suspend or abort further progression, as
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See PS II: 324.
See PS II: 324–5. Previous editors (including Dawson, BSM III: xxii) did not
identify the reverse sequence which follows a consistent pattern of terza rima. The passages
on f. 72r and f. 71v were incorrectly considered separate fragments; f. 72r may at first have
continued from f. 75v: 3 (line 147, PS).
46
PS restores the cancellation in l. 28: ‘Then I will tell thee all I know’.
47
One possible reason the preceding sequence was left uncancelled.
44
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if the discovery were alone significant for the poet (who, one observes, had not
arrived at it earlier). Following the pattern of the earlier sequence, Zonoras again
provides the insight, showing his guiding influence, affectionately signalled in
‘old old man’ (f. 71v: 2). All explicit reference to Plato is discarded, providing a
less intrusive and determinate Platonic framework that would safeguard authorial
independence, and Zonoras, aware from experience that ‘one grief alone’ can ruin
delight, identifies the source of the prince’s sorrow:
Thou lovest, and thy <he> lonely secret heart is laden
With feelings which should not be unrequited (f. 72r: 5/5a–6)
Co
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The smile this elicits from Prince Athanase, before the passage finally breaks off
at f. 72r: 10, might indicate an intuitive accord, perhaps the flash of recognition;
though a certain disquiet seems also present, as the simile that follows images a
lover ‘oerladen / [ … ] With iron chains’ (f. 72r: 7–8) and a beloved’s subjection
to another. That the cause is love (and not its absence) makes perfect sense in
Socratic terms, as the lover seeks his elusive, transcendent ideal. Alastor shows
a similar pattern (as do other earlier poems), with a tragic outcome that seems
destined for Prince Athanase too, notwithstanding Zonoras’s sense of just requital.
Athanase might find his soul companion, as the prefatory note indicates, but he
does so only on ‘his death bed’ (f. 83r: 1). On this account, the ideal is unattainable
in life. Suffering and virtue go hand in hand.
In the closing lines of the ‘Alternative Sequence’, the prince’s smile and his
desire to ‘tell thee [Zonoras] all I know’ (f. 72r: 10) might unite the companions
to a single cause, but the cancellation diminishes that possibility and grief,
momentarily alleviated perhaps, is in no sense overcome. The difference is that
the mystery and paradox that are the poem’s foundation and generative force
are dissipated. The suffering of the hero has become explicable. That might,
from Shelley’s point of view, have been too high a price to pay, and it might
have finally induced him to exclude this or the first sequence from ‘Athanase: A
Fragment’ – to restore, in a published work, the notion of inscrutability by means
of which experience of sorrow exceeds definition and comprehension and so
discountenances reason and the Utopian ideal. Such irresolution, earlier noted as
a general feature of Shelley’s writing, is a presiding theme in much of Shelley’s
serio-comic verse of 1820.48 Yet an irony remains of which Shelley was assuredly
aware: left fragmented, ‘Prince Athanase’ preserves its indeterminacy. Like its
sister poem in terza rima, ‘The Triumph of Life’, its outcome is forever uncertain.
Following the ‘Alternative Sequence’, there remain a few disconnected fragments
in terza rima, faint intimations of how Shelley might have wished to proceed with
composition of the poem.
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Cf. e.g. ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, and ‘The Witch of Atlas’. See also Richard
Cronin’s essay (Chapter 10, pp. 214).
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Shelley’s Work in Progress
Four Detached Passages
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As is seen in ‘Mazenghi’, ‘Ginevra’, ‘The Triumph of Life’ and other draft
fragments, the narrative of ‘Prince Athanase’ (in either sequence) comes to a
halt at a turning point that is determinate (point of resolution) and indeterminate
(incomplete).49 Shaped in this way, the narrative has a certain aesthetic
intelligibility. What is not represented – the unravelling of the story – emerges
from a secure point of reference while being left to the imagination, unrestricted
by comparison with ‘Athanase: A Fragment’. There is no way of attaching the four
concluding fragments (fols 72v, 71r–68v rev.) to any defined sequence of events
in the projected narrative, nor are they with absolute certainty all intended for
‘Prince Athanase’; yet one might, at a stretch, see in them a possible trajectory of
what lay ahead, each serving as shorthand or signpost of some key event.50 Grief
is regarded more positively in the first and, in the second, is offset by an exuberant
dawn, as Athanase enters Italy. In the third, quite eclipsing grief, Love is perceived
as a radiant emanation and source of ever-abundant inspiration; while in the fourth
a lady is rapturously described, who might be Urania or her earthly imitation,
Pandemos. Beyond his one definite appearance, Prince Athanase may in each case
be the implied subject or speaker. In these ‘Detached Passages’ labelled in PS (a),
(b), (c), (d), there is a pattern of emerging and transforming delight that is later
replicated in Prometheus Unbound.
Appearing in the MS draft on f. 72v immediately after the ‘Alternative
Sequence’ (continuing back to front) the first ‘detached passage’,51 in its succinct
contemplation of weeping, points to a remedial side to grief absent in the narrative.
Though ironically considered more painful (‘bitterer’) than the suffering (‘blood
of agony’, 3) of the persecuted martyr who dies in torture, an inward sorrow
(‘Tears’ ‘when the eyes are cold & dry’, 3, 1) is yet medicinal, providing solace
(‘peace & sleep’, 7). The heretofore monolithic and gloom-ridden account of
grief is shaken. In the second, the longest of the fragments (f. 71r–f. 70r; 42 lines
in PS), misery is more vibrantly transformed. Referred to as ‘despondency’ and
unobtrusively associated with the wintry Alpine scene, it is quite surpassed by
the exhilarating springtime sunrise that, in its meticulous detail, all but excludes
the presence of Athanase who ‘at this season [ … ] / Past the aerial white Alps’
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In the case of ‘The Triumph’, the pattern is curious, though perhaps arbitrary in
view of Shelley’s death.
50
The appearance of these fragments immediately after the narrative sections,
their exploration of themes such as grief, delight and love, their use of terza rima, and
the reference in one instance to Prince Athanase by name are discernible links with the
preceding draft.
51
The passage reappears cancelled in Prometheus Unbound II, iv (see PS II: 558,
note to ll. 27–8) and further modified in The Cenci I, i, 109–13. In both these instances, a
positive outcome is lacking.
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on his wanderings (f. 70v: 9–10/10a).52 The rejuvenated earth, signalling the
periodic cycles of rebirth, mirrors the love of ‘the shade of [one’s] own soul’ (f.
71r: 13) that seems related to Prince Athanase’s ideal quest, and is recorded in
the essay ‘On Love’ (June–July 1818). At the end of the fragment (albeit mostly
cancelled), the prince’s descent traces the expansive Italian scene of fields, towns
and their antique towers, reflected in ‘the lucid streams’ (f. 70r: 13) as well as
in his countenance, so giving an impression of reciprocal harmony and solace.
Anticipating the exordium of ‘The Triumph of Life’ (also set in Italy), the fragment
relies on a dialectical contrast inscribed into the natural scene – of the seasonal
withdrawal and assertion of life – and, like the eloquent fragment which follows,
evinces the lyrical freedom and fluency that results when the narrative is put to
one side or simply abandoned. Reconstructed in PS detached passage (b), 36–42,
the concluding lines, though incomplete and partly cancelled in MS, indicate the
plasticity of Shelley’s command over terza rima, and are a signal of his eventual
mastery of the form:
Such as the eagle sees when he dives down
From the grey deserts of wide air, beheld
Prince Athanase, and o’er his mien was thrown
The shadow of that scene, field after field,
Purple and dim and wide, and many a town,
Distinct with antique towers and walls, which yield
Their image in the lucid streams below
The third fragment (f. 69v–r; 24 near-complete lines in PS) is a short ode or
apostrophe to love, reminiscent of the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and possibly
an exploration of ‘the love divine’ identified by Zonoras at the end of the first
narrative sequence (PS 197), or of Diotima’s daemon (love as intermediary).53
The lines may have been intended to form part of an address by Prince Athanase
himself or to him, perhaps recording a moment of recognition subsequent to his
journey through the Alps, the mountains mentioned briefly in the last tercet. The
impetuous flow of the passage, which in the draft is not end-stopped, again evinces
Shelley’s growing command of terza rima. The identification of love with wine and
drunkenness is a subversive Dionysian trope,54 removing inhibitions (as reflective
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The crossing into Italy for Shelley was similarly dramatic and the passage seems to
commemorate that event (see Letters II: 3–4 [6 April 1818]).
53
Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 229 finds in this ‘invocation to Love …
many echoes from Agathon’s speech in praise of Love’.
54
Notably the Cyclops (Polypheme) – for whose grotesque plight Shelley is not
without sympathy – refers to wine as the ‘joy divine’ in Shelley’s translation (PS II: 400, l.
513; MS Shelley e. 4, f. 38r: 29). The drafts of these detached passages and translation of
the last scenes of Cyclops appear contiguously in MS notebook (e. 4). In the Symposium,
Dionysos is presented by Agathon as an adjudicator in matters of Love (Eros).
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In Conclusion
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of the ancient mystery cult which returned the individual to a natural state),
merging the speaker with all love’s exalted celebrants, and breaking any sense of
isolation or reasoned caution. It also signals the ceaseless replenishment of love,
becoming more abundant the more it ‘feeds’ (as with charity in Purgatorio XV or
in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes). Dedication to a god-like pagan figure
(reminiscent of Eros in the speech of Agathon) is continued in the image of an
immaterial presence that has ‘moving wings’ (f. 69v: 15a), ‘soars’ and ‘floats’ and
yet endows or ‘clothes’ nature with perceptible qualities of radiance and beauty (f.
69r: 1–5). It seems both to bestow and receive adoration and, as the last unfinished
lines perhaps suggest, will adorn even the icy winter cold with its presence. This
religion of love and nature that is variously manifested in Shelley’s poetry, and
very notably in Prometheus Unbound in opposition to theism, is extended in the
fourth fragment to the adoration of a lady. Her attraction, sensual and seductive,
is mainly expressed through her brown ‘starry/sphered eyes’ (f. 68v: 1/1a). Like
the love that imbues nature with its presence in the preceding fragment, so an
underlying ‘spirit’ in a flash brings light to dull watery eyes, compared to ‘the dim
orb<s> of the eclipsed moon’ (3). A parallel simile which alludes to the ‘serene
flame’ (6) of Venus links light to love, foreshadowing the Dantean Platonics
of Epipsychidion which coalesce Greek and Italian ideals. Yet the imagery is
ambiguous, and this semblance of the divine lady, Urania Aphrodite, might be
Pandemos – it is impossible to tell.
The two kinds of fragmentary text represented by the Press Copy ‘Athanase: A
Fragment’ and the incomplete holograph draft ‘Pandemos and Urania’/‘Prince
Athanase’, are products whose genesis is the same but whose nature as artefacts
differs, in some ways quite radically. It is important that these two ‘texts’ should
not be confused with one another or conflated. They serve different artistic
purposes and processes. The unresolved paradox of heroic ‘suffering-in-virtue’
generated by the abridged Press Copy version, and presented dialectically, has its
own raison d’être by virtue of its strict framing, segmentation and fictionalization.
Its fragmentary closure preserves its integrity. It is opened up to other possibilities
in the fuller originary rough draft, its source, and brought to a hypothetical, partial
resolution in alternative renderings, neither of which is definitely preferred.
Inevitably an explanation for the paradox, however speculative and uncertain,
weakens the idealist imprint and dialectical thrust of the argument, playing down
if not removing the enigma of unhappiness predicated on virtue and not (as
conventional morality would have it) on vice. Perhaps it is on these grounds that
Shelley chose to – as it were – close off irresolution within the Press Copy version,
thereby re-establishing thematic indeterminacy.
Yet the draft preserves the enigma, as if by authorial instinct or caprice. The
reader of the manuscript (or a transcription of it) is still left in doubt, but this is
occasioned by its incompletion – its unverified claims, and unrealized love-quest.
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That doubt, which Shelley himself entertained, is demonstrated in the step-by-step
unfolding of narrative design reflecting his poetic practice, and may be considered
a signal instance of it. His method is improvisatory, not clear-cut or dogmatic.
Fragmentation points to the provisionality of Shelley’s ideas, and his search for
an adequate embodiment of them – in this or future poems. The abandonment of
the draft as a whole (and not its introductory part) signifies less the collapse of its
ideas than the complicating impediments relating to their fuller articulation and
development – to the form they need take in order to become artistically coherent
and fully intelligible. The extended narrative and four detached passages anticipate
but as yet cannot fully articulate what is to come. In that regard, ‘Prince Athanase’
is superseded by poems such as Prometheus Unbound and ‘Julian and Maddalo’,
both of which were composed gradually and in stages, and later Epipsychidion
(which arose directly out of ‘Fiordispina’). ‘Prince Athanase’, on the other hand,
sketches the Shelleyan blueprint or ‘idealized history’, drawn towards a Platonic
and Dantean intertext, that undergirds later poems – and is functional on its own
terms. Its significance lies in its incompletion, by means of which the unravelling
of the paradox is held in suspension and endlessly deferred, as if closure and
openness were wrestling with each other. Moreover, because it is the generative
source of the Press Copy, it forever exists in relation to its abridgement – indeed
co-exists with it. A dynamic intratextuality constitutes a ‘ground’ which produces
the publishable end-product as an artefact but does not favour or reify it as superior.
Shelley’s work-in-progress is a patchwork composite text or series of texts, certain
at best of its outlines and broader scope but uncertain of its progress, recast several
times, breaking up eventually into smaller disconnected fragments and finally
emerging truncated as a ready-to-be-published fiction, a ‘Fragment’ of a fragment,
which is yet a poem in its own right. Each stage along the way is a noteworthy
event, adding a new perspective, and revealing conjointly a sustained if dispersed
effort to meet the intricate demands of composition, including the brave adoption
of terza rima, and to register the unnameable sorrow that adherence to the ideal –
the good life – inevitably entails.
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Chapter 9
Satyr Play in a Radical Vein:
Shelley’s ‘Cyclops’
Maria Schoina
τὴν τύχην μὲν δαίμον’ ἡγεῑσθαι χρεών,
τὰ δαιμόνων δὲ τῆς τύχης ἐλάσσονα.
(Ευριπίδης, Κύκλωψ, 606–71)
A ‘Peculiar’ Choice?
Co
py
believe
I do
οf force
That chance is a supreme divinity,
For things divine are subject to her power
(Shelley’s translation, f. 68v, ll. 34a–362)
In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature first published in 1809,3 August
Wilhelm Schlegel devotes a long section to ancient Greek drama in which he
examines the major plays of the three tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Euripides. In this comparative analysis, Euripides ranks lower than his tragic
predecessors in terms of ideas, style and craftsmanship, as he lacks their ‘lofty
earnestness of purpose’, or ‘severe artistic wisdom’, and thus, at times, ‘sinks into
downright mediocrity’.4 In this highly influential work Schlegel in fact formulates
what has been called the Damnatio of Euripides;5 yet the critic gives the dramatist
credit for his Cyclops (Κύκλωψ), a little-known contribution to a ‘subordinate
species’6 of tragic art, the satyric drama:
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All Greek quotations from Cyclops are cited from Hourmouziadis’s translation of
the play. See Evripidou Kyklops, trans., intro. and notes Nicos H. Hourmouziadis. Athens:
Stigmi, 2008.
2
Shelley’s draft MS of the translation of Euripides is quoted from BSM III, f. 49v‒58v,
61v‒67r, 37r‒38r, 67v‒68v, 73r, 72v, 73v, 60v‒61r. I will refer to the MS as ‘Cyclops’ and
to both the original Greek play and the 1824 published version as Cyclops.
3
German title, Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur.
4
Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (1815). 2nd ed., rev.
Revd A.J.W. Morrison, M.A. London: George Bell & Sons, 1892, Lecture VIII, p. 111.
Available at: https://archive.org/details/lecturesondrama00blacgoog.
5
Euripides, Alcestis, ed. L.P.E. Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. xl.
6
Schlegel, Lecture V, p. 75.
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In external form it [Cyclops] resembled Tragedy, and the materials were
in like manner mythological. The distinctive mark was a chorus consisting
of satyrs, who accompanied with lively songs, gestures, and movements,
such heroic adventures as were of a more cheerful hue … . As nature, in her
original freedom, appeared to the fancy of the Greeks to teem everywhere with
wonderful productions, they could with propriety people with these sylvan
beings the wild landscapes, remote from polished cities, where the scene was
usually laid, and enliven them with their wild animal frolics. The composition of
demi-god with demi-beast formed an amusing contrast. We have an example in
the Cyclops of the manner in which the poets proceeded in such subjects. It is not
unentertaining, though the subject-matter is for the most part contained in the
Odyssey; only the pranks of Silenus and his band are occasionally a little coarse.
We must confess that, in our eyes, the great merit of this piece is its rarity, being
the only extant specimen of its class which we possess.7
In his attempt to offer a palatable synopsis of the sole surviving specimen of satyr
play to his European audience, Schlegel duly draws attention to the presence of
satyrs as the constitutive element of the genre; perhaps out of delicacy, however,
the German critic chooses to soften and romanticize the satyrs’ innate crudeness
and subversive function in Euripides’s play (‘a little coarse’), portraying them,
instead, as frolicsome ‘sylvan beings’ whose presence registers Greek art’s
organic, harmonious relationship with nature. Schlegel’s reserve and idealization
may have resulted from his mystification or slight embarrassment over a play
which seemed to resist unproblematic categorization in the European dramatic
canon, featuring cannibalism, sodomy, rape, drunkenness, blinding, foul language,
as well as Euripides’s ‘impious’ philosophizing about the gods.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was reading Schlegel’s Lectures8 in March 1818, a
book he owned, referred to and lent to the Gisbornes in June of the same year
while at Livorno.9 Schlegel’s ambivalent account of the satyr play as well as his
denunciation of the dramatist as one who ‘is shaking the ground-works of religion,
[while] he at the same time acts the moralist’10 could be one of the reasons which
prompted Shelley to read Euripides’s work and produce a draft translation of
it in the first year of residence in Italy, that is, between April 1818 and March
1819.11 Originally, Shelley’s choice of this unusual play seems to agree with his
inclination to translate Greek texts which were challenging and/or marginalized:
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7
Schlegel, Lecture X, pp. 142‒3. Four hundred lines of the Ichneutae by Sophocles
have survived.
8
See Letters II: 484. Shelley read Schlegel aloud to Mary and Claire, probably in the
translation by John Black, on their way from Calais to Lyon (MS Journals 198–9 and 198,
n. 3).
9
Letters II: 17, n. 3.
10
Schlegel, Lecture VIII, p. 117.
11
Shelley made his translation of Cyclops from Euripidis Tragoediae Viginti, cum
variis Lectionibus, ex editione Josuae Barnes, vol. V, Oxonii, Typis et sumtu N.B. Bliss,
1811‒1812.
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from the Homeric Hymns, which he translated in January 1818, and again in July
1820, to Plato’s Symposium, translated in July–August 1818, to Cyclops, and to
Ion, translated in 1821 possibly between February and October.12 Shelley engaged
with texts which mirror his fascination with certain aspects of classical Greek
culture ‒ ethical, philosophical, religious, poetical, political ‒ and at the same time
help him reflect on his current preoccupations: his fate as an outcast, his aims and
ambitions as a poet, the contrast between man and God, authority or power, the
dynamic of Necessity, his views on love. Even though Shelley is strangely reticent
in his letters about his work on Cyclops, it is safe to assume that like all foreign
works of literature, the Greek drama would pose a challenge as an exercise in
translation but also as a testing ground for his ideas.
Shelley’s decision to translate Euripides and Plato stood in opposition to the
conventional taste of the day13 and was largely dictated by his dissatisfaction with
established translations as well as his readiness to argue for and expound ‘the
otherness of the Greeks’.14 As he famously stated in the introductory essay to his
translation of Plato’s Symposium, ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient
Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’, his aim was ‘to indicate a system of
reasoning which may enable the reader to form a liberal, consistent, and just
judgment of the peculiarities of [the] domestic manners [of the Greeks]’ since to
this day ‘[i]t is to be lamented that no modern writer has hitherto dared to show
them precisely as they were’.15 Although Shelley’s main concern in this essay is
to compare the different ideas of love among the ancients and the moderns, he
imaginatively ‘shapes his own ethos ‒ and poetics ‒ of love’16 and communicates
his Hellenist-derived views on homosexuality, sexual difference and religious
tolerance. It is evident that Shelley’s grievance also points to the failure of existing
translations to render ‘the frankly sexual and ribald character of some Greek
dramatic writing’17 and to his own intention to correct what was amiss:
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There is no book that shows the Greeks precisely as they were; they seem
all written for children, with the caution that no practice or sentiment, highly
inconsistent with our present manners, should be mentioned, lest those manners
12
For the dating, see James Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of
Platonism and the Poetic Mind. rpt New York: Octagon Books, 1969, pp. 382, 385, 462.
13
Hogg reports that ‘Plato is unfortunately little read, even by scholars, which is
much to be regretted, as he is, perhaps, the most edifying of the Greeks, and his style is so
easy and simple’ (Hogg to Shelley, 15 June 1821, in Shelley and Mary, ed. Lady Shelley. 4
vols. N.p.: Privately Printed, 1882, vol. 1, pp. 640–41).
14
Timothy Webb, ‘Romantic Hellenism’, in The Cambridge Companion to British
Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 148–
76 (p. 154).
15
Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, pp. 413, 407.
16
Michael O’Neill, ‘Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet’, in The
Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009,
pp. 239–55 (p. 241).
17
Everest and Matthews in PS II: 372.
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should receive outrage and violation. But there are many to whom the Greek
language is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded by this prudery to possess
an exact and comprehensive conception of the history of man.18
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Scholars have in recent times proposed more specific reasons behind Shelley’s
attraction to Euripides’s challenging play, arguing against traditional critical
opinion which for many years deemed the poet’s choice as a peculiar one;19 in fact,
a fair amount of evidence seems to suggest that Shelley’s translation of Cyclops
was neither strange nor unintended. Thus Timothy Webb, in his classic study, The
Violet in the Crucible, attributes Shelley’s interest in Euripides to his association
with the so-called ‘Athenian’ group at Marlow,20 that is, Thomas Love Peacock,
Leigh Hunt and Thomas Jefferson Hogg.21 Webb argues that Shelley’s conception
of classical literature ‘as something beautiful and therapeutic’22 rather than as
something pedantic and scholarly was largely cultivated through the influence
of his friends. The choice of a play which naturally subscribes to an Arcadian
image of Greece and is permeated by good humour and light-heartedness seems
less peculiar in such a context, especially at times when Shelley sought spiritual
solace or lacked inspiration.23 According to Webb, however, Cyclops primarily
attracted Shelley’s attention because it dealt with the wider implications posed
by Prometheanism and by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, both of which stood
close to his interest at the time and affected his choice of readings, writings and
translations. Webb also claims that Shelley’s sympathetic response to Polyphemus
has a precedent in the poet’s expressed compassion towards the unhappy monster
in Mary Shelley’s novel.24 Indeed, Shelley’s writing of the Preface to Frankenstein
as well as his involvement in the making of the novel were both excellent
opportunities to advance his own Promethean theory.
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Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, p. 407.
‘[Shelley’s] choice of poems for translation was peculiar; of the Homeric Hymns
he chose the most light-hearted, and from extant Greek drama he selected the only satyric
play’, M.L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700–1830. Cambridge: at the University
Press, 1945; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1986, p. 170.
20
Shelley was resident at Albion House, Marlow, from 18 March 1817 to 7 February
1818.
21
The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976,
p. 62. Webb emphasizes the influence of Hogg, who, in contrast to Schlegel, thought that
the Greek dramatist’s achievement was without equal: ‘The Cyclops & Bacchae are in a
stile of writing, of which there are no traces in the other Tragedians, they are compositions,
which separate their author from his rivals & shew that he was not only the best Tragedian,
but also most powerful in a different & exquisite species of Poetry’ (T.J. Hogg to Shelley, 5
April 1817, qtd. in Webb 57, n. 5).
22
Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, p. 62.
23
Webb, pp. 79, 80.
24
Webb, p. 85. See Robinson’s essay on Frankenstein in the present volume (Chapter
6). See also Mary Shelley’s reference to the monster as ‘Polypheme’ in her letter to Hunt
(MWS Letters I: 91).
18
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As Webb indicates, a major point of attraction for Shelley in Euripides’s play
was the figure of Polyphemus. The poet’s interest and acquaintance with both
classic and modern renderings of the ogre was largely nurtured via his friend
Leigh Hunt before the Shelleys’ departure for Italy.25 Even though it was ultimately
Euripides’s characterization of the Cyclops which most appealed to him,26 the poet
must have been strongly attracted and amused by the intriguing transformation
of the Homeric and Virgilian cannibal into a gentle, enamoured shepherd in
Theocritus’s pastoral world in Idylls 6 and 11, the latter translated by Hunt in
Foliage, which Shelley read in 1818.27 The implications of such a makeover were
several: Theocritus’s love-stricken, grotesque monster humanizes the Cyclops,
and connects with other and later traditions (mainly Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book
XIII [Acis and Galatea] and musical settings by Handel and Porpora28) which
elevate the rustic voice, giving it a poetic resonance. Tellingly, Shelley’s invitation
to the Gisbornes to join him in Naples for the summer of 1819 is humorously
addressed in the words of the heartbroken Cyclops beseeching Galatea to yield
to his love: ‘Ἐξένθοις, Γαλάτεια, καί ἐξενθοῖσα λάθοιο, / ὣσπερ ἐγώ νῦν ὧδε
καθήμενος, οἲκαδ’ἀπενθεῖν’.29
Setting off from completely different premises, Jennifer Wallace in Shelley
and Greece places Shelley’s literary Hellenism within a post-Napoleonic political
frame and reads his translation as a deliberate effort to deal with satyric drama,
a genre which has the potential ‘to interrupt or to disrupt’, offering Shelley ‘the
possibility of disturbing or resisting institutions of power’.30 She also points to
the doubleness and equivocality of the ‘drunken anarchism’ in ‘Cyclops’ which
becomes liberating but also uncontrollable and unruly, a parallel to ‘the dangers
Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, pp. 81–2.
Webb, p. 85.
27
Letters II: 2 (To Leigh Hunt, 22 March 1818). Hunt had also tellingly remarked
in his letter to Mary: ‘Didn’t you go to Sicily while you were in the neighbourhood – the
land of Theocritus and Proserpine and Polyphemus? I do not scruple to put the one-eyed
giant in such company, because he always appears to me a pathetic rather than a monstrous
person, though his disappointed sympathies at last made him cruel. What do you think of
this Polypheme theory of mine?’(9 March 1819, in Shelley and Mary, vol. 1, p. 370).
28
It is important that in February 1818 the Shelleys encountered Polyphemus in a
French ballet based on the story of Acis and Galatea (Webb, Violet in the Crucible, p. 81),
one of numerous adaptations of Handel’s Acis and Galatea (1718), perhaps the greatest
and most popular ‘pastoral opera’ (also described as a serenata, masque or oratorio) ever
composed, with an English libretto by John Gay.
29
‘Come, O Galatea; and having come, forget, as do I, sitting here, to return home’,
Theocritus, Idyll XI; Letters II: 91. Shelley’s letter from Rome to the Gisbornes is dated 6
April 1819 (the translation cited in Letters is Mary Shelley’s, which was provided in Essays
and Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon,
1840, vol. 2, p. 216). My quotation of the Greek corrects errors in Shelley’s rendering
(perhaps quoted off by heart).
30
Shelley and Greece: Rethinking Romantic Hellenism. Houndmills: Macmillan,
1997, p. 71.
25
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of political release … [and] popular revolution’ in Britain in the turbulent postNapoleonic years.31
Even though Wallace perceptively attributes Shelley’s choice of drama to ‘the
political possibilities and questions which Euripides’s text offers the reader’,32 she
provides minimal evidence of these possibilities and questions, and/or of the ways
Shelley emphasizes them. With regard to the translation itself, Wallace states that
through slight yet deliberate alteration of the original Greek, Shelley significantly
politicizes the text and especially ‘the apolitical monstrousness of the Cyclops’
behaviour’.33 In my view, Wallace exaggerates Shelley’s intentions and downplays
the political nuances and dynamics of Euripides’s Cyclops. This imbalance results
from the almost complete absence of the original Greek play from her examination.
Webb, by contrast, provides abundant evidence from Euripides’s play, which helps
him reach several solid conclusions not only on Shelley’s interpretation of the
satyr play, but also on the poet’s perception of the ancient Greek world.
Shelley, Euripides and Satyric Drama
The emphasis on the dynamics of genre duly proposed by both Webb and Wallace
(though in varying degrees) is a key point of departure, and inevitably moves
the spotlight to Euripides’s play rather than exclusively to Shelley’s ambitious
version of it. As I see it, many vital aspects of Shelley’s admittedly accomplished
translation (both textual and semantic) have remained veiled due to the general
absence of critical discussion of his text in the light of the original Greek play ‒
namely, of its models, its meanings, its rhythms. Thus, essential questions have
remained largely unanswered: In what spirit does Shelley read the original? How
does he respond to the poetic genre and draw on it to serve his purposes? How alert
is he to the narrative and lyrical possibilities of the Greek language and how does
he develop the possibilities which he observes in the original? What do his verbal
choices and changes in verse form and imagery indicate about his perception of
the play? In its attempt to address some of these issues, this chapter will re-focus
attention on the text of Euripides’s play and rely on the MS draft of Shelley’s
translation for comparative discussion.34
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Wallace, Shelley and Greece, p. 72.
Wallace, p. 71.
33
Wallace, p. 73. Continuing Wallace’s emphasis, recent explorations of Shelley’s
engagement with Euripides’s play attempt to flesh out further political references in the
text (which they treat independently of the original Greek), accentuating Shelley’s effort to
‘English’ the Greek work by fitting it into the Cockney ‘pleasure’ programme of political
resistance propagated by Leigh Hunt and his circle (Jeffrey C. Robinson, ‘The Translator’,
in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006, pp. 104–22 [pp.116, 106]).
34
The edited draft of Everest and Matthews in PS II: 371–412 (with headnote) is a
valuable source of reference.
31
32
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Satyr Play in a Radical Vein
A reading of Shelley’s version of ‘Cyclops’ in the light of its original reveals
several important facts about the poet’s literary sensibility, historical selfconsciousness, political and religious thinking, and about his attitude towards the
Greek world. Characteristically, Shelley builds on the Greek drama’s incongruities
and ironic inversions, relaying the relativism and double entendres which run
through it and provoke humour. His version shows his deft management of satyric
and comic elements and situations through his original and imaginative recasting
of the play’s abrasive rhythms, exaggerated structures, lascivious innuendos,
sympotic choral songs and ludicrous dialogues. At the same time, however,
Shelley orchestrates the changing tones and nuances of the play, weaving together
the sportive and the serious elements to remarkable effect. As a draft translation
then, Shelley’s ‘Cyclops’ captures in large measure the discordant, even disturbing
tones and evocative ideas of Euripides’s satyr play, such as its serious questioning
of the religious and moral norms of the time; but the reader will also recognize
several themes already apparent in Shelley’s own writings, particularly those ideas
running through Prometheus Unbound. To voice and add verve to these ideas,
Shelley, at times, adapts freely and rewrites aspects of Euripides’s drama, giving
his ‘Cyclops’ a refreshingly radical edge.
While remaining alert to Webb’s and Wallace’s arguments about Shelley’s
attraction to a little-known genre and to a non-canonical ancient Greek play, I
suggest that his choice of the particular text for translation is intimately connected
with his experience of self-exile in Italy; it also bears on his exploration of the
proximity of the comic and the tragic, a possibility afforded by the satyr play.
Furthermore, I argue that Shelley’s turn to Cyclops parallel to the composition of
his Aeschylean lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (which took place between
September 1818 and January 1820) is not accidental, but comes to reinforce the
thematic and stylistic affinity between the two works touched on by scholars,35
consolidating and enlarging the scope of Shelley’s interest in ancient Greek drama.
Shelley’s geographical estrangement from England shaped his perception
of classical tradition in important ways. As Everest and Matthews have argued,
Shelley’s literary projects in the first months abroad in Italy ‘constitute a
continuation and new inflection of the Hellenism cultivated in the Shelley-Peacock
circle at Marlow in the summer of 1817’.36 Indeed, the poet-exile came to regard
Italy as the preserver and mediator of the values that ancient Greece and Rome had
bequeathed to the world.37 Shelley’s expeditions in Naples and the city of Pompeii
in January 1819 added significantly to his vicarious experience of classical Greece,
stimulating ‘an intense act of imaginative interpretation’.38 On the other hand
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Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, pp. 85, 86; G.M. Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice
40
in Shelley’, ELH 24.3 (September 1957), pp. 191–228 (in part reproduced in SPP: 550–68).
41
36
Headnote to Athanase, in PS II: 312.
37
Alan M. Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991, p. 42
43
15. On this issue, see also Wallace, Shelley and Greece, p. 71.
38
44
Webb, ‘Romantic Hellenism’, pp. 148–76 (p. 155).
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though, Shelley would infuse his mind’s Hellenic imaginings with his material
experience of Italy, its evocative physical landscape and its powerful cultural and
literary tradition. As G.M. Matthews suggests, Shelley’s Act II of Prometheus
Unbound is replete with scenic influences from the area surrounding Naples (where
the Shelleys stayed between early December 1818 and February 28, 1819) and
abounds with volcanic and subterranean imagery:39 Shelley had climbed Vesuvius
in December 1818 and was staggered by the sight of the mountain ‘in a slight state
of eruption’.40 Matthews thoughtfully adds that even though Shelley did not visit
Aetna, ‘the mention of Silenus (Prometheus Unbound, II, ii, 90) suggests that Etna
and Sicily were also on his mind’.41 Schlegel’s evocative reference to Silenus in
his Lectures apropos of Euripides’s play supports further this assumption.
The allusion to a bacchic character and to his jocular pastoral pursuits (‘And
thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn’) at this point in Prometheus Unbound
corroborates the view that the visited or imagined scenery in this part of Italy
provided Shelley with ‘a perfect mythological background’42 which could explain
the poet’s attraction to a world of spirits and fauns, but also to one of cyclopses
and satyrs. Both Prometheus Unbound and (the translation of) Euripides’s play
feature volcanic and pastoral imagery,43 a fact which supports their affinity and
brings the composition of Prometheus Unbound closer to the draft translation.
Thus, if ‘Cyclops’ was made in-between the composition of Act I and Acts II and
III of Prometheus Unbound (between October 1818 and March 1819, that is) but
certainly after the visit to volcanic scenery (so, between January and March 1819),
then, in all probability, Shelley’s translation of Cyclops was an additional attempt
to foster his Promethean theory and imagery by way of a satyric reconstruction,
an imaginative expansion, a creative re-casting of the Aeschylean universe and
Prometheus Unbound.44 Unsurprisingly, it was also a welcome release from it. In
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Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, p. 204.
Letters II: 62.
41
Matthews, ‘A Volcano’s Voice in Shelley’, p. 206.
42
Matthews, p. 222.
43
The same landscape, origin of Virgil’s underworld, could well have inspired
the Virgil translations and Shelley’s reading of the episode of the Cyclops in Book 3
of the Aeneid. Modelled on Homer’s Odyssey, Aeneas’s narrative describes his and
Achaemenides’s dramatic escape from the ‘fearsome’ Cyclops and his tribe, and from ‘Etna
thunder[ing] horrific cascades of destruction’ (III, 571). See Virgil, Aeneid, translated with
notes by Frederick Ahl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 71.
44
Τhe date of the translation of Cyclops is a matter of ongoing debate. Shelley’s only
recorded reference to his translation, dated November 1819, is in a letter to Leigh Hunt: ‘I
have only translated the “Cyclops” of Euripides when I could absolutely do nothing else ‒
and the “Symposium” of Plato’ (Letters II: 153). This has led most commentators to believe
that Shelley’s remark would refer to the translation as a fairly recent accomplishment; yet,
they also point out that the translation of Cyclops would have had to take place during a
period when the poet was unable to proceed with his attempts at original composition.
Webb tentatively places the translation after the death of William Shelley, sometime during
the summer of 1819 (The Violet in the Crucible, pp. 79, 85). In the headnote to The Cyclops
40
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Shelley’s mind, the two works seem to be two halves of the same whole, divided yet
inseparable. Indeed, upon closer examination, Prometheus Unbound and Shelley’s
translation of Cyclops reveal intriguing correspondences which complicate their
generic differences. More importantly though, the draft translation exemplifies
Shelley’s highlighting and inventive development of standard elements at work,
such as the inherent incongruities of the satyr play and its tragic affinities.
Shelley’s exploration of and experimentation with genre makes us alert
to Richard Cronin’s claim that the poet ‘attempts in the poems of his maturity
to discover styles and genres that will, in themselves, express his themes’.45 In
other words, for Shelley, the genre does not simply serve the work’s meaning ‒
it is an expression of its meaning. Shelley’s interest in the satyr play is further
documented by his fashioning of Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) as a mixed genre of
satire following Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus.46
But what are the conventions of the satyr play (δράμα σατυρικόν) in the first place
and which aspects of the genre, and of Euripides’s drama in particular, was Shelley
attracted to and why? Normally placed as a coda to the tragic trilogy, satyr plays
have been termed ‘comically grotesque travesties of traditional myths’.47 Cyclops
famously dramatizes and parodies an incident from the Homeric Cyclopeia, the
ninth book of the Odyssey; this is a story the audience of 408 B.C. was most likely
familiar with, since by the time the play was staged the Odyssey had ‘already
passed into the world of μύθος’.48 However, the genre’s primal relationship with
tragedy grants it a serious character too, ‘serious insofar as the plots of satyr plays,
as much as those of tragedy, are constructed out of complications and resolutions
… which, no matter how grotesque and unreal they might seem to the audience,
are capable of causing genuine suffering to the characters caught up in them’.49
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in PS II: 371–2, Matthews and Everest argue against a date between July and October 1819,
one of the most creative periods of Shelley’s career, and propose, instead, June 1818, based
primarily on Shelley’s explicit linking of ‘Cyclops’ to his translation of the Symposium and
also on the position of the draft in the notebook.
45
Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. London: Macmillan, 1981, p. 75.
46
See Timothy Morton, ‘Porcine Poetics: Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant’, in The
Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009,
pp. 279–95 (p. 280). Even though it contains burlesque and grotesque features, Swellfoot,
in my view, is closer to comedy and satire than to the satyr play, given that the latter’s
chorus requires the physical presence of satyrs and has strong affinities with tragedy.
Swellfoot, instead, figures a cacophonous chorus of pigs which is closer to the conventions
of Aristophanic comedy.
47
Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play. Meisenhaim am Glan: Hain, 1980, p. 134.
48
Richard Hunter, Critical Moments in Classical Literature: Studies in the Ancient
View of Literature and its Uses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 59.
49
Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, p. 132. Demetrius’s influential account of the satyric
drama as ‘tragedy at play’ in his treatise On Style reinforces the idea of tragedy and satyr play
as interrelated and mutually informing genres. See W.R. Roberts, ed. and trans., Demetrius
On Style: The Greek Text of Demetrius De Elocutione. Cambridge: at the University Press,
1902. I am grateful to Dr Nikolaos Petsas for his help on this.
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Euripides’s Cyclops, which is believed to have been a parody of Hecuba, conforms
in large part to the formal norms of tragedy: structurally, it consists of a prologue,
parodos, four episodes, each followed by a choral song, the famous agon and an
exodus. In terms of plot, we attend to the sufferings of a hero, though we do not
experience pathos as in tragedy because the grotesque, distorted reality of the
situation ‘precludes a complete suspension of disbelief’.50 The play also touches
upon the tragic themes of justice and punishment, as well as upon the moral issues
surrounding the concepts of nomos (law) and xenia (hospitality) especially through
the figure of the sinful Cyclops and his act of hubris. Significantly, the Cyclops’s
blinding and final destruction also fit a tragic narrative pattern.
Despite what are considered to be a series of violations of artistic conventions
and compositional lapses,51 Euripides’s Cyclops is regarded as reasonably typical
of its genre both in content and execution.52 The deflation of the mythic hero and
debunking of serious motifs, the ironic inversions and non-sequiturs, the voicing
of thoughts that should not be spoken, the vein of pastoral romance, and the sexual
ribaldry are common satyrical elements found in Cyclops which Shelley explores
dynamically in his version. Moreover, the presence of the mischievous, hedonistic
satyrs works to ensure the necessary incongruity in the satyr play, which derives
from the stark juxtaposition of the comic/satyric and the serious/heroic. Such
incongruity, as Dana Sutton argues, is ‘profoundly subversive’ and renders the
self-contained and plausible world of tragedy ‘implausible’.53 Satyric drama, in
other words, acts as the ‘other’ play, one which like a mirror turns its (critical)
gaze upon tragedy, exposing and at the same time allaying its excesses, tensions
and anxieties. In Euripides’s play, internal inconsistency and a distorted reflection
of the heroic allow us to view the serious, composed and law-abiding but devious
Odysseus confronted, counterpoised and to a degree outwitted by the gross and
brutal, yet semi-urbane, Cyclops.
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Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, p. 132.
See Peter D. Arnott, ‘The Overworked Playwright. A Study in Euripides’ Cyclops’.
Greece and Rome 8.2 (October 1961), pp. 164–9, and Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, pp.
102–3. A.E. Haigh, however, claims that Cyclops achieves unity and aesthetic effect despite
its constitutive disjunctions: ‘the gross and brutal Polyphemus, the drunken Silenus, and
the cowardly and licentious satyrs, complete the picture. These discordant elements are
combined with rare skill into a work of harmonious beauty’, The Tragic Drama of the
Greeks. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1896, pp. 316–17.
52
Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, p. 95 and Z. Philip Ambrose, ‘Family Loyalty and
Betrayal in Euripides’ Cyclops and Alcestis: A Recurrent Theme in Satyr Play’, in Satyr
Drama: Tragedy at Play, ed. George W.M. Harrison. Swansea: The Classical Press of
Wales, 2005, pp. 21–38 (p. 21). Shelley was greatly fond of Alcestis which he called a
‘tragedy’ (despite the presence in the play of comic elements). See Letters I: 542.
53
Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, p. 168.
50
51
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But inconsistency does not only concern the satyr play’s relation with its
underlying tragic affinities. As has been argued in recent years,54 the moral matrix
of the play itself is not uncomplicated or unambiguous: Odysseus’s act of trickery
and crafty self-interest, his revenge upon the giant and his hubris near the end, when
he boastfully reveals his own name as he sails away, complicate his superiority
and civilized nature as a human being. On the other hand, the Cyclops’s eloquence
and scepticism together with his forthright, unpretentious and pragmatic claims
destabilize established notions of villainy, civility, ethics, monstrosity, cannibalism
and divinity. This chiasmus/reversibility between the two main characters lies at
the heart of the play, attesting to the complex socio-political operations, moral
shadings and unresolved dilemmas that run through Euripides’s Cyclops. Shelley’s
achievement, in my view, lies primarily in his uncovering, highlighting and at
times creatively heightening the effect of this doubling. One could therefore argue
that the emancipated milieu, subversive potential and interpretative dynamics of
the satyr play, and, above all, their ingenious sunoikisis (alliance) in the Greek play,
offered Shelley a space to experiment with Euripides’s themes, ideas, rhythms and
styles, and to explore the juxtaposition of the heroic and the comic as a proposition
for life. The next section of this chapter will provide examples of Shelley’s acts
of interpretation and identify instances of Shelley’s inventiveness and creative
rewriting of Euripides’s play to accord with his own concerns.
Shelley’s translation of Euripides’s satyr play belongs to the long list of the poet’s
works which were not published during his lifetime. The manuscript of ‘Cyclops’
included in one of Shelley’s notebooks now at the Bodleian library was transcribed
by Mary Shelley after the poet’s death and submitted to Leigh Hunt for corrections.55
Mary Shelley’s repeated appeals to Hunt in her letters of September and October
1823, in preparation of the Posthumous Poems, to send her his corrections for
Shelley’s translation, reveal her anxiety regarding its timely proofreading and
inclusion in the volume. Shelley’s draft translation of Euripides’s play must have
posed a unique challenge to Mary who had to work in a language she did not
know very well and tackle a text whose generic and cultural context she possibly
took largely for granted. Shelley’s manuscript was heavily edited by both Mary
Shelley and her consultants. The corrections aimed not only towards a refinement
of style, language and word choice but also towards a more accurate interpretation
of the Greek. The 1824 version fills in quite a few of Shelley’s omitted words and
lines, yet at the same time omits crude, obscene or indelicate parts of the play
without making clear if the omissions are Shelley’s or the editor’s. As a result, one
cannot really form an educated opinion of Shelley’s genuine translation by looking
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See Hourmouziadis’s introduction to his translation of the play, pp. 9‒26. Also,
David Konstan’s ‘Introduction’ in Euripides Cyclops, trans. Heather McHugh, with
introduction and notes by David Konstan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 3‒19.
55
MWS Letters Ι: 384, 399.
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at the 1824 volume because the extensive interventions and modifications cause
ambiguities and obscure the poet’s conception of the play. By contrast, Shelley’s
version, though only a draft, reveals an energetic, deliberate engagement with the
particularities and subtleties of the satyr play.
The most interesting example of the discrepancy between the MS draft and
the 1824 edition is found in ‘Cyclops’ f. 68r–68v: 61–74, 7–14. In this scene
Odysseus, having conceived his plan to blind the ogre and escape with his men
and the satyrs, makes sure that the Cyclops gets thoroughly drunk. The monster
starts to hallucinate: he sees himself as Zeus, the satyrs become the Graces, and
the wine-pouring Silenus becomes Ganymede, beloved of Zeus.56 Evidently, the
Cyclops ‘intends his κῶμος to end in sex’57 and reveals his homosexuality and
lechery: ‘ἣδομαι δέ πως τοῖς παιδικοῖσι μᾶλλον ἢ τοῖς θήλεσιν’ (somehow I take
more pleasure in boys than in women; ll. 583‒4).58 Silenus calls out ‘ἀπόλωλα,
παῖδες·σχέτλια πείσομαι κακά’ (Oh, I am lost, my sons! Some cruel things are
going to happen to me! l. 587) as the Cyclops drags him into the cave to rape him.
To his master’s chastisement, ‘μέμφῃ τὸν ἐραστήν κἀντρυφᾷς πεπωκότι;’ (Do you
turn down your lover and do you hold in contempt someone who’s drunk? l. 588),
Silenus bitterly protests ‘οἴμοι· πικρότατον οἶνον ὂψομαι τάχα’ (Woe’s me! Soon
I will see a very bitter wine! l. 589), alluding to his violation by the Cyclops as he
is hauled into the cave.
Most words in this episode have obvious sexual resonances. The 1824 edition
(the received version prior to PS II) does not introduce any substantial changes in
the first seven lines but omits the Cyclops’s lewd confession of his homosexuality
without any editorial sign of intervention. It also omits Shelley’s apostrophic
‘O great Polypheme’ to make the style more natural but fails to amend the next
line, ‘I am the Ganymede of Jupiter’, a question in the original Greek text. Not
surprisingly, the rest of the passage is omitted without any explanation. On the
other hand, Shelley’s treatment of this passage, as his manuscript shows, suggests
a number of things about his relationship with the Greek text.
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Ho ho, I can scarce rise ‒ what pure delight
The heavens & earth appear to whirl about
Confusedly … I see the throne of Jove
The holiest clearcongregation of the Gods …
Now of if the Graces tempted me to kiss
I would not. no I swear by their divinities
these
for the loveliest of them
all
56
Ganymede, son of King Dardanus of Troy, was a beautiful boy whom Zeus, in the
form of an eagle, carried off to Olympus to be his cup-bearer.
57
Willeon Slenders, ‘Λέξις ἐρωτική in Euripides’ Cyclops’, in Satyr Drama: Tragedy
at Play, ed. George W.M. Harrison. Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2005, pp.
39‒52 (p. 49).
58
Prose translations in English, given directly after the Greek in parenthesis, are
mine, as here.
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I would not leave this Ganymede. tis strange
Somehow or other I take more delight
In boys than women
Sil
O great Polypheme
I am the Ganymede of Jupiter
Cycl
By Jove you are, I bore you off from Dardanus
Sil
I perish boys, I suffer horribly
CyclChorus
Do you complain of
&
Do you complain, that you arelovedfallen
Into the lap of luxury & delight
Sil
Ah me, I soon shall sleep a bitter sleep (f. 68r–v: 61–74,7–14)
Interestingly, the manuscript shows no material sign of hesitation or intention
to gloss over the notorious lines ‘ἣδομαι δέ πως / τοῖς παιδικοῖσι μᾶλλον ἢ τοῖς
θήλεσιν’, which Shelley translates fluently and unambiguously, representing
liberally the Cyclops’s sexual divergence. The poet therefore seems to implement
his plan as asserted in ‘On the Manners of the Antient Greeks’ to illustrate the
Greeks ‘precisely as they were’ ‒ what Mary Shelley did not do when she edited
the text of ‘Cyclops’ for Posthumous Poems because of her concentrated efforts to
redeem the poet’s reputation.59
Another significant issue in the notorious passage is Shelley’s departures from
the original. Webb has pointed out the poet’s mistranslation of the Cyclops’s
rebuke to Silenus ‘μέμφῃ τὸν ἐραστήν κἀντρυφᾷς πεπωκότι;’ (Do you turn down
your lover and do you hold in contempt someone who’s drunk? l. 588) which
has resulted from his confusion of ἐντρυφᾷς (you mock at) with ἐντρυφαῖς (in
luxury), a mistake which led him, in turn, to confuse πεπωκότι with πεπτωκότι
and translate it as ‘fallen’ instead of the correct ‘drunk’. Though inaccurate, and
wrongly attributed to the chorus of satyrs in Shelley’s translation (it is attributed
to the Cyclops in the original), Shelley’s lines are appropriate to the transgressive
references of the passage;60 at the same time, I think, they are surprisingly comic,
as Silenus is mischievously chided by his children (as he calls the satyrs) for not
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See Susan Wolfson’s ‘Mary Shelley, editor’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary
Shelley, ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 193–210.
60
Webb, The Violet in the Crucible, p. 350. Webb argues that many of Shelley’s
errors in translation resulted from flawed texts, and reveals that the poet’s confusion
and mistranslation at this point is due to his adopting Barnes’s faulty readings which
Shelley used for his ‘Cyclops’. Shelley is thus doubly misled by his edition at this
point. Barnes’s text is available at Hathi Trust Digital Library:catalog.hathitrust.org/
Record/009716076.
59
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giving in to the Cyclops’s ‘lap of luxury & delight’ ‒ a suggestive reference to
the ogre’s lustful appetites. In other words, it seems fitting that the satyrs should
enjoy taunting Silenus for his earlier imprecation ‘οἱ παῖδες ἀπόλοινθ’ (may my
sons be destroyed; l. 269) when he was ingratiating himself with the Cyclops and
swore his loyalty to him (ll. 262‒9). Shelley’s departure from the original is a
creative intervention as it further parodies the parental relationship between old
Silenus and the mischievous satyrs. If, as noted earlier, the comedy of the satyr
play depends on a constant tension between its serious and sportive elements, then
Shelley seems to have grasped this principle well by capturing the spirit of the
juxtapositions and disjunctions which underlie the characters and their language.
Shelley’s apparent mistranslation at this point brings forward his comic and
playful side. Though largely overlooked, Shelley’s humour is strikingly manifest
in various expressions in (for example) ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘The Witch of
Atlas’, Swellfoot the Tyrant, and especially in his translation of Homer’s Hymn to
Hermes (‘Hymn to Mercury’), works notably written within two to three months of
each other in 1820.61 Though more accomplished as a verse translation, Shelley’s
‘Hymn to Mercury’ closely resembles ‘Cyclops’ in that both works derive from
Homeric mythology, recalling a world of pastoral romance and idyllic fancy
inhabited by gods, mortals, and, in the case of ‘Cyclops’, by demi-gods, the satyrs.
Scholars have long pointed out the strong resemblance between satyr play and
pastoral poetry. As Sutton claims, ‘the universes of both genres are … rather similar
in their unreality, so that both calamities and moral shortcomings … acquire an
unwonted tolerability’.62 The whimsical play, trickery and irresponsibility of the
god/daemon Mercury echo the satyrs’ playful world; however, set in the general
context of Euripides’s play, this world is more ribald, unsettling and ambiguous,
especially if one considers the relocation of the epic hero in the company of satyrs.
Shelley’s interest in the representation of rural life in Euripides’s play acquires
more significance if considered together with his concurrent translations from
Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue, the Fourth Georgic, and the earlier translation of several
of the Homeric Hymns. All these poems subscribe to a system of natural religion
with which Shelley sympathized.63
To return to the excerpt from ‘Cyclops’, Shelley also misinterprets Silenus’s
reply ‘πικρότατον οἶνον ὂψομαι τάχα’ (Soon I will see a very bitter wine; l. 589),
producing a totally different sense: ‘I soon shall sleep a bitter sleep’. At this point
Shelley seems to want to downplay the obscene overtones of the phrase and
provides instead a powerfully alliterative line in an effort to poeticize, or distract
attention from Silenus’s outcry. This is not the only case, as there are further
instances of Shelley’s tendency in his translation to tone down or transform the
coarseness of Euripides’s satyr play. Webb cites a powerful passage from the play,
that of the Cyclops’s speech declaring his scorn for Zeus, in order to illustrate
how Shelley copes with the intended bawdiness and abrasiveness of the Cyclops:
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See Webb’s essay in the present volume (Chapter 11).
Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play, p. 194.
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Robinson, ‘The Translator’, p. 116.
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‘when he pours / Rain from above, I have a close pavilion / Under this rock, in
which I lay supine / Feasting on a roast calf, or some wild beast / And drinking
pans of milk, & gloriously / Emulating the thunder of high Heaven’ (f. 63v: 2–7).
By choosing not to render accurately ‘πέπλον / κρούω, Διός βρονταῑσιν εἰς ἔριν
κτυπῶν’(I drum on the sheet, making a din to rival Zeus’s thunder; ll. 327‒8),
which refers to masturbation, but to write instead ‘Emulating the thunder of high
Heaven’, Shelley evades the lascivious resonances of this image and misses,
as Webb argues, ‘the intentional crudity’ of the scene as well as the force this
crudity adds ‘to the Cyclops’ defiance of the Gods’.64 Even though Webb is right
that the transformation of the original weakens the implications of this episode,
Shelley’s rendering seems to rely on the power of suggestion and inference for its
success, rather than on the doubtful effect an admittedly crude scene may have
on the mind of the reader. Hence he rewrites the indecorous lines in a way that
fits his sensibility and general conception of the play. Following on my previous
argument regarding Shelley’s interest in showing up the disjunctions of the
satyr drama, one could further claim that the elevated diction of ‘Emulating the
thunder of high Heaven’ contrasts notoriously with the bawdy, colloquial tone of
the Cyclops’s defiant speech. Shelley builds on the incongruity of the character
by manipulating his language, creating a powerfully ironic effect. By sharpening
the tone of the ogre’s speech through irony, Shelley is giving more weight to the
Cyclops’s protest in a manner that reminds us of Prometheus’s address to Jupiter,
highlighting Euripides’s questioning of divinity.
Everest and Matthews propose that Shelley’s uncertainty over the translation
of sexually evocative passages ‘might be explained in the context of a conscious
effort to strike a balance between fidelity to the original, and a publicly acceptable
English idiom of the early nineteenth century’.65 Since Shelley seems to have
made no effort to publish or revise the draft of ‘Cyclops’, he would not have
been overly concerned to follow established notions of language and taste. But the
issue of fidelity is crucial for a poet who acknowledged ‘the vanity of translation’,
and concerns the ways in which Shelley’s ‘faithful’ or ‘unfaithful’ rendering of
Cyclops conditions the overall thematic and stylistic overtones of his version.
Despite ample evidence of his effort towards accuracy and of his desire to show
the Greeks as they were, there are several instances where Shelley sacrifices
precision for the sake of his personal responsiveness, which he infuses into
several aspects of his translation ‒ as in the case of the passages with indelicate
implications.66 The excerpts discussed above are of note because they register
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The Violet in the Crucible, p. 134.
Headnote to The Cyclops, PS II: 373.
66
When not confident of his rendering, Shelley leaves phrases and lines of the Greek
untranslated probably with a view to revisiting them later. A telling example of this approach
is his omission of the sexually explicit passage of lines 165‒76 of the Greek, a passage
which concerns the ‘sexually stimulating properties of drink’ (Everest and Matthews, PS
II: 385, n. 158). He also mistranslates line 177 about Helen of Troy and downplays the
chorus’s (Silenus’s) abusive comments which follow.
64
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Shelley’s distinctive style as a poet, which is largely responsible for his controlled
and poised renderings of the play’s diction and language. For instance, the use of
the Latinate words ‘supine’, ‘emulating’, ‘impious’, ‘perish’ give the translation
an elevated tone which disguises and transmutes the occasionally lascivious
and colloquial pitch of Euripides’s Cyclops. Accordingly, and following Leigh
Hunt and Mary Shelley’s playful usage, Shelley employs the French version of
Polyphemus’s name in his translation, ‘Polypheme’, to soften the brutal aspect
of the Cyclops and distance him from his purely bestial/cannibalistic role in
Homer and Virgil. These interventions suggest the translator’s desire to increase
sympathy for the Cyclops. However, it is hard to tell if in the end the ogre comes
out as likeable or not because Shelley offers in his version a prismatic view of
the Cyclops and recreates his figure based not only on one but on several literary
models: his ‘Polypheme’ embodies the spirit of the ‘fearless rebel’67 as much as
that of the victimized ogre.
A closer inspection of Shelley’s text of ‘Cyclops’ reveals the poet’s preference
for poetic, even formulaic words. ‘Winged’, ‘hail’, ‘blithe’ and ‘whirl about’, added
wittingly in the course of the text, invest Shelley’s lines with an idealized, poetic
tone, altering the original eclectically, energetically and creatively. A powerful
example of Shelley’s inventiveness is the rendering of the lines of the Greek ‘ἰδού,
λαβών ἒκπιθι καὶ μηδὲν λίπῃς· / συνεκθανεῖν δὲ σπῶντα χρὴ τῷ πώματι’ (There,
take it and drain it off now. The drinker and his wine must end together; ll. 570–71)
which Odysseus drily addresses to the Cyclops as the latter becomes progressively
more intoxicated and delusional. Shelley translates: ‘Take it and drink it off ‒
leave not a dreg ‒ / O that the drinker died with his own draught’ (f. 68r: 52–3a).
The second line of the Greek is a compressed way of saying that the ogre should
drink the whole cup at one draught, even if it renders him unconscious.68 Shelley’s
version is faithful to the intended meaning and comic tone, yet the alliance of
‘drinker’ and ‘draught’ add further effect to the line, suggesting undue drinking
and deep self-concern. The effect of Odysseus’s provocation is thus more pointed
and subtle.
As one would expect, Shelley’s distinctive style and vocabulary enhance and
poeticize the (bucolic chorus) songs of the play. Shelley’s treatment of the lyric
passages appears more concentrated, deliberate and artful than his treatment of the
dialogic parts, which often communicate a kind of impatience on the translator’s
part. In the parodos, for example, we see the shepherd-satyrs enter the scene
singing a little shepherd’s song and driving a few unruly sheep before them.
Shelley’s version with its alternate rhymes and full vowel sounds is more graceful,
fluent and dignified than the original which sounds fairly colloquial and bacchic.69
A case in point is when Shelley adds a line (‘Bright as is their fountain wave’) to
accommodate the rhyme and when, instead of the onomatopoeic idiomatic ‘ψύττ᾿’
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Richard Seaford, ed., Euripides Cyclops. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 208.
69
See f. 51r: 1a–14.
67
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(shoo!) ‒ quite appropriate in the context of a shepherd addressing his animals ‒ he
uses the mild, though awkward, invocation ‘Oh, you come’.
Immediately after, Shelley takes even more liberties with the bacchic cry of
the satyrs who lament their captivity and separation from Dionysus. Omitting the
beginning of the epode to the choral song, however, Shelley misses completely
the intended meaning,70 transforming the nostalgic, even despairing tone of the
passage into a festive one. Here, Shelley seems to be ignoring the original, testing
instead his skills at lyrical composition, probably as a preparation for the choral
songs of Prometheus Unbound (Act II, scenes ii, iii).
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An iacchic melody
To the golden Aphrodite
Will I lift, as thus I fly
Seeking her and her delight
With the Maenads, whose white feet
To the music glance and fleet.71
Shelley’s lyricism contrasts sharply, even shockingly, with those lurid and grotesque
details of his translation which heighten the scenes of panic, cannibalism and
infliction of torture. Shelley juggles skilfully the incongruities of the satyr play,
at times idealizing and at times rendering Euripides’s lines dispassionately, in a
most ‘unpoetical’ manner. A case in point is the brief choral ode sung by the satyrs
watching the killing, cooking and eating of two of Odysseus’s men (ll. 356–74 in
the original), coming right after the two famous speeches of the ἀγών: Odysseus’s
plea for his men and himself to be spared and the Cyclops’s ‘sophistic’ rebuttal.
Shelley takes liberties with the structure of the song, strophe-mesodi-antistrophe,
and by freely reordering the lines literally re-creates the lyric. The densely written
MS with its heavily crossed-out words, rewritings and irregular lineation (f. 64v)
shows Shelley experimenting with the Greek, and suggests the poet’s concerted
effort to convey the rowdy satyrs’ dread and helplessness before the beast’s
cannibalism, as well as the comic goriness of the scene. The final product, an odd
fusion of the lyric and the morbid, is compelling in its vibrant, almost Dionysiac
rhythm, which reinforces the imagery, grotesque effect and attention to gruesome
detail. It is also revealing of Shelley’s attraction to the macabre, a result of his
earlier zest for Gothic terrors.
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………………………………….
The monster<>
He is<> cruel & bold
HisHe drags<>
He murders the strangers
That sit on his hearth
And dreads no avengers
70
See ll. 68–72 in the original Greek text.
f. 51v: 1–15.
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To rise from the earth
He roasts the men before they are cold
And minces their flesh
He snatches them broiling from the firecoal
And from the cauldron pulls them whole
And minces their flesh, & gnaws theirbonesbones
With hiscursed teeth till all be gone
………………………………………
Farewellfoul dread pavilion
Sacri Farewell rites of dread‒.
The Cyclops Vermilion
With slaughter uncloying
Now feasts on the dead
Delighting in strangers’flesh
In the flesh of strangers joying!72
Here and elsewhere in Shelley’s version, the details of consuming (food, wine
or human flesh), as well as the figuration of torture and corporeality are much
expanded, showing the poet experimenting with different styles and tones.
Odysseus comes out of the cave expressing terror and disgust at what he has
witnessed, that is, the Cyclops’s cannibalism, and goes on to describe at length
and in lurid detail ‘[h]orrible things ‒ deeds to be feigned in words / But not to
be believed as being done’ (f. 65r: 3a–4). Shelley seems to suggest that ‘words’
(μύθοις in the original) have such evocative powers that they can far exceed actual
experience, just as in Swellfoot the Tyrant where the ‘intense food imagery …
evokes the density and affective power of language’.73
In similar vein, even though it is not always easy to tell where misinterpretation
ends and deliberate rewriting begins, Shelley’s acts of creative (mis)translation
add subtle layers of meaning to Euripides’s satyr play, lending valuable insight
into Shelley’s complex thought and his painstaking efforts to express it. The poet’s
lifelong and troubled relationship with authority and patriarchy, finding its most
impressive dramatization in Prometheus’s confrontation with Jupiter, is given a
satiric thrust in ‘Cyclops’. Thus, a pivotal point in Shelley’s version is Odysseus’s
quick prayer to Hephaestus and Sleep to aid him to blind the Cyclops and thus
break free from the island. In his invocation, Odysseus sounds matter-of-fact and
sceptical; he offers ‘a challenge to the gods’, demanding to be rewarded for his
‘mortal piety’.74 He thus concludes by saying: ‘καὶ μὴ ̓πὶ καλλὶστοισι Τρωϊκοῖς
πόνοις / αὐτόν τε ναύτας τ’ἀπολέσητ’ Ὀδυσσέα / ὑπ’ἀνδρὸς ᾧ θεῶν οὐδέν ἢ
βροτῶν μέλει. / ἢ τὴν τύχην μὲν δαίμον’ ἡγεῑσθαι χρεών, / τὰ δαιμόνων δὲ τῆς
τύχης ἐλάσσονα’ (After his glorious deeds at Troy, don’t let Odysseus, and his
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f. 64v: 14a–26, 32a–38.
Morton, ‘Porcine Poetics: Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant’, p. 285.
74
Judith Fletcher, ‘Perjury and the Perversion of Language in Euripides’ Cyclops’, in
Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play, ed. George W.M. Harrison. Swansea: The Classical Press of
Wales, 2005, pp. 53–66 (p. 56).
73
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crew be destroyed, by a man who has no care for gods or mortals. Or we will
regard chance as a god and the other gods weaker than chance; ll. 603–7). Given
that the question: ‘do the gods exist?’ is posed often enough in Euripidean theatre,
it is only natural that Shelley would engage more liberally with this aspect of the
play. Indeed, instead of rendering the last two lines as an impersonal/collective
tentative statement of purpose or as a condition, Shelley writes: ‘I of force believe
/ That chance is a supreme divinity / For things divine are subject to her power’
(f. 68v: 34a–36).
Shelley’s compelling intervention is pregnant with implications. First,
Odysseus offers a bold challenge to the gods in his prayer for assistance by
forcefully claiming their weakness before ‘τύχην’. Drawing on both Euripides
and Aeschylus,75 Shelley transposes the two dramatists’ doubts about established
religion as well as the intellectual crisis of their times into the present context
of contemporary Europe. Furthermore, Shelley’s deliberate mistranslation makes
Odysseus not only a more defiant but also a more complex and equivocal character
than he appears in Euripides’s play, as it stresses (and stretches) his self-sufficiency,
self-absorbedness and materialistic perspective and understates the resonance of
his humane and civilized self. In this way, Shelley builds on one of the main ideas
of Euripides’s play ‒ the reversibility of the two main characters ‒ closing even
further the distance between the human and the ogre and firmly positioning them
as each other’s double. As in the original play, much of the humour lies in this
striking reversal of roles. Drawing on the earlier parallelism with Prometheus
Unbound, it is worth mentioning that much the same happens with Prometheus,
who is Jupiter’s double, until the moment the Titan expresses pity for his oppressor
(Prometheus Unbound I, 53) and ceases to hate him. In Cyclops, Euripides seems
to mock at Odysseus who claims superiority before the ogre in his play; Shelley,
coming from a troubled post-revolutionary milieu, questions the idea of humanity
as a transcendental trait granted a priori to individuals, and openly puts to the test
anyone’s pretension to it ‒ humans’, cyclopses’ and satyrs’ alike ‒ heightening
Euripides’s scepticism towards authority of any kind.
What is thus significant and central to Shelley’s response to the Greek play
is that Shelley has Euripides’s characters act more defiantly towards agents of
authority ‒ the gods or their masters. Thus, Shelley has Silenus appear more of
a rebel than he actually is towards the Cyclops. When Odysseus lures Silenus
with wine and finally gets him drunk, the satyr sheds his fear of his master and
becomes contemptuous of him while preparing to get food for Odysseus and his
crew: ‘δράσω τάδ’, ὀλίγον φροντίσας γε δεσποτῶν’ (I will do just that and pay
little heed to my master; l. 163). The line has been rendered in various ways;
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75
Compare Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 507‒18 where Prometheus asserts
that Zeus has less power than ‘The three-shaped Fates and mindful Furies’ who are ‘the
helmsman of Necessity’ Aeschylus, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1926, vol. 1. Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. I am
grateful to Alan Weinberg for bringing this to my attention.
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Green translates rather loosely ‘I’ll risk it, and not care what he can do’ whereas
McHugh76 prefers a more elevated tone, ‘Yes, indeed I will, my master can be
damned’. Shelley’s version, ‘That will I do despising any master’ (f. 55v: 4), is
faithful to Euripides’s use of the plural δεσποτῶν (of masters) but makes a poignant
break from the meaning of ‘ὀλίγον φροντίσας’ (paying little heed to) through the
categorical ‘despising’.
The spirit of defiance against any kind of authority or oppressive power, which
lies at the heart of Prometheus Unbound, also pervades Shelley’s version of the
Cyclops’s speech-retort to Odysseus. For instance, the ogre’s bold pronouncement
‘Ζηνὸς δ’ἐγὼ κεραυνὸν οὐ φρίσσω, ξένε’ (And as for Zeus’s thunder-bolt, I’m
not terrified at that, stranger; l. 320) becomes in the hands of Shelley ‘Stranger
I laugh toscorn Joves thunderbolt’ (f. 63r: 19a–19). At this point in the translation,
Shelley’s disdainful, defiant and totally independent Cyclops rises above
Euripides’s partially domesticated and humanized creature and even higher above
Homer’s unsophisticated beast. In similar vein, Shelley turns his initially faithful
translation of ‘τοῦ Διός τε τὸν θρόνον / λεύσσω τὸ πᾶν τε δαιμόνων ἁγνὸν σέβας’
(I see Zeus’s throne and the whole holy majesty of the gods; ll. 579‒80) into
a rather improbable version by intentionally mistranslating ἁγνὸν (holy):‘ …
I see the throne of Jove / The holiestclear congregation of the Gods … ’ (f. 68r:
63–4). Shelley thinks of the Cyclops’s inebriated confusion and desire for sex as
incompatible with expressions of religious piety ‒ hence he weakens the gravity
of his speech. But the stylistic intervention has wider implications in the context of
Shelley’s subtle politicization of the Cyclops. The ogre’s scorn for and questioning
of the effectiveness of human law and religion brings home Shelley’s distrust for
fabricated systems and institutions which may act as forces of oppression on
human beings.
How close to Prometheus is Shelley’s figure of the Cyclops? Is the Cyclops
a mock-Promethean figure? Shelley does not idealize the monster, nor does
he seek to underplay the Cyclops’s violent and transgressive nature. But since
monsters seem to reveal a lot about the cultures that produce them and imagine
them, Shelley poses the issue of transgression anew. Thus, the poet challenges the
supposed villainy of the ‘impious’ (ἀνόσιον), ‘uncompanionable man’ (ἄμεικτον
ἄνδρα), by capitalizing on less monstrous aspects of the Cyclops stressed in the
play: his cynicism, love of freedom, rebelliousness, self-autonomy, practicality
and the pursuit of pleasure. In this way, the contrast with Odysseus gains
momentum. As mentioned before, Shelley’s ambivalent presentation of Odysseus
accentuates the hero’s boastfulness, self-centredness, false piety and vengefulness.
Consider, for example, Odysseus’s words right after he reveals his true name to
the blinded Cyclops: ‘δώσειν δ’ἒμελλες ἀνοσίου δαιτὸς δίκας’ (you were destined
to be punished for your impious meal; l. 693), which Shelley freely renders ‘I
have taken / A full revenge for your unnatural feast’ (f. 61r: 13–14). Odysseus
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Satyr Play in a Radical Vein
is shown glorying in revenge, setting himself up as the totally autonomous man,
independent of chance or the will of the gods (‘ἒμελλες’). In similar vein, Shelley
transforms Odysseus’s call for comradeship and loyalty to his friends, ‘εἰ θανεῖν
δεῖ, κατθανούμεθ’ εὐγενῶς / ἢ ζῶντες αἶνον τὸν πάρος συσσώσομεν’ (Rather, if
we must die, we will die nobly – or live on and also retain our old reputation; ll.
201‒2), into a mock-heroic self-aggrandizing declaration: ‘‒ if I needs must die,
/ Yet will I die with glory ‒ if I live, / That praise which I have gained shall yet
remain’ (f. 56v: 21–3).
For all these reasons, Shelley’s ‘Cyclops’ attests not only to Shelley’s
exceptional skills as a translator of Greek literature but may be regarded, to an
extent, as an original rewriting of an ancient Greek play. As I have argued, ‘Cyclops’
is a polysemic text which functions successfully on a number of interrelated
levels. Shelley’s translation shows a consistent fidelity to Euripides’s satyr play
while frequently intensifying and transforming the Greek text in a deliberate and
imaginative fashion. Drawing on the rich subtext of Greek drama which ‘allows
for the proximity of the comic and the tragic’,77 Shelley crafts meanings and raises
issues close to his current poetic and political concerns. In ‘Cyclops’, one cannot
miss the resonant notes that the Cyclops and Odysseus strike on account of their
material-mindedness, self-interest, lack of sympathy and conceit, an indication of
Shelley’s anxiety about people’s rising dependency on ‘the selfish and calculating
principle’.78 Moreover, as Wallace rightly indicates, ‘Cyclops’ registers Shelley’s
pressing concern with the proper mode of resistance to oppression and authority
as expressed in Prometheus Unbound. But what is vitally important is that Shelley
manages to infuse all this deep reflection into a sympotic, satyric and parodic
milieu, gracefully navigating through a Cyclopean universe.
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Adrian Poole, ‘Greek Drama’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in 41
English, IV: 1790–1900, eds Peter France and Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford University 42
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Press, 2006, pp. 178–87 (p. 184).
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‘A Defence of Poetry’, in SPP: 531.
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Chapter 10
The Sensitive-Plant and the
Poetry of Irresponsibility
Richard Cronin
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In 1985 Harold Bloom pointed out that The Sensitive-Plant had been all but
ignored by Shelley’s recent critics. Not much has changed since, and this seems at
first glance odd. It was a popular poem among Shelley’s Victorian admirers, and
one of the poems that most successfully resisted the twentieth-century assault on
Shelley’s reputation. Donald Davie thought it, for all its faults, ‘sound and strong’.
In Earl Wasserman’s Shelley: A Critical Reading, the study that did most of all
to re-establish Shelley as a major poet, The Sensitive-Plant is given a privileged
place.1 Wasserman turns to it immediately after the chapter in which he expounds
the ‘intellectual philosophy’ that, in his view, Shelley explores in all his major
poems, because, it seems fair to assume, he believes that Shelley’s philosophy
finds in The Sensitive-Plant its most lucid articulation.
The poem’s narrative, its ‘fable’ as Wasserman terms it, describes how a
garden paradise is destroyed when the ‘Lady’ who tends it dies, but the poem ends
with a ‘Conclusion’ in which we are invited to entertain the possibility that the
destruction of the garden and the death of the Lady might be illusions. The garden
and the Lady, it may be, survive, because ‘For love, and beauty, and delight / There
is no death nor change’ (Conclusion, ll. 21–2).2 Wasserman sets himself to show
that the poem’s conclusion does not contradict its fable, but was implicit in it from
the first. The poem’s central metaphor compares flowers with stars. The loveliness
that is embodied in the flowers remains visible at night when it manifests itself
as the starry sky. The metaphor is crucial because it quietly intimates Shelley’s
‘modest creed’, that the mortal world of existence in which the flowers have their
place may simply be the form in which our limited and fallible senses permit us to
experience the immutable realm that Shelley consistently associated with the stars.
My summary does scant justice to the intricacy and the scrupulousness of
Wasserman’s reading, but it at least suggests its distance from criticism of the
kind that has dominated Shelley studies in recent decades. The historicist turn
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1
Modern Critical Views: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1985, p. 18; Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1952, pp. 153–4; Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading.
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971, pp. 154–79.
2
The Sensitive-Plant is quoted from PS III. The poem’s sections are separately
lineated.
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evident in so much criticism since Wasserman seems to have brought with it a
turn against The Sensitive-Plant. It need not have been so, since gardens and their
upkeep have traditionally been used to figure the state of the nation. Richard II
has its ‘Garden Scene’, and for Hamlet the state of Denmark is ‘an unweeded
garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely’
(I, ii, 135–7). Shelley recalls that tradition in Queen Mab when he suggests that if
only the world could be rid of ‘kings and priests and statesmen’ it would become a
garden ‘Surpassing fabled Eden’ (IV, 89). He recalls it too in the manuscript draft
of The Sensitive-Plant when the garden is described as a ‘Republic of odours and
beams’.3 For Alan Bewell the tradition offers the key to an understanding of the
whole poem: the diseases that infect the garden figure the calamitous effects of
reactionary government.4 But the interest of Shelley’s recent critics has been less
engaged by utopian or dystopian visions than by textual traces of more immediate
political and historical realities. Nora Crook and Derek Guiton did suggest in 1986
that The Sensitive-Plant had its origin in a depression brought on by news of the
Cato Street Conspiracy, but they did not develop the thought, and it has not been
taken up.5 More recently critics have not found it appropriate to bring the poem
into any very close relationship with England in 1820, and that is surely one reason
for its neglect. But there have been signs in recent years that critical fashions
are changing. Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges, Angela Leighton’s On Form,
and recent books by Michael O’Neill all suggest a renewed interest in the formal
character of poetry, and that is the kind of interest that The Sensitive-Plant seems
more likely to repay.6 Wasserman ends his analysis of the poem by acknowledging
its ‘tetrameter quatrains’, ‘the frequency of the skimming anapaests’ and ‘the filigree
quality of the descriptions’, but for him such features work only in conjunction
with ‘the seeming triviality of the flower fable’ to save the poem from becoming
‘too solemn and philosophically ponderous’. The poem’s formal characteristics
establish its tone but do not contribute to its meaning. It may be worthwhile to
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Goslee, BSM XVIII: 181. Stephanie Dumke convincingly argues that Shelley’s
phrase echoes a phrase of Calderón’s. See ‘The Influence of Calderón and Goethe on
Shelley in the Context of A. W. Schlegel’s Conception of Romantic Drama’, unpublished
PhD thesis, Durham University, 2013.
4
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999, pp. 209–19.
5
Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986, p. 204.
6
Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997; Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry,
Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; Michael
O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, and
The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish
Poetry since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. O’Neill has also published a
fine reading of The Sensitive-Plant. See ‘The Sensitive-Plant’, Cambridge Quarterly 25.2
(1996), pp. 103–23.
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
invert Wasserman’s procedure and begin not with the poem’s meaning but with
the skimming anapaests and the quatrains, and, to borrow Wasserman’s words
again, with the ‘thicket of baroque decorations’ that allows Shelley’s simple fable
to spread through more than 300 lines.
The ascendancy of free verse seems to have fostered a low tolerance for
anapaests even in readers prepared to relish iambs, trochees, even dactyls.
When Ezra Pound makes the point that in a poem the ‘rhythm, cadence, and the
arrangement of sounds’ must be in keeping with the sense, he pauses to castigate
The Sensitive-Plant:
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When you have words of a lament set to the rhythm and tempo of There’ll be a
Hot Time in the Old Town to-night you have either an intentional burlesque or
you have rotten art. Shelley’s ‘Sensitive Plant’ is one of the rottenest poems ever
written, at least one of the worst ascribable to a recognized author. It jiggles to
the same tune as ‘A little peach in the orchard grew.’ Yet Shelley recovered and
wrote the fifth act of the Cenci.7
Eugene Field’s ‘The Little Peach’ seems to be offered as an intentional burlesque,
and The Sensitive-Plant as bad art, but the poems are surely not similar enough
to warrant the comparison. The ‘jiggle’ of The Sensitive-Plant is for one thing far
more various. Its tetrameter line may be made up of four anapaests, ‘And the Earth
was all rest, and the Air was all love’ (Part First, l. 99), or of four iambs (given
that ‘plumed’ is allowed two syllables), ‘The plumed insects swift and free’ (Part
First, l. 83), but most of the lines mix anapaests and iambs and over the course
of the poem do so in all possible combinations. The metre is designed, I take it,
to replicate for the ear the discordia concors that the garden exemplifies in its
planting. A particular metrical effect will sometimes catch the reader’s attention,
but it is in much the same way that a single plant might fix the gaze of someone
wandering through a garden. When, for example, on the stream’s ‘inconstant
bosom’, ‘Broad water-lilies lay tremulously’ (Part First, l. 45), the tremulousness
is metrically reproduced so exquisitely that most readers will be persuaded to
pause, and, it may be, rehearse the line again.
The poem’s metre is as gaudy as the garden flowers, and so is its syntax,
although the first stanza seems chaste enough:
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201
A sensitive-plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light
And closed them beneath the kisses of night. (Part First, ll. 1–4)
When the plant closes its leaves at night, the stanza closes in sympathy. The
paratactic syntax is arrested, but only momentarily. The next stanza begins, ‘And
The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. (with introduction) T.S. Eliot. London:
Faber and Faber, 1954, p. 31. Pound is of course mistaken to imagine that the composition
of The Cenci post-dated The Sensitive-Plant.
7
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the Spring arose on the garden fair’ (l. 5). It is a syntax (Part First of the poem has
114 lines of which 25 begin with the word ‘And’) that allows the sensitive plant
to be crowded out by all the other flowers in the garden. The third quatrain seems
to begin a story:
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field, or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want
As the companionless Sensitive-plant (Part First, ll. 9–12)
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But the narrative is at once suspended, overtaken by description, as the other
flowers of the garden are described one after another in a sequence that extends
for almost 60 lines.
The primacy of the sensitive plant is established by its early introduction, by
its ‘companionless’ solitude, and by its richly figurative trappings, panting like an
over-heated doe with love’s sweet want. But its distinctiveness is challenged when
so many of the other flowers are figured just as richly. The hyacinth, for example:
And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue,
Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew
Of music so delicate, soft and intense,
It was felt like an odour within the sense. (Part First, ll. 25–8)
The colours, because hyacinth flowers are bell-shaped (in de la Mare’s ‘Alone’, the
‘wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell’), combine to form a peal. The plant is dissolved
into music, its appeal to the eye figured as an appeal to the ear, but when the peal
of bells is ‘felt like an odour’, the plant recovers its vegetable self. The stanza is
curiously elaborated, ‘quaint and affected’ according to the Quarterly reviewer,8 in
a way that seems scarcely in keeping with the scant role that the hyacinth plays in
a poem in which this is its only appearance. The trembling, panting sensitive plant,
unlike the hyacinth, is eroticized, but no more extravagantly than the rose:
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And the rose like a nymph to the bath addresst,
Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast,
Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air
The soul of her beauty and love lay bare. (Part First, ll. 29–32)
8
The reviewer, William Sidney Walker, describes how the stanza works rather
precisely: ‘The bells of the flower occur to the poet’s mind; but ought not bells to ring a
peal? Accordingly, by a metamorphosis of the odour, the bells of the hyacinth are supposed
to do so: the fragrance of the flower is first converted into a peal of music, and then the
peal of music is in the last line transformed back into an odour.’ This is well observed, but
for the reviewer it serves only to expose Shelley as ‘a mere poetical harlequin’. Review of
‘Prometheus Unbound, a Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts; with Other Poems. By Percy Bysshe
Shelley. 8vo. 1821’. Quarterly Review 26 (October 1821), pp. 168–80 (p. 175).
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The rose’s strip-tease attracts attention, but so does the pun by which undressing
becomes addressing (in the manuscript the rose is ‘like a lady half drest’).9 The
result of all this is that the sensitive plant risks being supplanted by all the other
garden flowers.
The sensitive plant or mimosa is commonly distinguished by the capacity
that gives it its name: its leaves close when touched, when darkness falls, and
in response to changes of temperature, and this made it a natural anomaly, a
living form that unsettled the distinction between vegetable and animal.10 But
many of the other plants are described in a manner that threatens the sensitive
plant’s uniqueness. The description of the narcissi, who ‘gaze on their eyes in the
stream’s recess / Till they die of their own dear loveliness’ (ll. 19–20), recalls the
Greek youth who died because he was unable to tear himself away from his own
reflection, a self-absorption for which he was punished by being transformed into
the flower. The hyacinth, too, was produced by metamorphosis: it grew from the
blood of a youth loved by Apollo. But even flowers to which no such stories are
attached are humanized. The rose is like a nymph, the lily of the valley is ‘Naiadlike’ (l. 19) and the lily is like ‘a Maenad’ (l. 34). It is a garden, like the ‘Garden
of Live Flowers’ in Through the Looking-Glass or Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves
of the Plants, in which all the plants, not just the mimosa, are represented in a way
that undoes the distinction between different orders of being.
Shelley signals the hyper-fertility in the garden in the number and variety
of its plants, and still more emphatically in his syntax. The poem is written in
quatrains formed from two couplets, as if the couplets, like the garden plants,
refused restraint,11 and very soon the sentences begin to outgrow their quatrains,
as they sprout subordinate clauses, and figures propagate supplementary figures:
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203
And on the stream whose inconstant bosom
Was prankt under boughs of embowering blossom
With golden and green light, slanting through
Their Heaven of many a tangled hue
Broad water lilies lay tremulously … (Part First, ll. 41–5)
The subject and verb demanded by the first phrase of one stanza are not supplied
until the first line of the next. The effect is still more extravagant when flowers,
9
BSM XVIII: 165.
See Robert M. Maniquis, ‘The Puzzling Mimosa: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in
Romanticism’. Studies in Romanticism 8.3 (1969), pp. 129–55, and Donovan’s headnote to
the poem in the Longman edition.
11
Alan Weinberg suggests that the stanza may be Shelley’s version of the Spanish
redondilla, a telling suggestion since Shelley read Spanish poetry enthusiastically from the
summer of 1819, assisted by Maria Gisborne and Charles Clairmont, although the redondilla
is trochaic rather than anapaestic, and uses quatrains rhyming abba more commonly than
quatrains rhyming aabb.
10
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introduced in the second line of one stanza, do not find space to shine until the
third line of the next:
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers, as an infant’s awakening eyes
Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it,
When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven; and every one
Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun … (Part First, ll. 58–65)
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A mother and a child, and a Davy lamp (an obtrusively topical reference, since
Davy only developed his lamp in 1815) come between the subject and its verb, and
even after this stanza the sentence continues:
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed
Like young lovers, whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere. (Part First, ll. 66–9)
The stanza does not just exemplify the poem’s characteristic syntax, it seeks to
explain it. The stanzas do not remain separate from their neighbours any more
than the flowers do. Stanzas and plants are both allowed to ‘interpenetrate’. The
tendency culminates in the final quatrains of ‘Part First’. A sentence begins in line
98 (though it begins with a conjunction), ‘And when evening descended from
Heaven above’, and ends only with the first section of the poem in line 114, ‘Cradled
within the embrace of night’, after a succession of clauses so convoluted as to have
exercised Shelley’s editors. Reiman and Fraistat interrupt it by introducing full
stops at the ends of lines 105 and 109; Donovan substitutes a semi-colon for the
first stop but preserves the second; Leader and O’Neill do the same, but shore up
the sentence’s grammar by placing the stop inside rather than outside the bracket.
The stops may be ungrammatical but they are well-meant: they offer pauses that
spare readers the dizzying bewilderment to which Timothy Webb in his Everyman
edition alone of modern editors subjects them.12 The variety of editorial solutions
signals a shared recognition that the poem employs a syntax designed at once to
underline and to organize the exuberance of the garden’s growth. On the page
the poem remains neatly marshalled into its four-line stanzas, and those stanzas
retain just enough independence one from another to reassure the reader that this
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See SPP: 289; PS III: 303; Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill, eds, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics),
2003, pp. 453–4; Timothy Webb, ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose. London:
J.M. Dent (Everyman), 1995, p. 195.
12
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
is a cultivated garden rather than a wilderness, but its order is only precariously
maintained.
‘Part Second’ begins by introducing into the garden its Eve, the woman
charged with tending the garden ‘from morn to even’ (l. 9). She is needed because
Shelley’s Eden has become so overgrown, its plants, like its syntax, in urgent
need of restraint, but her presence in itself compromises the garden’s perfection.
Spenser’s Garden of Adonis has no need of any gardener:
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Ne needs there Gardiner to set, or sow,
To plant or prune: for of their owne accord
All things, as they created were, doe grow,
And yet remember well the mightie word,
Which first was spoken by th’Almightie lord,
That bad them to increase and multiply:
Ne doe they need with water of the ford,
Or of the clouds to moysten their roots dry;
For in themselues eternall moisture they imply.
(The Faerie Queene III, vi, 302–10)
The plants in Shelley’s garden cannot so securely be left to their own devices. They
are, for example, reliant on the lady to sprinkle ‘bright water from the stream / On
those that were faint with the sunny beam’ (Part Second, ll. 32–3). The garden, as
Shelley suggests when he compares the Lady with Eve, more closely resembles
Milton’s Eden, except that Milton’s Eve, even before the Fall, acknowledges that
her gardening, once a recreation, is becoming a chore:
Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour,
Our pleasant task enjoyn’d, but till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint, what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wilde. (Paradise Lost IX, 205–12)
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Shelley’s garden shares the tendency to wildness, as his syntax and figures reveal
even more clearly than the vegetation, but his Lady, unlike Eve, seems not to
exercise a disciplinary function. Significantly, she does no pruning. Eve comes to
her task from her nuptial bed, and yet still seems disconcerted by the wantonness of
Eden’s vegetation. She and Adam discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate
sexuality, assisting the vine in its marital embrace of the elm, but checking the fruit
trees when their sexual play threatens to become an end in itself, disconnected
from the duty to procreate:
where any row
Of Fruit-trees overwoodie reachd too farr
Thir pamperd boughes, and needed hands to check
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Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine
To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines
Her mariageable arms, and with her brings
Her dowr th’ adopted Clusters, to adorn
His barren leaves. (Paradise Lost V, 212–19)
Shelley’s Lady by contrast gardens ‘from morn to even’, never awakening in all
that time from her erotic daze. It seems as if she were all the while accompanied
by the Spirit who comes to her dreams at night (or seems to) and may linger about
her all day, as unseen in the daylight as the stars in the sky:
Co
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She had no companions of mortal race
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake
As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the veil of daylight concealed him from her. (Part Second, ll. 13–20)
The poem invites the reader to imagine the Spirit visiting the Lady’s dreams as
Satan visits Eve’s. Both women carry the dream into their waking hours, and the
Spirit, like Satan, has ‘deserted heaven’, but Shelley’s is a ‘bright Spirit’ whereas
the ‘lustre’ of Milton’s Satan is ‘visibly impar’d’ (Paradise Lost IV, 850). The two
visitations seem related only by difference.
Eve stands apart from the plants that she tends, whereas Shelley’s Lady is
almost a plant herself, ‘Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean’ (Part
Second, l. 8). She is herself flower-like but like a flower that inhabits a different
element. Nevertheless, the ministrations of the Lady, just as much as Eve’s lopping
and pruning, remain paradoxical. Remedial work can secure the perfection of the
garden only by compromising it, because a perfect garden would need no gardener.
The Lady would be able to complete her task, and render the garden truly perfect,
only if she could somehow contrive to erase the marks of her own presence, which
is what, in one stanza, she succeeds in doing:
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And wherever her aery footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep
Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep. (Part Second, ll. 25–8)
But the paradox, as the phrase ‘sunny storm’ intimates, cannot be so easily evaded.
This garden is an Eden that may become too dry and need watering. The Lady
must intervene again if the rainfall is too heavy:
And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers. (Part Second, ll. 35–6)
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
Like Milton’s Eve, ‘our general Mother’ (Paradise Lost IV, 492), Shelley’s Lady
is maternal even though she seems to be childless:
If the flowers had been her own infants she
Could never have nursed them more tenderly. (Part Second, ll. 39–40)
But she finds that her tenderness to the flowers demands that she practise cruelty
to other living things. She may, unlike Eve, avoid pruning, but she remains an
embarrassed exponent of pest control:
And all killing insects and gnawing worms
And things of obscene and unlovely forms
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,
Co
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In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent. (Part Second, ll. 41–8)
Jack Donovan compares her with Mrs Mason in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original
Stories from Real Life, who counsels her young charges in the duty of compassion
by recommending her own considerate practice: ‘If some insects are to be
destroyed, to preserve my garden from desolation, I have it done in the quickest
way.’13 Shelley’s Lady refrains even from humane pesticide, but in another way
she is still more rigorous than Mrs Mason. Mrs Mason asks her pupils not to allow
their behaviour to be governed by merely aesthetic preferences: ‘would you dare
kill it, merely because it appears [to you] ugly?’ Shelley’s Lady banishes from the
garden the creatures that threaten the welfare of the plants, but she also banishes
those that compromise the garden’s beauty by their ‘obscene and unlovely’
appearance. She takes care that they are softly couched on the journey, but she
exiles them to the ‘rough woods’ all the same. The bee, the mayfly, the moths
and the chrysalises are spared, and more than spared: the Lady appoints them
her ‘attendant angels’. But this serves only to show that the Lady’s justice is as
arbitrary as God’s: her garden is an Eden in which innocence itself is no protection
for ‘unlovely forms’.
And neither, it emerges, rather shockingly, is it any protection for the Lady
herself:
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This fairest creature from the earliest spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
All the sweet season of summertide,
And ere the first leaf looked brown – she died! (Part Second, ll. 57–60)
13
The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler. 7 vols.
London: Pickering, 1989, vol. 4, p. 368.
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The dash and the exclamation mark register the jolt, but the metre is scarcely
perturbed. The death is so shocking because of the garden’s equivocal status. It
is subject to time: its flowers arise from their dreams only when they feel that
Spring has arrived, and at night they close their petals, the sensitive plant retiring
to rest earliest of them all. But there are also suggestions that in the garden the
operation of time is suspended. Some flowers seem to bloom in succession, first
the snow-drop and the violet, but the hyacinth, the rose and the late-flowering
tuberose bloom all at once:
And all rare blossoms from every clime
Grew in that garden in perfect prime. (Part First, ll. 39–40)
Co
py
But it is the equivocal status of the Lady herself that clinches the surprise of her
sudden death. Part Second opens with a quatrain so smooth that it is hard not to
overlook its radical inconsistency:
There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream
Was as God is to the starry scheme. (Part Second, ll. 1–4)
Milton’s Eve may prop the flowers, but when she strays from her own ‘best prop’
(Paradise Lost IX, 433), her husband Adam, she finds that she lacks the strength
to withstand Satan’s blandishments. She falls, and in falling brings death upon
herself. Insofar as she is Eve-like the Lady is mortal, but she is also ‘as God is to
the starry scheme’, and God is able to sustain the order of the universe precisely
because he transcends it, and one crucial aspect of that transcendence is that he is
not subject to time.
In Part Third the Lady changes character yet again. The garden maintains
its beauty for three days, but on the fourth the Lady’s funeral procession passes
through it, the coffin followed by a ‘crowd’ of mourners. She had seemed the
garden’s tutelary spirit, akin to Persephone, but she is revealed now as a wellrespected member of a community. She changes in other ways, too. She had been
the ‘soul’ of the garden (Part Third, l. 18), but in death she becomes emphatically,
even grossly corporeal. The poem notices ‘the smell, cold, oppressive and dank,
/ Sent through the pores of the coffin plank’ (Part Third, ll. 11–12). In a ghastly
symmetry the stink of putrefaction replaces the scent of summer flowers, ‘the
jessamine faint, and the sweet tuberose, / The sweetest flower for scent that blows’
(Part First, ll. 37–8). The decaying corpse that ‘slowly changed, till it grew a heap
/ To make men tremble who never weep’ (Part Third, ll. 20–21) counters the heady
eroticism of the summer garden. The body’s decay inverts the plants’ growth, and
yet in another sense the garden and the corpse act each as the other’s grotesque
reflection. Both are insistently fleshly, and the one arouses a desire as excessive
as the disgust prompted by the other. The flowers had entered into a sympathetic
communion with the Lady when she lived:
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers through all their frame. (Part Second, ll. 31–2)
The sympathetic bond persists when she dies:
The garden once fair became cold and foul
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul. (Part Third, ll. 17–18)
Co
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As summer fades into autumn the plants begin to rot in sympathy with the rotting
corpse. But the garden in decay of Part Third closely parallels the ‘garden fair’ of
Part First.
The metrical delicacy, for example, persists. As the flowers shed their leaves,
the garden dwindles, a process noted in a line that itself has shrunk to a mere seven
syllables, ‘Leaf after leaf, day by day’ (Part Third, l. 32). The stream that flows
through the garden becomes choked with vegetation, a calamity at once marked
and mimicked in a line in which the metrical flow is impeded by a superfluity of
stressed syllables:
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water snakes. (Part Third, ll. 72–3)
The ‘running’ tetrameter rhythm of the poem becomes suddenly ‘thick and dumb’
(Part Third, l. 71). The paratactic syntax of Part First reappears (26 of the 115 lines
of Part Third begin ‘And’), and proves to be as appropriate to the propagation of
weeds as to flowers:
Between the time of the wind and the snow
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.
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209
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
And the dock, and henbane, and hemlock dank,
Stretched out its long and hollow shank
And stifled the air, till the dead wind stank.
And plants at whose name the verse feels loath,
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics and fungi with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy, – as if the decaying dead
With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Their mass rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake,
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Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high,
Infecting the winds that wander by. (Part Third, ll. 50–69)
Co
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Shelley’s recent editors have restored the last of these stanzas, which was included
when the poem was first published in 182014 but omitted by Mary Shelley in 1839.15
She was deterred from including it, I suspect, not so much by the thought as by the
gusto with which it is expressed. Nora Crook and Derek Guiton astutely suggest
that the name Shelley is ‘loath’ to include in verse is the common stinkhorn,
which emits a foul stench like carrion, and has an obscenely phallic shape. The
stinkhorn’s Latin name, phallus impudicus, makes it the precise counterpart of
the sensitive plant, the mimosa pudica.16 But, despite his protestations, Shelley
seems to take as much relish in incorporating into his verse loathsome fungi as he
had in cataloguing the garden’s flowers. In both cases the verse pays tribute to the
rankness of the garden’s growth by cultivating an extreme metaphorical vitality.
The stink of the weeds reverses the scent of the flowers, but also corresponds with
it. Winter is personified with unusual vigour, wielding the wind as his whip. With
his choppy finger on his lip, he rehearses the attitude of the witches in Macbeth.
The frozen cataracts clank at his girdle ‘like manacles’. Winter is the counterpart of
the Lady, his presence as assertive as hers is self-effacing. He is the anti-gardener
whose task it is to drive underground all plants, even the weeds that have taken
over the garden, but he is in himself supplanted, when winter gives way to spring.
The Sensitive-Plant has a teasing relationship with a poem written a few
months earlier, and printed in the volume of 1820 a few pages later, Ode to the
West Wind.17 When autumn comes to the garden, the wind strips the vegetation:
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,
And white, with the whiteness of what is dead,
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past –
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast. (Part Third, ll. 34–7)
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The echo of the Ode, in which the ‘leaves dead / Are driven, like ghosts from an
enchanter fleeing, / Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red’, seems pointed,
especially when in both poems the wind blows ‘the winged seeds’ to beds that
seem like graves. The Ode ends when the withered leaves, which are also the
poet’s pages, are invited to ‘quicken a new birth’. The Sensitive-Plant, too, ends
when the dead come back to life:
14
In Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems.
London: C. and J. Ollier, 1820.
15
The stanza is scored out in Mary Shelley’s fair copy of the poem, it may be with
Shelley’s authority. In 1820 and in Mary Shelley’s transcript, it is ‘moss’ rather than ‘mass’
that falls from the fungi. Donovan (unwisely?) emends to ‘mass’ on the authority of the
draft manuscript.
16
Crook and Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody, p. 205.
17
This relationship is discussed in some detail by Timothy Webb. See Shelley: A
Voice Not Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977, p. 238.
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
When winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. (Part Third, ll. 114–17)
Co
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The coming of winter, here as in the Ode, is the sign that Spring cannot be far
behind, but Spring in this poem offers only a grotesque parody of resurrection.
The mimosa cannot revive for good botanical reasons, because it cannot survive
the winter in temperate climates. Only ‘loathliest weeds’ respond to the coming
of spring, and they do not undergo a new birth but sprout from the ground like
vampires rising from their tombs.
The Sensitive-Plant may seem a sardonic retort to ‘Ode to the West Wind’, but
in the ‘Conclusion’ Shelley reverses the poem’s apparent import. In the closing
speech of Prometheus Unbound, which immediately precedes The Sensitive-Plant
in the 1820 volume, Demogorgon urges all who hear him ‘to hope, till Hope
creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates’ (IV, 573–4). The SensitivePlant ends similarly, with an invitation to consider the possibility that the garden’s
wreck may have been all an illusion, and that ‘For love, and beauty, and delight /
There is no death nor change’ (Conclusion, ll. 21–2):
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest a mockery. (Conclusion, ll. 13–16)
But there seems the world of difference between Demogorgon’s insistence on the
duty of hope and the ‘modest’ suggestion that in a world in which all experience
amounts to no more than a mockery, death might just be one mockery the more.
For Wasserman the Conclusion makes explicit a thought that has been implicit
throughout the poem, a thought figured most compactly in ‘an apparently casual
image’ to which a rather weighty ‘symbolic meaning’ is attached. The Lady is
careful not to disturb the chrysalises when she comes across them:
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And many an antenatal tomb
Where butterflies dream of the life to come
She left clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous cedar bark. (Part Second, ll. 53–6)
It is not just that the death that the caterpillars seem to suffer will be exposed
as a mockery when the butterfly emerges. Inside the chrysalis the butterfly is
already perfectly formed, because the butterfly is the psyche or soul, and the soul,
as well as being immortal, is what constitutes the true identity of each one of
us, though it may well be an identity that in mortal life is disguised. But is it as
easy as Wasserman suggests to distinguish between the image of the chrysalis,
which is only ‘apparently casual’, and all the poem’s other images? For example,
as well as the chrysalis there is the mayfly, ‘the beam-like ephemeris’, which is
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introduced in the preceding stanza. Like the butterfly it is released from its naiad
state and soars into the air, but its flight lasts only hours: its immortality proves
disappointingly short-lived. The butterfly may figure human immortality, but the
mayfly commonly figures human transience, and the poem with a fine impartiality
finds room for both.
Only one other quatrain in the poem has attracted as much critical attention
as the quatrain that sets out the ‘modest creed’ – the lines that echo Diotima’s
analysis of love in Plato’s Symposium:
For the Sensitive-Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower –
It loves – even like Love – its deep heart is full –
It desires what it has not – the beautiful! (Part First, ll. 74–7)
Co
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Because it is scentless and has no ‘bright flower’, the sensitive plant is excluded
from the mutuality that defines the experience of all the other flowers of the garden:
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed
Like young lovers, whom youth and love make dear,
Wrapt and filled by their mutual atmosphere. (Part First, ll. 66–9)
For these blooms the difference between self and other lapses. They are like young
lovers whose love of their own youth and beauty is indistinguishable from their love
of the youth and beauty of the objects of their love. Theirs is a perfectly fulfilled
love, which is, from the sensitive plant’s point of view, a contradiction in terms.
Love, as the sensitive plant understands it, is the desire for what is not possessed.
The mimosa is an exponent of the aesthetics of lack that Shelley rehearses in
poem after poem, as, for example, in the lyrics to Jane Williams, whom Shelley
came to associate with the Lady of this poem.18 Jane’s power is contingent on her
not returning the love that she is offered. As Shelley explains it in his essay ‘On
Love’, love is the desire ‘to awaken in all things that are a community with what
we experience within ourselves’. It is prompted by the discovery ‘within our own
thoughts’ of ‘the chasm of an insufficient void’. Love is a ‘want or power’, that
is, it is a desire produced by a lack. When Shelley classified himself as an ‘Exotic
… unfortunately belonging to the order of mimosa’,19 he made explicit an analogy
to which most readers of the poem have responded. The destruction of the garden
produces in both the poet and his reader the inner vacancy that impels them to
imagine the only possibility that promises to supply it, the thought that
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Letters II: 438. For a recent account of Shelley’s aesthetics of lack, see Paul A.
Vatalaro, Shelley’s Music: Fantasy, Authority, and the Object Voice. Farnham: Ashgate,
2009.
19
Letters II: 368.
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The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility
That Garden sweet, that lady fair
And all sweet shapes and odours there
In truth have never past away –
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed – not they. (Conclusion, ll. 17–20)
Co
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In this view of things, the sensitive plant takes its place alongside all the figures
in other poems by Shelley that have always and inevitably been understood as
self-characterizations, alongside, for example, the ‘frail Form’ of Adonais. But
in Adonais there is a startling discrepancy between the ‘frail Form’ and the
poet who might be inferred from an examination of the poem itself, a poem so
extravagantly baroque in its ornamentation, so coolly conscious of its own artifice.
The discrepancy and extravagance are reproduced in The Sensitive-Plant.
Shelley’s poem has on the face of it very little in common with another poem
about a garden that runs to rack and ruin when deprived of the attentions of the
woman who tended it. The poem now most commonly known as ‘The Ruined
Cottage’, the poem that Shelley would have encountered recast as the first book
of The Excursion, is very different in manner, unlikely to impress anyone by its
‘filigree quality’. But many readers have felt a discrepancy between the tale of
Margaret and the so-called reconciling addendum in which the Pedlar instructs
the young man that to continue to grieve over Margaret’s fate would be to ‘read
/ The forms of things with an unworthy eye’ (The Excursion, I, 940). He delivers
the lesson so persuasively that the young man turns away and walks along his
road in happiness. I want to suggest that there is a rather similar discrepancy
between the story of The Sensitive-Plant and the poem’s Conclusion. The ending
of Wordsworth’s poem commonly divides his readers. For some, the Pedlar, the
young man, and by implication Wordsworth himself are reconciled to Margaret’s
death all too easily. Others have received the Pedlar’s lesson more gratefully. The
Pedlar weeps as he rehearses Margaret’s tale. He asks, ‘Why should a tear be on
an old Man’s cheek?’, and in the Pedlar’s conclusion those tears are not wiped
away but transmuted, reappearing as the ‘silent rain-drops’ that silver ‘the highspear-grass on that wall’ (I, 943–4). The observation is Peter Larkin’s in his recent
collection of essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge, where it points the way to
Larkin’s poised understanding of the Pedlar’s conclusion as at once consoling and
awkwardly inadequate.20 The Sensitive-Plant should, I suggest, prompt a rather
similar response.
The Conclusion voices the possibility to which Shelley, as a poet of lack, was
committed, but it expresses it couched in the accents of a very different poet who
entertains it as no more than a ‘pleasant’ hypothesis. The presence of those two
voices is, I think, more characteristic than is commonly recognized in the work of
a poet who insists that it cannot be determined whether poetry ‘spreads its own
figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things’,21
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See Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses. New York:
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SPP: 533.
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who cannot tell whether poetry offers access to a reality that is obscured by the
phenomenal world, or whether poetry too is, ‘Like all the rest, – a mockery’. Shelley
can never quite decide whether poetry has the power to transfigure the world, or
whether it is a kind of writing that simply takes delight in its own figurations.
That is why the Conclusion of the poem is at once wistful, embracing a
creed that has to support it only the urgency of the wish that it might be true, and
nonchalant, detached from, even amused by, the human capacity to be persuaded
of what it would be pleasant to believe. For Shelley, poetry is produced in response
to ‘the chasm of an insufficient void within us’, which is why all poets, like
Shelley, belong to ‘the order of mimosa’. But The Sensitive-Plant suggests that
poets are hybrids, and also bear the character claimed by John Keats, for whom the
‘poetical Character itself’, a character that must be sharply distinguished from the
‘wordsworthian or egotistical sublime’, is defined by its lack of any self. ‘It has no
character’, Keats insists, which is why it takes ‘as much delight in conceiving an
Iago as an Imogen … It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any
more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation’.22
The Sensitive-Plant is a poem that seems as indifferent as Keats would wish
between Iago and Imogen, a poem in which Shelley takes as much delight in
rendering the dilapidation of the garden as its perfection, in which he figures fungi
with the same relish with which he figures flowers, in which Winter, nature’s
turnkey, cataracts clanking at his belt, is presented just as vividly as the Lady
whose ‘step seemed to pity the grass it prest’. It is Keatsian too in its conclusion,
ending, as Keats thought poems should, not in ‘any irritable reaching after fact
& reason’23 but in speculation. Most recent Shelley criticism has been concerned
to explore the poet’s ideological commitments. The most recent account of The
Sensitive-Plant, Jerrold Hogle’s, seems to me exactly right in its insistence that the
poem’s ‘metaphoric movement’ runs counter to the fixity of meaning that readings
such as Wasserman’s ascribe to the poem. But when Hogle locates within the
poem ‘a non-hierarchical process of redemptive transfiguration’ that constitutes
‘the ultimate resistance to all the older hierarchies that still try to suppress or
destroy it’, he risks doing some fixing of his own.24 It may be that the peculiar
value of The Sensitive-Plant is that it exemplifies the presence in Shelley’s work
of a very different kind of poetry, a poetry that, like Shelley’s own Witch of Atlas,
or like Mercury in his translation of the Homeric hymn, seems playful rather than
purposive. As he acknowledged in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley
had ‘a passion for reforming the world’, but he was also ready to write poetry of
a very different kind, poetry that seems to take delight in its own irresponsibility.
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24
See Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Visionary Rhyme: The Sensitive-Plant and The Witch of 42
Atlas’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and Anthony 43
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Howe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 360–74 (pp. 366–7).
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Chapter 11
‘Infinitely comical’:
Italianizing the ‘Hymn to Mercury’
Timothy Webb
I
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Shelley’s version of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes1 (known to him as ‘Hymn to
Mercury’) is a striking poetic success which exhibits many of his characteristics
and is distinguished by enviable wit, ease and fluency. Although extracts from
this translation have been included in their relatively short Shelley anthologies by
John Holloway (1955) and Timothy Webb (1977),2 most critics continue to avoid
any detailed engagement with the poem, mainly perhaps because they have been
uncertain whether specific credit should be accorded to ‘Homer’ or to Shelley. The
Oxford edition which, until very recently, provided the main authoritative source
for Shelley’s poetic text, and which is still prominently available on library shelves,
has not helped by placing the poem towards the end of the book and apparently
marginalizing it under the heading of ‘Translations’. The few classicists who have
dared to engage with the text have usually preferred to read the poem in terms of
its representation of the Greek, even its ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’; but, although
this approach has its own undeniable virtues, it engages only marginally with the
nature of Shelley’s poetic achievement.3
As a result, all too little attention has been paid to the extraordinary ways in
which the main interests of the hymn often coincide with the concerns of the poet
himself. For instance, when the Hymn describes the young Hermes hiding from
the wrath of Apollo, his half-brother, it is hard not to believe that the translator
alone was responsible for what seems an identifiably ‘Shelleyan’ image: ‘As
among fire-brands lies a burning spark / Covered, beneath the ashes cold and
dark’ (ll. 308–9).4 The Greek poem devotes much space to a celebration of the
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1
Here and throughout the chapter, the title in italics represents the Greek original,
while that in inverted commas signifies Shelley’s translation.
2
John Holloway, ed., Selected Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Heinemann
Educational Books 1960; Timothy Webb, ed., Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poems.
Everyman’s Library. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1977.
3
For further discussion see Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and
Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 (hereafter TVC), p. 90.
4
Throughout this chapter, quotations from Shelley’s translation are taken from PS
III, based on Shelley’s transcription of the MS draft in the Harvard Notebook, pp. 110–45.
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virtues of music and poetry; Hermes/Mercury (Shelley switches between the
Greek and Latin versions largely in accord with the claims of rhyme or prosody)5
subdues Apollo ‘by the might / Of winning music’ (ll. 558–9). The child-god’s
theft of Apollo’s cattle which first appeared to constitute grave grounds for serious
disagreement is now apparently forgotten, while Apollo remains in awe of Hermes
and his ‘sly chameleon spirit’ (l. 693), and Apollo and Hermes engage in an
extended negotiation and mutually celebratory dialogue. Climactically, Hermes
presents his brother with ‘this music-flowing shell’ (l. 659), the lyre which he has
so recently invented and from which ‘sweet as love / The penetrating notes did live
and move / Within the heart of great Apollo’ (ll. 563–5); Apollo reciprocates by
acknowledging his step-brother’s irresistible capacities and presenting him with
‘The beautiful wand of health and happiness’ (l. 710). On a narrative level, this
reciprocated generosity reconciles Hermes and Apollo and provides an aetiology
for Apollo’s jurisdiction over the lyre; in the translation, the lengthy passage is
managed with exceptional grace and felicity so that it comes as little surprise that
these lines look forward to Shelley’s own treatment of the subject, with appropriate
sociological and historical intensification, in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, which he
wrote in the following year.6
Although the Homeric Hymns are not now attributed to ‘Homer’, stylistically
they have much in common with the two epics traditionally associated with his
name. Shelley translated into rhyming couplets a group of shorter Hymns (the
longer ‘Hymn to Venus’ was left unfinished) in early 1818 before he left for Italy;
in July 1820 he rendered into ottava rima the Hymn to Hermes, which was much
longer, more anecdotal and different in tone and spirit. Not only is this one of the
longest hymns; it also pays homage, not to an established divinity such as Venus or
Minerva (to use their Latin names, as Shelley did), but to a baby who has just been
born. Clearly, Shelley’s appreciation of the Homeric was wide enough to include
in their diversity the Hymns, which had been recommended to him by Hogg
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Except those few derived from Shelley’s manuscripts, all Greek quotations are taken from
Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer, ed. and trans. Martin L. West. The
Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
5
During the course of his translation, Shelley uses the name ‘Hermes’ on 17 occasions
and ‘Mercury’ on 10; both versions are used within two lines of each other in stanza lxvii.
In two letters he refers to the ‘Hymn to Mercury’; since prosody cannot be at stake here,
it seems that, for all his Hellenism, Shelley (like Byron) was still affected by the Latin
orientation of the previous century. Even Shelley’s experience of living in Italy was prone
to produce this result: although there are some textual uncertainties, his notes on the statues
at Florence (see below) seem to have included Venus, Bacchus, Minerva and Mercury. This
apparently surprising tendency in a writer who was ‘subtly generous of the honour of the
Greeks our masters & creators’ (Letters II: 89) demonstrates how difficult it must have been
fully to escape from strongly prevailing cultural practices and assumptions. In suggestive
contrast, George Chapman, who lived in a period more directly open to Greek influences,
used unmistakably Greek names in all his translations from the Homeric Hymns.
6
For a general survey and for a critique of the poem, see TVC, especially pp. 70–79.
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‘Infinitely comical
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and by the poetic example of Peacock in Rhododaphne and which he ordered in
Chapman’s translation.7 The Hymns which Shelley had first translated in 1818
were likely to attract his attention because, like some of his own poems, they
celebrated natural forces, and perhaps because in their formalities they provided
evidence of an alternative system of piety; more than two years later and in a
different country, the Hymn to Hermes appealed to him on many grounds, not least
its comic and joyful presentation of the ‘subtle, swindling baby’ (l. 317) who gives
the poem its title and who, with whatever differences, has something in common
with those irresponsible and capricious forces later celebrated in poems such as
‘The Witch of Atlas’ and ‘The Zucca’.8 There may have been a more personal
reason, too: Mercury had been cultivated and honoured by Leigh Hunt, who even
compared his friend Shelley to the youthful god.9
Like many of his contemporaries,10 Shelley was a severe critic of the militaristic
ethos and both his predilections and the interests of his own work suggest that he
was likely to favour those elements in the Homeric canon which allowed room
for the pastoral or the idyllic;11 yet, in spite of such apparent inclinations and
such persuasive influence, he continued to recognize the merits of Homer’s more
renowned poetic achievements. This admiration for Homer, and especially for
the IIiad, is not surprising, and Shelley should be exonerated from any charge of
preferring for translation a text which was more obviously ingratiating and less
unsettling. He may well have been susceptible to the tastes of friends like Hogg
and Hunt, but even some of their emphases must have been flexible since, in spite
of his stated preferences, Hunt actually published more translations from the Iliad
than from the Odyssey and the Homeric Hymns. Yet, although his own declared
preference was for the Iliad,12 Shelley may have found the Hymns more in keeping
with his recognition that the Greeks were a pastoral people, living in accord with
nature. For various reasons, this interest may also have coincided with his tendency
to translate works which had still to be established as part of the canon for English
readers or which were challenging in various ways (Euripides’s satyr-play Cyclops
or his versions from Goethe’s Faust are good examples).13 His translations from
the Hymns, and especially the Hymn to Hermes, were certainly an expression
of personal engagement and, particularly in the second case, a psychological
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7
TVC, p. 63.
For a detailed discussion, see Timothy Webb, Shelley: A Voice Not Understood.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977, chapter 8 (‘The Animation of Delight’),
pp. 229–60.
9
TVC, p. 72.
10
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in The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004, pp. 287–310.
11
A quotation from Anacreon in one of the notebooks suggests that Shelley recognized
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12
See Letters I: 545; II: 250.
13
See TVC, passim.
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diversion; yet they also gave voice to a view of the world not merely antiquarian 1
or scholarly or charmingly recondite but in its way as relevant to the concerns of 2
Shelley’s contemporaries as An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess 3
Charlotte or ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ or Prometheus Unbound. His ‘Discourse on 4
the Manners of the Antient Greeks’, written in the summer of 1818, was primarily 5
intended to explain sympathetically Greek homosexual practices as a necessary 6
adjunct to his translation of Plato’s Symposium; now his translation of the Hymn 7
to Hermes celebrated without any apparent reservation the amusing adventures 8
of a trickster and the splendid irresponsibility of a child-god in settings which 9
were palpably pastoral and far removed from the urban realities which leave their 10
troubling mark even on poems such as ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’.
11
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II
An important influence on many of Shelley’s translations from Greek, including
‘Symposium’, ‘Cyclops’ and the ‘Hymn to Mercury’, was the fact of living in Italy.
Shelley paid careful attention to Italian language, literature and politics and to the
landscapes and locations of the Italian cities and towns where he lived and through
which he passed on his travels; but his experience of Italy also provided him for
the first time with a sense of the south and encouraged him to approach the Hymns
through eyes which were primarily Italian rather than Greek or English. Even in
the early days in Italy, he was beginning to approach Greek literature in a way
which took it out of the study or the library and into the vitalities of the open air.
An early letter to Peacock14 provides memorable images of the naked poet leaping
into the refreshing waters of a rock pool. What is most surprising perhaps is the
appearance of Herodotus in this pastoral setting – ‘My custom is to undress and
sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus’. Here, like the habit of naked bathing, reading
Herodotus is an expected and regular activity; but its rightness is expressed not
just by its apparently unremarkable introduction into a long descriptive passage
but by its absorption, like that of Shelley himself, into a landscape which may
carry traces of Wordsworth15 or even of England, but is essentially Italian and
therefore, ultimately, redolent of Greece.
There are other examples, but perhaps the most significant is that provided by
Pompeii which the Shelleys visited on 22 December 1818. Shelley, whose long
descriptive letter to Peacock16 is a masterpiece of poetic evocation and an example
of how English Romantic Hellenism often capitalized on Italian opportunities, did
not conceal his admiration: ‘I was astonished at the remains of this city; I had no
conception of any thing yet remaining so perfect.’ He was delighted by the view
from two theatres; he appreciated the paintings and attributed their excellence to a
mental contagion which was positive and creative in its outcome; and he compared
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Letters II: 25–6.
Letters II: 25–6.
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Letters II: 70–76.
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the settings of public buildings to the dark enclosures presented by contemporary
cities, often frustratingly separated from the natural world: ‘in the present case
the glorious scenery around is not shut out, & … unlike the inhabitants of the
Cimmerian Ravines of modern cities the antient Pompeians could contemplate
the clouds, & the lamps of Heaven could see the moon rise behind Vesuvius, &
the sun set, in the sea, tremulous with an atmosphere of golden vapour, between
Inarime & Misenum’; ‘tremulous’ in this precise but ecstatic description has an
obvious connection with ‘trembling’ in the letter from Bagni di Lucca (‘the stones
and sand … seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday’),17 and suggests
that, in Shelley’s perception, the effects of Italian light were themselves endowed
with a special emotional intensity.
Perhaps the most important feature of this Pompeian expedition was that
Shelley explicitly translated his Italian experience into Greek:
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This scene was what the Greeks beheld. (Pompeii you know was a Greek city.)
They lived in harmony with nature, & the interstices of their incomparable
temples, were portals as it were to admit the spirit of beauty which animates
this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what
was Athens? what scene was exhibited from its Acropolis? The Parthenon & the
temples of Hercules & Theseus & the Winds? The islands of the Aegean Sea, the
mountains of Argolis & the peaks of Pindus & Olympus, & the darkness of the
Beotian forests interspersed?18
Faced with these components of the scene, Shelley once again ignores the
achievements of Roman civilization by posing a sequence of unanswered
questions; compare Keats’s engagement with the unresponsive Grecian urn. This
leads him to an empathetic understanding of the basis of Greek civilization and
a concluding regret, this time not expressed in the form of a question but as a
lament:19 ‘O, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman
conquest of the world, but for the Christian religion which put a finishing stroke
to the antient system; but for those changes which conducted Athens to its ruin, to
what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!’
A similar attitude marks one of his letters from Rome to Peacock in which, in
spite of his anxieties about the damaging influence of ancient Rome, he pointedly
prefers the ruins and sculptures to the negligible contribution of Christianity and
the few pictures it has ‘suffered to spring forth from its dark & pernicious Chaos’.20
This rejection of orthodoxies in favour of a system imperfectly but powerfully
suggested by the remains of Greek mythology was not merely a provocative
attitude; he may not have sacrificed to the Greek gods in his back-garden, as
Thomas Taylor was alleged to have done, but his commitment was completely
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Letters II: 26.
Letters II: 73–4. ‘Beotian’ is contemporary spelling.
19
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serious. As he put it in ‘On the Devil, and Devils’, which was written in the same
notebook as his draft translation of the Hymn to Hermes:
The Sylvans & Fauns with their leader the Great Pan were most poetical
personages, & were connected in the imagination of the Pagans with all that
could enliven & delight. They were supposed to be innocent beings not greatly
different in habits & m{anners} from the shepherds & herdsmen of which they
were the patron saints. But the Xtians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek
mythology as well as the little they understood of their philosophy to purposes
of deformity & falshood.21
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The argumentative and deliberately controversial essay from which this passage is
taken was unfinished and unpublished – hence the refreshingly minimal punctuation
and the retention of ampersands; but it vividly, if sometimes mischievously,
expresses a critique of prevailing Christian beliefs, claiming that the disappearance
of Greek mythology and the failure to make sense of Greek philosophy was a loss
to European culture too rarely admitted. His admiring reference in ‘A Defence of
Poetry’ to ‘the antient system of religion and manners’ should not be discounted as
an unthinking instance of Romantic philhellenism. As I once suggested: ‘Shelley
implies that one of the features of Greek civilization which he valued most highly
was its religion, whose charm, beauty and true spirituality he contrasts to the
sanguinary history of Christianity, tragically enacted in the wars of religion and
unhappily embodied in the image of a sadistic and tyrannical deity.’22 If that is the
case, Shelley’s choice, in early 1818 when he was still in England, of Castor and
Pollux, the Moon, the Sun, the Earth, Minerva (more properly, Athena), Venus
(more properly, Aphrodite), and at much greater length Mercury (or Hermes) in
the summer of 1820 when he was temporarily settled at Livorno, may well have
been driven not only by a translator’s intimate objectives but also by a desire to
resurrect and celebrate alternative divinities and to capture the attractions of a
system which seemed to have been long eliminated.
Life in Italy necessarily brought Shelley into repeated contact with these
polarities. A few months after his arrival, he described in some detail the picture
gallery at Bologna. The challenge is a particularly interesting one because here (as
elsewhere in Italy) Shelley seems to react as an English Protestant in a Catholic
country, although he is also a committed atheist who is necessarily offended by
many of the images he encounters. In particular, his attention is attracted by a
Guercino portrait of the founder of the Carthusians:
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I never saw such a figure as this fellow. His face was wrinkled like a dried snakes
skin & drawn in long hard lines. His very hands were wrinkled. He looked like
an animated mummy. He was clothed in a loose dress of death-coloured flannel,
such as you might fancy a shroud might be after it had wrapt a corpse a month or
two. It had a yellow putrified ghastly hue which it cast on all the objects around,
Dawson and Webb, BSM XIV: 96–9.
Timothy Webb, ‘Shelley and the Religion of Joy’. Studies in Romanticism 15.3
(1976), pp. 357–82 (p. 361).
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so that the hands & face of the Carthusian & of his companion were jaundiced in
this sepulchral glimmer. Why write books against religion, when one may hang
up such pictures … 23
Although the vehemence of this description is partly qualified by other, more
empathetic, descriptions, it can best be examined in contrast with those prosepoems on Greek sculpture which Shelley composed when he was a regular
visitor to the gallery at Florence in 1819. Many of these figures were, in Shelley’s
estimation, strikingly different in spirit from the Guercino portrait, even though
the comparison is never specifically presented. Take for example his description
of ‘Mercury’ (apparently so named by Shelley):24
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Another glorious creature of the Greeks. His countenance expresses an
imperturbable and god-like self-possession; he seems in the enjoyment of
delight which nothing can destroy. His figure, nervous yet light, expresses the
animation of swiftness emblemed by the plumes of his sandalled feet. Every
muscle and nerve of his frame has tranquil and energetic life.
This manifestation is necessarily an older figure than that of the ‘subtle-witted
/ Infant’ (ll. 520–21) who is celebrated in the ‘Hymn to Mercury’; yet his selfpossession and his ‘enjoyment of delight’ make a telling counterpoint to the
wrinkled and jaundiced appearance of the monk with its repeated intimations
of the grave, and provide an eloquent commentary on the spirit of Shelley’s
translation. Perhaps part of the significance of the young Mercury of the Homeric
Hymn, the ‘herald-baby’, is that he expresses the opposite polarity to God the
Father, particularly as represented in Italian painting. From his first sight at
Naples, Shelley had resisted the received enthusiasm for Michelangelo and was
privately scathing about his representations both of Jesus Christ and of God the
Father. According to his interpretation, Michelangelo’s Day of Judgement in the
Sistine Chapel is ‘a dull & wicked emblem of a dull & wicked thing’, while ‘Jesus
Christ is like an angry pot-boy & God like an old alehouse-keeper looking out of
window’.25 Not only does this challenge an apparently settled reputation in art; it
also implies that Christian notions of divinity are far from adequate or satisfying
and intimates that, particularly when compared to the ‘imperturbable and god-like
self-possession’ of Mercury, or the ‘immortal beauty’ of Bacchus whom Shelley
also celebrated, the vulgarities and banalities of Jesus Christ and God the Father
are crudely displeasing.26
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Letters II: 52.
Shelley’s Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (1954, corr. 1966). London: Fourth Estate,
1988, p. 347.
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Letters II: 112.
26
‘Shelley’s vision of Greece is intrinsically beautiful but it must also be recognized
as part of a dialectic. The full significance of Shelley’s Greece becomes clearer when it is set
against Christianity, Praxiteles against Michelangelo, Paestum against York Minster, God
the Father against the Apollo Belvedere’ (Webb, ‘Shelley and the Religion of Joy’, p. 365).
24
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In his version of the Hymn to Hermes, Shelley emphasizes those characteristics
which set the gods apart from ordinary mortals. At an early stage, immediately
after he has invented the lyre, Hermes is energized by a surprising desire: ‘Seized
with a sudden fancy for fresh meat / He in his sacred crib deposited / The hollow
lyre, and from the cavern sweet / Rushed, with great leaps up to the mountain’s
head’ (ll. 80–83). The Greek allows for leaping but, aided by the effect of run-on
lines, the final version endows Hermes with an urgency which is not in the original
and emphasizes a more than ordinary energy: ‘Rushed’ is Shelley’s addition, as is
the detail ‘with great leaps’ which expands on the original ἂλτο (‘sprang’) while
maintaining a tone which finds room for comic exaggeration. Not long afterwards,
Apollo goes in search of his stolen cattle. Shelley writes: ‘And a delightful odour
from the dew / Of the hill pastures, at his coming, flew’ (ll. 300–301; 231–2 in the
Greek). The Greek does not actually make a direct connection between the passage
of the god and the ‘delightful odour’, nor do Chapman and more recent translators;
but, in Shelley’s imagination, Greek divinity is gifted with special powers and its
very presence is signalled by pleasure and delight.
The imperturbability and self-possession of ‘the unabashed boy’ (l. 568) is
recurrently evident during the action of the ‘Hymn to Mercury’, marking his
relations with other gods (ll. 517–22):
So speaking, the Cyllenian Argiphont27
Winked, as if now his adversary was fitted,
And Jupiter according to his wont
Laughed heartily to hear the subtle-witted
Infant give such a plausible account,
And every word a lie –
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This brief passage suggests that even Jupiter admires the mental qualities of
his child, although he recognizes that Hermes is not to be trusted; the final line
develops what is merely implied in the Greek and Shelley, who took particular
trouble over this choice, seems eventually to have restored in the draft his original
‘Which he well knew was false’, which does not feature in the final version.28
Even more effectively, perhaps, the self-possession of both parties is enacted by
the run of the lines which captures with precision the innate irresponsibility of the
child and the amused tolerance of the father. Shelley is inventively responsive to
the challenges of his original and presents the unpredictable behaviour of Hermes
with apparent ease: ‘He winked as fast as could be and his brow / Was wrinkled,
and a whistle loud gave he / Like one who hears some strange absurdity’ (ll. 371–
3). When Apollo tries to carry the baby, Hermes reclaims control by farting and
sneezing (ll. 390ff.). Here, even the original Greek is less than explicit, although
27
That is, Hermes, who was born in Cyllene and became the slayer of Argos.
BSM XIV: 166–7.
28
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its meaning is clear; the first two lines are missing from Hutchinson’s edition but
Shelley translated them in the manuscript: ‘He sent out of his belly, that which
was / A fearful herald of the want behind’ (ll. 390–91).29 Shelley does not capture
the full force or the amusingly inappropriate phrasing of τλήμονα γαστρός ἒριθον
(a hard-worked belly-slave; l. 296), which must have been designed to tickle an
audience; yet, contrary to the apparent evidence of printed texts, even this example
does not seem to have seriously troubled his presentation of the trickster who, like
his translator, is endlessly resourceful.
This last example introduces a potential problem for Shelley, who has to
reconcile impetuosity and quicksilver inventiveness with the physical and must
find room for both extremes, sometimes even playing them off against each other.
For instance, at a relatively early stage, Shelley is faced with a severe challenge to
his skill as translator when it is necessary to render the passage in which the babygod transforms a wandering tortoise into a lyre (ll. 49–63):
Then scooping with a chisel of grey steel
He bored the life and soul out of the beast –
Not swifter a swift thought of woe or weal
Darts through the tumult of a human breast
Which thronging cares annoy, – not swifter wheel
The flashes of its torture and unrest
Out of the dizzy eyes – than Maia’s son
All that he did devise hath featly done.
And through the tortoise’s hard stony skin
At proper distances small holes he made
And fastened the cut stems of reeds within,
And with a piece of leather overlaid
The open space, and fixed the cubits in,
Fitting the bridge to both, and stretched o’er all
Symphonious cords of sheep-gut rhythmical.30
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These stanzas may stand as an example of the flexibility of Shelley’s practice,
his inclusive poetics and his seemingly untroubled switches of tone and register.
The manuscript shows that in this case the first stanza was composed with few
corrections, although the second was clearly more difficult. Shelley’s final version
of all these lines is firmly based on the Greek, even if the draft first version was
often even nearer to the words of his original than the text which was finally
29
BSM XIV: 156–7. Missing lines are restored in PS III: 391–2. For an analysis of
Shelley’s difficulties with the obscene elements in Euripides’s Cyclops, see the detailed
treatment by Maria Schoina in Chapter 9.
30
The manuscript shows that the second stanza was always a line short (BSM XIV:
132–3).
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transcribed.31 This general fidelity to the Greek original and his disinfecting choice
of verse-form allows him triumphantly, though with what level of consciousness
we cannot say, to avoid a fashion which had long since become arch and selfindulgent. This fashion for sounding shells (often a metaphor for poetry) and little
prattlers involved creations in art, interior decoration and book-illustration, as well
as poems; the resulting odes were ‘coterie pieces intended for readers possessed of
a special, cultivated taste in both poetry and the fine arts and a quick responsiveness
to the “gentle passions”’.32 The tangibility of Mercury’s lyre and the detailed and
seemingly ‘unpoetic’ description of its creation in both the Homeric Hymn and its
translation happily preserve Shelley from such aesthetic clichés and such instances
of poetic artifice.
Consequently, few readers of Shelley’s translation would charge him with being
merely decorative, or tasteful, or obediently following a neo-classical taste. He is
particularly at ease in imagining the activities of a new-born baby. For instance, as
part of his alibi, Hermes makes this fraudulent claim (ll. 350–57):
An ox-stealer should be both tall and strong –
And I am but a little new-born thing,
Who, yet at least can think of nothing wrong;
My business is to suck and sleep, and fling
The cradle-clothes about me all day long,
Or half-asleep hear my sweet mother sing,
And to be washed in water clean and warm,
And hushed and kissed and kept secure from harm.
Two of the last three lines are added to the original, and the penultimate line has
been expanded (the Greek speaks only of warm baths); while ‘kissed’ must have
been inserted at a late stage since it does not feature in the manuscript. The scale and
nature of Shelley’s success can be measured by comparison with Chapman, who
translates (ll. 473–6): ‘No infant’s worke is That. My powres aspire / To sleepe and
quenching of my hunger’s fire / With Mother’s Milke, and gainst cold shades to
arme / With Cradle-cloths my shoulders, and Baths warme’.33 Here, and elsewhere
in the poem (for example, ll. 310–15), Shelley is preserved from the merely
fashionable or the tediously literal by his delighted and empathetic presentation of
the wayward and irresponsible child, perhaps even, as I have argued elsewhere, by
a tendency to acknowledge the force of daemons or intermediary spirits which he
may have recognized in the child.34 His Mercury (or Hermes) is certainly no mere
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This is the Harvard Fair Copy, which provided the basis for the text in Posthumous
Poems and most later editions.
32
Benjamin Boyce, ‘Sounding Shells and Little Prattlers in the Mid-EighteenthCentury English Ode’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 8.3 (1975), pp. 245–64 (p. 262).
33
Text from Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad. The Odyssey and The Lesser Homerica,
ed. Allardyce Nicoll. 2nd edn, 2 vols (Bollingen Series XLI). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1967, p. 556.
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TVC, pp. 71–3.
31
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putto, no cherub with a musical shell. Admittedly, the fashion had largely passed
by the time Shelley made his version. Admittedly, too, even at the height of the
fashion, the Homeric Hymn (once described by Joseph Spence as a ‘ridiculous old
legend’) remained immune, not least because it is too complex to fit easily into
any of the patterns which might have made it acceptable to eighteenth-century
drawing-rooms and to connoisseurs, however apparently unconventional their
aesthetics. In addition to the resistance of the original itself, Shelley’s translation
is rescued from any risk of sentimentality by the verbal choices which constantly
inform his version with imaginative energy and make it, in the best sense, a comic
creation rarely troubled by the anxious and inhibiting claims of a translation which
is strictly literal.
These successes were founded on a number of preferences. Although Shelley
was always aware of the presence of Plato, the Greek tragedians and the epics of
Homer, ‘the only sure remedy for diseases of the mind’,35 he was also susceptible
to the attractions of the Greek romances, even if he recognized their limitations –
‘they are all very entertaining’, he told Peacock36 ‘and would be delightful if they
were less rhetorical and ornate’. ‘Hymn to Mercury’ obviously responds to the
pastoral settings of the original poem – ‘the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows
/ Where the immortal oxen of the God / Are pastured in the flowering unmown
meadows’ (ll. 89–91); ‘green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass’ (ll. 109);
‘shadowy mountain and resounding dell / And flower-paven plains’ (ll. 119–20);
‘the water-troughs which ever run / Through the fresh fields’ (ll. 129–30); ‘the
sacred wood / Which from the inmost depth of its green glen / Echoes the voice of
Neptune’ (ll. 240–42); ‘High Pieria – / Where a black bull was fed apart, between
/ Two woody mountains in a neighbour glen, / And four fierce dogs watched there,
unanimous as men’ (ll. 250–53); ‘high Cyllene’s forest-cinctured hill / And the
deep cavern where dark shadows lie’ (ll. 296–7); ‘the folded depths of the great
Hill [“odorous” Olympus]’ (ll. 429; 427); ‘the low shore on which the loud sea
laughed’ (l. 448); ‘the pastures wide / And lofty stalls by the Alphaean ford, /
Where wealth in the mute night is multiplied / With silent growth’ (ll. 534–7); ‘the
snowy head / Of white Olympus’ (ll. 679–80); ‘a vale round which Parnassus flings
/ Its circling skirts’ (ll. 744–5; ‘skirting crags’ in manuscript). This alertness to the
natural world37 must be connected to that delighted recognition of the importance
of nature to the Greeks which marks his long letter from Pompeii.
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IV
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Shelley’s responsiveness to nature was clearly linked with another taste which 38
was unconventional for an English writer of the ‘Romantic’ period. On 20 May 39
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Letters II: 360.
36
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Letters II: 213.
37
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attracted him to the Cyclops and marks his own translation.
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1820 Shelley read to his wife Spenser’s Virgil’s Gnat, a free translation of Virgil in
ottava rima. Neither Shelley’s letters nor Mary Shelley’s journal records a reading
of Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie, although it was apposite to Shelley’s
own translation both because of its use of ottava rima and because of its gentle
inflation of a subject which is potentially below the concern of poetry. Spenser
took delight in celebrating the apparently ordinary, an exercise which would later
prove uncomfortably challenging for Pope in his version of Homer. Whatever
Shelley’s reading, it is clear that Spenser left his mark on the ‘Hymn to Mercury’
because the poem is mildly archaizing in its occasional use of Spenserean diction,
most obviously perhaps in the unusual word ‘depasturing’ which also features in
Shelley’s translations from Plato’s Republic,38 and especially in its employment of
ottava rima. Even more obviously, the influence of Milton can be traced, especially
in the stanza in which Apollo threatens to hurl the thieving Hermes into ‘dismal
Tartarus’ (334–41).39 In these ways, Milton and especially Spenser contribute to
a distancing effect, by which the Homeric Hymn is slightly removed from the
present, both as a sign of its seemingly unreachable antiquity and because it gives
voice to a world which we may recognize but with which we are no longer directly
familiar. The presence of this unbridgeable gap and the inevitable challenge it
poses for any translator is expressed, though with a different emphasis and a
characteristic sense of unreachable and sacred otherness by Charles Olson in ‘A
Newly Discovered “Homeric” Hymn’ (ll. 15–18): ‘Hail and beware them, in their
season. Take care. Prepare / to receive them, they carry what the living cannot do
without, / but take the proper precautions, do the prescribed things, let / down the
thread from the right shoulder. And from the forehead. / And listen to what they
say, listen to the talk, hear / Every word of it’.40
Shelley did not encounter or imagine such explicit instructions but this
deployment of Spenser, and to a lesser extent Milton, indicates that Shelley
recognized some of the problems; it also suggests that English models should not be
completely ignored and that his version could even be seen as, in some way, part of
an English tradition. Yet in the achievement of a vivid resurrection, the Italian uses
of ottava rima were clearly a direct and powerful influence. Although the reading
aloud of Virgil’s Gnat occurred only a few weeks before, Mary Shelley’s journal
specifically indicates that her husband combined his translation of the Hymn to
Hermes both with his reading of the Greek Romances and with his reading aloud
of Niccolò Forteguerri’s Il Ricciardetto (1738; composed between 1716 and 1725).
This unusual but significant combination seems to have had the effect of enabling
Shelley to see the Hymn to Hermes not exclusively as a Greek poem, or a Greek
original which had been possessively ‘Englished’, but as a Greek poem mediated
through examples which were undeniably Italian. Perhaps this interpretation was
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Cited from The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, eds Richard Ellmann and 43
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Robert O’Clair. 2nd edn. New York and London: Norton and Co., 1988, p. 815.
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heralded or made less unlikely by the example of Spenser; yet Shelley’s version
is undoubtedly informed by the Italian comic or burlesque tradition and its genial
and jocular treatment of epic subjects which Shelley encountered in the work of
various Italian poets, not least in the form of Il Ricciardetto. According to Mary
Shelley, he read this poem to her or ‘aloud’ on at least 10 occasions at the end of
June and the beginning of July 1820; he also read Il Ricciardetto (though whether
‘aloud’ or ‘to me’ or silently is not specified) on 7 and 9 July, while Mary Shelley
seems to have read the poem to herself on 12, 17, 26 and 27 July.41 Shelley’s
only explicit reference to this recurrent reading occurs in a letter to the Gisbornes
dated 30 June 1820 where he mentions: ‘We are reading Ricciardetto [in itself this
formulation suggests a more active and collaborative process than is intimated by
Mary Shelley’s journal entries, which seem to imply her own passivity]. I think
it admirable [he continues], especially the assaults of the Giants, and Ferrau’s42
conversion of them.’43 He returned to the poem on 7 June of the following year
when he read it aloud in the evening, which suggests that it may have become
a favourite and may even have featured during the intervening period; Mary
Shelley’s journal only notes this single reading, though it can hardly be trusted
as a complete record.44 Perhaps, too, the flow and freedom of the original was
enhanced by the process of reading aloud for which Forteguerri, with his switches
of register, was particularly suitable.
Forteguerri is today an elusive presence whose reputation may have been
seriously damaged for Italian readers by Francesco De Sanctis who harshly
dismissed his work many years ago as ‘nullità poetica della vita e della forma’. But
his verse had been sufficiently congenial to appeal to Leopardi, who was Shelley’s
Italian contemporary although, disappointingly, the poets were apparently unaware
of each other.45 Forteguerri’s poem shifts between the everyday and the low comic
style in which he operates in the epic-romantic and serio-comic tradition of
Boccaccio (the inventor of ottava rima, a writer much admired by Shelley), Berni,
Pulci (partly translated by Byron), Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto (46 cantos read by
Mary Shelley in the summer of 1818, some at least with Shelley, who had first read
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MS Journals I: 324–7.
Alan Weinberg has pointed out to me that the reading ‘Terran’ in Letters is
understandable but mistaken; Shelley is here referring to a Saracen knight (Ferraguto,
Ferraù) who appears in Boiardo and Ariosto as well as in Forteguerri, and into the
presentation of whose character the poet (Forteguerri) ‘has thrown the most biting and
humorous satire upon the whole race of mendicant friars’, ‘The Ricciardetto of Forteguerri’.
New York Literary Gazette and Phi Beta Kappa Depository 1.20 (21 January 1826), pp.
306–9 (p. 307).
43
Letters II: 207.
44
MS Journals I: 369.
45
For a brief but helpful treatment, see the anthology, Il Settecento: L’Arcadia e L’età
delle riforme, vol. 6 no. 1, eds Gaetano Compagnino, Guido Nicastro, Giuseppe Savoca.
Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1973, especially pp. 578ff.; De Sanctis is cited on p. 584.
41
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his poetry in England).46 All these writers presented their version of romantic-epic
in ottava rima so that, in following their lead, Shelley was also following, not
so much the example of Spenser or his own friend Byron (though he must have
been conscious of Byron’s outstanding incorporation of a foreign verse-form into
English) as that of his Italian predecessors. Forteguerri may have been sceptically
unsettling but he was less obviously a satirist than Byron, more given to burlesque,
and more characteristically engaged in what Alan Weinberg has called ‘goodhumoured jesting’ and ‘exuberant and amused leggerezza [lightness of touch]’, in
contrast to English ‘wit’.47
Whatever the poetic consequences, Shelley was alert to the fact that his choice
of verse-form would separate him from his translating brethren, whether ancient
or modern: for instance, in a fragmentary preface, he wrote of ‘a blank verse,
which is ill and easily made by the herd of translators’, perhaps thinking more of
translators such as Cowper than specifically of those few who had translated one
or more of the Hymns. Almost as soon as his translation was published, Cowper
had fallen out of favour. Advising Charles Lloyd on his own attempt at Homeric
translation, Charles Lamb had remarked in 1809: ‘I find Cowper is a favourite
with nobody. His injudicious use of the stately slow Miltonic verse in a subject
so very different has given a distaste.’48 This common abdication of poetical
responsibility Shelley contrasted with the formal challenge of ‘the octave stanza’,49
although, unfortunately, he did not develop the antithesis, and we must speculate
what virtues he preferred in making this choice and what objectives must have
been sacrificed. Two days before he finished his version (that is, on 12 July) he
told Peacock: ‘I am translating in ottava rima the “Hymn to Mercury” of Homer.
Of course my stanza precludes a literal translation. My next effort will be, that it
should be legible – a quality much to be desired in translations.’50 Only a week
later, he informed Maria Gisborne: ‘I have been translating the hymns of Homer,
for want of spirit to invent – I have only finished one, the Hymn to Mercury, in
ottava rima.’51 Once again, the unusual verse-form is mentioned, specifically if
undemonstratively, as an essential defining feature; this letter also suggests that, at
least at one point in 1820, Shelley might have entertained plans to translate more
than one of the Hymns. As late as 25 January 1822 he may have revived this plan
when he told Leigh Hunt that he had a ‘parcel of little Poems – the Witch of Atlas
& some translations of Homers Hymns the copyright of which I would sell’.52
Nothing seems to have come of this, but the conjunction indicates that ‘The Witch
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MS Journals I: 211–20; Letters II: 20.
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Private communication. See also Alan Weinberg, ‘Il Ricciardetto and Shelley’s The 38
Witch of Atlas’. Studi D’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe 3.4 (1990), 4.1 (1991), pp. 32–42.
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‘Infinitely comical
of Atlas’, also in ottava rima, must have been associated by him with the ‘Hymn
to Mercury’, which had so clearly enabled his own poem; there is also at least the
intriguing possibility that there were other translations of the Homeric Hymns,
which have now disappeared.
In spite of his choice, Shelley was aware that this verse-form was fashionable
and used, for example, by Byron, Frere, Keats and Barry Cornwall; if employed
unthinkingly or less than precisely, it could be dangerous.53 In a letter of 15 February
1821 he expressed his views to Peacock, whose The Four Ages of Poetry had
irritated him into a detailed response but some of whose individual assessments
he shared: ‘The man whose critical gall is not stirred up by such ottava rima as
Barry Cornwall’s, may safely be conjectured to possess no gall at all. The world
is pale with the sickness of such stuff.’54 Barry Cornwall (pen-name of Bryan
Waller Procter) was, for a time, a poet much in vogue who would become one of
the backers of Posthumous Poems. Less than five weeks later, Shelley expressed
further outrage at Procter’s verses and confessed to Peacock: ‘I had much rather,
for my private reading, receive political geological & moral treatises than this
stuff in terza, ottava, & tremilesima rima, whose earthly baseness has attracted the
lightning of your undiscriminating censure upon the temples of immortal song.’55
As these remarks imply, Shelley must have recognized that, in casting
his version in ottava rima, he was taking a considerable risk; he was also, and
deliberately, breaking new ground as an English translator of Homer, though not of
Virgil since Spenser had translated Virgil’s Culex into that distinctive verse-form.
All of his seven previous versions of Homeric Hymns had been made while he was
still in England and rendered into rhyming couplets, the standard poetic form for
English translators. Even if Pope himself had not managed a version of the Hymns,
it was difficult, directly or indirectly, to escape from the pervading influence of his
Homeric translations, which a resistant Wordsworth had once described to Walter
Scott as ‘poison’.56 The manuscript suggests that Shelley planned to include two
sentences in his preface, giving voice to his own anxieties as a translator and the
difficulty of escaping from so powerful an example: ‘This translation is as bad as
Pope’s – without being as good; that is, it has all its faults and none of its merits.
I beg those critics who mean to speak unfavourably of it to copy this sentence
into their reviews, unless they can find a severer.’57 Now, by selecting ottava
rima, he is, of course, eventually liberating himself from comparison with Pope
whose faults, and virtues, he recognizes. Yet he still prefers to stick with Pope as
a criterion rather than explain or defend a choice which necessarily removes him
from a seemingly inevitable English tradition (followed not only by Pope in his
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The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part 1, 1806– 41
1811, ed. E. de Selincourt. 2nd ed., rev. M. Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, vol. 42
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Cited in TVC, p. 126.
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Homeric translations but by other translators of the Hymns including Shelley’s
friends Peacock and Hunt). Ironically, too, one probable source of influence in this
choice was English: Byron had read the First Canto of Don Juan aloud to Shelley
when they were together in Venice in October 1818, while later in the same month
Mary Shelley read ‘Beppo’.58
Most readers will find that, for all their virtues,59 the versions of the Homeric
Hymns which Shelley made in England fail to exhibit that imaginative freedom
or that sureness of touch which so evidently characterizes his translation in the
‘Hymn to Mercury’. Almost any comparison will demonstrate a clear distinction.
Compare, on the one hand, descriptions of the creation of the lyre, the discovery of
the ‘mystery’ of fire, the pleasurable and idle pursuits of a baby, the effects of music
and song; and, on the other, resonant but dutiful accounts of Castor and Pollux,
who ‘suddenly appear / On yellow wings rushing athwart the sky, / And lull the
blasts in mute tranquillity’ (ll. 16–18), or the fruitful Earth (‘Happy are they whom
thy mild favours nourish, / All things unstinted round them grow and flourish’ (ll.
12–13), or Minerva, ‘the Cerulean-eyed’, at whose portentous birth ‘lifted from
its depths, the Sea swelled high / In purple billows, the tide suddenly / Stood still,
and great Hyperion’s son long time / Checked his swift steeds’ (ll. 13–16). Of
course, the Hymns which Shelley first chose for translation are not characterized
by the comic spirit which permeates the Hymn to Hermes; but, whatever defence
may be adduced, these examples suggest that conventional poetic diction and
rhyming couplets reinforce or inform each other, while ottava rima provides
much greater fluency and, it would seem, a less inhibiting reverence. Perhaps the
first set of Hymns is trammelled by the relative shortness of the poems while
the Hymn to Hermes allows its translator to take full advantage of its generous
narrative possibilities. Whatever the causes and the contributing factors, Shelley’s
undoubted success as a translator in the ‘Hymn to Mercury’ coincides with his
exploration of a poetic form which was new to him but entirely appropriate to his
subject. For most English readers, it is precisely this break with prevailing English
poetic tradition, once followed even by Shelley’s younger self, and that daring
preference for Italian models, which marks a new beginning. Here, as in ‘Ode
to the West Wind’ and ‘The Triumph of Life’ the strength of the poem is partly
derived from the poet’s bold decision to assimilate a foreign verse-form into the
body of English.
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Letters II: 42; MS Journals I: 230. On 3 January 1820 Shelley read Don Juan ‘aloud
in the evening’ (MS Journals I: 340), an occasion which provides continuity with Byron’s
own reading to Shelley and suggests, once again, the possible influence of reading aloud.
For a brief comparison of Shelley’s version with Byronic use of ottava rima, see TVC, pp.
127–30.
59
Considered in TVC, pp. 68–70 and in Webb, ‘Shelley and the Religion of Joy’.
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‘Infinitely comical
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As Shelley admits, and as he must have known from his reading of Spenser, the
use of ottava rima necessarily ‘precludes a literal translation’. There is one point
in the manuscript where he specifically addresses the implications of his formal
preference. At the top of p. 16560 he writes: ‘The literal is – who ever follow
or minister to, the Olympian Muses – but without regard to <them> the relation
expressed by ὀπηδός [follower] may be considered as a convertible term – ’. The
passage to which this note directly refers is immediately on the other side of the
same page, and concludes: ‘And I, who speak this praise, am that Apollo / Whom
the Olympian Muses ever follow’ (ll. 603–4). The Greek text makes it clear that,
in the original, the roles are reversed and that Apollo is the follower of the Muses
and not the other way round. Shelley’s note shows that he was aware of the strictly
‘correct’ translation but preferred to provide an alternative version, impressed by
the thought that the Greek word was ‘a convertible term’ but also perhaps taking
advantage of a convenient rhyme between ‘follow’ and ‘Apollo’. The manuscript
does not appear to contain any similar confessions, though its evidence does
suggest that, occasionally, Shelley was exercised to find appropriate versions; but
even this single instance indicates that, quite apart from the occasionally strange
readings of his original Greek text, students of Shelley’s ‘translation’ should be
careful not to accuse him of ignorance or imperfect Greek, even when he appears
to make a ‘mistake’.61 The manuscript often shows that Shelley first translated
‘correctly’ and then preferred another version which he must have considered
more felicitous, even if less strictly accurate.
Shelley’s procedures and the danger of passing judgement might be illustrated
by two further examples. In the first case, when Hermes sings that his parents
had ‘Dallied in love not quite legitimate’ (l. 73) the manuscript suggests that the
ultimate choice of ‘Dallied’ was only reached after Shelley had tried ‘In love &
joy’, ‘Were mixt in love’ and ‘Courted’ as possible translations of ὠρίζεσκον
(conversed; l. 58 in the Greek), a conundrum signalled by the word οαριsτυs
(a term used in the Iliad, meaning ‘fond discourse’) which Shelley has entered
in the manuscript, as usual without breathing or accent (and with a seemingly
unconventional form of ‘s’); ‘not quite legitimate’ has felicitously arisen from the
implications of ‘incorrectly’ which also has no precedent in the Greek.62 A second
example is ‘the ghosts of men’ (l. 341), intended by Apollo as a threatening feature
of the grim underworld to which the young Hermes might be committed; in fact,
this is Shelley’s version of ὀλίγοισι μετ’ ἀνδράσιν (among little men, l. 259 in the
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BSM XIV: 172.
See, in particular, TVC, pp. 90ff. and (for Plato), James A. Notopoulos, The
Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1949, pp. 572–603.
62
BSM XIV: 134–5. Shelley’s noting in his manuscript of the singular noun rather than
the verb-form used in the poem suggests that at this point he was resorting to a dictionary.
61
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Greek); but this verbal choice seems not so much an error as a happy substitution
in keeping with images of the Homeric underworld.
This licence allows Shelley to omit various features of the original and to
fill his version with contextual details which frequently enrich the relatively
straightforward narrative of the Greek. The Greek runs to 580, Chapman’s version
to 1,011 and Shelley’s to 772 lines. As these figures show, Greek is naturally more
compressed; but the Shelley version rarely, if ever, appears to be swollen by its
own concerns, although there are times when the translation gently imposes its
own agenda on the original. Shelley is much nearer than, say, Chapman, to the
spirit of the Greek, but this appearance is also something of an illusion. Close
comparison with the original clearly shows that Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Mercury’ may
convey the impression of fidelity: while not restrained by the claims of literalness
or exact rendition, it is a strong, persuasive and personal interpretation. Shelley’s
version is augmented by many personal touches and emphases and by the addition
of numerous placing and adjectival details. Among other things, the first 100 lines
yield, almost at random, ‘And other glorious actions to achieve’ (l. 16), ‘from
the grass on which it fed’ (l. 46), ‘And grasping it in his delighted hold’ (l. 47),
‘woe or weal’ (l. 51), ‘tumult’ (l. 52), ‘dizzy’ (l. 55), ‘a tumult sweet / Οf mighty
sounds’ (developed from the original; ll. 67–8), ‘not quite legitimate’ (l. 73), ‘still
scoffing at the scandal’ (l. 74), ‘In plastic verse’ (l. 77), ‘brazen pan’ (l. 78), ‘lone
season of dun’ (l. 86), ‘safely stalled in a remote abode’ (l. 92), ‘elate and proud’
(l. 93). Apart from one case which is uncertain, none of these examples has a direct
equivalent in the Greek. Some of these additions fill out the line and conform to the
structure of the rhyme scheme; some contribute details or adjectival thickening.
In many cases, though, the addition is much more than the conventional adjectival
decoration which had become all too characteristic of translations from the Greek;
cumulatively, it often endows the action with an extra dimension, geographical,
emotional or linguistic.
Frequently, Shelley develops possibilities which he observes in the original:
for instance, he writes (ll. 140–41), ‘Mercury first found out for human weal /
Tinder-box, matches, fire-irons, flint, and steel’, where the Greek for the second
line simply mentions πυρήϊα πῦρ τ’ (firesticks and fire; l. 111 in the Greek);
later, the single word φηλητέων (meaning ‘of thieves’; l. 293 in the Greek) is
amplified to ‘of those / Who swindle, housebreak, sheep-steal and shoplift’ (ll.
383–4). This concretizing and particularizing kind of effect may remind readers
of Byron, not least in its introduction of such seemingly ‘unpoetic’ diction and
unglamorous concerns; yet, as I pointed out some years ago, although Shelley
occasionally includes Byronic touches in his translation, his handling of ottava
rima is expressively and recognizably different.63 He regularly enriches the texture
of his original in various ways: for instance, from later lines, ‘The penetrating
notes did live and move’ (l. 564), ‘Clothe in the light of his loud melodies’ (l. 576),
‘Was folded up within you at your birth’ (l. 588), ‘Thy power of unpremeditated
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song’ (l. 590), ‘chameleon spirit’ (l. 693)’ and ‘Thou dost alone the veil from death
uplift’ (l. 763). The lyre is animated by an unquenchable spirit which sometimes
seems to express the child-god himself: so it ‘teaches, babbling in delightful
mood’ (l. 649), a characterization which goes beyond the less expressive Greek
term φθεγγομένη (loudly voicing; l. 484 in the Greek). If it is mishandled by
those ‘who are unskilled in its sweet tongue’ (l. 653; the sweet tongue is Shelley’s
invention), the lyre ‘gossips something wrong, / Some senseless and impertinent
reply’ (ll. 655–6); here Shelley replaced the expressive ‘babbles’, perhaps because
it repeated the word ‘babbling’ which had been introduced only a few lines earlier.
As these examples show, Shelley is affected by the Greek, which explores the
concept of a lyre capable of speech and appropriately responsive to its handler;
as these details also illustrate, he has developed the potential of his original and
strengthened the animation of the lyre. In due course, he took further advantage of
the personification described in the original Greek, and expanded in his translation,
and accorded this motif a central place in ‘With a Guitar, to Jane’.64 Curiously,
Shelley omits or perhaps blunts the phrase in which Hermes admits that the lyre,
much like Hermes himself, prefers to flee from ‘toilsome drudgery’ (ἐργασίην
φεύγουσα δυήπαθον; l. 486 in the Greek); his version seems to be ‘Chasing the
heavy shadows of dismay’ (l. 652).
Yet, in spite of this apparent reluctance to follow the lead of his original, Shelley’s
version generally ensures that the lyre and the child who has constructed it are held
together, even identified, by language which could apply to either. Although he
cannot have known the pronouncement of Charles Lamb, his translation embodies
Lamb’s characterization more exactly than any other: ‘Homer is perfect prattle,
tho’ exquisite prattle, compared to the deep oracular voice of Milton. In Milton,
you love to stop, and saturate your mind with every great image or sentiment;
in Homer you want to go on, to have more of his agreeable narrative.’65 Since
Lamb’s assessment was intended to discourage any imitation of Cowper, it may
exaggerate the disparity between blank verse and the Homeric hexameter, and it is
particularly hard to apply to the Iliad, not least to its later books; yet it is beautifully
appropriate to the poem to Hermes. By capturing the babbling spirit of the lyre,
and by associating it with Mercury, and more generally with the high spirits of the
poem itself, Shelley is able to achieve that legibility,66 or readability, for which
he aimed and to animate his poem with an immediately intelligible and graphic
narrative flow. His version makes most readers ‘want to go on’. His omissions
and additions, briefly detailed on this and the previous page, all contribute to this
effect, maintaining a high level of local interest and a momentum which is hard
to resist. This momentum affected even the process of translation itself: although
Shelley sometimes encountered difficulties in finding a translation which was
sufficiently exact or otherwise effective, the manuscript recurrently demonstrates
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The connection is considered in TVC, pp. 73–4.
Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, vol. 3, p. 23.
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64
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an impressive level of fluency so that many of the most striking words and phrases
do not emerge from any tangled process of revision or correction but seem to have
arrived on the page without evident struggle.
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Referring specifically to Il Ricciardetto, Shelley told the Gisbornes that he was
‘very grateful to anyone who amuses me’. The letter in which he makes this
admission67 is mainly concerned with anxieties and troubling circumstances.
Shelley, who confesses that ‘I struggle with despondency’, is unillusioned about
the comforts life can bring him: ‘The reflection [that he has been a party in making
financial claims on the Gisbornes], is full of bitterness, as most of the draughts
are which life presents to me.’ His next letter to the Gisbornes, written perhaps a
week later, reports: ‘My Neapolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction
that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything
connected with me. … An ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten this dunghill
of a world.’68 Both his declared need for amusement and his assessment of the
Homeric Hymn to Hermes as ‘infinitely comical’69 must be seen in this perspective.
Such a recognition and a willingness to acknowledge the comical elements in the
Homeric Hymn may seem immediately obvious to admirers of the Shelley version,
but readers of Chapman’s clotted70 and lengthy translation or of the recent and
more scholarly versions by Michael Crudden (Oxford World’s Classics, 2002),
Jules Cashford (Penguin, 2003) or Diane J. Rayor (University of California Press,
2004) may recognize the elements which set this Hymn apart from the others but
still be a little surprised by the full implications of the adjective. Although classical
scholars are usually prepared to admit that this Hymn is necessarily comical, most
translations do not capture this spirit or generate a prevailing lightness of tone as
consistently as Shelley.
In this way, verse-form and Shelley’s interpretation of the Greek poem reinforce
or complement each other. Hermes was widely known as ‘the little Prometheus’
and this Hymn seems to represent a holiday from more serious concerns so that, in
some ways, it plays over more serious issues in a compellingly different key. The
same frame of mind seems to have marked ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘The Witch
of Atlas’, possibly Swellfoot the Tyrant and, at an earlier stage, his translation from
Cyclops. A comparison of Shelley’s version with its Greek source suggests that
he was particularly responsive to its ludic possibilities. For instance, the second
stanza of his translation acknowledges the attributes of Hermes according to the
ritualistic practice of the Hymns; here Shelley follows the lead of his original
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Letters II: 206–7.
Letters II: 211.
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Letters II: 218.
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This adjective is employed in TVC, p. 140 (for a larger comparison between Shelley
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‘Infinitely comical
but adds a dimension by turning the already unheroic catalogue into a list of
compound epithets constituting an unusual litany of praise (‘A shepherd of thin
dreams, a cow-stealing, / A night-watching, and door-waylaying thief’ [ll. 13–
14]). This cumulation of adjectives must have caused the translator some thought
since the manuscript71 shows that the striking word ‘door-waylaying’ resulted
from a consideration of the meaning of the Greek word πῠληδόκος72 (watching
at the door; l. 15 in the Greek), and was first rendered as ‘gate expecting’, more
literal but also more clumsy in English. Shelley responds easily to other amusing
elements in the original. For example, there is Hermes’s ingenious method of
concealing his own involvement in the theft and mysterious disappearance of
Apollo’s cattle: ‘Backward and forward drove he them astray / So that the tracks
which seemed before, were aft’ (ll. 97–8); and his own deliberately deceptive
method of progression – ‘And, as on purpose, he walked wavering / From one
side to the other of the road –, / And with his face opposed the steps he trod’
(ll. 275–7). The translation also does justice to other episodes and handles them
with leggerezza: for instance, Mercury’s return to his cradle – ‘Now, he obliquely
through the keyhole passed / Like a thin mist or an autumnal blast’ (ll. 188–9);
‘obliquely’ is Shelley’s rendering of δοχμωθεὶς (edgeways; l. 146 in the Greek)
while ‘thin’ is a second thought for ‘autum’, presumably once intended to turn
into ‘autumnal’, and looks back to the ‘thin dreams’, an adjective earlier added
by Shelley.
Shelley is also alert to the comic potential of the juxtapositions of the Hymn, its
situations and its language. For example, when Hermes/Mercury invents the lyre,
Shelley records that ‘from his lips he sent / A strain of unpremeditated wit / Joyous
and wild and wanton – such you may / Hear among revellers on a holiday’ (ll. 68–
71). This version more or less follows the Greek original, though ‘unpremeditated’
slightly differs in emphasis from the Greek implication of something improvised
(ἐξ αὐτοσχεδίης πειρώμενος, meaning ‘impromptu, experimentally’; l. 55 in the
Greek), not least by suggesting a Miltonic tradition which might be recognized
by an English reader; the word is picked up again at l. 590 where Apollo refers
admiringly to ‘Thy power of unpremeditated song’, where once more the adjective
has no exact precedent in the Greek.73 In a recent study, Nicholas Richardson
comments that ‘Hermes’s song is compared to the mocking songs of young men
at feasts’. Perhaps Shelley does not quite capture what Richardson calls ‘its
humorous or risqué tone’, or illustrate his comment that ‘The practice alluded to
in the hymn is that of capping songs in an impromptu and witty way in a sympotic
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BSM XIV: 134–7.
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The fact that Shelley writes down the word in the nominative singular, whereas
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42
recourse to a dictionary.
73
For a consideration of Shelley’s debts to Milton in his translation, see TVC, pp. 43
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112, 119–21.
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context, with a mockery which could, if uncontrolled, easily slide into abuse’.74
Yet ‘tumult sweet / Of mighty sounds’ (ll. 67–8), ‘wit’ (l. 69) and ‘Joyous and
wild and wanton’ (l. 70; where the original has παραιβόλα κερτομέουσιν [bandy
taunts; l. 56 in the Greek]) are all introduced in Shelley’s interpretation or in
shadings which bring the poem closer to his concerns; they affect the tone of the
whole passage, much as the substitution of ‘revellers’ for youths (ἡβηταὶ; l. 56 in
the Greek) and ‘holiday’ for festivals (θαλίηισι; l. 56 in the Greek) bring to bear
on it a context which is less anthropologically or linguistically exact but more
concentratedly unrestrained. Though it may seem extravagant to claim that these
lines could easily provide a description of the prevailing spirit of Shelley’s own
translation, the poem as a whole is informed by an infectious good humour, and a
capacity for identification and witty engagement, not always so obviously or even
always so elegantly expressed in the original.
Perhaps the spirit of Shelley’s translation and its emphasis on the ‘delightful Boy’
(l. 770) can best be illustrated by one short passage (ll. 158–65):
We mortals let an ox grow old, and then
Cut it up after long consideration –
But joyous-minded Hermes from the glen
Drew the fat spoils to the more open station
Of flat smooth space, and portioned them, and when
He had by lot assigned to each a ration
Of the twelve Gods, his mind became aware
Of all the joys which in religion are.
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The body of this stanza can be traced directly to its Greek original, which includes
the details of sacrificing to the Gods, a ritual practice followed at length by the
heroes of Homeric epic, and which identifies Hermes as χαρμόφρων (l. 127 in the
Greek; correctly translated by Shelley). But the Shelley version differs from the
Greek in at least two major and defining details which he has transformed to his
own purposes. The concluding reference to the joys of religion has no precedent
and, not accidentally, introduces the word ‘joy’, which is not mentioned in the
Greek. Even more significantly and again unlike the Greek, the whole of Shelley’s
stanza is based on a contrast between the cautious behaviour of mortals (‘let an
ox grow old’ and ‘after long consideration’) and the instinctive and unrestrained
actions of divinity. Undemonstratively, but with exactly calculated components,
the verse-form allows the translator to give voice to a view of the world which
acknowledges narrative curiosity but is always poised to keep sublimities in place
by the recurring device of its rhyme and the onward flow of its versification. The
74
Nicholas Richardson, ed., Three Homeric Hymns: To Apollo, Hermes and Aphrodite.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 163.
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‘Infinitely comical
sureness and speed of Hermes is expressed in and matched by a verse-form which
takes full advantage of enjambement and even modifies the potentially satirical
effect of its final couplet by a deliberate imprecision.
The stanza shows that Shelley was much indebted to his original but that he
also interpreted it to the full by his easy use of ottava rima, by his mastery of
tone, and by the ways in which he described a self-gratifying mentality; such an
unrestrained sensibility is persuasively charming but, by normal human criteria,
self-serving and even egotistical since it acknowledges no boundaries. In spite
of his losses, but with admiring recognition, Apollo acknowledges the divinelysanctioned functions of Hermes which have been listed before and richly illustrated
by the convolutions of the myth (ll. 697–8): ‘Thieves love and worship thee – it
is thy merit / To make all mortal business ebb and flow / By roguery’. The final
stanza of the Hymn (normally devoted to celebrating the attributes of the relevant
divinity) further emphasizes that the defining exploits of this god fall outside those
normal structures which define most societies (ll. 767–80): ‘Hermes with Gods
and men even from that day / Mingled, and wrought the latter much annoy, /
And little profit, wandering far astray / Through the dun night.’ Here Shelley, who
wrote these lines with apparently little hesitation, maximizes the possibilities of
the Greek and in ‘wandering far astray’ even allows his readers a final pun which is
not in the original but defines a character enviably and unrepentingly deviant. Like
Odysseus, Hermes is πολύτροπος, a word which might suggest travelling far afield
(‘much travelled’) but might also indicate a boundless resourcefulness (‘shifty,
versatile, wily’); like the Ithacan hero, he is admired for those qualities and that
quickness of mind which make him a celebrated trickster.75 Shelley’s enraptured
engagement with the ruins and setting of Pompeii and his hours of contemplating
statues in the Uffizi may here have reached their perfect point of focus. Surely
one can detect in this ‘joyous-minded Hermes’ ‘an imperturbable and god-like
self-possession’ (‘god-like’ not suggesting here a comparison but the sometimes
surprising behaviour which might be expected from a divinity); surely one can say
of him as of the statue at Florence, ‘he seems in the enjoyment of delight which
nothing can destroy’?
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For a discussion of the trickster god, see Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: The 43
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Evolution of a Myth (1947). New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
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Chapter 12
‘Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream’:
|Shelley’s Art of Ambivalence in Hellas
Michael O’Neill
I
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The end of Hellas is, given the work’s obsession with cycles, an appropriate place
to start:
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last! (ll. 1096–101)1
The triple imperative to ‘Cease’ seems self-directed, as though the Chorus were
commanding itself to stop its imaginings, its lyric voicings. By implication, it
serves also as a form of authorial and poetic self-address. Shelley, the stanza
suggests, should ‘cease’, and so, too, should Hellas. It is as though the work as a
whole were conscious that, unless it ends and ends quickly, it will have to go on
confronting the inescapable fact that ‘hate and death’ will ‘return’.
The lines are among the most startling and most violent of Romantic poetry’s
characteristic returns upon itself, to adapt a phrase from Matthew Arnold.2 Shelley
involves the reader in the imaginative process of finding that rhyme itself forms a
vehicle for ‘return’, the verb provoking thought of the ‘urn / Of bitter prophecy’
which Hellas induces itself and its reader to ‘drain … to its dregs’. The metaphor
is forcefully mixed: the ‘urn’, a vessel of ashes, is also a means for drinking in
‘bitter’ knowledge of the future, and Shelley seems to adapt Keats’s own odic
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1
Unless indicated otherwise, Shelley’s poetry and prose are quoted from Percy
Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, eds Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (2003). Rev.
edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, hereafter SMW. Page numbers are supplied in
the notes for quotations from the prose. The author will like to thank Dr Oliver Clarkson
and Dr Paige Tovey for helpful suggestions.
2
Of a passage in Burke, Arnold writes: ‘That return of Burke upon himself has always
seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature’, ‘The
Function of Criticism’, in Arnold: ‘Culture and Anarchy’ and Other Writings, ed. Stefan
Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 26–52 (p. 35).
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240
‘bitters’ to his concerns. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ Keats experiences ‘a drowsy
numbness’ (l. 1) as though he had ‘emptied some dull opiate to the drains’ (l.
3), heading towards an oxymoronic state approaching death-in-life; in ‘Ode on a
Grecian Urn’, he realizes that the ‘urn’ amounts to a ‘Cold Pastoral’ (l. 45) that
will ‘remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man’ (ll. 47–8), offering
its resilient, enigmatic equation between beauty and truth.3 Shelley registers an
outburst of renewed shock at the thought of woe’s continuance throughout history,
and a wish that the cup or urn of such knowledge might pass him by.
The end of Hellas, then, encompasses a more nuanced perspective than is
allowed for by the play’s reputation as a piece of philhellenic propaganda. This
is not to deny the force of Shelley’s support for the Greek cause, apparent (for
example) in his co-translation with Mary Shelley of Alexander Ypsilanti’s ‘Cry
of War to the Greeks’; his evidently partisan Preface, and comments in letters
along the lines of ‘Greece has risen in this moment to vindicate its freedom’,
though even here the subsequent remark that ‘Massacres of the Turks have begun
in various parts’ strikes a subliminally disquieted tone.4 It is not my purpose to
deny that Shelley sought to throw his literary weight behind the cause of Greek
‘freedom’. Rather, I am suggesting that his ethical imagination is on the look-out,
in the language through which it expresses itself, for the complexities, scruples,
problems and difficulties thrown up in the wake of ardent commitment to the
embracing of a nationalist ideal.
That the presence of such complexities has not always been recognized may
throw light on the work’s comparative neglect. Hellas is not exactly ‘unfamiliar’
in overviews of Shelley’s poetic career; and yet it seldom features among the
more celebrated of the poet’s works. Even the final chorus, until recently, has
been anthologized more than analysed. Certainly, what is comparatively rare is
recognition of the artistic subtlety with which Hellas shapes an outlook that is
shiftingly, fluidly ambivalent and complex. Perhaps because it is at once taxingly
occasional in its detailed topicality and not evidently transparent in its conceptual
trajectory (an early reviewer speaks in unconsciously Shelleyan terms of ‘a maze
of inexplicable thought’), Hellas has consistently failed to attract the critical
acclaim it deserves.5 Shelley, too, may have played a part in the underestimation of
his work by referring to it with apparently slighting indifference as ‘written at the
suggestion of the events of the moment’.6 This essay seeks to correct the relative
lack of esteem enjoyed by Hellas: in its first half, by exploring the poetry of the
work’s choral lyrics; in its second half, by turning more directly to the work’s
treatment of time and history.
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Qtd from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott. London: Longman, 1970.
39
4
For a transcription of ‘Cry of War to the Greeks’ in Mary Shelley’s hand, with
40
corrections by Shelley, see Weinberg, BSM XXII (2): 238–45; Letters II: 280.
5
Review of ‘Hellas, a Lyrical Drama, by Percy B. Shelley’. The General Weekly 41
Register of News, Literature, Law, Politics and Commerce 13 (30 June 1822), pp. 501–3 42
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(p. 502).
6
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SMW: 548.
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‘Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream’
II
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In the wake of comments by Jerome McGann, Jonathan Sachs asserts of the final
stanza that ‘these lines sit uncomfortably with the rest of the poem and make
the optimistic idealization of Greece difficult to maintain’.7 The view is elegantly
argued, yet it is grossly over-simplifying to read this final stanza of the last choral
ode in Hellas as undermining the poem’s previous optimism. For that optimism is
never single-toned, nor is the ‘idealization of Greece’ ever other than self-aware.
The point is well made by Robert M. Ryan, who observes that ‘McGann does
not see that the pessimism of the last stanza is an undercurrent in the chorus as
it is in the drama as a whole’.8 The lyrical drama finishes on a downbeat which
is complicatedly at one with and inseparable from its more up-tempo moments.
Indeed, the close is not wholly different in inflection from the end of Shelley’s
previous lyrical drama, Prometheus Unbound. That earlier work concluded by
imagining the need to ‘hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it
contemplates’ (IV, 573–4). Wreckage of hope is the conjectured ground for hope’s
unremitting creativity. In Hellas, hope is at once under strain and capable of a
desperate resilience.9
The stanza brings out how ‘hazardous’ an ‘exercise of the faculty which bards
possess or feign’ it is ‘to anticipate however darkly’, as Shelley puts it in a note to
the final chorus, ‘a period of regeneration and happiness’.10 ‘The world is weary
of the past’, the ode finishes, ‘O might it die or rest at last!’ The last line seems
to wish to abolish ‘the past’, or at least for it to ‘rest at last’. But, as Shelley’s
self-aware irony in his note suggests, the poem’s anticipations of ‘a period of
regeneration and happiness’ are working ‘darkly’, in the dark about what might
eventuate because only too conscious of history’s darkness. The result is a work
marked by its simultaneous commitment to a cause associated with political and
cultural ‘freedom’ (here that of Greek independence) and by its capacity to register
the obstacles shadowing such commitment; it is a mature bringing together of
Shelley’s political and aesthetic considerations.
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7
In his provocative essay, McGann sees the poem as ‘hopelessly divided against
itself’ and suggestively (for my argument) points to Hellas’s employment of ‘poetic
counterstatement’, ‘The Secrets of an Elder Day: Shelley after Hellas’ (1966), rpt. in
Shelley: Modern Judgements, ed. R.B. Woodings. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 253–73
(pp. 270, 254–5); Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination
1789–1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 163.
8
Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature
1789–1824. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 216.
9
Compare Alan M. Weinberg on Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Italian
Experience. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991: ‘Shelley, in Act IV, shows how close to
collapse his Paradise is’, p. 132.
10
SMW: 586.
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For Robert Ryan, the poem’s main conflict is between ‘redemptive’ and
‘fatalistic’ ideologies.11 Constance Walker writes acutely about the work’s use of
what she calls ‘the dynamics of antithesis’.12 My reading has been aided greatly
by the accounts of Ryan and Walker, but it lays more emphasis than they do on
Shelley’s quarrel with himself. It seeks to quicken a grasp of the poetry’s art of
ambivalence, the dazzling rush created by its depiction of warring apprehensions (a
possible source, too, of the readerly bewilderment noted above). This ambivalence
incorporates ambiguities, as it displays a ‘simultaneous attachment to incompatible
or contradictory ideas, or beliefs’, to use Kenneth Weisbrode’s words.13 Crucial to
the poem’s effects is its quality of near-tragic sensitivity to what is involved in the
taking of political sides. Shelley finds ways of defamiliarizing what might have
been a merely partisan poem by a number of techniques, including a focus on
the Turkish emperor Mahmud and his depressive view of history’s cycles, which
comes close to voicing and mirroring Shelley’s own misgivings, and allowing the
viewpoint of ‘the enemy’ to be viewed sympathetically as in Aeschylus’s Persae,
the immediate model for Hellas. Shelley’s writing attains an inward empathy with
Mahmud, who alludes to Macbeth (at l. 644 and l. 918), faces the future with tragic
composure, recognizes power’s ultimate futility (as tyrants seldom, if ever, do),
and becomes in some ways the dramatic centre of the work’s movement towards
change and resolution. Moreover, it is a near-inevitable consequence of Shelley’s
generic choice, given the dramatic scenario he inherited from Aeschylus’s Persae,
which focuses on the moods of the defeated Persians rather than the joy of the
victorious Greeks.14
In breaking up the scenes of Greek plays, and allowing the chorus a voice,
the ode, with its dialectical structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, is a form
that permits lyric to be part of and participate in drama. Shelley exploits fully the
tendency of the choric ode to express vacillating emotions; Hellas teems with
mood swings associated with the formal interplay built into it at larger structural
and local levels. The three stanzas of the second choral ode, ‘Worlds on worlds’
(l. 197), for example, are each 14 lines in length; they might be thought of as
continuous with Shelley’s experiments with the form of the sonnet, and, indeed,
the ode, and they contain the shifts and switches of direction virtually intrinsic
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Ryan, The Romantic Reformation, p. 214.
Constance Walker, ‘The Urn of Bitter Prophecy: Antithetical Patterns in Hellas’.
Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 33 (1982), pp. 36–48 (p. 37).
13
Kenneth Weisbrode, On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having It
Both Ways. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012, p. 11.
14
See Timothy Webb’s comment that ‘Temperamentally, Shelley was always liable
to align himself with the defeated rather than with the conqueror’, Shelley: A Voice Not
Understood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977, p. 199. For more work
on Hellas and genre, see Stephen Cheeke, ‘Wrong-Footed by Genre: Shelley’s Hellas’.
Romanticism 2 (1996), pp. 204–19; and Michael Erkelenz, ‘Inspecting the Tragedy of
Empire: Shelley’s Hellas and Aeschylus’ Persians’. Philological Quarterly 76 (1997), pp.
313–37.
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to both forms. The stanzas are mirrored by the final choral ode (or, technically,
exode), also, as Donald H. Reiman points out, ‘forty-two lines long’.15 It is as
though the final ode is continually trying to compose a set of resolving sestets,
but never obtaining quite the resolution it desires. This is to praise the poetry
for the art with which it dramatizes longing and the possibility of unfulfilment.
In ‘Worlds on worlds’, the first stanza sets one kind of everlastingness, endless
material processes ‘rolling ever / From creation to decay’ (ll. 197–8), against a
different notion of permanence as it asserts, ‘But they are still immortal’ (l. 201) in
its rendering of reincarnated figures:
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But they are still immortal
Who, through birth’s orient portal
And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
New shapes they still may weave,
New Gods, new laws receive,
Bright or dim are they as the robes they last
On Death’s bare ribs had cast. (ll. 201–10)
Tempted though one might be to call them ‘souls’, Shelley uses the more enigmatic
pronoun ‘they’ and in his note refers to ‘living and thinking beings which inhabit the
planets’ (l. 584), a phrase which opens up the notion of extra-human life. Platonic
trust in spirit negotiates with matter’s tumultuous passage in the lyric, even as
the terms themselves (spirit and matter) are deliberately avoided. The syntax is
at once rapid, moving the sense past line-endings, and open to qualification, as
when the verb ‘Clothe’ takes on an almost exultantly accidental tone in ‘Gathered
around their chariots as they go’. The ‘immortal’ ‘Clothe’ themselves, that is,
with whatever ‘dust and light’ they travel through, ‘dust and light’ to which they
are superior but by which they are affected. Immortality coexists with motion;
‘hurrying to and fro’ between birth and death, death and birth, they ‘weave’
and they ‘receive’, creators and receivers of the lives they live, lives that seem
ultimately snatched from the skeleton-like fate glimpsed in ‘Death’s bare ribs’.
Such ‘beings’ engage in ‘unceasing flight’ (l. 204), a phrase whose energy recalls
the lyric’s opening. Notopoulos detects a ‘direct echo from the argument of Cebes
in the Phaedo, wherein he states that the soul may pass through many bodies, just
as the weaver may outlive many coats’.16 But a Platonic distinction between soul
and body is not merely what is offered here. As so often in Shelley, an apparent
contrast between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ also admits Spinozistic continuity between
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15
Donald H. Reiman, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1969). London: Macmillan, 1976, p.
148. The point is also made in Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose, ed. G.M. Matthews.
London: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 211.
16
James A, Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and The
Poetic Mind. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1949, p. 304.
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the two or, at least, a semantic blurring that adumbrates an anti-Cartesian position
and foreshadows the findings of modern physics.
The second stanza speaks of the coming of ‘A power from the unknown God, /
Promethean conqueror’ (ll. 211–12), Jesus Christ. Even if the stanza is mistrustful
of traditional titles (Christ is not named), it maintains, by contrast with the first
stanza, a reasonably unthwarted course, as it shows the complexly ‘triumphal
path’ (l. 213) trodden by Jesus and, subsequently, Christianity: ‘The cross leads
generations on’ (l. 224). In the third stanza, the Chorus of Greek Women, as
though unable wholly to suppress the poet’s argument with Christianity, utters a
Milton-inspired lament for ‘The Powers of earth and air’ (l. 230) which ‘Fled from
the folding star of Bethlehem’ (l. 231) and from the contrastingly singular and
monotheistic ‘power from the unknown God’.17 Moreover, in the final four lines,
the chorus effects a gentle but definite shock of mild surprise by assuming the
subject-position of those once in thrall to those ‘Powers’: ‘Our hills and seas and
streams … Wailed for the golden years’ (ll. 235, 238; emphasis added). As in ‘Ode
to the West Wind’, this chorus combines ode and sonnet to reinforce its dramatic
articulation of feelings that are by no means single-toned. Mahmud cries ‘woe to
all!’ (l. 893), and his ancestor the Phantom of Mahomet hears ‘voices … / Wailing
for glory never to return’ (ll. 867, 869), where ‘Wailing’ echoes the earlier ‘Wail’ to
suggest a kinship of lament between the Greek women and the Turkish conqueror.
Thus, to seize on the final lines of the work as though they constituted an
utterly unexpected cry of hopelessness is simplistic. True, they surprise, but they
do not fall on the ear as a wholly dissonant note. Throughout the final chorus, there
are hints of mixed feelings. The opening lines cannot but twin a fresh beginning
with an assertion of near-repetition:
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The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. (ll. 1060–65)
The cadences are stirring, with the three strong and assertive parallel declarations:
‘The world’s great age’, ‘The golden years’ and ‘The earth’. Yet all three
assertions contain verbs that speak of renewal, repetition, beginning again:
‘begins anew’, ‘return’, ‘renew’. It is as though going forward means returning
to what had happened before. Utopian imaginings, then, involve an element of
nostalgic revisiting, and that revisiting extends to the language of the stanza
which echoes previous moments in the work, in such a way as to cast a shadow
over the attempted tone of jubilation. The opening adjectives manage to sound
almost triumphalist, yet, on closer inspection, to betray uncertainty: ‘great’ may,
17
See Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, esp. stanzas XIX and XX,
describing the ‘loud lament’ (183) made for and by the departing gods of Greece.
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as Ryan argues, allude merely to duration as in the Platonic notion of the ‘great
year’, rather than necessarily imply the distinction that the apparent parallel with
‘golden’ suggests.18 That parallel both does and does not hold firm, as though
one saw a light switching on and off over and over. The use here of ‘great’ shares
subliminally, on this argument, in the doubt that surrounds the word elsewhere
in Shelley, as in his sonnet meditation on ‘political greatness’, or, indeed, in his
brooding over the inner flaws of ‘The wise, / The great, the unforgotten’ (ll. 208–9)
in ‘The Triumph of Life’: a poem that has an intimate creative relationship with
the convergence of radiance and darkness in Hellas.
Again, the reference to ‘The golden years’ summons up a memory of the close
of the earlier choral ode, ‘Worlds on worlds are rolling ever’, which concludes with
an evocation of pagan loss at the coming of Christianity’s ‘killing Truth’ (l. 234)
when ‘Our hills and seas and streams’ (l. 235) ‘Wailed for the golden years’ (l. 238).
The new ‘golden years’ mean making a truce with the religion (Christianity) that is
held responsible earlier for their loss. Constance Walker observes that the passage
which follows ‘mocks the choral metaphor of “golden years” by using “gold” in
its most literal sense, as Mahmud responds to his soldiers’ demand for pay: “More
gold?”’.19 The same opposition is at work in the final chorus which instantly brings
into play the idea of ‘The golden age’, deriving from Hesiod and Ovid, and used
in poems by many writers, as in Joseph Warton’s translation of Virgil’s fourth
Eclogue, which looks forward to ‘The Golden age this infant shall restore’ (l. 11).20
It moves, however, to a near-disenchanted assertion that ‘Saturn and Love’ (l.
1090) will have for ‘their altar dowers’ ‘Not gold, not blood’ (l. 1094), but ‘votive
tears and symbol flowers’ (l. 1095), where ‘symbol’, a rare adjectival usage in
Shelley (and other poets), catches the eye. Those ‘symbol flowers’ might describe
poetry’s own self-conscious efforts to transcend the mire of ‘gold’ and ‘blood’, a
familiar combination in later Shelley, speaking of the alliance between wealth and
bloodshed.21 The ‘flowers’ of poetry know that they are at best ‘symbol’ flowers;
they are ‘symbolical’ and have a ‘signification’,22 but they are secondary, too. The
power of the symbolic may invest them, but they share in the condition of naming
an absence that attends the symbolic.23
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Ryan, The Romantic Reformation, p. 216.
Walker, ‘The Urn of Bitter Prophecy’, p. 44.
20
The Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. Joseph Warton (1753), qtd from
Literature Online available at: http://literature.proquest.com/marketing/index.jsp.
21
For Shelley’s unadmiring collocation of ‘blood & gold’, see his letter to Horace
Smith of 29 June 1822, in Letters II: 442. For discussion, see Neville Rogers, Shelley at
Work: A Critical Inquiry (1956). 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, pp. 274, 282–5.
22
A Lexical Concordance to the Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (hereafter
Conc), comp. and ed. F.S. Ellis. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892.
23
In terms that are relevant to my argument, Neville Rogers glosses ‘votive tears’
as ‘“verse memorials” such as Adonais had been to the immortality of Keats’s thought’,
Shelley at Work, p. 285.
18
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Shelley attempts to represent the new ‘golden years’ as a triumph of Greek
mythology, yet throughout Hellas he has associated the Greek cause with
Christianity, in part for pragmatic, opportunist reasons as a means of securing
Western sympathy for the Greeks. As he argues in a note to the second chorus,
‘The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as true in their
relation to the worship they superseded, and that which in all probability they will
supersede, without considering their merits in a relation more universal’ (l. 584). In
the phrase ‘popular notions’ Shelley implies, as elsewhere, a distinction between
Christianity’s true nature (about which he is, at best, elliptically tight-lipped) and
‘popular notions’. So when he writes later in the final chorus, ‘Saturn and Love
their long repose / Shall burst, more bright and good / Than all who fell, than One
who rose, / Than many unsubdued’ (ll. 1090–94), he intimates a new version of
myth, one that is ‘more bright and good’ than the three groups alluded to in the
last two lines and glossed as follows in Shelley’s note: ‘the Gods of Greece, Asia,
and Egypt’, ‘Jesus Christ, at whose appearance the idols of the Pagan World were
amerced of their worship’, and ‘the monstrous objects of the idolatry of China,
India, the Antarctic islands, and the native tribes of America’.24 The new religion
of ‘Saturn and Love’ (emphasis added) seeks to broaden the significance of the
deities invoked, since ‘Love’ cannot wholly be identified with, say, Venus. And
yet this new version of past mythology vies with what seems also a restoration of
‘Saturn and Love’, when they ‘were among the deities of a real or imaginary state
of innocence and happiness’,25 as Shelley’s note puts it: a characteristic scepticism
asserting itself (‘real or imaginary’) in the midst of ardent commitment.
The motion of going in circles haunts the ababcc-rhymed stanzas of the final
chorus. The summary couplet in each stanza announces a temporary suspension
of to-ing and fro-ing, but even here an effect of shimmering ambivalence often
occurs. Thus, at the close of the first stanza, the fact that ‘faiths and empires gleam,
/ Like wrecks of a dissolving dream’ (ll. 1064–5) invites us, first, to notice that
some form of survival is implicit in ‘wrecks’ and, secondly, to question whether
these ‘gleams’ have forfeited any claim to our imaginative interest; as they ‘gleam’,
do they do more than make manifest the fact of their imminent dissolution? The
verb here appears to imply the transitory, even delusive nature of the ‘gleam’,
here collapsing into the insubstantiality of ‘dissolving dream’. Yet in the previous
semichorus, just a few lines earlier, ‘gleam’ shines with a more hopeful lustre, as,
indeed, does the idea of ‘dream’: ‘Through the sunset of hope, / Like the shapes of
a dream, / What Paradise islands of glory gleam!’ (ll. 1050–52). The technique here
reveals a poised delicacy of implication: Shelley’s use of the same word to imply
both paradisal hopes and a mage-like dismissal of ‘faiths and empires’ implies
the precarious nature of poetic optimism; it extends, too, a sympathy towards that
which it is intent on banishing since ‘faiths and empires’ seem made of the same
stuff as ‘Paradise islands of glory’.
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SMW: 586
SMW: 586.
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That they are confirms the all-important function of the work’s will to orient
the imagination. Hellas is a remarkable work because it bravely stages such a
will and allows us to see it confronting the frail grounds of its existence, to depict
itself, that is, as ‘pavilioned upon chaos’ (l. 772).26 In this final chorus, one can
see the insecurity of reincarnated Hellenism. Indeed, Shelley’s note is slightly
at odds with the poem; when he speaks of ‘the idols of the Pagan World’ being
‘amerced of their worship’, he expresses in ‘amerced’ his sense of an unjustified
violation, yet the poem demands some recognition of the claims of the superseding
‘One who rose’. Christianity may supersede pagan ‘idols’, but it has brought
with it complications that cannot be resolved by returning, as the second two
stanzas of the final chorus do, to ideas of ‘A brighter Hellas’ (l. 1066) or ‘A loftier
Argo’ (l. 1072), or ‘Another Orpheus’ (l. 1074), or ‘A new Ulysses’ (l. 1076).
These comparatives seek to reconstitute the ancient world in the modern; they
echo a Virgilian topos in the Roman poet’s fourth, ‘messianic’ Eclogue in which
repetition of old themes is seen both as evidence that ‘the Golden Age / Returns’
and that ‘there’ll be lingering traces still of our primal error’, so that, for example,
‘A second Argo will carry her crew of chosen heroes’.27 Shelley’s comparatives
betray a dependence on underpinning myths: myths that frequently, as with the
stories of Orpheus and Ulysses, incorporate sadness and death (‘And loves, and
weeps, and dies’, l. 1075) or inevitable betrayal and heartache (‘leaves once more
/ Calypso for his native shore’, l. 1076–7). Even reaching a ‘shore’ seems merely
repetition, a question of embarking on a voyage ‘once more’. In Virgil, as noted,
these repetitions are ‘lingering traces … of our primal error’: indeed, the Latin is
harsher in inflection than Day Lewis’s translation conveys, referring to sceleris
vestigia (traces of wickedness). Virgil foresees that even in the new order old
imperfections will die hard; Shelley hopes that the return of myth will usher in
a new order, but, for all his ideological objections to notions of Original Sin, his
allusion to Virgil sharpens his and our awareness that discarding ‘primal error’ is
virtually impossible.
Anticipating the final line of the poem, the fourth stanza intensifies the
interrogation of myth as the vehicle for Utopian hope:
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O, write no more the tale of Troy,
33
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
34
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
35
Which dawns upon the free:
36
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew. (ll. 1078–83)
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26
See M[ilton] Wilson, ‘Pavilioned upon Chaos: The Problem of Hellas’, in 41
42
Woodings, Shelley: Modern Judgements, pp. 228–40.
27
The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis. London: Oxford 43
44
University Press, 1966, pp. 18–20.
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The move and the formulation are typical of the mercurial life and poetic vitality
of Hellas. Strengthening the force of his poem, Shelley senses a weakness in
the chorus’s previous lyricism, and almost abjures what has gone before; the
‘once more’ (l. 1076) of Death’s seemingly inevitable script leads him to turn on
what he has been doing: ‘O, write no more the tale of Troy’. The danger of that
‘tale’ is dependent on a condition that seems only too much like an inevitable
occurrence (‘If earth Death’s scroll must be’). The mythmaking poet finds himself
in contention with the overwhelming power of another ‘script’, one already
written and hard, it would seem, to gainsay. Hellas is a poem rich in awareness
of counter-conditions, other, less positive perspectives. Classical myth takes as its
central seer, the stanza half-suggests, the tragic figure of Oedipus, blinded when
able to see, and Shelley would forestall any such fate for himself or for those on
whose behalf he writes his poem: he would not ‘mix with Laian rage the joy /
Which dawns upon the free’, where ‘dawns upon’ breathes idiomatic vividness
(‘suddenly occur to’) into the more hackneyed image of a new dawn. Laius, the
father whom Oedipus unwittingly kills at the crossroads, is a brilliant substitution
for Shelley’s first thought, the horrors of the house of Atreus, with its legacy of
‘Thyestean blood’.28 The revision is finely alert to the paradoxes encoiled within
the story of Oedipus: the solver of the nightmare confronting Thebes was also
its cause and victim. It is as though Shelley detects the possibility of cultural
parricide in an act of imaginative redemption dependent on Hellenic myth. Even
here, a further condition suggests that troubles lie in wait, as a spin of the stanza’s
syntactical wheel brings into play ‘Riddles of death Thebes never knew’; ‘renew’,
in the rhyming position, is again shaded with irony, as though renewal will present
the poet with previously hitherto unrealized ‘Riddles’.
The lyric associates those ‘Riddles’ with ‘Death’, making a link, in the context
of the poem, with the historical process of seeking freedom through armed
struggle. It is riddling that the search for freedom should lead to further conflict
and ‘Death’. And yet the lyric is itself riddling about the nature of those ‘Riddles’.
They resonate with Shelley’s use of ‘riddle’ in a note purporting to be about the
second choral lyric. This note’s second paragraph, however, seems to refer less to
the ‘concluding verses’ of ‘Worlds on worlds are rolling ever’, verses that enact
the conflict between pagan and Christian worship, than to those that conclude the
entire poem, which can be described as seeking to ‘indicate a progressive state of
more or less exalted existence’.29 Whether this be a correct interpretation or not, the
note has relevance to the ‘Riddles of death Thebes never knew’ in its meditation,
unlinked to the overt theme of ‘Worlds on worlds are rolling ever’, on ‘the origin
of Evil’. Shelley writes: ‘That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in
our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may
be regarded as equally certain.’ He claims the right and duty of the poet to ‘have
conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled by an
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inextinguishable thirst for immortality’.30 But such conjecturing does not mean he
is able to forsake the sense that modern times will pose new ‘Riddles’, and Hellas
gains greatly in emotional force and intellectual integrity from that fact.
One such riddle is addressed in the next stanza, with its opening gambit of
imagining ‘Another Athens’ (l. 1084) and subsequent denial of its capacity to
last: this born-again Athens will ‘leave, if nought so bright may live, / All earth
can take or Heaven can give’ (ll. 1088–9). Yeats’s ironic reworking of these
Virgilian-influenced lines in ‘Two Songs from a Play’ (‘Another Troy must rise
and set, / Another lineage feed the crow’) brings out, one might argue, what in
Shelley are potentially troublesome undercurrents.31 Shelley’s language is again
operating with maximum concatenated force. So, ‘Heaven’ avoids the polemical
downgrading inflicted on it in Prometheus Unbound, in which the first act finishes,
‘Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more’ (I, 820). There, ‘Heaven’ serves,
in effect, as code for ‘God’, thought of as a tyrannical Jupiter-figure; in Hellas,
Shelley first wrote ‘God’, then replaced the word with ‘Heaven’, aligning it with
‘earth’, as benign co-executors of the new Athens’s bequest.32 Once more, the
idea of the legacy appears; the thing itself cannot last; what can survive is ‘All
earth can take or Heaven can give’, and while the stanza ends with the idea of
a giving, it feels like a compensation; the two rhyme-words – ‘live’ and ‘give’ –
exist in a sharply contrapuntal relationship. The idea of legacy is there in the verb
‘leave’, glossed by the Shelley Concordance in this instance as meaning ‘leave
behind, bequeathe [sic], let remain’, but also building into itself, as the condition
for any such leaving, the fact that there must be a leaving that is a departing from
or abandonment (the Concordance’s first meaning for the verb is ‘depart from or
abandon a person’). It has, moreover, a greater force for drawing on an earlier,
comparable use of the word, in the initial full choral song, where Shelley writes
the typically Janus-faced lines, ‘Let Freedom leave, where’er she flies, / A Desert
or a Paradise’ (ll. 90–91): a ‘Desert’ if the leaving is solely an abandonment, a
‘Paradise’ if the leaving is a legacy.
In Hellas Shelley suggests two possibilities of redemptive, spiritual meaning:
one is the contradiction-ridden invocation of a re-created Hellenism which
reaches eloquent and self-deconstructing heights in the final chorus; the other is
the spectral glimpse of what Ryan calls a ‘pure Christianity’ which is in his view
gestured towards at the close of the third chorus:33
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In sacred Athens, near the fane
Of Wisdom, Pity’s altar stood:
Serve not the unknown God in vain,
But pay that broken shrine again,
Love for hate and tears for blood. (ll. 733–7)
30
SMW: 585.
W.B. Yeats, Poems, ed. Daniel Albright. London: Dent, 1990.
32
BSM XVI: 204–5.
33
Ryan, The Romantic Reformation, p. 212.
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The ‘unknown God’, alluding to Paul’s reproach to the ‘men of Athens’ for their
‘too superstitious’ worship of ‘THE UNKNOWN GOD’ (Acts 17: 22, 23), is,
on Ryan’s reading, the deity who presides over a ‘religion that had never yet
existed on earth and perhaps never could’.34 Whether this religion is a version of
Christianity rather than a purified adaptation of Greek thought is more arguable
than Ryan allows, especially in view of the locale’s description as ‘sacred Athens’
(emphasis added). Typically, however, Shelley turns his source against itself,
apparently reinstating the value of serving ‘the unknown God’, a value which
Paul has questioned. And even more typically he opens his own critique to further
self-interrogation as his syntax allows for a double reading of the line ‘Serve not
the unknown God in vain’. This might mean: ‘Do not serve the unknown God
vainly but do so in appropriate ways’; or it might mean: ‘Do not undertake the vain
labour of serving the unknown God since such a God belongs with the “poisonous
names” (l. 53) rejected in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.’ The ‘shrine’ (of ‘Pity’)
may be ‘broken’ as the scene of previously ‘broken’ vows, or it may be ‘broken’
in the sense of being overturned. These uncertainties do not undercut the pleading
that ‘hate’ should be paid with ‘Love’, ‘blood’ with ‘tears’. But they show that
such pleading has as its ultimate sanction less a divine commandment than a
self-begotten imperative, such as seems at work propelling the ‘they of Athens
and Jerusalem’ (l. 134) in ‘The Triumph of Life’, the unfinished poem on which
Shelley would shortly embark in 1822.
III
Hellas is a lyrical drama that immerses itself in time, even as it longs for a conquest
over cyclical temporality. Written when the outcome of the Greek rebellion against
Ottoman rule was uncertain, since the rebellion’s initial victories were clouded
by the fact that the western powers were pursuing a policy of non-intervention,
the poet casts the work as one that cannot wholly follow the completed design
of the ‘first model of my conception’, the ‘Persae of Aeschylus’ and supply a
‘catastrophe parallel to the return of Xerxes and the desolation of the Persians’.35
Shelley wished, as Kenneth Neill Cameron has it, to publish Hellas quickly in
order ‘to add his voice effectively to the already considerable chorus of opposition
to Castlereagh’s non-intervention policy’.36 But Cameron’s word ‘chorus’ reminds
us that Shelley’s choice of literary genre, lyrical drama, involves the use of choral
lyrics that do not simply oppose, but explore what it means to oppose.
‘I have’, Shelley asserts in his Preface, ‘contented myself with exhibiting
a series of lyric pictures, and with having wrought upon the curtain of futurity,
which falls upon the unfinished scene, such figures of indistinct and visionary
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Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1974, p. 379.
34
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delineation as suggest the final triumph of the Greek cause as a portion of the
cause of civilization and social improvement’.37 The ‘curtain of futurity’ recalls
Shelley’s phrasing in ‘A Defence of Poetry’. There, he says that whether poetry
‘spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene
of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being’.38 This formulation
waives as relatively unimportant the question of whether poetry finds or bestows a
meaning. Yet, in Hellas, the question comes to the fore. If the ‘curtain of futurity’
is virtually the same thing as poetry’s ‘own figured curtain’, does the poet do
more than express pious hopes concerning ‘the cause of civilization and social
improvement’? In asking that very question, albeit usually at an implicit, even at
times subliminal level, Hellas ceases to be ‘a mere improvise’ which ‘derives its
interest … solely from the intense sympathy which the Author feels with the cause
he would celebrate’,39 and becomes a poem that reflects on its status as a ‘figured
curtain’, and thus on the nature of a poetry that would reshape history into an
image of its own desires.
The description of the work as a ‘mere improvise’ may seem wryly selfdeprecating. But Hellas has something of an improvisatory quality, for all the
symmetry of its carefully plotted imbalance between four choral sections and three
blank-verse episodes, in the very sense it gives of committing its hopes, aspirations
and fears to the mercy of testingly intricate formal structures. An example occurs
in the opening sequence. Interweaving the voices of ‘Greek Captive Women’ and
an Indian slave caring for the sleeping Mahmud, Shelley arranges the episode
with skill and art; it emerged from (and replaced) painstaking preliminary drafts
of what Reiman and Neth call the ‘Discarded lyric dialogue in the Harem’. Of
these drafts, they note in terms relevant to the present essay that ‘The complexity
of the argument in this rejected passage … makes it difficult to say in every case
which speaker is taking which side of the argument’.40 At the same time, in the
final version, Shelley sweeps his fingers across the lyric strings with a deft, light
rapidity. The word ‘sleep’ recurs, but it takes on different inflections from the
different singers. The Greek Captive Women point up the sinister suggestions of
‘sleep’, understood as an elegiac metaphor for the killing of the Greek soldiers
‘Who now keep / That calm sleep / Whence none may wake, where none shall
weep’ (ll. 18–20). The Indian slave uses the same rhyme, but, reversing it, ‘would
live to weep, / So thou [Mahmoud] mightst win one hour of quiet sleep’ (ll. 25–6).
As the dramatic poem unfolds, it displays impressive artistry in its refusal
to propagandize. The chorus of Greek Women affirms the prospect of waking:
while ‘Tyrants sleep, let Freedom wake’ (l. 30), it says, and invokes the notion of
powerful ‘words which, like secret fire, shall flow’ (l. 32). But immediately the
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SMW: 548–9.
SMW: 698.
39
SMW: 548.
40
BSM XVI: xxxix.
38
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single choral song splits into semichoral lyrics which problematize the idea of
easy access to words that will function like ‘secret fire’:
SEMICHORUS 1
Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;
Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed, – but it returneth
SEMICHORUS 2
Yet were life a charnel where
Hope lay coffined with Despair;
Yet were truth a sacred lie,
Love were lust –
Co
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SEMICHORUS 1
If Liberty
Lent not life its soul of light,
Hope its iris of delight,
Truth its prophet’s robe to wear,
Love its power to give and bear. (ll. 34–45)
Much of the work’s self-challenging and arduous clinging to optimism is apparent
in this triadic lyric, with its affirmative thesis, undercutting antithesis, and
conditionally hopeful synthesis. Cameron is right to describe the poem as made
up of ‘deceptively tenuous lines’.41 Indeed, tenuousness here has its own tenacity.
Shelley is prepared to confront the possibility that ‘Truth’ might be a ‘sacred lie’ in
the second quatrain when a doubt-tinged ‘If’ momentarily but memorably subverts
the difficult commitment maintained in the first semichorus’s opening lines. The
incomplete grammar mimed here is an indication of the indeterminacy running
through the lyrical drama; throughout, one finds a sense of incompleteness that
both hints at possible failure and spurs on to renewed hope. The movement of the
verse is so light it is easy to underestimate the embattled and affecting depth of
engagement with emotional opposites here. The poetry uses abstractions not in a
tired, worn way, but to suggest how they might seem worn and tired, how ‘Hope’
might be ‘coffined with Despair’, were it not for the intervention of ‘Liberty’, with
its transforming gifts and metaphorical persuasions: ‘soul of light’, ‘iris of delight’,
and ‘prophet’s robe’. In the draft version of the final line, Shelley crossed out ‘its
power to give and bear’ and replaced it with ‘flowers to give & thorns to bear’.42
It may be that the return to the first version is a recognition that metaphor itself is
rolling ever from creation to decay, and that the ‘power to give and bear’ needs
to be restated in an unadorned way. That, in turn, is an instance of the glinting
restlessness that shines off the poetry in Hellas; it is as though the work’s language
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BSM XVI: 172–3.
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were a double-edged blade flashing out dazzling and often opposed figures from 1
imaginative space. First ‘Liberty’ breathes new life into potentially hackneyed 2
abstractions; then, as that new life threatens to become stylized, the verse switches 3
back to a less figurative idiom, in the trust that, by this stage, the reader, having 4
followed the switches of trajectory, will sense the enhanced significance of words 5
such as ‘give and bear’.
6
As though the poetry has survived a perilous passage of self-searching, the 7
chorus embarks on a lyric narrative of Freedom’s course. The poetry assumes a 8
greater confidence, its metre shifting from nervy trochees into more stabilized 9
iambs that, after establishing themselves as a norm, can accommodate further 10
trochaic lines (ll. 52–3), conferring on the trochees an air that is, this time, aspiring 11
rather than anxiously yearning:
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In the great morning of the world,
The spirit of God with might unfurled
The flag of Freedom over Chaos,
And all its banded anarchs fled
Like vultures frighted from Imaus
Before an earthquake’s tread. –
So from Time’s tempestuous dawn
Freedom’s splendour burst and shone: – (ll. 46–53)
In this fascinating rewriting of Genesis, Shelley locates a space between orthodoxy
and transgression. As he identifies the cause of ‘Freedom’ with ‘The spirit of God’,
he quietly enhances the significance of the former. His phrase treads a fine line;
it allows for a double reading of ‘The spirit of God’ as the Holy Spirit and a
more abstract sense of divinity’s disembodied essence. Yet, reining in any too
subversive a rewriting, Shelley suggests, through an allusion to Paradise Lost
(Satan is compared in Book III, line 431, to ‘a vulture on Imaus bred’), that he
is reading Milton’s epic in an orthodox spirit. At this point, as history bursts into
it, the poem bursts into history (‘Time’s tempestuous dawn’) and into something
close to the charting of libertarian energies associated with Shelley’s own version
of the progress poem in ‘Ode to Liberty’. Trochees, here, are the vehicle for a new
access of creative energy: ‘Freedom’s splendour burst and shone’. But the verbs
are in the past tense and one of them – ‘burst’ – reveals a doubleness characteristic
of the work; as in its gerundival form later on where the ‘Worlds on worlds’ are
‘bubbles on a river / Sparkling, bursting, borne away’ (ll. 199–200), ‘burst’ can
mean ‘suddenly manifest’ or ‘vanish’, an ambiguity much more present than it is
when it ghosts the close of ‘England in 1819’. Shelley imagines how ‘a glorious
Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day’ (ll. 13–14), his primary
meaning being, as the Concordance suggests, ‘break forth’, though that ‘breaking
forth’ may hint at a fizzling out. In Hellas the double meaning of ‘burst’ exists
in a latent state in ‘burst and shone’, where the meaning ‘suddenly manifest’ is
uppermost because of the subsequent ‘shone’, even as ‘and’ need not necessarily
imply temporal sequence: that is, the bubbles may have vanished and shone in the
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same instant. This latent doubleness then moves closer to the surface in ‘Sparkling,
bursting’, where the position of ‘bursting’ (and the subsequent ‘borne away’) lends
force to a reading that emphasizes ephemerality, de-materialization.43
Subliminally this ambiguity heralds the recognition that the progress of Freedom
is complex and interrupted, as the rest of the chorus reveals, before the entire
opening sequence is rounded off by a return to the semichoral vacillations which
preceded the full ode. The opening sequence concludes with a note of foreboding
about what would happen were ‘Freedom’ to experience ‘Annihilation’ (l. 106)
rather than ‘resurrection’ (l. 100), the latter term preceding the former rather than
following it, as one might expect in a work that seems, in places, to entertain
transformative hope. The first semichorus’s aghast ‘If Annihilation’ completes
itself in the second semichorus’s lines, lines that use ‘her’ to refer to ‘Greece’ (see
ll. 97, 99) while reminding us the same word has been used before for ‘Freedom’
(see ll. 90, 93), thus uniting the nation and the concept: ‘Dust let her glories be! /
And a name and nation / Be forgotten, Freedom, with thee!’ (ll. 107–9).44 The form
of the utterance has an oracle’s air of inevitability, as though a dismal vision had
been summoned into being as an admonitory alternative to the work’s best hopes.
There is a note there, in the ecstatic submission to the idea of failure, that
recalls Yeats’s description of Demogorgon as thrust into being ‘by that something
in [Shelley] which again and again forced him to balance the object of desire
conceived as miraculous and superhuman, with nightmare’.45 This may be a touch
melodramatic, but, as Harold Bloom remarks, Shelley needed such a figure as ‘the
god of scepticism, and thus the preceptor of our appalling freedom to imagine
well or badly’.46 Awareness of this ‘appalling freedom’ informs the language and
mode of Shelley’s second lyrical drama. It explains his switch of genre from that
adopted in the preliminary ‘Prologue in Heaven’, in which, influenced by the
openings of Goethe’s Faust and the Book of Job, Shelley places the fight for Greek
independence in a supra-human context.47 In this earlier version, the struggles of
men are viewed with lofty detachment from the ramparts of eternity. Instead, in the
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For stimulating discussion of ‘bursting’ in Shelley, see Argyros I. Protopapas,
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poetic Science: His Visionary Enterprise and the Crisis of SelfConsciousness. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2013, passim.
44
For relevant commentary, see Jeffrey N. Cox’s comment, in relation to Hellas, that
‘A free Greece will be a wonderful thing; it will not be the millennium’, ‘The Dramatist’,
in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006, pp. 65–84 (p. 77).
45
W.B. Yeats, ‘Prometheus Unbound’ (1933), in Essays and Introductions. London:
Macmillan, 1961, p. 420.
46
Harold Bloom, ‘The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction to Shelley’, in The Ringers
in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971,
p. 99.
47
See Cian Duffy, ‘Percy Shelley’s other “lyrical drama” and the inception of Hellas
(1822)’, forthcoming in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, for a re-contextualization
of the so-called ‘Prologue’ and of the poem’s composition.
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finished lyrical drama, Shelley brings forward no such extra-human speaker. The
nearest thing to a seer or prophet in the work, Ahasuerus is distinctly human in his
claims, accorded at best ‘a sort of natural magic’ in his dealings with Mahmud,
the Turkish emperor, and described as ‘disclaiming all pretension, or even belief,
in supernatural agency’.48 From this perspective even the Greek women’s earlier
trust in ‘the Spirit of God’ may seem metaphorical, rather than metaphysical. If the
Phantom of Mahomet the Second appears, it does so to a mind that has wrought
upon itself. It is as though Mahmud were interiorizing imaginatively, through
Ahasuerus’s promptings, the account of the fall of Constantinople to Mahomet
provided by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall, a passage to which Shelley directs
us in a note.
Ahasuerus lures Mahmud into imaginative empathy with the past, so that
the latter can question Mahomet about ‘The written fortunes of thy house and
faith’ (l. 809), and especially about how power won through violence must
inevitably succumb to violent overthrow, ‘How what was born in blood must die’
(l. 811). Ahasuerus, one might argue, does not so much voice his own belief in
the inevitability of overthrow as evoke Mahmoud’s fear of such a thing.49 Yet as
Mahmoud describes ‘The sound / As of the assault of an imperial city’ (ll. 814–
15), and embarks on a Gibbon-inspired evocation of war’s horror, he articulates
the major threat to optimism about the current struggle, the fear that it, too, will be
‘born in blood’ and thus ‘must die’. The text shadows its hopes with fears.
Gibbon’s account of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 (Shelley
mistakenly gives the date as two years later) is a quietly virtuosic demonstration
of the horror of warfare and the ease with which the great work of time can be
overthrown. Among other things, he suggests the brutal menace of successful
military strategy; of the Turkish tactics, he writes: ‘the similitude of a twined or
twisted thread has been applied to the closeness and continuity of their line of
attack’; of the decisive assault, he asserts: ‘in the uniform and odious pictures of
a general assault, all is blood and horror and confusion; nor shall I strive, at the
distance of three centuries and a thousand miles, to delineate a scene of which
there could be no spectators, and of which the actors themselves were incapable
of forming any just or adequate idea.’50 It is hard not to link these quotations with
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SMW: 586.
For excellent commentary on the way in which ‘Ahasuerus shatters Mahmud’s
assumptions and convictions and thrusts him into the state of aporia’, see E. Douka
Kabitoglou, ‘“The Name of Freedom”: A Hermeneutic Reading of Hellas’, in Shelley:
Poet and Legislator of the World, eds Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 129–43 (p. 135). See also pertinent discussion
in Lorraine Morris, ‘All That Faith Creates, or Love Desires: Shelley’s Poetic Vision of
Being’, PhD thesis, Durham University, available at: Durham E-Theses Online: http://
etheses.dur.ac.uk/4602, pp. 208–45.
50
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed., abridged and with
a critical foreword by Hans-Friedrich Mueller, intro. Daniel J. Boorstin. New York: Modern
Library, 2003, pp. 1210, 1211.
49
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the potent subtext that keeps obtruding in Hellas, to its artistic advantage. The
‘similitude’ in the first might suggest the fate of a writer seeking to keep his hands
clean while ‘exhibiting a series of lyric pictures’51 in favour of a ‘cause’ that cannot
but involve ‘blood and horror and confusion’. The second strikes at the heart of
the Shelleyan assumption that human beings are inevitably ‘actors or spectators’
(l. 185), as he had described the human predicament in Adonais, a phrase he would
modify in ‘The Triumph of Life’, when Rousseau tells the Poet that he will ‘from
spectator turn / Actor or victim in this wretchedness’ (ll. 305–6). With silky, deadly
irony, Gibbon depicts a situation deprived of agency, understanding, heroism; his
‘pictures of a general assault’ invite comparison with and indeed contrive to be
enfolded within Shelley’s ‘series of lyric pictures’. Ahasuerus says that the vision
experienced by Mahmoud shows how ‘the full tide of power / Ebbs to its depths’
(ll. 848–9). Hellas, true to its instinct to dramatize conflicting perspectives, is
astute enough to realize that such Ozymandias-like ironies can boomerang.
Power can reassert itself, as though it were a force at odds with human agency,
as though it obeyed its own narrative imperatives.52 Such an awareness seeps into
the lyrical drama’s reworking of idealist thought. Shelley asserts the need to believe
in the possibility of freedom from history as cyclical enchaining. Yet he seems, on
another level, to verge perilously on a rejection of agency. Ahasuerus is ‘an adept
in the difficult lore / Of Greek and Frank philosophy’ (ll. 741–2). One assumes he
is able to expound the thought of Plato and also of more modern thinkers such as
Spinoza, Bacon, Rousseau, the philosophes, Kant, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. But
what emerges in his response to Mahmoud’s half-respectful, half-taunting assertion
that ‘Thou dost not own that art, device, or God, / Can make the future present’ (ll.
758–9) is a redefinition of those temporal terms: ‘Sultan!’, he cries, ‘talk no more
/ Of thee and me, the future and the past; / But look on that which cannot change
– the One, / The unborn and the undying’ (ll. 766–9). That ‘One’, lifted out of
time, is a disturbing concept for modern criticism, intent on repudiating an earlier
Platonic notion of the ‘One’, or Hegelian trust in the spirit such as is articulated by
Earl R. Wasserman when he argues that ‘Hellas assumes that man is defined by the
persistent active presence in him of the universal Spirit and that Spirit can develop
through man’s mastery of time’s cycle … until the difference between time and the
atemporal is infinitesimal’.53 Mark Kipperman concedes that the Shelleyan One
seems to support a notion that the poet’s ‘metaphysics etherealizes the historical
present’, but he argues that, in ‘dramatic context’, what is being imagined is the
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SMW: 548.
See Jack Donovan on the ‘competing dynamics [in Hellas] of history, narrative,
genre, and text’, ‘The Storyteller’, in Timothy Morton ed., Cambridge Companion to
Shelley, pp. 85–103 (p. 98). See also William A. Ulmer for the view that ‘Hellas plots
history metaphysically as a dialectical variation of metaphor’, ‘Hellas and the Historical
Uncanny’, ELH 58 (1991), pp. 611–32 (p. 614).
53
Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1971, p. 411.
52
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‘transition from … one understanding of history to another’.54 Submitting, for his
part, that Ahasuerus ‘is uninterested in the details of earthly history and whether
its course is circular or linear’, Hugh Roberts contends that there is a difference
between Ahasuerus’s ‘voluntarist relativism’ and ‘that expressed in the choruses’,
the latter suggesting that ‘non-linear “renewal” leads to irreversible evolution’.55
For Roberts, Shelley establishes a critical attitude towards Ahasuerus, and does
not use him as a mouthpiece for his dogmatic ideas.
Though Kipperman and Roberts admirably recognize both the involvement
in history and dramatic play to be found in Shelley’s second lyrical drama, the
problem or the challenge remains: Shelley, in a work that addresses a particularly
urgent moment in European history and appears to wish to take sides with
contemporary Greece in its struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, invests
with considerable authority a contemptuous view of those temporal categories –
‘the future and the past’ – which are necessary for the writing of history or the
imagining of change. In a sense, Mahmoud and Ahasuerus are debating the nature
of prophecy. The former asks sceptically whether anyone can ‘unveil’ (l. 754)
‘the unborn hour’ (l. 752); the latter would turn from the anxiety to locate such an
hour towards focusing on ‘The unborn and the undying’ (l. 769). Both speakers
use the word ‘unborn’, but their meanings differ: Mahmoud refers to a future
time which is awaited anxiously because it has yet to come into being; Ahasuerus
means something that participates in the condition of ‘that which cannot change’
(l. 768), and seems beyond flux in a way not available to or desired by those earlier
‘immortal’ (l. 201) beings ‘hurrying to and fro’ (l. 203) between birth and death.
Ahasuerus, Prospero-like, sees the real, ‘this Whole / Of suns, and worlds,
and men, and beasts, and flowers’ (ll. 776–7), as ‘but a vision’ (l. 780), ‘motes of
a sick eye, bubbles and dreams’ (l. 781).56 ‘A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye’,
Horatio’s line from the first scene of Hamlet, troubles the mind’s eye of Hellas;
can these ‘bubbles, and dreams’ be dismissed? Ahasuerus advises Mahmoud to
look on the ‘One’ as a stay against this relentless stream of seemings. The ‘One’ as
a refuge from meaningless evanescence passes into, houses itself within ‘Thought’
(l. 795), which is both, it would seem, gateway into and manifestation of the
‘One’. The passage tilts, in Gerald McNiece’s terms, from ‘objective’ idealism
(belief in the ‘One’) to ‘subjective’ idealism (belief in the power of ‘thought’).57
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Mark Kipperman, ‘History and Ideality: The Politics of Shelley’s Hellas’, Studies
in Romanticism 30 (1991), pp. 147–67 (pp. 160, 161).
55
Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1997, pp. 480, 481.
56
For the likely influence of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream [La vida es sueño], see
Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1976, pp. 218–22. Also of great value is chapter 6 of Stephanie Dumke, ‘The
Influence of Calderón and Goethe on Shelley in the Context of A.W. Schlegel’s Conception
of Romantic Drama’, unpublished PhD thesis, Durham University (2013).
57
For relevant discussion, see Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. 250.
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Or one might argue that Shelley proceeds to fuse the two categories by showing
that thought’s power is to apprehend or manifest the ‘One’. Certainly, the close
of Ahasuerus’s speech begins to take the sage out of Platonic realms into those
associated with more subjectivist accounts of cognition:
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:
Nought is but that which feels itself to be. (ll. 783–5)
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Douglas Bush speaks of Ahasuerus as ‘a mystic who re-utters Prospero’s speech
in the spirit of Berkeley’, a characterization that is witty and perceptive.58 But
whereas Prospero’s vision turns into a lament for the insubstantial nature of
existence, and Berkeley sees the ‘One’ as among the ‘attributes’ one might attach
to a ‘Spirit, “who works all in all,” and “by whom all things consist”’, Ahasuerus’s
speech finds access to a surprising current of energy, one suggestive of Shelley’s
conceptual uniqueness and hard to locate within any philosophical system.59 This
is the energy of poetic adventurousness; the word ‘flight’, for example, animates
the potentially static ‘eternal’, and gives ‘thought’ a kinetic quality evident in the
second spirit’s ‘flight of fire’ (‘The Two Spirits: An Allegory’, l. 3) or Shelley’s
own ‘flight of fire’ (l. 590) at the close of Epipsychidion. And, as a thing in motion
casting ‘shadows’, thought grants an at least secondary ‘being’ to that which has
no ‘being’ in itself, namely ‘The future and the past’. Without abandoning belief in
the One, Ahasuerus has brought it within the condition of time at the close.
Thus I would take issue with two ways of reading this passage. One is to seek
to cancel the reality of the ‘One’ by claiming that it is merely a synonym for ‘the
endless process that … underpins the other Ones … in Shelley’s later writing’,
as Jerrold E. Hogle has it.60 But Hogle’s own gloss on ‘eternal flight’ as showing
that the dynamic of change and history is ‘always … a passage across’ is helpful,
and underpins my objection to a second way of reading the passage: that is, that
it reveals renunciation of human agency.61 ‘Shelley’, writes Bush, ‘does not now
picture a world of freedom and love as something which, however remote and dim,
can be thought of as within reach of man’s will. He has retreated still further from
actualities into a solitude of pure idealism where alone he can remold the sorry
scheme of things nearer to the heart’s desire’.62 This contradictory formulation (at
once withdrawing and bestowing agency) undervalues the complexity of Shelley’s
poem; ‘the solitude of pure idealism’ is less an escapist retreat than glimpsed
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Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (1937).
New York: Norton, 1963, p. 164.
59
George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge; Three Dialogues between
Hylas and Philonous, ed. with intro. G.J. Warnock. London: Collins, 1962, pp. 139, 140.
60
Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of
His Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 294.
61
Hogle, Shelley’s Process, p. 291.
62
Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Romantic Tradition, p. 164.
58
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as a vantage-point that makes possible imaginings that enable further enabling
imaginings.
The One in Hellas is close to a Platonic absolute or at any rate proto-Supreme
Fiction, and a means of regathering energies of resilience that will allow for a reentry into the dimension of history. Shelley’s very imagery in a number of places
seems determined to locate the existence of the spiritual even as it proposes its
unbounded, free condition. In the event of an Ottoman victory, a semichoral lyric
imagines a ‘sunnier strand’ (l. 1028), and seeks to follow ‘Love’s folding star /
To the Evening land!’ (ll. 1029–30), presumably America. ‘The world’s eyeless
charioteer, / Destiny, is hurrying by’ (ll. 711–12) with great force in Hellas, but its
hurry must contend with the desires of those ‘immortal’ beings ‘hurrying to and fro’
from one state to another. They seem to speak, or be spoken for, by the semichoral
lyric (ll. 693–4) which, above all else in the work, brings out what Shelley means
by the prefatory assertion ‘We are all Greeks’.63 In it, Shelley allows for tragic
decline and fall: his lyric’s addressee in line 696 is presumably ‘Slavery’, as at line
676, an abstraction which is treated with contemptuous indifference but also with
alertness to its corroding ubiquity:
Temples and towers,
Citadels and marts, and they
Who live and die there, have been ours,
And may be thine, and must decay;
But Greece and her foundations are
Built below the tide of war,
Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity … (ll. 693–700)
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Shelley compresses much thought into these lines through a poetic form which
compels attention. So the phrasing of ‘they / Who live and die there’ dismisses
dying generations with lofty but not indifferent calm. At the same time, the simple
verb ‘are’ is, as at the end of Adonais, requisitioned in a prominent position for its
promise of permanent being and set with something close to defiance in a rhyming
relationship with ‘war’. That the image is an image, however, a feigning, to use
a word important for Hellas (compare lines 152, 411 and the final Note), is also
evident, partly because the metaphor of Greece as ‘below the tide’ yet ‘Based on
[a] crystalline sea’ communicates an expressive strain.
Later on, deploying another ‘If’, another conjecture, another lyric picture,
Shelley resolves those strains in the imagining of a possible wrecked Greece: ‘yet
shall its fragments reassemble, / And build themselves again impregnably / In a
diviner clime / To Amphionic music on some Cape sublime, / Which frowns above
the idle foam of Time’ (ll. 1003–7). The syntax itself contrives to ‘reassemble’
‘fragments’ of hope, claiming for such hope the ‘impregnable’ strength of a fortress
of the spirit which can never be taken by the force of historical reversals, until the
63
SMW: 549.
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lyric comes to a close, a pool recomposing itself after a stone has shattered its
calm. This is hope that is not coffined with despair, but confronts the possibility
of failure. Again, comparatives (‘a diviner clime’) and unspecified locality mirror
the ardent desire of an imagination dependent for its continued life on the building
of a city of the mind, a building performed by the imagination’s own ‘Amphionic
music’. Such a ‘music’ is bravely plangent. Hellas tests the reader’s mind and
affects the reader’s heart through its self-examining idealism. At the same time, it
composes a hymn to the politically yearning spirit, which it paradoxically fortifies
through its very art of ambivalence.
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Chapter 13
Shelley, Jews and the Land of Promise
Nora Crook*
I
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There are monographs with the titles Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis, Shelley’s Style,
Shelley’s Goddess, Shelley’s Eye, Shelley’s Music, and many others, but no Shelley’s
Jews. In 1988 Nabil Matar wrote that the Romantics concerned themselves with
Jews chiefly as the Biblical ‘prophetic poets of human history’, or as figurative
personages like Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, oblivious of real Jews ‘eagerly
trying to change their “homeless” image’. The major Romantic poets show in both
verse and private correspondence little interest in contemporary Jews, and their
rights ‘never became the preoccupation of the Romantics’.1 This description of a
‘typical’ Romantic attitude seems particularly applicable to Shelley.
Since Matar, interdisciplinary studies of the political and social position of
Jews in Britain during the Romantic period, and of Jewish participation in British
Romanticism, have produced a more complex map of interaction.2 Theatre history
studies, for instance, have analysed the significant change in the stage-Shylock
* I am grateful to the Bodleian Libraries and to the University of Tokyo Library for
permission to quote from manuscripts in their possession, and to the supportive staff of
the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library. A
version of part of this essay appeared in Nora Crook and Tatsuo Tokoo, ‘Shelley’s Jewish
Orations’. Keats-Shelley Journal 59 (2010), pp. 43–64, which contains texts of the two
‘Jewish’ fragments discussed below; page numbers are taken from this essay. Michael
Scrivener considers Hellas in the light of these fragments in ‘Reading Shelley’s Ahasuerus
and Jewish Orations: Jewish Representation in the Regency’. Keats-Shelley Journal 61
(2012), pp. 133–8. The first version of the present essay, which was written before the
publication of Scrivener’s essay, has benefited retrospectively from it during revision. In
Johnsonian phrase, I ‘rejoice to concur’ with Scrivener and cannot resist quoting some of
his valuable remarks.
1
N.I. Matar, ‘The English Romantic Poets and the Jews’. Jewish Social Studies
50.3/4 (Summer 1988–Autumn 1993), pp. 223–38 (p. 223).
2
To confine oneself to the twenty-first century, see three collections of essays edited
by Sheila Spector: British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion,
Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Romanticism/Judaica: A Convergence
of Cultures. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011; Judith W. Page, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and
Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004;
Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature, 1780–1840: After Shylock.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
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from Macklin’s red-hatted monster of malignity (1741) to Kean’s demonic, yet
sympathetic figure (1814). Philosemitic and ‘anti-antisemitic’ Romantic-period
literature has been more extensively documented and assessed.3 But Matar’s
analysis still stands in some major respects. Rights for Jews never became a cause
on a par with Abolitionism or Catholic Emancipation. Articles by Mary Shelley
and by William Hazlitt published in early 1831 during the movement (1830–34)
for a Jewish Emancipation Bill to equalize the civil rights of Jews with Catholics
after the success of the Catholic Emancipation Bill (1829), complicate but do not
disprove this overall judgement. Each wrote scathingly about unjust treatment of
Jews, but not as part of a concerted campaign; Hazlitt died shortly before his article
appeared.4 Again, sympathy expressed during the Romantic period for the historic
wrongs of Jews may sometimes be a manifestation not of true philojudaism, but
of an almost paranoid anticatholicism, for which the bad record of antisemitism
in the Iberian peninsula provided a useful Catholic-bashing hammer.5 But,
without engaging in the broader issues raised by Matar, this essay queries whether
Shelley was really oblivious to the attempts of contemporary Jews to cease to
be wanderers. It looks at those few imaginative works in which he attempted to
situate Jews within a contemporary (though highly idealized) world, particularly
two short pieces that have only come to attention in the last fifteen-odd years. In
these, Shelley’s prejudices seem to be in abeyance. He sees outside them, as if
asking himself, ‘If I were a Jew, what sort of Jew would I be?’
While Shelley does not indulge in antisemitic diatribes such as are found in
Voltaire and Burke, his casual remarks about Jews are negative, when he mentions
them at all.6 Coleridge, for all his contradictory statements about Jews, at least
3
See Judith Page, ‘“Hath not a Jew Eyes?”: Edmund Kean and the Sympathetic
Shakespeare’. The Wordsworth Circle 34.2 (Spring 2003), pp. 116–19; Michael Scrivener,
The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832. London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2007, p. 149.
4
[Mary Shelley], ‘Review of J.P. Cobbett’s Tour in Italy’. Westminster Review 14
(January 1831), pp. 174–80 (pp. 179–80); Hazlitt, ‘Emancipation of the Jews’. The Tatler
(28 March 1831), pp. 701–2. For attribution of the review of Cobbett’s Tour, see Nora
Crook, ‘Counting the Carbonari: A Newly-Attributed Mary Shelley Article’. Keats-Shelley
Review 23.1 (2009), pp. 39–50. Both articles may have been provoked by [William]
Cobbett’s virulently anti-Jewish Emancipation pamphlet Good Friday; or the Murder of
Jesus Christ by the Jews. London: Published for the Author, 1830.
5
On this issue see, with respect to Robert Southey, Timothy Webb, ‘Catholic
Contagion: Southey, Coleridge, and English Anxieties’, in Romanticism and Religion from
William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, eds Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2006, pp. 75–92 (pp. 83, 85–6).
6
They almost invariably relate to rich Jews or to the God of the Jews. Many are
clustered in 1811, when Shelley’s father cut off his allowance, and he was at his most
Voltairean. Shelley imagines his sister Elizabeth ‘bound to some fool, in a bond fit only
for a Jewess’, marriage being, for him, a low commercial contract (20 June 1811, Letters
I: 111). For other animadversions on Jews, see in particular Letters I: 101, 193; II: 46 and
Thomas Love Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley’ [Part 1]. Fraser’s Magazine 57
(1858), pp. 643–59 (p. 657).
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conversed with them, from old-clothes men to learned scholars.7 The schoolboy
Leigh Hunt enjoyed the music of Duke’s Place Synagogue, and regarded his visits
as serving ‘to universalize my notions of religion, and to keep them unbigoted’. He
‘retained through life a respectful notion of the Jews as a body’.8 Byron, certainly
no Judaeophile, nevertheless collaborated with Isaac Nathan and John Braham to
produce Hebrew Melodies (1815). But while Shelley in 1811 enjoyed Voltaire’s
‘extravagant ridicule of the Jewish nation’ and responded with ‘a wild, demoniacal
burst of laughter’ when his friend Hogg whispered that Sir Timothy Shelley was
‘the God of the Jews; the Jehovah you have been reading about!’, Hogg could
not interest him in Hebrew studies.9 His encounters with Jews seem confined
to financial transactions. Shelley’s Oxford bookseller, Henry Slatter, claimed
to have lost £1,300 through making him a loan in order to dissuade him from
‘flying to Jews’, which he actually did at some point after 1812.10 ‘Jews’ often just
meant ‘money-lenders’, but Shelley certainly went to the notorious ‘Jew’ King
(Jacob Rey), money-broker to the aristocracy during the first two decades of the
nineteenth century. He deposited with King, presumably as security, a copy of the
1791 settlement establishing his right to inherit his grandfather’s property.11
His resentment of usurious Jews interacted with his crusade against Christianity,
which, though the end was to expose Christianity as worse than Judaism, was
predicated on first discrediting the Old Testament as true history and good morality.
In A Refutation of Deism (1814) Theosophus asks rhetorically whether there is a
‘record of such groveling absurdities and enormities so atrocious, a picture of the
Deity so characteristic of a demon as that which the sacred writings of the Jews
contain’ – a view that Shelley never retracted and that he partly reaffirmed in Note
8 to Hellas.12 In a fragment from Mary Shelley’s early writing, ‘History of the
Jews’, probably of late 1815, strongly influenced by A Refutation and Voltaire’s
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Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 2nd edn. London: John
Murray, 1836, pp. 52, 98; for Coleridge’s friendship with and indebtedness to Hyman
Hurwitz, the first Professor of Hebrew at University College, London, see Ewan James
Jones, ‘Coleridge, Hyman Hurwitz, and Hebrew Poetics’. Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 40 (Winter
2012), pp. 59–68. On Coleridge’s conflictedness, see Matar’s ‘The English Romantic Poets
and the Jews’, pp. 231–3 and Page, Imperfect Sympathies, pp. 1–2, 33–4.
8
Hunt, Autobiography. 3 vols. London: Smith & Elder, 1850, vol. 1, pp. 172–5. It
was in Hunt’s Tatler that Hazlitt published ‘Emancipation of the Jews’.
9
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. London: Moxon,
1858, vol. 1, pp. 108, 304–5.
10
Letters I: 61, n. 2; Thomas Medwin, The Shelley Papers. London: Whittaker,
Treacher, 1833, pp. 20–21.
11
In June 1816, writing from Geneva, Shelley suggested that the hard-up Godwin
should buy this copy from King and use it as a guarantee to raise a loan (Letters I: 478).
For King’s combination of radicalism and rascality, see Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography. For his earlier attempt to compromise Godwin, see The Letters of William
Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, vol. 1, pp.
149–52.
12
Prose I: 101; SPP: 464.
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La Bible enfin expliquée (1776), and no doubt coloured by Shelley’s moneyborrowing, ancient Greeks are played off against Jews, both ancient and modern:
Noah, after the Flood, got drunk ‘perhaps in his rapture at his deliverance … .
Such are the feelings of a Jew & befitting the father of their race but surely the
feelings of Deucalion & Pyrrha were of a much milder and more amiable nature
when they wept for the loss of their fellow creatures & companions’. Whether
or not Shelley collaborated in this production, he could hardly have disapproved
of it.13 It was to include an extract from Tacitus’s account of Jewish history and
customs, of which a translation by Shelley (dated 1814–16 by Eugene Murray) is
extant. This contains Tacitus’s infamous statement that Jews hate all nations but
their own.14
In what is arguably the most distasteful reference to Jews in Shelley’s
published work, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) presents Jews as henchmen of
tyrants. Swellfoot, faced with seditious pigs (Burke’s ‘swinish multitude’), calls
in ‘the Jews, Solomon the court porkman, / Moses the sow-gelder, and Zephaniah
/ The hog-butcher’ (I, 69–71), and orders them to castrate and slaughter the pigs.
Sweeping aside their feeble demurrals, he despatches them to do his dirty work
off-stage. ‘Moses’ is probably intended for the clergyman Malthus (see PS III: 667
n.). But if Swellfoot’s Jews are to be understood as Christians with undesirable
‘Jewish’ qualities this hardly improves matters. Swellfoot shows the influence of
William Cobbett, whose demagoguery and encouragement of revenge Shelley
abominated, yet whose economic analysis in Paper Against Gold he accepted in
‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (1819–20), nowhere distancing himself from its
conspiracy theories concerning Jewish financiers. Paper Against Gold insinuated
that Jewish bribery lay behind the appearance of ‘fine benevolent Jewish
characters’ in ‘some of our modern plays’.15 Shelley must have realized that he
was introducing some nasty Jewish characters into his play. It should, however,
be noted that Swellfoot’s Jews are in keeping with the other personages, who,
except for the veiled Liberty, whether victims or oppressors, are a gallimaufry of
grotesques and animal-human hybrids, following the conventions of Aristophanic
comedy, satyr-plays, and contemporary print-culture caricature.16
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Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives (MSLL), ed. Nora Crook et al. 4 vols. London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2002, vol. 4, p. 337; see pp. lxxii–lxxvi for the argument that this was
a case of collaborative joint-authorship or of Mary Shelley incorporating an unquantifiable
material by Shelley into her text.
14
Tacitus, Historiae, Bk V, chap. v §1: ‘Adversus omnis alios hostile odium’; see
Murray, BSM XXI: 330–31, 511–12.
15
Paper Against Gold. 2 vols. London: J. McCreery, 1815, vol. 1, p. 151. Reiman
estimates that Shelley worked on ‘A Philosophical View’ most intensively between
December 1819 and January 1820 (SC VI: 951–4). Shelley recommends Paper Against
Gold in lines 2370–76 (SC VI: 1014).
16
See also Timothy Morton, ‘Porcine Poetics’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan
M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 279–95 (p. 294).
13
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Nor is the above account the whole story. J.B. Pereira, the Brazilian friend and
enthusiast for Shelley’s doctrines who attempted to translate Queen Mab (1813)
into Portuguese, may have been an exception to the apparent rule that Shelley
knew no Jews outside the world of finance.17 It is tempting to speculate that it
was the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew in Queen Mab, that most fired
Pereira’s enthusiasm. Shelley’s fascination with Ahasuerus, from The Wandering
Jew (1809) through Queen Mab (1813), down to Hellas (1822), involved endowing
the Jew with moral attributes that indicate a measure of self-identification with this
exilic figure. His Jew is never the scapegoat bearing the guilt of Jews for killing
Christ, nor the remorseful shoemaker of the Percy ballad ‘The Wandering Jew’.
In Queen Mab he is the angry Romantic outcast and denouncer of tyrants, whose
punishment is disproportionate to his crime. For Queen Mab Shelley drew much
of his conception of Ahasuerus from the lyric rhapsody Der Ewige Jude by the
Sturm und Drang writer Christian Schubart, further adapting Schubart’s adaptation
(which is not without sympathy for the Jew) of the traditional Judaeophobic legend.
In Scrivener’s words, ‘The Romantics usually work with these cultural myths …
and make something less toxic than the raw material from which they started’.18
In the translation of Schubart that forms Shelley’s Note to Queen Mab, VII,
67 (‘Ahasuerus, rise!’), Ahasuerus is an ‘unfeeling wretch’ who turns away the
suffering Christ from his door. Thus far, Shelley’s paratext preserves a footstep of
the villainous hard-hearted Jew of popular fantasy, in as much as Schubart’s poem
does also.19 But, as has often been observed,20 Shelley’s Christ is not the merciful
Saviour of Schubart, whose blood offers redemption to the (still rebellious) wretch
after 1,800 years. The ‘Ahasuerus, rise!’ note omits the ‘redemptive’ portion of
Schubart’s rhapsody, while the next note contains Shelley’s most notorious
footnote, written under the influence of Holbach’s Ecce homo (1770), suspecting
the historical Jesus of being ‘an ambitious man, who aspired to the throne of
Judea’.21 In the actual poem of Queen Mab, Christ is on the Cross when Ahasuerus
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17
See Letters I: 431; Peacock, ‘Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Part II’. Fraser’s
Magazine 61 (January 1860), pp. 92–109 (p. 93). Shelley knew Pereira between 1813
and 1815. ‘Pereira’ was one of the Spanish/Portuguese toponyms adopted by persecuted
Sephardic Jews to disguise their origin. Michael Scrivener informs me (private
communication) that all Brazilian Pereiras are likely to have Jewish ancestry.
18
Scrivener, ‘Reading Shelley’s Ahasuerus’, p. 136.
19
For an account of Schubart’s contribution to the myth, see Edgar Rosenberg,
Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1960, pp. 197–9.
20
See, for instance, Teddi Chichester Bonca’s discerning account of Shelley’s
treatment of the Wandering Jew (Shelley’s Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and
Sorority. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999, pp. 29–40).
21
Footnote to Note to VII, 135–6 of Queen Mab, ‘I will beget a son, and he shall bear
/ The sins of all the world’.
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meets him. Christ does not appeal to him for succour, and there is no callous
refusal as such. Instead, Ahasuerus exposes Christ as the hypocritical Son of the
implacably vengeful Almighty. He expresses no pity, having doubts that Christ
suffers like a mortal when he groans; he is righteously indignant that the supposed
Saviour has lighted ‘flames of zeal’, and provoked ‘massacres and miseries’ in
Judaea. He scornfully tells him to go and cease to trouble the earth, whereupon
the seemingly meek sufferer reveals his true colours, smiles with ‘godlike malice’,
and curses Ahasuerus with immortality (VII, 161–83). A transitional version of
Ahasuerus appears in Alastor, where he is a baleful figure, a ‘Vessel of deathless
wrath’ (both God’s wrath and his own wrath against God), a ‘slave / … Lone as
incarnate death’, and the undying alter ego of the Poet (ll. 677–81). Like the Poet,
he is a victim, but filled with an anger that the gentle Poet, who has died seeking an
unattainable love, had been incapable of. The Jew here is the emblem of a ferocity
that Shelley acknowledges as a component of his own energies.
Shelley’s castigation of Jehovah and the scriptures as instruments of fraud was,
even as early as 1812, tempered by a plan of separating ‘all the good of the Jewish
Books’ from the bad.22 More importantly, Shelley regarded, or came to regard, the
Jewish nation as containing within itself, no less than other cultures, the seeds of
its own regeneration. Inasmuch as one can deduce how he imagined this process, it
does not differ from his general conception of universal liberation from despotism
and ‘Falshood’: the ‘eminent in virtue’ (Queen Mab VI, 33) shall start up and
proclaim truth; national virtues, slumbering, shall be aroused by the living spirit
of great poets and prophets, which shall combine with the spirit of the age when
necessity ensures that the time is ripe. The national virtues that Shelley ascribes
even to ancient Jews are tenacity and the indispensable ‘unconquerable hope of
liberty’ (The Assassins, composed 1814–16).23
Shelley’s Jewish ‘eminent in virtue’ of the past are exceptional, alienated Jews
with whom he can identify, who, grounded in their law, nevertheless transcended
it and became benefactors of mankind. While the dominant tactic of Queen Mab
is to pit a legendary Jew against a deified one, and to elevate the blasphemous
Ahasuerus at the expense of the Saviour Christ, even in the Queen Mab Notes
Shelley warmly admires a human Jesus, firmly to be distinguished from the
hypocrite Son of God, and foremost among ‘true heroes, who have died in the
glorious martyrdom of liberty … in the cause of suffering humanity’.24 By 1817
he had totally embraced this view, dropping the imputation of ambition. The fate
of these heroes was rejection, persecution and misrepresentation by hypocrites,
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To Elizabeth Hitchener, 27 February 1812; Letters I: 265.
Weinberg, BSM XXII (2): 20–21, modifying Prose I: 124. A passage in ‘History of
the Jews’, perhaps contributed by Shelley, defends assassinations carried out by the ancient
Jews: ‘Let us sympathise even with these bloodthirsty robbers in an ardent love of Liberty’,
and sees them as types of nobler assassins such as Brutus and Cassius, whom he was later
to defend in ‘On Christianity’ (MSLL, vol. 4, p. 344; Prose I: 254).
24
Note to VII, 135–6, ‘I will beget a son’, to which the Footnote (see note 21) is a
palinode. Neil Fraistat discusses the contradiction between the two in CPPBS II: 639–40.
22
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tyrants and the multitude. Such was the reward of Jesus, such too, to a lesser
degree, was that of Spinoza, who for his heresies was formally expelled from the
Sephardic community of Amsterdam in 1656.25 Between 1817 and 1822 Shelley
translated at intervals the whole of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
sometimes with Mary Shelley.26 Behind these reformers stood the Jewish poetprophets, contributors to the ‘episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the
co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the
world’.27
The first overt sign of Shelley’s interest in the poetry of the Old Testament as
poetry is probably in 1815, when he ordered Robert Lowth’s lectures, De Sacra
Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academicae (1753),28 the work that had deeply
influenced Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction and established the poetry in
Hebrew of the Old Testament as great literature, equal to the classics in strength
and artistry, once the rules peculiar to its organization were understood. Lowth’s
most important contribution was his identification of parallelism as the dominant
organizing principle of Hebrew poetry. Shelley never comments on Lowth directly,
and we may suppose that he found much to wrangle with, yet he absorbed some
of his key principles, and there is more parallelism in Shelley’s poetry than has
hitherto been noted.29 But more pertinent for this essay is Lowth’s linkage, in his
Lecture 19, of sacred prophetic poetry to sublime obscurity, in which future events
are imperfectly disclosed, and for which the metaphoric language of the Hebrew
prophetic books was, Lowth maintained, better adapted than sources available to
classical writers.30 Shelley would not have agreed,31 but his admiration for Hebrew
poetry is cast in Lowthian terms. In the prose fragment known as ‘On Christianity’
(composed 1817) Shelley imagines Old Testament poetry as forming the moral
nature of Jesus and making him a poet. While he gives first place to the Book of
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For a compendium of references to Spinoza in Shelley letters and journals, see SC
VIII: 737–43.
26
MWS Letters I: 262. A fragment dating from the 1817 period was left behind in
England. It was part-published with a facsimile leaf by Charles Middleton as original
Shelley juvenilia (Shelley and His Writings. 2 vols. London: Newby, 1858, vol. 1, pp. 182–
90), but has since disappeared. See note 44.
27
‘A Defence of Poetry’, SPP: 522.
28
Letters I: 437 (5 December 1815).
29
For instance, ‘The spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it – the dawn
rebels not against night but it disperses it –’ (Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 18, front pastedown;
Crook and Webb, BSM XIX: 4–5).
30
Citations and quotations from George Gregory’s translation of Lowth, Lectures on
the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1787). Boston, Mass.: Joseph T. Buckingham, 1815,
pp. 124–6. For a recent recognition of the importance of Lowth, see Ian Balfour’s ‘Shelley
and the Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds Michael O’Neill and
Anthony Howe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 411–26.
31
See, for instance, his considering the Book of Ezekiel unrefined (‘On the Devil, and
Devils’, composed c. November 1819–c. January 1820; Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 9, p. 67
[Dawson and Webb, BSM XIV: 74–5]).
25
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Job, which he did not consider to be Jewish in origin,32 ‘Ecclesiastes had diffused
a seriousness and solemnity over the frame of his spirit’.33 In ‘A Defence of Poetry’
he enlarges this canon: ‘It is probable that the astonishing poetry of Moses,34 Job,
David, Solomon, and Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus
and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of
this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid poetry.’ The effect
on ‘the moral condition of the world’ if ‘the Hebrew poetry had never been
translated’ is something that Shelley considers unimaginable, on a par with other
counterfactual possibilities such as ‘if a revival of the study of Greek literature had
never taken place’.35 The moral effect, for Shelley, of Hebrew poetry in translation
works principally through style: the bold imagery startles the world from its cold
trance, while the obscure prophecy stimulates the imagination to create futurity.36
By contrast, Spinoza was for Shelley a profound thinker, one of the ‘great
luminaries’, a peer of Bacon and Montaigne,37 though a reasoner, unlike Bacon,
whom Shelley regarded as a poet. Spinoza supplied Shelley with further aspects
of Jesus’s moral character as expounded in ‘On Christianity’. One of these is that
‘Jesus Christ … accommodated his doctrines to the prepossessions of those whom
he addressed’.38 Shelley evolves this passage by expanding Spinoza’s remark on
Jesus in Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: ‘sese ingenio populi accommodavit’,39
32
He argues that Satan appears nowhere else in the Old Testament, and that the imagery
is drawn from ‘a severer climate than Palestine’ (Bod. MS Shelley adds. e. 9, pp. 37–8;
BSM XIV: 44–7). He is undoubtedly drawing here on Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary,
but may also be taking a cue from Spinoza, who in ‘An Examination of the Remaining
Books of the Old Testament According to the Preceding Method’ inclined towards the book
being a translation, probably from some Gentile author (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus [A
Theologico-Political Treatise], trans. by R.H.M. Elwes. London: G. Bell, 1883, Part 2, x,
§32; available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/phi/spinoza/treat/index.htm).
33
Prose I: 249–50.
34
Shelley evidently refers to the songs of triumph and farewell ascribed to Moses
(Exodus 15; Deuteronomy 32–3).
35
SPP: 524, 530. Shelley particularly drew on Job, Song of Solomon, Psalms,
Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.
36
Shelley’s career-long appropriation of the Bible, using episodes and the framework
of particular books as paradigms for counter-myths, his eclectic weaving of Biblical allusion
with other texts, his use of Biblical rhetoric and images (chariots, whirlwinds, waters, the
cup, the rainbow, the blood crying from the ground, the spirit panting and thirsting), his
self-projection as Cain the outcast and Christ the saviour – lie outside the scope of this
essay. They have been extensively studied, notably by Bryan Shelley, who records Shelley’s
interest in the Apocrypha and in particular the Book of Wisdom; see especially pp. 151–2 of
his Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
37
‘Philosophical View’ (SC VI: 970, 973).
38
Prose I: 261.
39
On pp. 50–51 of Shelley’s copy of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, now
SC 660 in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, this passage has
a pencilled marginalium: ‘Christ’s superiority to an ordinary prophet. He accommodated
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but takes matters further. He emphasizes Jesus’s radical departures from Jewish
law and practice, taking some pleasure in his adroitness. Like all effective
reformers, Shelley asserts, Jesus justifiably aimed ‘like a skilful orator’ to lead his
listeners ‘by his professions of sympathy with their feelings, to enter with a willing
mind into the exposition of his own’, the honourable and practical motive for this
insincerity being to secure their receptivity to truth.40
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Events that may have further modified Shelley’s negative perception of Jews were
his December 1818 reading of Madame de Staël’s Corinne (in which the heroine
salutes the proud refusal of modern ill-treated Roman Jews to pass under the Arch
of Titus), and his 1819 sojourn in Rome. For the first time he would have actually
encountered ghettoized Jews.41 They are marginal figures in his description of the
Cenci palace: ‘a vast and gloomy pile … in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense ruins of
Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of trees’ (Preface to The
himself to the notions of the vulgar’ (SC VIII: 733). Donald Reiman identified SC 660 as a
1674–7 reprint of the 1670 Hamburg (i.e. Amsterdam: J. Rieuwertsz) edition, and deduced
that Shelley received it in early 1813, having ordered the Tractatus through his bookseller
(SC VIII: 731, 737–8). There are many other marginal annotations, but some, especially
one citing the eighteenth-century divine John Jortin (read as ‘?Souter’ in SC VIII: 735,
736), seem out of Shelley’s orbit. After examining SC 660 (October 2011) I concluded that
most of the annotations are probably not in Shelley’s hand, though the most interesting
comment (criticizing Spinoza’s definition of justice, in ink) is certainly his, and two relating
to Locke (in pencil) might be. I am therefore reluctant to interpret Shelley’s Spinozism
through the other annotations, though he is likely to have found them congenial. SC 660
has the signature of a previous owner, ‘Philip Mallet 1798’. This might be Philip Mallet
(b. 1778/9, d. 26 June 1812), son of a wealthy dissenting ‘English Jacobin’ (d. 1795) of
the same name, living at Stoke Newington. The younger Mallet was a scholar, barrister,
speaker, republican, admirer of John Horne Tooke and editor of Bacon’s Advancement of
Learning, Hobbes’s ‘On Liberty and Necessity’ and Locke (Admissions to Trinity College,
Cambridge. Vol. III, 1701–1800, eds W.W. Rouse Ball and J.A. Venn. London: Macmillan,
1911, p. 355; J. McCreery, The Press, a Poem: Part the Second. London: Cadell, 1827, pp.
76–7; Annual Register 54 [1813], p. 177). If Mallet wrote the annotations, they were in place
when Shelley acquired SC 660, and may have directed his reading. Unfortunately I have
not found a specimen of Mallet’s handwriting. Thomas Love Peacock, Thomas Medwin,
Edward Williams (Shelley’s amanuensis for the Tractatus translation in 1821–22), whose
hands have some features in common with that of the annotator, and Shelley’s son, Sir Percy
(SC 660 has his book-plate), have been considered, but none is sufficiently convincing.
40
Prose I: 262–3.
41
See Corinne; ou, l’Italie. 3 vols. Londres: Peltier, 1807, vol. 1, pp. 35–6, 189.
Between 1555 and 1870 Roman Jews were locked into the ghetto every evening, except
for a few years under Napoleon. After Napoleon’s defeat ghettos were restored in Italy, but
enforcement during the period 1815–22 was less stringent than previously, except in Rome.
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Cenci).42 An overgrown complex of ruined palaces is seen from a newer palace,
the dwelling of a domestic tyrant, which, centuries after the owner’s dreadful
crimes, broods over a precinct where descendants of captive slaves of a ruined
empire have lived under oppression for generations – what an image of a chain
of doing and suffering wrong! In September 1819, he read with great enjoyment
Boccaccio’s Decameron, one of the rare instances of his known reading outside
the Bible in which a notably good, rich and wise Jew appears. This is the tale of
Melchisedech (Day 1, Tale 3), the source of Lessing’s philojudaic Nathan the Wise
(1779). Both Shelley’s friend Edward Williams and Shelley himself were later
to draw on it in 1821 when writing their respective dramas, the unpublished The
Promise and Hellas.43 Certainly, it is during the winter of 1819–20, a period during
which Shelley wrote ‘Peter Bell the Third’ and began reading and translating
Spinoza again,44 that we discover a uniquely overt expression of admiration for
Jews as a people, a brief interpolation in the unfinished ‘A Philosophical View
of Reform’, at a point where Shelley is also reflecting on empire and ruin. It is
typical of Shelley’s contrarieties that this admiration surfaces during the period
when the influence of Cobbett is strongest. Hailing the stirrings of independence
and enlightenment in the Eastern Mediterranean, the hopeful harbingers of the
Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Shelley envisages that ‘The Jews, that wonderful
people which has preserved so long the symbol of their union, may reassume
their ancestral seats’.45 By the ‘symbol’ Shelley means circumcision; the idea that
the rite has maintained Jewish identity derives from the Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus. Spinoza sardonically remarks that the ‘signum circumcisionis’ (‘sign of
circumcision’) might ‘preserve the nation for ever’. If the Jews can adhere to it so
tenaciously, they might equally well ‘raise up their empire afresh’, and ‘God may
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See note 63.
44
‘Peter Bell the Third’ was composed during the last week of October 1819
immediately after Shelley had been reading Spinoza. After its prologue, the poem playfully
begins with a conjunction, ‘proving’ that it is a fragmentary continuation of Wordsworth’s
Peter Bell, a joke that may have been suggested by a passage in ‘An Examination of the
Remaining Books of the Old Testament’: ‘That the book of Ezekiel is only a fragment, is
clearly indicated by the first verse. For anyone may see that the conjunction with which it
begins, refers to something already said, and connects what follows therewith. However,
not only this conjunction, but the whole text of the discourse implies other writings’
(Treatise, Part 2, x, §24–6). The Shelleys translated Spinoza in bursts between January and
April of 1820, during which time Shelley was writing ‘Philosophical View’, and reread
him in autumn 1820. In November 1821 Shelley resumed the translation, this time with
Williams as amanuensis (MS Journals I: 299–300, 305–6, 312–14, 319; Medwin, The
Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1847], rev. and ed. H. Buxton Forman. London: Humphrey
Milford; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913, pp. 252–3; Maria Gisborne & Edward E.
Williams: Shelley’s Friends. Their Journals and Letters, ed. F.L. Jones. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1951, pp. 111–12).
45
SC VI: 989.
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a second time elect them’.46 Shelley’s remark, however, unlike Spinoza’s, seems 1
not to be ironic.
2
The same is true of two tantalizing Shelley fragments, both relevant to the 3
Jews reclaiming their ‘ancestral seats’, one in the Bodleian Library, the other in 4
Tokyo University Library.47 The first was titled by Thomas Medwin ‘The Arch of 5
Titus’ and first published in 1832 from a copy that Shelley had permitted him to 6
take. The other, untitled, remained unknown until 1923 when it was published in 7
Japan, and is still uncollected.48 There is nothing else quite like them in Shelley’s 8
oeuvre. Both are incomplete prose addresses in which Shelley speaks in the person 9
of an imaginary contemporary Jew to fellow Jews, though Medwin’s version of 10
‘Arch of Titus’ effaces this, a misrepresentation disclosed only in 1995.49 They are 11
discontinuous and different in tone, but likely to belong to the same compositional 12
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), p. 43 (Treatise, Part 1, iii, §104–5).
47
Bod. MS Shelley, adds. c. 4, fol. 207 (Murray, BSM XXI: 246–9) and Tokyo
University Shelley MS A100/1590.
48
The Shelley family gave the Tokyo fragment to Richard Garnett, who in 1902,
during a period of great interest in Zionism following publication of Theodor Herzl’s
Der Judenstaat (1896), gifted it to a famous Japanese poet and Romanticist, Bansui Doi.
A reading text was published with a facsimile in Sheri Kenkyū, Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku
Eibungakukai hen (The Shelley Memorial Volume, by Members of the English Club,
Imperial University of Tokyo). Tokyo: Kenkyūsha, 1923. Doi’s family later presented the
MS to the University of Tokyo. Tatsuo Tokoo retranscribed it and published the result in
1993 under the title ‘On Zionism’. His diplomatic transcription, with light modifications
after my collation with A100/1590 in 2006, is in the K-SJ essay ‘Jewish Orations’, where I
call it ‘Restoration of the Jews’, the fragment being a proto-pro-Zionist monologue rather
than an essay fragment on Zionism. An alternative name might be ‘Address to the Jews’.
In 2010 I was unaware of Bryan Shelley’s remarks on the 1923 Tokyo publication in
Shelley and Scripture (1994). His noting the fragment’s Spinozism and its prediction of the
downfall of the Ottoman Empire antedated my essay.
49
By E.B. Murray (BSM XXI: 497). Its first appearance was as the first of several
short miscellaneous prose fragments that make up the tenth article on Shelley that Medwin
published in the Athenaeum (1832–33). The eighth and ninth articles were composed of
‘Critical Notices of the Sculpture in the Florence Gallery’. When Medwin collected these
articles in The Shelley Papers of 1833, he ran them consecutively, so that ‘Arch of Titus’
followed on directly from the ‘Critical Notices’, and, save for a discreet rule, now seemed
to be one of them. For Essays, Letters from Abroad (1840), Mary Shelley used Medwin’s
text of ‘Arch of Titus’, even though she had Shelley’s holograph. Evidently interested in it
as a descriptive piece only, she did not include it with Shelley’s other notes on sculpture but
placed it as a footnote to his March 1819 letter to Peacock. Forman, without access to the
‘Arch of Titus’ holograph, reversed her uncoupling, and gave ‘Arch of Titus’ first place in
what he called ‘Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence’ in The Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley in Verse and Prose, ed. H. Buxton Forman. 8 vols. London: Reeves and Turner,
1880, vol. 7, pp. 43–4. The lack of a complete modern critical edition of Shelley’s prose
works has ensured a long life to Forman’s error, which continues to mislead the unwary
through its perpetuation in the Julian edition (1927–30) and in David L. Clark’s widely read
Shelley’s Prose (1954).
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project, though this cannot be absolutely proved. The drafts are on virtually
identical paper, and are the only known examples among Shelley MSS of whole
sheets of that particular paper. They have about the same number of written lines
a page, ignoring interlineations, and are similar in penning style and ink, if one
may judge from notes taken in situ, aided by photofacsimiles. It also seems more
probable that composition was prompted by a single set of circumstances than that
Shelley attempted over time to make separate feints at writing as an imaginary
Jew. ‘Arch of Titus’ has been conjecturally dated March 1819, but on weak
grounds: Shelley wrote a letter to Peacock describing the Arch during that month,
and continued the unfinished prose narrative ‘The Coliseum’ (1818–19), which he
had started the previous November. But the manuscripts of ‘The Coliseum’ and
‘Arch of Titus’ are physically very different from each other, and, apart from the
theme of ‘ruins of Rome’ and an opening reference to the Passover, there is no
connection in content between them.50 The Tokyo manuscript is definitely later
than the first quarter of 1820, as it mentions some of the same political situations
as ‘Philosophical View’, but at a more advanced stage. The likeliest window of
composition for both is between late 1820 and late summer of 1821, when unrest
in the Middle East was increasing, but before Shelley had learned of the latest
political developments referred to in Hellas (composed chiefly during October
1821). In the first, the speaker looks backward to ‘the desolation of our City’ and
describes the Arch, erected in the Roman Forum to commemorate Titus’s victory
at the siege of Jerusalem in ad 70, but now ruined. Its panels depict ‘the walls of
the temple split by the fury of the conflagration’, ‘matrons & virgins & children &
old men, gathered into groupes; and the rapine & license of a barbarous & enraged
soldiery are imaged in the distance’. The ‘sacred instruments of our eternal
worship’, including the seven-branched candlestick and the shewbread table, are
profaned, ‘our magistrates & priests & generals & philosophers dragged in chains’
beside the victor’s wheels. The speaker describes this imagery as ‘almost erased
by the lapse of fifty generations’, as well he might, since apart from the ‘sacred
instruments’ (borne in triumph by Roman soldiers), these features are not and
could never have been on the actual panels.51 His vivid sense of history peoples the
vacancy of this tabula rasa. Lady Morgan in her Italy (1821) also adds colourfully
imagined details to her account (soldiers drunk on blood, abject Jewish captives),
and it is possible that Morgan’s brief description incited Shelley to compose the
fragments in late August or early September 1821.52 But Italy lacks Shelley’s
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50
E.B. Murray suggested that ‘Arch of Titus’ might be part of ‘The Coliseum’, the
stranger youth being the Wandering Jew, and Mary Shelley mistaken in identifying the
youth as Greek (BSM XXI: 497). This is improbable. For one thing, ‘The Coliseum’ is set in
Rome, but the speaker in ‘Arch of Titus’ tells his audience/readers that the Arch is in Rome
(not ‘this city, Rome’), which implies that he and/or they are supposed to be somewhere
else. For a more detailed argument, see Crook and Tokoo, ‘Jewish Orations’, pp. 47, 50–53.
51
Crook and Tokoo, pp. 58–9.
52
Lady Morgan, Italy. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1821, vol. 2, p. 354. Italy is a
conjectural item of Shelley’s reading in 1821, much of which is unrecorded. Byron received
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empathy. ‘Arch of Titus’ is the only instance of Shelley’s imagining the feelings of
a contemporary Jew contemplating the Fall of Jerusalem. The speaker’s reference
to Jewish philosophers suggests that for him Jerusalem is a site of wisdom. He
himself is philosophical, in the manner of Volney in Les Ruines (1791), as he
reflects that the family of Titus, destroyer of Jerusalem, is no more, that his arch is
‘mouldering to its fall’, that ‘[t]he Flavian Amphitheatre is become a habitation of
owls and dragons’ (a direct allusion to Isaiah 34: 13), and that ‘Rome is no more
than Jerusalem’.
In the Tokyo fragment the speaker, by contrast, looks forward to the City’s
restoration. He has switched register (or, possibly, the portions represent a
dialogue between two Jewish speakers). The Hebrew philosopher-prophet voice
cedes to that of a Spinoza redivivus, reasoned and eloquent, though not poetic,
hybridized with the voice of Shelley the pragmatic ‘Hermit of Marlow’, author
of A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom (1817),
and (perhaps, though Greece is nowhere mentioned) the enthusiasm of Alexander
Ypsilanti’s proclamation, ‘Cry of War to the Greeks’, which the Shelleys received
on 1 April from Alexander Mavrocordato and translated together to advance the
cause of Greek independence.53
The Spinozan speaker is an interpreter of obscure scriptural prophecies. He
discloses that their purport is both rational and utopian. He outlines ‘a certain
infallible plan for … re-establishing the antient free republic of the Jews according
to the Mosaic law, & rebuilding the City & the Temple’ and once more possessing
‘the Land of Promise’. Evasively, he does not actually propose a return to the legal
decrees of the Pentateuch (‘Mosaic law’), only to the republic legislated by Moses
in the wilderness.54 The obfuscation concerning whether a theocracy is envisaged
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his copy on 16 August, the day or the day before Shelley left Ravenna. Claire Clairmont
began reading Italy at Livorno on 1 September (The Journals of Claire Clairmont [CCJ],
ed. Marion Kingston Stocking. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 248).
She was living with the Shelleys for much of the first part of September. Byron’s ‘On the
Day of the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus’ in Hebrew Melodies had imagined the fall
of Jerusalem from the perspective of a Jewish eyewitness, but one eager for vengeance, as
Shelley’s Jewish speaker is not.
53
Compare ‘Cry of War’: ‘Behold our temples trampled underfoot, our children
ravished from us to glut the brutal appetites of our unnatural & barbarous tyrants; our houses
sacked, our land devastated, and we ourselves treated as slaves’ (Weinberg, BSM XXII (2):
240–41) and the passage quoted above from ‘The Arch of Titus’; also the exhortations
‘What Grecian heart will be indifferent to the call of his country?’ (BSM XXII (2): 29–31,
238–45) and ‘is there a Jew who would not devote himself to its success?’ i.e., of the
proposed restoration (‘Jewish Orations’, p. 63). The ‘Cry of War’ translation was probably
first made by Mary Shelley from a French version, not modern Greek, and then improved
by Shelley. Mavrocordato communicated with Mary Shelley in French, and the translation
has several Gallicisms (e.g. ‘marine’ for ‘navy’).
54
Crook and Tokoo, ‘Jewish Orations’, p. 60. Shelley draws on Paradise Lost, where
the archangel foretells that the Israelites will ‘their great Senate choose / Through the
twelve Tribes’ (XII, 225–6), and on Commonwealth republican theory, which maintained
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is evidently designed to ‘accommodate’ the message to the understandings of his
auditors, and to persuade them that, like Shelley’s Jesus, he is urging ‘only the
restoration and reestablishment of the original institutions, and antient customs of
your own law and religion’ (‘On Christianity’).55
The speaker’s terms – ‘God’, ‘the Almighty’ – imply orthodoxy, but his God
proves to be Spinoza’s ‘Deus sive Natura’ (God or Nature), and the wording would
allow a rebuilt Temple to be dedicated to this conception. The speaker declares
that it is ‘a vulgar error to imagine that [the Almighty] produces the great political
changes on which the happiness of nations depends, by an agency distinct from
that of Man & nature’.56 A necessitarian like Spinoza, he declares that in the same
way that God is the sole cause of ‘all the events which have place in the Universe’,
so he is of ‘all our thoughts and actions’. When these ‘become sufficiently
powerful to produce a great event, they may be considered as the means selected
by the Almighty to produce that event’ – a form of words that would permit a
sceptic to dispense with any belief in a supernatural agent. Salvation is simply
the ‘reestablishment of our political state & the public prosperity & private virtue
which will result from it’, despite the ‘pretension of certain reli fanatics that it
relates to a future state of life’. (The prudential substitution of ‘fanatics’ for ‘reli’
tellingly indicates Shelley’s tactics of ‘accommodation’.) The ‘reflecting mind’
needs no ‘supernatural instruction’ to be convinced that ‘the good will of all
professions will be happy’. The word ‘professions’ is similarly slippery. It might
refer to professions of faith, and commit the reborn state to universal religious
tolerance, or merely mean that the rich man, the rabbi and the rag-merchant will all
be happy if they are good, a proposition that few could quarrel with. The speaker
then issues a Shelleyan trumpet-prophecy, daringly proclaiming that the state
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that in later changing this model for a monarchy, the Jewish nation disobeyed God’s will
(see 1 Samuel 8). According to Coleridge (1795): ‘If we except the Spartan, the Jewish
has been the only Republic that can consistently boast of Liberty and Equality’; see No.
2 of Lectures On Revealed Religion in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
eds Lewis Patton and Peter Mann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971, vol.
1, p. 126. Coleridge was influenced, directly or indirectly, by James Harrington’s The
Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), which argues for the democratic and popular character
of the Jewish commonwealth legislated by Moses at God’s command, and on the fitness of
the Jews for excelling at agrarian as well as commercial pursuits if they were to be given
land. An entry in an unpublished list of books left behind in England by Shelley when he
departed for Italy attests to his ownership of a copy of Oceana (Pforzheimer Collection of
Shelley and His Circle, Shelleyana 1082). There is a brief cancelled reference to Harrington
in ‘Philosophical View’ (SC VI: 971 and n.).
55
Prose I: 262.
56
Crook and Tokoo, ‘Jewish Orations’, p. 60. Cf. Tractatus (1670), p. 14: ‘to say that
everything happens according to natural laws, and to say that everything is ordained by the
decree and ordinance of God, is the same thing’ (Treatise, Part 1, iii §14). This was one of
Shelley’s favourite quotations from Spinoza; see Queen Mab, last quotation in Note to VII,
13 (‘There is No God!’), and A Refutation of Deism (Prose I: 122).
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might be brought into being with a human Word, as God created light: ‘We have
only to say, it shall be, & it is.’57
The speaker next turns to the financing of the plan, putting a novel spin on some
of the historic aspersions on Jews. He concedes something to Tacitus but without
implicating the entire Jewish people: there are rich Jews, merchants and capitalists,
who hate all other nations, but their hatred is rational, the ‘natural consequence of
their misfortunes & their wrongs’. They have accumulated fortunes (gained in the
first place by industry and economy, not craft and extortion), but only because
the ‘tyranny & insolence of their oppressors’ restricts their spending. Their undue
influence with governments is granted, but it may readily be turned to a good end,
the restoration of their nation-state. Non-Jewish financiers, their rivals, will not
impede their exodus, and ‘for manufacturing countries they would create a’.58 The
sentence was obviously continued on a lost leaf, but probably the composition
was not very much longer than its present length. This final portion shows Shelley
beginning to lose his grip on character and sense of audience. The voice starts to
sound like an Englishman trying to convince other Englishmen that it would be in
their interest to support a Jewish homeland.
What makes Shelley’s Tokyo fragment unusual in its time, if not unique, is
that it is free of early nineteenth-century Christian conversion millenarianism (the
belief that conversion and restoration of the Jews would herald Armageddon, the
defeat of the antichrist and the earthly Kingdom of God).59 Moreover, Shelley
imagines the return of the Jews to their ‘ancestral seats’ as a Jewish initiative, not
as an offer from a European power seeking Jewish support, such as Napoleon
actually made but did not proclaim, nor as a European solution to an identified
‘Jewish problem’. Yet there is something self-defeating in the monologue that
Shelley (who, as far as is known, never met any real Jewish proto-Zionists60) may
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57
Crook and Tokoo, ‘Jewish Orations’, pp. 60–61. Cf. ‘Shelley believed that mankind
had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none’ (Mary Shelley, ‘Note
on the Prometheus Unbound’, PW II: 133).
58
Crook and Tokoo, pp. 62–4.
59
The Revd G.S. Faber, whom Shelley placed among the ‘Armageddon-Heroes’
(Letters I: 45), and whom he entangled in a hoax, posing as an honest doubter (1811),
expounded these views in A General and Connected View of the Prophecies, Relative to the
Conversion, Restoration, Union, and Future Glory of the Houses of Judah and Israel; the
Progress, and Final Overthrow, of the Antichristian Confederacy in the Land of Palestine;
and the Ultimate General Diffusion of Christianity. 2 vols. London: Rivington, 1808. For
other varieties of 1790s Christian millenarianism see Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, eds
David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel. Leiden: Brill, 1990, especially pp. 256–74.
60
From the existence of the Tokyo MS, Emily Sunstein conjectured that the Shelleys
encountered contemporary Zionism among the progressive Livornese Sephardic community
(Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. 2nd edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1991, p. 436 n. 33), but their recorded contacts with Jews of Livorno are tangential only.
Claire Clairmont saw (22 July 1820) the casting of a cylinder for Henry Reveley’s steam
boat at Livorno, where a Jew was present (Livorno shipping was controlled by Jews, which
the steam boat presumably would not have been). On 27 July she visited the gardens of a
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have recognized: this compound of Isaiah, Jesus and Spinoza, this Moses of a new
exodus, propounds a rationalist message designed to be misunderstood by at least
some of those whom he tries to persuade, and who would reject him if they were
to understand him fully.
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There is another reason for Shelley’s failure to persist with his address(es),
if the suggested dating is correct: their eclipse by the cause that engaged his
imaginative energies in 1821 after Adonais: the liberation of Greece. Yet the
attempt, I would suggest, finds an oblique expression in the appearance in Hellas
(1822) of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, Shelley’s last and subtlest treatment of
this figure.
Ahasuerus no longer wanders, but dwells somewhere in the significantly
named Demonesi islands in the Sea of Marmara, the Greek Propontis, at the
meeting point of Asia and Europe. As one of the ‘Jews dispersed throughout the
continents of Europe Asia & Africa, & in the Mediterranean islands’ mentioned in
the Tokyo fragment, he is, in Scrivener’s words, a representative of ‘the Diaspora,
whose exiles are ready to return’,61 but he is also acculturated to Western thought,
including that of Plato, ‘an adept in the difficult lore / Of Greek and Frank
philosophy’ (Hellas, ll. 741–2). He is summoned to the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud
by Hassan, a polymorphous figure, a loyal servant whose services end up doing his
master no good at all. Hassan recounts Greek defeats as though they were victories
so vividly that Mahmud protests, ‘Your heart is Greek, Hassan’ (l. 454), which
Hassan does not deny. Hassan despises Jewish merchants: ‘the yellow Jew / Hides
his hoard deeper in the faithless earth’ (ll. 326–7), but is in awe of Jewish sages – a
clear illustration of what Scrivener calls the Romantic denigration of ‘the pedlar,
the materialistic and foreign seller of commodities’ while idealizing ‘the prophet,
the vehicle for inspired speech’.62 It is by exciting in Mahmud an irresistible desire
to talk to Ahasuerus that Hassan inadvertently enables the Jew to gain control over
the Sultan’s imagination.
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villa owned by a prominent Livornese Jewish merchant family: ‘In the evening walk with
the Signorine Ricci to villa Busnach; the Jew Montefiore & his daughter’ (CCJ: 157–8,
159), but it is impossible to tell from this whether she actually met two members of the
famous Montefiore family. Shelley was in Pisa on both dates.
61
Scrivener, ‘Reading Shelley’s Ahasuerus’, p. 138.
62
Scrivener, p. 133. Hassan, the Turk, calls the Jew ‘yellow’ because gold is yellow and
because of the yellow badge decreed by medieval Islamic (and later Christian) sumptuary
laws to distinguish Jews from other minority religious communities. There seems to have
been no association between yellow and cowardice in Shelley’s day.
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The consultation that ensues parallels Saladin’s interview with the wise Jew
in the Decameron and in Act III of Williams’s The Promise.63 In all three works
despot and Jew are given a magnanimity that raises them above their stereotypes,
especially in Hellas, where the wise Jew is not rich, and is summoned by Mahmud
to release the treasure of his secrets, not, as in Boccaccio and The Promise, to open
his coffers. Both Williams’s Melchisedech and Shelley’s Ahasuerus live austerely,
and are the subjects of speculation. Ahasuerus, Proteus-like, inhabits a sea-cave,
and is said by some to be immortal, while Melchisedech, according to superstitious
rumour, repairs to a cave to work forbidden spells that turn all he touches to gold.
He has, in fact, no occult powers. Shelley similarly represents Ahasuerus as
‘disclaiming all pretension or even belief in supernatural agency’. He depends on
‘a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by anyone who
should have made himself master of the secret associations of another’s thoughts’.64
In his affirmation that he does not disdain Mahmud, nor ‘the worm beneath thy
feet’ (l. 762), he follows Spinoza’s maxim, ‘humanas actiones non ridere, non
lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere’ (‘neither to laugh at, or bewail, or detest the
actions of men; but to understand them’).65 In some of Shelley’s finest sententious
verse, he proceeds to impress on Mahmud his insignificance and that of the
Ottoman Empire, when contemplated in Spinozan phrase, sub specie aeternitatis,66
and undermines Mahmud’s belief in its continuance. Thus the Jew dislocates
Mahmud’s reality, leaving the way open for the return of an essentially classical
63
Williams began work on The Promise in May 1821, and finished it in July. Shelley
corrected it (corrections are transcribed in Walter E. Peck, Shelley: His Life and Work. 2
vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1927, vol. 2, pp. 365–80). As Act III of
this May–July version has not survived, it is not completely certain that it contained a
‘wise Jew’ scene. However, Williams’s journal entries about revising The Promise between
24 October and 5 December 1821 suggest that he did not insert new scenes at this point.
The Melchisedech scene is the only one identified: ‘Employed revising the Jew scene’ and
‘Read my Jew scene to S[helley], and revise a little’; see, in particular, Maria Gisborne
& Edward E. Williams, entries of 21 October, 24 October and 20 November (pp. 103,
105, 113). Williams’s revised Promise, a neat fair copy, is in the Pforzheimer Collection
(Shelleyana 578; examined by me October 2011). Williams fair-copied Hellas between 6
and 10 November 1821, making it possible that the ‘Jew scene’ in the revised Promise was
influenced by Hellas. The possibility that the influence was mutual is also very strong.
64
Hellas, Note 6 (SPP: 463).
65
Tractatus-Politicus I, §4, in Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma (1677). Quoted by
‘Shelley’ in the fictionalized dialogue ‘Byron and Shelley on the Character of Hamlet’,
together with this translation; see New Monthly Magazine, n.s. 29 (1830), pp. 327–36 (p.
336). SC VIII (p. 743) names the source as the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, but this is a
slip: the Tractatus-Politicus is a different work. Both the quotation and the translation, with
a slight variation, are found in the epigraph to Essay 1 of Coleridge’s The Friend. Medwin,
the probable author, may have derived them from notes taken verbatim from Shelley’s
conversation, or from The Friend, or both.
66
Ethica V, §29 and 30. Arthur Hallam owned a copy said to be Shelley’s, present
whereabouts unknown (SC VIII: 742). Ethica is also in the Opera Posthuma, which Shelley
ordered with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (SC VIII: 737).
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and predominantly Athenian Golden Age, though one anticipated with doubt and
foreboding, especially in the final lines. Jewish restoration is not mentioned; it is
not presented as Ahasuerus’s motive for undermining the idea of empire. Yet just as
from the Tokyo fragment a pro-Hellenic subtext can be extrapolated (anything that
hastens the collapse of the Ottoman Empire aids the Greek War of Independence),
the subtext here is that Jews and Greeks (and unconsciously disaffected servants of
Muslim despots like Hassan) have a common cause, and together demonstrate that
all subjugated nations in the Congressional post-Napoleonic era, even those exiled
for 2,000 years, may be roused to self-liberation from ‘Tyrants who have pinnacled
themselves on [their] supineness’.67 As a synthesis of the great-mindedness of
Boccaccio’s Melchisedech, the philosophy of Plato and Spinoza, and of Eastern
and Western traditions of poetry, Ahasuerus embodies the moral authority and
wisdom that might be the precondition for such a restoration.
Shelley’s heart, too, is Greek. Yet he gestures at the fusion of Hebrew and
classical prophecies of restoration and renewal in his Note 7 of Hellas, citing
two famous and often compared prophecies, the eleventh chapter of Isaiah and
Virgil’s Fourth ‘Messianic’ Eclogue. In what appears to be a direct allusion to
Lowth’s assertion that ‘some degree of obscurity is the necessary attendant upon
prophecy’ because of ‘the impropriety of making a complete revelation of every
circumstance connected with the prediction’,68 Shelley describes the final Chorus
of Greek captives, themselves Christian, as ‘indistinct and obscure as the event of
the living drama whose arrival it foretells’. It will remind the reader ‘of Isaiah and
Virgil, whose ardent spirits overleaping the actual reign of evil which we endure
and bewail, already saw the possible and perhaps approaching state of society in
which the “lion shall lie down with the lamb” and “omnis feret omnia tellus [Every
land will bring forth all things].” Let these great names be my authority and my
excuse’.69
Predictions as to how Shelley’s attitude towards Jews and Judaism might
have evolved had he lived must also be dark and imperfect. That he would have
tried to publish his lost translation of Spinoza seems probable, but obstinate
questionings remain (‘Would he have made greater efforts to discover more about
contemporary Jewish culture? Would he have given any thought to the inhabitants
of Palestine?’).70 Such speculations wander in the same region as ‘How would he
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‘A Defence of Poetry’, SPP: 463–4. Virgil’s status in medieval Europe as a quasiChristian poet, equipping him to be Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, has been
traced back to Eusebius’s interpretation (c. 337 AD) of Eclogue IV as prophetic of the
Kingdom of Christ on earth. Lowth regarded this Eclogue as an exception to his rule that
Classical prophecy lacked Hebrew sublimity. In Lecture 21 he expounds a now exploded
theory of its transmission to Virgil from the Hebrew original via Greek translations, or via
divine inspiration (Lectures [1815], pp. 298–309).
70
In 1811 Faber (see note 59) accused Shelley of imposing on him with a claim to
have ‘travelled through Palestine, which resembled a stone-quarry more than anything else’
67
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have completed “The Triumph of Life”?’ – a barren and dry land where no water is. 1
Yet he was unquestionably curious about the Eastern Mediterranean, and jumped 2
in late 1820 at the idea of joining Thomas Medwin’s ‘plan to be accomplished with 3
a friend of his, a man of large fortune, who will be at Leghorn next Spring, and 4
who designs to visit Greece, Syria, and Egypt in his own ship’, a plan that, had 5
it materialized, would have given him eyewitness impressions of Palestine, then 6
part of Syria.71 Such openness to new experience, together with his conviction that 7
‘circumstances make men what they are[.] … we all contain the germ of a degree 8
of degradation or of greatness, whose connexion with our character is determined 9
by events’,72 holds out the promise that Shelley’s knowledge of Jewish affairs 10
would have become better informed, and his views more enlarged and inclusive. 11
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(Bod. MS Don. c. 180, fols 41–5; see James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Biography.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, pp. 120, 702 n. 93). Shelley may have
supposed, like some late nineteenth-century Zionists, that Palestine was an ‘empty land’,
but there is too little evidence to encourage conjecture.
71
Shelley to Claire Clairmont, 29 October 1820; Letters II: 242. The ‘man’ has been
plausibly conjectured to be Edward Trelawny. The ‘large fortune’– and the ship – were
someone’s wishful thinking.
72
Hellas, Note 4 (SPP: 463).
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Chapter 14
Shelley’s Italian Verse Fragments:
Exploring the Notebook Drafts
Alan M. Weinberg
The Corpus of ‘Italian’ Fragments
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Several draft verse fragments, whose subject, locality or reference is discernibly
Italian in character, were written over the course of the poet’s residence in Italy (30
March 1818 to 8 July 1822). Among these texts, the most notable is ‘The Triumph
of Life’, a work whose frame setting is distinctly Italian and Mediterranean (the
bay of Lerici), and whose indebtedness to Italian poetry, specifically the allegories
of Dante and Petrarch, is now well attested.1 But while ‘The Triumph’ once
languished among Shelley’s most seriously neglected poems, it is now ironically
considered among the best known and admired, a reputation well deserved as it
is a work of towering stature, albeit incomplete. In consequence of its present
renown, it will not feature among the group of unfamiliar fragments which is the
subject of the present essay.
With the exception of the ‘Song for Tasso’ and probably ‘Mazenghi’, these
texts were written in Pisa or its environs,2 and all but the ‘Tasso’ fragments
have Tuscan subjects, mainly Pisan or Florentine. They may be anchored in an
immediate Italian context (the poet’s domicile) or in the culturally vibrant past
– which includes, in addition to Tasso, the notable influence of Dante as well as
other authors – though the tenor of these works is by no means idealistic. The texts
cover a fairly wide range of ‘Italian’ topoi, often interrelated, focusing (as the case
may be) on a poet, a patriot, historic and contemporary scenes, legendary figures,
recreation (boating on the Tuscan waterways), an emblematic vegetable plant. The
fragments themselves are of varied length. The more extended are inconclusive
narratives such as ‘Mazenghi’ and ‘Ginevra’, and unformed or unrealized ones
such as ‘Fiordispina’ and the river bucolic, ‘The Boat on the Serchio’. The latter
two have pronounced lyrical or dialogic qualities that protract, perhaps even
override whatever story might have been intended. The briefer fragments are
mostly descriptive portraits such as ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’ and ‘The Tower
of Famine’. There remain, in this grouping of texts, brief sketches of a drama on
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See e.g. Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1976, pp. 326–9, and Alan Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience.
London: Macmillan 1991, pp. 202–42.
2
For the dating of ‘Mazenghi’, see p. 286 below.
1
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the Italian poet Tasso (among the first of Shelley’s concerns on arrival in Italy), and
the opening stanzas of a mythopoeic fable, ‘The Zucca’ (composed in Shelley’s
last year), whose Italian qualities are muted yet present in title (original with the
poet), the plant itself, which is the centre of focus, the wintry setting (the time of
composition) and rhyme scheme (ottava rima). While these diverse fragments are
not united by any single concern, they do form a network of related ideas, and
have been grouped here chronologically, in pairs, as reflective of periodic ties
and linkages. A pattern of four groups emerges that may reflect some degree of
authorial design, as in the pairing of the brief Pisan sketches or of ‘Fiordispina’
and ‘Ginevra’. It should be noted, too, from the outset that nearly all the titles are
editorial and did not (as far as is known) have the poet’s sanction.
These texts may have less lustre than the ‘The Triumph of Life’, may be
neither as ambitious in conception nor substantial in length. Nevertheless they
are significant draft fragments in their own right, all embedded in a texture of
ongoing creative thought and composition, and of response to the Italian ‘world’.
Moreover, they share with the epic fragment a sense of the provisional, of the
unformulated that, in the case of Shelley, is idiosyncratic and determines the very
nature of the artefact and the kind of response that would be pertinent. Unlike the
surviving art works and ruins of the past, these works are not mutilated, were not
once whole and entire, but were simply left unfinished by a young poet neither
wholly displeased to leave texts in an imperfect state, nor granted the fullness
of time ever to rethink or revise them. Much as he strove to perfect his art, he
understood that imperfection was bound up with the very nature of creative
activity and has a value and significance of its own.
The stark fact of incompletion is often overlooked in the now abundant critical
discourse on ‘The Triumph of Life’, and the result is an inevitable distortion of
the work’s character. Faced with the seemingly inchoate manuscript (see BSM
I), whose last pages in this instance were scribbled hastily on loose paper, one
may be left in doubt regarding even the primary signification of the text, largely
because this has not been resolved by the author. Much the same doubt arises
in regard to the rough state of the other Italian fragments, especially ‘Tasso’,
‘Fiordispina’, ‘Ginevra’ and ‘The Boat on the Serchio’, the texts, in these instances,
apparently abandoned by the poet. In manuscript, which is where Shelley left
them, they appear to the ordinary eye as disordered and incomprehensible, and
as hieroglyphics of cancellations and reworkings set down seemingly in the
white heat of inspiration. Considerable editorial skill is required to discern the
probable sense embedded in an unfinished authorial draft, and certain readings
will always remain conjectural. Some of the poet’s drafts which appear to be
intermediate (as in the case of ‘Mazenghi’, ‘Evening. Ponte a mare’, ‘The Zucca’)
are more intelligible and cause fewer problems for the reader.3 For nearly two
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freshly edited by Kelvin Everest (‘Mazenghi’ and ‘Tasso’ for vol. 2) and Michael Rossington 43
(the remaining five fragments for vols 3 and 4) in Poems of Shelley (PS). London: Longman 44
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centuries, corrupt or unsatisfactory texts have caused the fragments to recede into
the background of Shelley’s corpus, so receiving at best only sporadic attention.
Such editions, mostly out of date, have neither inspired nor prompted reliable
discussions of these fragments. This state of affairs will alter in the wake of new
editions presently being published which scrupulously contextualize and provide
intelligible readings of the manuscripts. Such impressive scholarship is invaluable,
though smoothed-out readings, with hesitations, cancellations and insertions –
in short, the writing process – selectively signalled in the notes but elided from
the text, might begin to seem overly authoritative.4 Induced as one is to return to
the original notebook drafts for anchorage – now available for consultation in
facsimile and transcription in BSM5– one discovers a different textual reality, one
which resituates the drafts among others in a continuum that draws attention to the
nature of Shelley’s compositional practice. Frequently one notes how Shelley is
ready to abandon a text which, though in a rough state and incomplete, appears to
have served some creative purpose germane to the author’s needs. In the ensuing
discussion, I shall follow this path of investigation in order to reveal the underlying
concerns and attributes of Shelley’s ‘Italian’ fragments.6
Poet and Patriot: The ‘Tasso’ Fragments and ‘Mazenghi’ (1818–19)
Occupying Shelley from the moment he arrived in Italy – as his reading of Manso’s
and Serrassi’s ‘Lives of Torquato Tasso’ and his own sketch for a scenario show7
– the project of ‘a tragedy on the subject of Tasso’s madness’,8 which he expected
to take several months to complete, appears to have been suspended at Bagni di
Lucca in July 1818,9 and may well have been dropped once the character of Tasso
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(Pearson Education), 2000, 2011; New York: Routledge, 2014. These fragments will again
be independently edited by Nora Crook and, in the instance of ‘Fiordispina’, by Stuart
Curran for later volumes of Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (CPPBS). Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000–2012 (8 vols planned, 3 vols published). I am deeply
indebted to Michael Rossington, Jack Donovan and Nora Crook whose advice and editorial
work have provided me with invaluable assistance regarding manuscripts, dates and matters
of interpretation.
4
For consideration of this editorial practice, see Michael Bradshaw, ‘Reading as
Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks’, in The Unfamiliar Shelley, eds Alan
M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 21–40, esp. pp. 31–2.
5
The Italian verse fragments are reproduced in facsimile and transcribed in BSM II
Massey, III (Dawson), VI (Adamson), XII (Crook), XIV (Dawson and Webb), XV (Jones),
XVIII (Goslee), XIX (Crook and Webb).
6
Although presently not easily accessible to all readers, BSM will soon be available
online in the Shelley-Godwin Archive (see http://shelleygodwinarchive.org).
7
MS Journals: 203 and n. 4, 209. The scenario has been dated June 1818 (BSM III:
355) or April/May 1818 (PS II: 366).
8
Letters II: 8.
9
PS II: 366.
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was recast in the Maniac of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ (probably begun at Este in the
autumn of 1818).10 With the illustrious Ferrarese poet, Shelley would have felt a
close tie: as if thinking of his experience in England which prompted his self-exile,
Shelley later remarked, in contemplation of the handwriting of Tasso, that the
latter’s ‘unoffending genius could not escape … hopeless persecution’.11 Romantic
legend (already represented in Goethe’s drama Torquato Tasso [1790], Byron’s
The Lament of Tasso [1817] and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV: xxxvi–xl [1818])12
gave the Italian an aura that appealed to Shelley’s imagination. Yet attempts at a
play based, it appears, on Tasso’s frustrated, thwarted love for Leonora d’Este were
sporadic and failed to develop further, perhaps because Tasso’s hyper-sensitive
nature, approaching insanity, may not have lent itself to dramatic progression.13
Three surviving fragments do, however, indicate the specific focus of Shelley’s
interest. A brief scene, perhaps intended to open the play (it is marked ‘scene 1’) and
drafted on the first pages of MS Shelley adds. e. 11 (pp. 166–161 rev.),14 presents
Tasso through the eyes of his friend, (Cardinal) Albano, who is in conversation
with (Giovan Battista) Pigna and the poet’s mercenary rivals, (Count) Maddalo
and (Lorenzo) Malpiglio. This framing device serves to provide a contextualized
and sympathetic viewpoint on Tasso (partly drafted in pencil). Most striking, in
Albano’s report, is the young Tasso’s inwardness, his living as a poet intensely
in the mind. The person and the poet seem indistinguishable. Momentarily, his
fiery eyes appear to ‘track’ (p. 163 rev.: 28) ‘the winged children of his brain’
(p. 162 rev.: 12), a cancelled yet suggestive image of hyperactive and feverish
imagination. Thereafter, as drooping lashes fall, he is brooding and restrained with
regard to his patron, the Duke, who seems pensive and still. Leonora sits mute,
her pale hands ‘clasped’ but ‘quivering’, as if complicit with some secret shared
between herself and Tasso (p. 164 rev.: 18–19). The scene is sharply focused,
poignant, expectant of things to come, and its discontinuation regrettable. Another
small fragment, ‘Silence; oh well are Death & Sleep & thou’,15 appearing a few
pages further on in adds. e. 11 (p. 155 rev., and immediately followed by a draft
of the essay ‘A Future State’), continues the note of mental flight, Tasso, it would
seem, seeking his soul’s union with ‘sounds’ (presumably Leonora’s singing),
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BSM XIV: 173.
Letters II: 47.
12
Later memorialized in Delacroix’s ‘Tasso in the Hospital of St Anna Ferrara’ (1839).
13
Peacock remarked (on 30th May) that he did not think Shelley’s subject sufficiently
theatrical though (he added) ‘in the Greek sense perhaps it may be dramatic’ (Letters II: 9
n. 11).
14
See Jones, BSM XV: 167–160, and G.M. Matthews, ‘A New Text of Shelley’s
Scene for Tasso’. Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 11 (1960), pp. 39–47.
15
See BSM XV: 157, 176 (note) and PS II: 369–70.
11
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freeing his soul ‘To track,16 along the lapses of the air / This wandering melody’,
and thus escaping ‘these faint & weary17 limbs’ (11, 15–16, 12).
Lastly, a third fragment, mostly in pencil, designated ‘Song for Tasso’ by Mary
Shelley (and drafted in adds. e. 12, pp. 39–40),18 is a lament whose chief feature
is its reflection on unfulfilled but undying love, from the perspective of helpless
captivity. The scene shifts to a later episode in Tasso’s life most probably suggested
by the visit, in November 1818, to the dungeon at Ferrara where, according to
legend, Tasso was imprisoned for his illicit love. In the ‘Song’, Shelley continues
to draw a veil over Tasso’s subservience towards the Duke which, Shelley noted
on his visit, was pitiable rather than deserving condemnation.19 Perhaps intended
only to sum up Tasso’s situation and not to form part of the play, the successive
seven-line stanzas (each comprising two couplets and a triplet, the last incomplete)
record Tasso’s uncanny fidelity to Leonora, despite every disappointment and
inclemency. He has been as true to her as to his commitment as epic poet, his
‘Keen thoughts’ encompassing ‘all that men had thought before / And all that
Nature shews’ (p. 39: 6, 7–8).20 His persistence in love is both heroic and futile
and may point to insanity. He remains obsessed with Leonora’s image, ‘A silvershining form like thee’, which yet eludes him and which is ‘but a vapour hoar’
(p. 40: 3, 12).21 If, as may be the case with Mazenghi (noted below), his love is
‘misdirected’, yet he does at the same time seem undefeated, committed to his
ideal at all costs, and able to suffer for it. The poet is, one feels, the man, and this
would seem to be the crucial point Shelley is making. Though left incomplete
here, Tasso’s lament is reconstituted dramatically in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, in the
Maniac’s extended monologue that neither the optimism nor pessimism of the
friends (fictional surrogates for Shelley and Byron) can satisfactorily explain.
The topic of heroic resistance in the face of persecution – imaging Shelley’s
unflinching conception of superlative being – was further explored in a second
‘Italian’ fragment of the period, this time within the domain of political conflict. The
poem ‘Mazenghi’ – an incomplete narrative in sesta rima (or sestina narrativa),22
comprising some 30 unnumbered stanzas – is based on recorded events of the
early quattrocento concerning the warring republics of Florence and Pisa and an
instance of Italian virtue-in-exile that caught Shelley’s attention.
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One notes the repeated verbal image. To track = ‘to trace the course or movements
of’ (OED).
17
PS II: 370 reads ‘heavy’.
18
See Goslee, BSM XVIII: 41–3.
19
Letters II: 47.
20
Cf. PS II: 446, ll. 5, 6–7.
21
PS II: 447 provides a corrected reading. BSM XVIII reads ‘[?vaporous] hour’.
22
The rhyme scheme adopted by Shakespeare for his narrative poem, Venus and
Adonis, and Spenser for Astrophel (his elegy on the death of Sir Philip Sidney). Giambatista
Casti’s Gli Animali Parlanti (1802), a political satire, made popular Italian use of the verseform and was highly regarded by Leopardi. Casti’s poem is reflected in Byron’s Beppo and
Don Juan and was almost certainly known to Shelley. See footnote 46.
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In the notebook MS Shelley e. 4, the fragment is immediately preceded by
the scenario for the drama of ‘Tasso’ and (reverso) by a brief fragment on the
‘Apennine’ (in PS II: 35 precisely dated to 4 May 1818, but probably written soon
after). There are currently two views on the dating of ‘Mazenghi’ and the position
of the draft in the notebook could support either. Everest and Matthews (PS II)
posit composition in the spring of 1818, following upon the ‘Apennine’, when
Shelley was residing at Livorno in the vicinity of the Torre di Vada and the Tuscan
marshes, where the action of the narrative fragment takes place. Dawson (BSM III)
in the main follows the dating of Mary Shelley who appended ‘Naples [December]
1818’ when publishing nine stanzas of the fragment in PP: 257–9, though Dawson
extends possibilities into the early weeks of 1819. In favour of the later date is
the fact that Mazenghi’s story is found in Sismondi’s Histoire des républiques
italiennes du moyen âge, certainly read by Shelley in January and February 1819
at Naples (as recorded in MS Journals: 247–8).23 One might add that Florence,
Mazenghi’s birthplace and described in knowledgeable detail in the fragment, was
not seen by Shelley before his brief visit in August 1818.24 If (as I believe) a later
date is correct, the story which embraces Florence, Pisa and the Maremma offered
the poet from the vantage point of Naples, itself filled with echoes of the past, a
distanced retrospect of his formative experience of Italy.
It is notable that ‘Mazenghi’ and the works surrounding or impinging on its
composition, all have Italian or, in the specific instance of ‘Cyclops’, set at Mount
Aetna, Graeco-Italian contexts. Shelley was accommodating his mind to the
historical and mythic undercurrents of Italy, searching out their silent recesses,
and he did so without conforming to conventional tastes. He found a useful point
of reference for his own isolation in exile in an unfamiliar chapter of local Italian
history recording the ostracism of a patriot and the betrayal of liberty (as would
be associated in his mind with his own unhappy experience of English politics).
In the case of ‘Mazenghi’, Shelley’s protagonist-hero is, unlike Tasso, hardly a
prominent figure, nor is Torre di Vada a notable historical landmark. Mazenghi’s
banishment from Florence and single-handed defeat of the Pisan galley ship
at Vada in continued loyalty to his native city, are given only brief mention in
Sismondi’s Histoire,25 and the hero’s story seems otherwise very much lost to time.
Allowing himself scope to strengthen matters of personal interest, Shelley changed
the historical figure’s name from Pierre (Pietro) Marenghi to Albert Mazenghi,26
bringing himself closer to the Florentine in imagination, though the English first
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The Latin and Greek translations interspersed with, or following, ‘Mazenghi’
may well have been prompted by associations with Virgil and the Cyclops at legendary
or volcanic sites in the bay of Naples. See BSM III: xv. For dating of ‘Cyclops’, see Maria
Schoina’s discussion of the translation in Chapter 9 (esp. pp. 184–5).
24
Letters II: 33.
25
J.C.L Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge. 16
vols. 2nd ed. Paris: chez Treuttel and Würtz, 1818, vol. 8 (ch. 60), pp. 142–3.
26
In the first stanza (f. 42r: 6), Shelley began with ‘Marenghi’ but then altered the ‘r’
to ‘z’.
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name was eventually cancelled (f. 44r: 12). By the time of Shelley’s first residence
in Livorno, Pisa and both the tower and town of Vada were in evident decline and
off the beaten track. Present degradation is heavily inscribed in the manuscript,
particularly in the second and ninth stanzas, though Shelley’s account of Vada
(second stanza) is hampered by clichéd Gothic formulations (‘plague infected
corpses’, ‘The wretched natives Men women children crawl’,27 f. 42r: 12–13/13a)
and is largely scored through and unformulated, as if the weight of history should
not be allowed to erase remembrance of ‘Mazenghi’s urn’ (f. 42r: 6). Likewise, the
persistent feuds that plagued the Pisan republic (only reconciled by the common
enemy, Florence) are signalled early in the poem, in the fourth and fifth stanzas,
but this account is also itself fragmentary, indicating that Shelley might have been
impatient with historical detail (as recorded in Sismondi’s larger narrative), and
wished to move on rather to his ironic celebration of Florence, a liberticide in
the war against Pisa and, as we discover subsequently, faithless in banishing its
patriot, Mazenghi.
On first visiting Florence, Shelley described it as ‘the most beautiful city I
ever saw’.28 With libertarian emphasis, this idea is cast in the paradisal image in
the sixth stanza – that Florence was ‘Like one green isle amid the mid AEthiopian
sand / A nation amid slaveries’ (f. 43r: 8–9) – an image itself prefigured, in early
autumn 1818, in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills, as the leitmotif refrain
of the Petrarchan ‘green isle in a sea of misery’. In ‘Mazenghi’, it encapsulates the
erstwhile republic’s creativity, its unique embodiment of the imaginative freedom
central to Shelley’s own philosophy – freedom that is always imperilled and must
therefore be defended. The stanza in question is intelligible provided one restores
several cancellations (as occurs silently in PS II: 355); but the phrase ‘true, wise,
& just’ (10) which sums up Florence’s achievement (broadly in keeping with
Sismondi elsewhere in his History),29 is understandably scored out as it dilutes the
focal image, reducing it to a bland abstract formula (about to be put in question);
overanticipates a more suitably placed résumé two stanzas later, and fails to
provide a completing rhyme for ‘tyrants prey’ or its alternative ‘spoil’ (11). The
impact and indeed significance of the tribute relies on the irony upon which it
hinges in the concluding line: that the same Florence made a mockery of itself in
subjugating Pisa (in 1406), a calamity from which the latter has never recovered,30
and which has due consequences for Florence as it may never regain its former
stature (Shelley later in September 1819 referred to Florence as the ‘ghost of a
republic’).31 The same ironic pattern (a negative expressed by way of a positive, in
turn enhancing the value of the latter) is repeated in the succeeding stanzas (7 and
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The account echoes, perhaps too obviously, Byron’s lines, ‘and thus they creep, /
39
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets’ (Ode on Venice, 12–13).
40
28
Letters II: 33.
29
See for example the brief tribute to the Florence of Dante in Sismondi, Histoire 41
42
(1818), vol. 5 (ch 32), pp. 166–9.
30
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See ninth stanza.
31
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8): Florence’s cultural and artistic eminence as the heir to Athens (‘foster-mother/
nurse of mans witherin abandoned glory’, 12/12a)32 is – in the concluding couplet
– demeaned by its falsehood, its betrayal of all it has stood for.33 The sorrowful
decline of Athens – through subjugation as much as desertion – echoes the motif
of ‘rise and fall’.34 These nuanced reflections point to the balanced complexity of
Shelley’s engagement with the Italian (and Grecian) past, and the absence of any
sentimental attachment to it.
The account of Mazenghi’s cruel exile from his native Florence – a tragic
reversal which, though a ‘sad reality’,35 itself undergoes a reversal – forms the
greater part of the fragment (stanzas 11 to 30) and is very largely the poet’s own
invention, in pursuance of congenial thematic interests. Forced to live in the wild
and in the diseased Maremma (Dante’s ‘fiere selvagge’, Inf. XIII, 8; ‘quante
bisce’, Inf. XXV, 20; and ‘i mali’, Inf. XXIX, 48)36 and thus, it would seem, to
endure a double woe, Mazenghi nevertheless accommodates himself to their
severities and becomes in the course of time an active citizen of nature, taming
‘every newt & snake & toad / And every seagull’ (stanza 20; f. 45v: 20–f. 46r:
1) – creatures of the perilous marshland. As a figure isolated from his fellow man,
he recalls the wise hermit figures (the ‘old man’ in Laon and Cythna and Zonoras
in ‘Prince Athanase’): but, like the eponymous protagonists of these works, he
is more obviously a victim of injustice or antipathy. The narrative perspective
remains subtle and ironic through to the fragmentary end. Rising above his trying
circumstances, Mazenghi acquires solace certainly, but more than that, the capacity
of interrelating with what is both inimical and hospitable in his unprotected
physical environment. Responsive to the ‘[ ] liberty’ (f. 46v: 3)37 he experiences
in nature – and that was paradoxically denied him as a Florentine citizen – he
acquires a power that, foreshadowed as early as in Queen Mab, is also given to
Zonoras (in the cancelled sequence of ‘Prince Athanase’) and extolled by the old
man of ‘The Coliseum’ (begun November 1818): namely, to commune ‘with the
immeasurable world’ – the extent marked by the splendidly original image of ‘the
wide vast Heaven, star-impearled’38 – and to feel ‘his spirit, as soul life beyond his
limbs dilated / Till his mind grew like that it contempla[ted]’ (f. 46v: 7, 5/5a/5b,
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‘ … et l’Athènes de l’Italie rappelle celle de la Grèce, autant par le génie de son
peuple que par les chefs-d’œuvres qu’on lui vit produire’, Sismondi, Histoire, vol. 5, p. 167.
33
Reference to ‘A beast of deadlier <p> subtler venom’ (f. 43v: 11/11a) points to
Florence’s subjection to Austrian military rule at the time of writing.
34
Cf. similar sentiments with regard to Athens in Childe Harold II (see for example
stanza 6).
35
See Dedication, The Cenci, PS II: 726.
36
For discussion of Dante’s influence in ‘Mazenghi’ (especially in regard to the
Purgatorio), see Jack Donovan, ‘Shelley’s Second Kingdom’ (Chapter 7).
37
The last line of the twenty-third stanza is mostly incomplete, presenting a large
blank between ‘And feel’ and ‘liberty’.
38
The coinage, ‘star-impearled’, replaces a discarded early reference to the ship
‘Walking in pride upon the purple Ocean’.
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8/8a–9). This sense of ‘at-oneness’ has its notable antecedents in Wordsworth’s and
Coleridge’s poetry, but Shelley’s emphasis in ‘Mazenghi’ falls idiosyncratically on
expansiveness of being and the capacity of mind which, assimilating what might
be threatening, frees the individual from what, in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, is called
the ‘principle of Self’ or ‘Mammon’. Very precise phrasing displaces rather than
affirms the Romantic quest for self-fulfilment.
Mazenghi is now disposed to return, emboldened, to the service of Florence,
despite what he has suffered. ‘The thought of his own kind’ and ‘of his own
country’ (f. 48r: 7, 9/9a) has, it is implied, dispelled any instinct of revenge, the
‘bitter faith’ repaying ‘ill for ill’ that, at the very outset of the fragment, Mazenghi’s
urn can ‘unlearn’ (f. 42r: 6, 2, 5).39 The negative formulation (‘unlearn’) points to
the possible reversal both of historical decline and the ignorance that attends it,
through the intelligent perception of heroic example. Significantly, the error of
revenge is the keynote in Shelley’s reflections on Christ’s teaching that precedes
‘Mazenghi’ in the e. 4 notebook. Yet despite reaching the end of the story (as found
in Sismondi), the narrative comes to a sudden halt in the middle of stanza 29, as
if Shelley were not keen to pursue the hero’s defence of treacherous Florence.
This reluctance is intimated in an isolated, possibly final stanza in sesta rima40
(following a blank folio, f. 48v) wherein ‘love’, though ‘among / The things
which are immortal’, is seen to be ‘misdirected’ as, in Mazenghi’s case, Florence
– recipient of his unconditional loyalty – has betrayed itself and him (f. 49r: 4–5).
The pointer to immortality, impressively enhanced by the couplet rhyming of
‘surpass’ and ‘was’ (‘surpass / All that weak frail stuff which will be, is or or which
was’, 5a–6/6b/6a),41 might reconstitute Mazenghi’s ‘love’ in a domain that (as in
Dante’s Paradiso) outreaches or transcends human limitation.
Although incomplete and seemingly discarded, ‘Mazenghi’ is a notable and
sensitive portrait of an exile’s experience refiguring Shelley’s own self-exile in his
first year in Italy, and re-echoing too Dante’s banishment from his native Florence
in 1302. As an historical prototype, politically obscure and cast in the mould of the
stoic Roman patriot, Mazenghi himself may not be equal to the intense sensibility
which characterized earlier fictional protagonists such as the Alastor-poet, Laon,
Cythna, Lionel in Rosalind and Helen and Prince Athanase. Nor is he quite a match
for the hyper-sensitive Tasso; but, like the legendary poet, eventually recast in the
enigmatic figure of the Maniac, his magnanimity seems to override inclemencies
or imperfections, finding expression in the union of what he is and what he does.
Such dedicated singleness of purpose implies promise in a world darkened by
betrayal, soon finding ampler heroic embodiment in Prometheus Unbound.
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Historic Pisan Scenes: ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’ and ‘The Tower of
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Following early residence at Milan and Livorno, and subsequent peregrinations to
Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Livorno and Florence over a period
of nearly two years, which influenced several ambitious, complete works, the
more settled lifestyle of the Shelleys at Pisa and neighbouring towns or resorts,
from 1820 to 1822, gave occasion for further sporadic Italian sketches.42 The first
of these, the evocation of a scene, has the poignant suggestiveness of a riverside
etching. The work in question is the fragment ‘Evening. Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, the title
given by Mary Shelley in Posthumous Poems, 1824 (but not in her copybook MS
Shelley adds. d. 7). Nowhere in the surviving draft manuscript (MS Shelley adds.
e. 9, pp. 346–8)43 is there any specific reference either to Pisa or the bridge (Ponte
a Mare), but the general impression of the view at sunset, as might be captured
by an observant artist, undoubtedly portrays contemporary Pisa on a summer
evening, and to that extent justifies the title. Each aspect of the scene alternately
appealing or unappealing is touched on: the sea-bound, fast flowing river Arno,
its slightly dismal, ominous nocturnal life and dried-out neighbouring vegetation;
the dreamy reflection of the town in its moving waters; the bare, dusty, deserted
pavements; the lingering, impressively picturesque twilight, also noted admiringly
by Medwin,44 and faint intimation of sea in the distance, towards the setting sun.
These details are quietly and unobtrusively worked in, unlike the account of the
Medusa painting at Florence (c. November–December 1819), which is precisely
detailed and energetic in description.45 Shelley’s verse is lazy, even halting in its
motion, taking advantage of the sesta rima, whose single quatrain and couplet
restrict elaboration and speed, and are suited to brief successive meditations.46 The
verse-form recalls ‘Mazenghi’, allowing room for lyrical reflection and likewise
– as if a link were intended – centred on Pisa (Vada was in Pisan territory until
captured by the Florentines).
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Five of which were written in the course of a single year, from June 1820 to June
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43
Dawson and Webb, BSM XIV: 252–5.
44
Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1847), rev. and ed. H. Buxton
Forman. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1913, p. 238.
45
‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery’ is not ‘perfectly
finished’ (PS III: 219) and therefore might be considered a fragment. The sequence of
stanzas remains undecided, two lines are slightly incomplete, and two fragmentary stanzas,
copied out by Mary Shelley from the lost holograph, have an uncertain status. See editorial
headnote, PS III: 218–19.
46
The ‘relaxed’ verse-form made popular in The Court of Beasts (1816), William
Rose’s translation of Casti’s ‘gossipy’ satire, Animali Parlanti, reviewed by Ugo Foscolo
in the Quarterly Review 21 (April 1819), pp. 486–98, following J.T. Coleridge’s hostile
review of Laon and Cythna. (Both reviews appeared anonymously.) See esp. p. 494 and
footnote 23 above.
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The draft fragment (a fifth stanza truncated and a line in the third incomplete)
was almost certainly composed in the summer of Shelley’s first residence at
Pisa, in June 1820 (and not in 1821 as Mary Shelley supposed).47 Drafted among
miscellaneous fragments towards the back of adds. e. 9, its haunting image of
Pisa’s reflection in the Arno – ‘Over the Within the surface of the fleeting river / The
wrinkled image of the city lay / Immoveably unquiet’ (p. 347: 1/1a–3) – reappears
with almost identical phrasing in the guise of Athens in the ‘Ode to Liberty’ VI,
1–3 (c. 10 May–21 June), the river there indicated as a metaphor of ‘Time’. This
recurrence implicitly aligns Pisa and Athens, indicating that the past they reflect
(reminiscent of the Athenian inheritance of Florence in ‘Mazenghi’) is distorted
and troubled by time (‘wrinkled’, ‘unquiet’), yet nevertheless unchanging (‘and
forever / It [image of the city] trembles but it never fades away’, 3–4). Thus Pisa
will continue to embody the liberty and eminence that, like Athens, she has lost.
It might be compared to Livorno which, in the ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (drafted
as well in adds. e. 9, and begun 15 June), has little historical distinction but, in
compensation, the vibrancy and charm of rural Italy in summer (in contrast to
shabby, frenetic London).
An oblique disquietude characterizes the fragment in all its aspects, from the
very first lines to the end. While nothing is directly said about Pisa’s decline,
the unpopulated, seemingly deserted scene points further to its unmistakeable
occurrence. The features described are that of a forsaken city: departed swallows
which come and go, ‘flitting’ bats and ‘slow soft toads’ (p. 346: 2, 3) which inhabit
the air and the damp river bank in the absence of other life. Even the sunset, itself
the poetic emblem of decline, is subdued and funerary – the cloud ‘cinereous’
(replacing ‘enormous’; p. 347: 8, 8a/8b), the ‘thundersmoke’ ‘lurid’, and a ‘streak
of light of dun & sulphur[e]ous gold’ (p. 348: 2, 3–3a) – reinforcing the stillness
(as if the scene were frozen) yet indicating, in the ‘intermitting’ coastal breeze (p.
346: 13), and the changing cloud formations on the horizon, ongoing movement.
Caught up and finally side-tracked into fragmentation by the resonant, darkening
sunset, Shelley’s ‘still-life’ seems, in the absence of finality, to suspend time in a
moment of observation, and yet to suggest the appeal and sustainability of the past,
the sad, haunting finitude of the present, and the silent persistence of time passing.
A companion fragment, ‘The Tower of Famine’ (as Mary Shelley entitled it
in Harvard MS Eng. 822) appears to have been composed at Pisa in December
1820,48 the draft manuscript written reverso near the centre of MS Shelley
adds. e. 8 (pp. 92–90 rev.),49 in the company of ‘Woodman and the Nightingale’
(similarly drafted in terza rima). Discarded formulations alternate with passages
of impressively fluid composition, the lines and stanzas typically unstopped – as
in ‘Woodman’ or the translation of ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’ (Purg. XXVIII,
1–51) – to give the sense of interlocked impressions of a dominant scene. Gone is
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the subdued charm of the earlier Pisan fragment (there reflecting a less oppressive
sentiment), and in its place, more strongly brought out, is the sense of a city of
death, cursed by inglorious misdeeds. The centre of focus is the surviving ‘tower
of Famine’ (p. 92: 9 – la Muda or Torre della Fame)50 in which Count Ugolino della
Gherardesca was imprisoned with his four sons, all dying from starvation at the
hands of Archbishop Ruggieri (hunger possibly having driven Ugolino to devour
his children). Though at no point does Shelley explicitly refer to Canto XXXIII
of the Inferno, where, at considerable length, Ugolino recounts his experience
and the treachery that engulfs him, the ill-famed tower is in itself the emblem
of Dante’s canto which has memorialized the tragic events, beyond even that of
strict historical fact. Shelley’s choice of terza rima (each tercet distinctly marked
with a dash or cross) further signals Dante’s influence and presence, inevitably
calling to mind Ugolino’s self-pitying lament despite his own evident treachery,
his gruesome fate (he will gnaw at Ruggieri’s head for all eternity) and the pilgrim
Dante’s wearied curse of the Pisans (‘vituperio delle genti / del bel paese’, Inf.
XXXIII, 79–80) for having permitted the murder of children – the outcome of
ruthless factional rivalry, power-mongering and self-interest.
In this fragment, Pisa’s glorious past is completely shrouded. Even the terrible
events attaching themselves to the tower (which, it is implied, has a phantom-like
presence [p. 91: 8a–15]) are unstated and a far distant memory, taking place in
the late thirteenth century. The ‘desolation’ referred to in the opening line (p. 92:
2), and the ‘shipwrecks of Oblivion’s wave’ (8) are not of recent provenance; and
the ‘people’ of Pisa, said to be ‘extinguished’ (7a/7 – the city once their ‘cradle’
[6], now their ‘grave’ [6a]), could have risen to prominence only briefly, and have
been in decline ever since. This deepening of historical perspective, obliquely
indicated, allows Shelley to focus not on the past but rather on the present reality
– the ‘grave’ – the tower its dreaded symbol and macabre landmark. Modern
dwellings languish beneath it, as if weighed down by its gloomy superstructure –
an image never actually depicted or concretized, but only implied analogously in
the ‘spectre wrapt/shrouded in shapeless terror’ (p. 91: 11–11b). The rhyming of
‘wave’ and ‘rave’ in the second tercet (p. 92: 8, 11a) links the forgotten past to the
desperate present, equally obsessed with ‘bread & gold & blood’ (12a), the signs
of hunger, greed and violence. Ancient discord has its due effects. The inhabitants
seem only to flicker into existence, their lives in that sense merely an oil-lit flame,
defenceless against the ‘Pain’ and ‘Guilt’ (12a, 12b) which the tower seems to
transmit and embody.
Repetition in the second and fourth tercets (‘There stands … There stands’, p.
92: 9; p. 91: 1), made parallel and identical in revision, sets up the tower as the
figure that dominates the poem (fragment though it be), the consciousness of the
city, and the mind of the reader. Positioned centrally and iconically ‘Amid the
desolation’ (p. 92: 2), the edifice later appears as one of many ancient ‘towers’
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(p. 91: 1) whose character is an impressive sign of the isolated stature of ancient 1
Pisa, as are ‘[ ] domes’, ‘brazen-gated temples’ and ‘bowers / Of solitary wealth’
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leaving them thereby to ‘stand aloof’, ‘withdrawn’, ‘ghasted with its presence’
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(8a/8b, 10, 8a). There is a sense in the finally fragmented simile, whose over5
elaboration unbalances the poem, taking it on a digressive and abortive course,
6
that surviving beauty (as in the Boccaccian ‘company of ladies fair’, 13) becomes
7
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The ‘donna ideale’ and Marriage: ‘Fiordispina’ and ‘Ginevra’ (1820–21)
In a vein markedly different from the negative, even cynical mood of ‘The Tower
of Famine’, though a product of the same winter, at Pisa, being mostly drafted in
the same notebook in late January 1821,51 ‘Fiordispina’ is a benign, light-spirited
and limpid representation of the ‘donna ideale’ (the Italian feminine sublime) as
the subject of marriage. This composition has received little attention of its own,
largely because it has long been considered the disjointed, discarded precursor
of Epipsychidion, the Dantean panegyric of womanly perfection in beauty and
love, as manifested in ‘Emily’ (Teresa Viviani). Presented as a series of wholly
disconnected fragments by Richard Garnett in 1862 (supplementing by several
lines the fragments in PP),52 ‘Fiordispina’ nevertheless emerges, thanks to recent
editing, as a more substantial and continuous narrative, even if only an abandoned
first draft.53
Sketched in MS Shelley adds. e. 8, pp. 52–69, 14–16 (the page sequence
not strictly continuous), the draft is difficult to follow as its sequence is barely
discernible; it is heavily but inconclusively revised, missing words, phrases or
rhymes; and is furthermore enmeshed in drafts of Epipsychidion. Lines 51–110
of the edited text, though correctly belonging in the first instance to ‘Fiordispina’,
as descriptive of the youthful bride’s overwhelming beauty and grace, were
subsequently incorporated, with slight alterations, in the later address to Emily
(January–February 1821). This transfer of passages indicates that the drafting of
‘Fiordispina’ precedes or coincides with Shelley’s adulation of Teresa Viviani, and
is in all probability a fictionalized record of his initial response to her. Fiordispina
herself, one must note, has notable antecedents in other fictive Shelleyan creations,
most recently the Witch of Atlas (August 1820), and her conception is probably
inspired by her namesake in the romance epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, whose
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Possibly begun by mid-December 1820 (PS IV: 63).
See Relics of Shelley. London: Edward Moxon & co, 1862, pp. 28–33.
53
I am indebted to the fine textual scholarship of Carlene Adamson (BSM VI: 11–14;
110–15; 190–225 and descriptive commentary, passim) and Michael Rossington (PS IV:
62–74).
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confusion over the identity of her beloved (the female warrior, Bradamante, whom
she thinks is a man, or Ricciardetto disguised as Bradamante’s twin sister) blurs
sexual difference; as well as by Despina in Forteguerri’s Il Ricciardetto, whose
marriage to the eponymous hero rounds off this playful burlesque on a celebratory
note.54 Far from being merely a source for Epipsychidion, ‘Fiordispina’ appears,
on its own terms, as a significant fragment that bridges, via its serio-comic literary
derivatives, the transition to the Italianate style of idealized history in emulation
of Dante’s Vita Nova.
Its brief, historicized narrative is simply told. In legendary Florence (as it would
seem), on the auspicious day of her wedding to her cousin, Cosimo, who seems
almost her own twin, Fiordispina gathers and displays flowers, and helps her aged,
loquacious nurse, Medica, up the steps of the portico, while the latter playfully
encourages the young bride to make the best of her matrimonial night, following the
tradition of her female progenitors – ‘For tis a game our grandmothers have plaid
/ Through you should lose And always won at last And never yet was lost.’ (p. 68:
10–12a).55 Medica brings to mind the cautionary, shrewd adult protectiveness of
Juliet’s nurse in Romeo and Juliet and something of the same expediency. Poised
on a similar conflict between youthful idealism and adult pragmatism, the story
has potential for development even if this does not materialize. What remains may
appear slight and short of incident, but it should be borne in mind that ‘The Witch
of Atlas’, for all its greater length and completion, is hardly more eventful. In the
case of the Witch the story progresses almost without notice, from one ottava rima
stanza to the next. In ‘Fiordispina’, the barely fleshed-out narrative covering, in
an edited text, just 157 lines of rhymed couplets, from line 57 unarranged into
paragraphs, provides a scaffold as well as superstructure for the poet to develop
several interlocking concerns relating to love: the propitious spring, encapsulating
the promise of youth and offsetting the passage of time (ll. 1–12); the idea of
soulmates separated by birth but indissolubly matched (12–35); gathered flowers
as, possibly, emblems of sexual initiation (36–56); the entrancing, sublime beauty
of young womanhood (60–114); female stratagems of temporizing experience
(115–32); and the perpetuation of identity in or beyond matrimony (133–57).56
Together united by a single trajectory, namely the safeguarding of a vibrant
and not physically restrictive innocence, the diverse sections (indicated above)
tend to become digressive and ends in themselves, each in turn drawing away from
the tenuous line of narrative, as if impatient of its possible restraints, and brought
back to it in a manner that is abrupt or disjunctive. Thus each is, to a degree,
a fragment within a fragment. Neither the flowing exposition of the betrothed
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54
This popular parody of chivalric romance, read by Shelley from 26 June to 27 July
1820 (MS Journals: 324–7), also influenced ‘Hymn to Mercury’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’.
See Timothy Webb’s essay on the ‘Hymn to Mercury’ (Chapter 11).
55
The motif of flowers as in ‘Fiordispina’ and those she displays, the names ‘Cosimo’
(implying harmony, beauty) and ‘Medica’ (a derivative of Medici) and the ‘portico’ are all
emblematic of a Renaissance Florentine setting.
56
Line references are to the edited text in PS IV: 65–74. For corresponding pages in
MS Shelley adds. e. 8, see headers for drafts of ‘Fiordispina’ in BSM VI: 190–225; 110–15.
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cousins’ extraordinary resemblance to each other (‘like two flowers / Upon one
stem’, p. 55: 5–6), nor the scene of the displayed flowers remorsefully ‘divided’
by Fiordispina ‘from their [ ] stem’ (p. 57: 3a), is intelligibly subsumed in the
narrative and both drift off into vacant spaces of manuscript. The 60-line passage
incorporated in Epipsychidion is an obvious instance of over-elaboration, as its
length and exalted verse tend to overwhelm the whole composition. It arises out of
the scene on the portico, Fiordispina assisting Medica, ‘like night by day / Winter
by Spring or Grief by Sorrow by sweet Hope – / [ … ] Led into life & light’ (p.
60: 8a/8b–10c). The positive emblems here announced – as if Fiordispina (like her
predecessors Beatrice or Laura) embodied the day, season and occasion – are the
spur to their delicate, finely-tuned and extraordinarily fluent adumbration, and their
manifestation in rapturous beauty, concluding with the Petrarchan refiguration of
Fiordispina as a Witch of Atlas-like transubstantiation into shadow, metaphor and
vision – perhaps, it is implied, into poetry.
Following upon a number of rejected passages (p. 65: 21–p. 67: 17), the return
to the portico brings Fiordispina back on terra firma as simply one ‘so fair’ (p. 67:
20; PS IV: l. 115) – the connective link with ‘so fair was is she’ in the previous
couplet (18) that eventually curtails further elaboration. The narrative proceeds on
a more realistic note, but not out of character since the poem now hinges on the
acute contrast between the exotic ‘fabulous’ bride and her down-to-earth nurse,
whose obtrusive withered ugliness is a little played down in revision. But the
dichotomy now set up between fresh and wearied experience (so different from
the harmony of youth and age in ‘Prince Athanase’) seems to question Medica’s
precautionary wisdom concerning sexual consummation, even though the nurse is
confident of success as regards Fiordispina. The lovers’ single identity (a strong
motif reasserted in the heroine’s preparedness to die for Cosimo – a premonition
here of Ginevra’s similar commitment) and the promise of self-replication in
marriage and future birth (albeit advocated by the earthy Medica and, in her
opposition to sacrificial heroics, only with Fiordispina’s future in mind) seem
to hold at bay several indications of mortal disquiet in the whole fragment. The
name ‘Fiordispina’ = ‘flower of thorn’ (eglantine) might alone suggest beauty-insuffering, though this is never openly explored. The wizened figure of the nurse
seems a reminder of the cost of hardened experience, of how playing the game
of life is inimical to ingenuous youth. While the eventual drift of the narrative
remains uncertain – and was probably not fully entertained by the poet – the
contextualization of superlative existence in time and space, that is, in a tale of
prospective marriage, has the value of an experiment and is comparable to other
examples of Shelleyan actualization. Moreover, while the subject of the whole
fragment and its broad areas of interest are conventional, and redolent of a former
age, there is more than a suggestion of transgression in the merging of sexes, and
in the exaltation of the physical body, cast in the language of divinity which, in
Dantean and Petrarchan manner, establishes its own earthly frame of reference,
sub specie aeternitatis. But if marriage was finally not the most congenial vehicle
of love-union for Shelley, the elopement of the lovers in Epispychidion more
adequately served the purpose.
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That marriage is the instrument of social hegemony forcing compliance with
its empty rituals – is the problem and not the solution – finds dramatic expression
in ‘Ginevra’, one of the more developed, cohesive and contained among the Italian
fragments. Often seen as Shelley’s implied critique of Teresa Viviani’s capitulation
to an arranged parental marriage,57 and thus of her identification as the embodied
‘donna ideale’, this composition, more broadly speaking, reappraises the marriage
convention and finds it pernicious.58 It takes advantage of the freer exploration
of love-union in Epipsychidion which, unlike ‘Fiordispina’, never relies on the
idea of ceremonial marriage, not even in its imagery, although figuratively ‘the
marriage of true minds’ is a dominant motif.
The manuscript of ‘Ginevra’ (the title given to it by Mary Shelley)59 is a rough
working draft, heavily revised but with many undecided phrases and lines of verse,
and lacking a formal conclusion of the narrative (if indeed the action has more or
less come to an end). The work starts briefly on the remaining reverso pages of
‘Shelley’s Pisan Winter Notebook’, MS Shelley adds. e. 8 (pp. 138–133 rev., 130–
122 rev.),60 being crowded out by existing drafts, among them ‘The Fugitives’,
Epipsychidion and ‘Fiordispina’ already completed in the opposite direction,
themselves interspersed with ‘The Woodman and the Nightingale’ and ‘The Tower
of Famine’ in reverso (all of which date roughly from December 1820 to February
1821). It continues with the bulk of the fragment at the very beginning of ‘The
Faust Draft Notebook’, MS Shelley adds. e. 18 (pp. 1–28),61 a notebook evidently
begun from both sides in April–May 1821 – indicating the date of composition of
‘Ginevra’ – but mostly used in 1822.62 The drafts in MS Shelley adds. e. 8 give the
best indication of the works to which the composition of ‘Ginevra’ relates. Those
just cited – none eventually completed except Epipsychidion – all point to certain
pressures, imperfections or evils weighing on the permanence or resilience of love
and beauty: the lovers riding the powerful storm in their flight from an imposed,
preordained marriage (‘The Fugitives’); the ‘High, spirit-winged Heart’ (Emily)
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57
See, for example, Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, p. 288 and
Enrica Viviani della Robbia, Vita di Una Donna. Firenze: Sansoni, 1936, p. 121. Viviani
della Robbia notes earlier: ‘Tutte le vie rimanevano ermeticamente chiuse, fuorchè quella
del matrimonio, che la famiglia stava trattando per lei, senza alcun suo intervento’ (p. 117).
58
An undercurrent in Shelley’s thought. See Jack Donovan’s discussion of Rosalind
and Helen (Chapter 7).
59
Perhaps following Samuel Rogers, who named his poem ‘Ginevra’ (no. XVIII in
Italy, 1822) after a visit to Byron and Shelley at Pisa. Hunt later named his rendering of the
story A Legend of Florence. A Play. In Five Acts (1840) with an epigraph drawn from the
Dirge of Shelley’s fragment (1840).
60
See Adamson, BSM VI: 371–60, 355–38.
61
Crook and Webb, BSM XIX: 6–61.
62
BSM XIX: xlii–xliii, xxvii–xxviii. Neville Rogers’s view (in Shelley At Work: A
Critical Inquiry. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) that ‘Ginevra’ was continued in
1822 is now discredited (see PS IV: 203). The brief, well-anthologized ‘A Lament’ which
begins the notebook in reverso (‘O World o Life o Time’, p. 164 rev.) might have prompted
the dirge that ends ‘Ginevra’. See BSM VI: 39–41 for discussion of ‘A Lament’.
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unhappily encaged in her convent; the mellifluous arboreal nightingale vulnerable
to the ill-will of the forester; ancient and modern Pisa ruined by greed and enmity;
and Fiordispina under pressure of conformity to her nurse, and to the rites of
sexual initiation in marriage. A conflict or dichotomy is discernible between the
free spirit and the rigidities of power – a motif that underlies much of Shelley’s
poetry including, as we have seen, ‘Mazenghi’ and the Tasso and Pisan fragments.
It recurs in Adonais founded on the idea that Keats was destroyed by malicious
critics; the elegy being the highly ‘finished’ meditation on untimely death that,
from its inception in mid-May 1821,63 appears to supersede ‘Ginevra’ – by strange
chance focused on the identical theme – and lead to its subsequent abandonment.
The source of ‘Ginevra’, Marco Lastri’s L’Osservatore Fiorentino – which
Mary Shelley was consulting in April 1821 for her novel Valperga (BSM XIX:
xxxiv) – records the tale of Ginevra degli Amieri,64 whose assumed death in 1400
in consequence both of an unhappy marriage to Francesco Agolanti, and of the
plague (‘la gran morìa’),65 is brought eventually to a happy resolution. Awaking
(like Juliet) in the family tomb – in Ginevra’s case in the Duomo of Florence – she
is in turn rejected as a phantom by her husband and family (of the nobility), but
joyously received by her true lover, Antonio Rondinelli, who wins her in marriage
when the ecclesiastical court annuls her tie to Francesco. Popularity assuredly
feeds on the comfortable, romantic ending, which Lastri does find rather stretched,66
and there is a Boccaccian quotient in the story that imparts to it the suggestion of
illustrative folklore, as indicating the true devotion of Florentine lovers and their
just reward. Shelley, however, characteristically adapts the story to his own ends.
His interests lie in the circumstances surrounding Ginevra’s ‘death’, its immediate
cause and immediate effect – and not in its aftermath, following interment –
leaving doubt as to whether she will return to life. Adherence to popular legend
would have ruined Shelley’s story, by weakening the sense of marital oppression
and personal choice which weighs on the whole of the existing narrative fragment
and gives it its motive force and definition. This recognition of what was at stake
– the need to prolong uncertainty – would have been as good a reason as any to
discontinue the poem, which breaks off in the fourth stanza of the choral dirge, as
if the unremitting finality of Ginevra’s loss to all concerned were suspended in the
void, with no solution forthcoming, the slight intimation in the dirge of reckoning
or illumination leading, in the very last lines, nowhere: ‘She shall sleep … / But
at length / But when at the fatal Arcangelic clarion / Of’ (MS Shelley adds. e. 18,
p. 27: 26–9; p. 28: 24). Given this perspective, fragmentation would appear to
enhance the dramatic effect of futility and ravage, as further gruesomely intimated
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L’Osservatore Fiorentino Sugli Edifizj Della Sua Patria. Terza edizione, tomo
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by the ‘rats in her breast’ (p. 27: 17) and the ‘worms [ … ] alive in her golden hair’
(20). But the effect is equivocal since Ginevra’s death may have been feigned, and
there is no way of telling.
The careful deployment of the narrative shows how insistently – and dramatically
– the marriage motif is sustained. Focusing exclusively on the wedding day (as in
‘Fiordispina’), and achieving thereby an economy and intensity redolent of Greek
drama, Shelley collapses the four years of Ginevra’s marriage (in Lastri’s account)
to less than half a day, from before noon to evening, altering the husband’s name
to Gherardi to underline the poet’s reworking of the original, notwithstanding its
legendary appeal, and for stronger effect of gothic villainy. The concluding dirge
anticipates the burial to come, the latter taking place off stage and beyond the limits
of the fragmentary text. The action is confined to four successive scenes, each of
which distinctly advances the course of events. In the first, Ginevra, tormented,
departs from the nuptial altar and cathedral, espoused against her will. In the
second, at midday, she unconditionally pledges herself to Antonio in the garden of
her husband, retiring to the Gherardi family palace in a state of abject stupefaction.
In the third, the evening wedding feast takes place, muted by the bride’s silent
unmentioned presence and her state of mind. Before long she is missing and
discovered ‘dead’. In the fourth, misery and commiseration follow.
Each stage of the narrative (following the day’s progression) builds towards
the climax, which is anticipated when Ginevra offers Antonio her wedding ring as
‘this token ofmy faith –
The mark/pledge of vows to be absolved by death
[…]
And I am dead; or shall be, [ … ] soonthat and my knell
Shall/Wi mix its music with that merry bell … ’ (MS Shelley adds. e. 18, p. 4:
26–31; p. 5: 3–7)
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This is the turning point of the drama: ‘token’, ‘faith’, ‘mark’ or ‘pledge’,
‘vows’ displace the formal ritual, releasing Ginevra from external obligation, yet
signifying an absolute commitment to her lover that only death can absolve. She
negates, indeed subverts, formulaic pledges – as symbolized by the wedding ring
– and ethically redeploys their terms of reference. Her sensibility is registered
in the metonymic rhyming of ‘my knell’ and ‘that merry bell’, signs that death
and marriage have in her experience (as well as in the poem generally) mingled
and fused. Ginevra dissolves marriage into a rite of death, presenting herself
in a tragically unconventional light. Love, set in opposition to expedient social
arrangements, finds its due emphasis when, a short while earlier, Ginevra declares
it to be ‘unimpeachable’ by any circumstance of whatever nature, including ‘the
tyrannniczing will / Of parents’ (p. 3: 31, 23–25).67 This, in the manner of Socrates,
identifies love with virtue (areté). Since she is prevented from continuing her
67
There are clearly many echoes here of Shakespeare (e.g. Sonnet 116, Romeo and
Juliet) to reinforce the point.
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relationship with Antonio, her only recourse is death which, paradoxically, affirms
and indeed celebrates her undying love.
Though a victim of circumstance, Ginevra is all the same an active participant
struggling to affirm her authentic self against all odds. Her integrity outreaches
that of Mazenghi (her exact contemporary), but it is on account of it, one feels,
that her unhappiness is so extreme. The paradoxical alignment of virtue and
suffering recalls its extensive exploration in Rosalind and Helen, ‘Mazenghi’ and
the ‘Athanase’/‘Prince Athanase’ fragments. Subtly indicated, Ginevra’s attributes
of beauty are underplayed to lay emphasis on her exemplary character, and the
suffering that stifles her being. The Florentine ‘donna ideale’ – as we see depicted
in Fiordispina – is transformed into an Antigone (Shelley’s favourite female
protagonist)68 who, in unyielding opposition to vested authority, places fortitude
and death above a compromised life. Ginevra is in the good company too of
Shelley’s liberated heroines, and her outrage at being forced to conform reminds
one, from the very outset of the poem, of Beatrice Cenci (another historical yet
‘legendary’ figure) after she has been violated by her father, a further Italian
expression of patriarchal assertion of power. These interconnections point to the
breadth of reference that, in the poet’s revisioning of the ‘donna ideale’, embraces
both antiquity and modernity, a series of tragic figures, as well as a stringent
feminist perspective.
Represented as a negation, rather than a celebration, of life and love – a
disquieting foretaste of the phantom-like attrition depicted in ‘The Triumph of
Life’ – marriage is shown to be inherently false, disillusioning, and violent (‘life’s
great cheat for a thing / Bitter to taste sweet in imagining’, MS Shelley adds. e. 8, p.
125 rev: 11a–12; PS, 36–7). The sharp juxtaposition of opposites (the sequence of
‘bitter’ and ‘sweet’ is telling) registers the dislocation between a grievous outcome
and an appealing conception as, for example, represented in ‘Fiordispina’. Though
lacking the finish and precision of a complete poem, the writing in ‘Ginevra’ has
drive, intensity and purpose. The verse, held in momentary check by the couplets,
but repeatedly impelling itself beyond the end-rhyme to form fuller imposing
structural units – not dissimilarly from the way Shelley deploys terza rima – has
a cinematic effect of steady momentum, indicating the pressure of circumstances
weighing on the protagonist, and giving the reader little space for distance or
composure. The opening sentence of nine lines, beginning ‘Wild, pale & frenzy
weak wonder-stricken’ (p. 137 rev.: 4a) to indicate the unnerving shock received by
Ginevra, sets the tone, immediately unsettling the reader, the verse driving forward
as it does throughout the fragment. The passage proceeds not by direct description
but rather by an extended Dantesque analogy of a person arising from ‘mortal
fever’ (8–8a), ‘stagger[ing] forth into the air & sun’ (6–6b)’, and experiencing
extreme mental distraction. This simile (seven lines in PS, but requiring several
further lines of draft), which almost seems to spiral out of control, comes finally to
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‘You are right about Antigone – how sublime a picture of a woman … . Some of us 42
have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone, & that makes us find no full content 43
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in any mortal tie’ (to John Gisborne, 22 October 1821, Letters II: 364).
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a halt with the delayed main clause – ‘Ginevra from the nuptial altar went’ (15) –
this being the only indication of an actual event that undergirds the psychological
drama and its due consequences.
There is no letting up of this forward pressure until the end of the
fragment. Propulsion of this nature achieves its marked effects in capturing the
overdetermined formality of marriage – its opulent, factitious festivity – which, in
its hostility to the sensitive, emancipated female spirit, appears to glare coldly like
the chariot of death in ‘The Triumph of Life’. This surreal manifestation inimical
to personal agency and well-being is shown less in the celebrations themselves,
deceptively buoyant in the marriage feast, than in Ginevra’s noble but bewildered
or life-threatened aspect. Though flamboyantly arrayed with gold and jewels, the
procession projects upon Ginevra’s consciousness a ‘weary glare’ which ‘Lay like
a chaos of unwelcome light / Upon the sense Vexing the sense with [f]gorgeous
undelight’ (p. 129 rev.: 3a–3, 4–5a). Abnormal jarring conflict is underlined by
the substitution of ‘Vexing’, the negating prefixes and oxymoronic phrasing. The
glowing occasion registers its glaring falsity. A ‘glare’ again emanates from Ginevra
herself in later passages, explicitly when her death-like state is contemplated:
If it be death when there is felt around
A sense smell of clay, a pale & icy glare
And silence [ … .] (adds. e. 18, p. 17 : 14–17)
The ‘icy glare’, re-evoking the ‘fixed & glaring glassy light’ of Ginevra’s ‘open
eyes’ (12/11), indicates that the festive celebration of matrimony in ‘Gherardi’s
hall’ inhabits death, like the Tower of Famine, and now stripped of its ostentatious
glitter, seems to haunt the inert body of Ginevra with its spectral presence. But
while the ‘smell’ (rather than ‘sense’) ‘of clay’ is equally ominous, and the tragic
note unmistakable, a doubt is instilled through the repeated question – ‘if it be
death’ (8), ‘If it be death’ (15/14) – whether Ginevra is only in a death-like state and
will revive. Since her ‘death’ raises her (like Antigone) above her circumstances,
effectually reconstituting the nuptials as a funeral rite and her love as incorruptible,
it may well be that ‘the glare’ signals the defeat of marriage, rather than its deathly
triumph over Ginevra. The rough inconclusive draft, marked finally by heavy
indications of mortality, enhances the ambiguity, leaving the outcome unsettled
and enigmatically unresolved.
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Companionship in Tuscany: ‘The Boat on the Serchio’ and ‘The
Zucca’ (1821/2)
Noted for its autobiographical poignancy, but seldom discussed in any detail,69
‘The Boat on the Serchio’ (as Mary Shelley called it in PP) is among the more
69
Notable exceptions in matters of textual scholarship are Joseph Raben, ‘Shelley’s
“The Boat on the Serchio”: The Evidence of the Manuscript’. Philological Quarterly 46
(1967), pp. 58–68 and Nora Crook, ‘“The Boat on the Serchio”’. Keats-Shelley Review
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open-ended of Shelley’s Italian fragments. Departing from the greater formalities
of ‘Ginevra’ and Adonais (wherein the presence of mortality is all too prevalent),
its quizzical review of earthly endeavour and its outgoing, warm-spirited record of
companionship, in the late spring of 1821, recall the half-serious musings of the
‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, written at Livorno almost exactly a year previously. Its
ostensible subject – a carefree sailing expedition along the waterways of central
Tuscany – brings us perhaps closer to the quotidian Shelley and his friendship
with Edward Williams than any other of his compositions. Yet its unconscious
premonition of their fatal drowning off the coast of Viareggio a year or so later, in
July 1822, injects a disturbing as well as uncanny tragic quality that is sometimes
hinted at, even playfully, in the writing.
The work has suffered from defective editions that have intensified its
fragmentation, leading to both its absence from present-day volumes of Shelley’s
poetry and to its sporadic reception. The received holograph manuscript, in Bod.
MS Shelley adds. e. 17, p. 218–p. 208 rev.,70 provides the rough draft of only the
second half of the fragment (lines 70–139 in PS IV); that of the first half is lost,
surviving only in Mary Shelley’s transcript of it in her copybook, MS Shelley
adds. d. 7, no. 79, fols 48–53,71 and in PP, where her reading is slightly corrected.72
Publications, following PP, have continued to bring transcript and manuscript
together into one poem and gradually restored intelligible lines of verse, but it is
only since 1992 that Nora Crook and, more recently, Michael Rossington, have
provided meticulously reliable and more or less ‘complete’ readings – as far as it
is possible to determine. However, it should be emphasized that the work is a very
rough draft that, like the other fragments under consideration in this essay, was
left to posterity without further revision and, as far as can be ascertained, without
much thought to its completion.
In consequence, there are several cruxes in the fragment that may never be
satisfactorily resolved. In the surviving draft manuscript and transcription, Shelley
provides no speech marks for the protagonists, Lionel and Melchior (representing
himself and Williams), and this leaves open the question of who speaks several
of the lines, including those that open the poem. ‘Our boat is asleep in Serchio’s
stream’ (d. 7, f. 48: 1) might suggest that it is Lionel and not the narrator (and this
is Crook’s provisional solution in her 1992 paper), but at this early point there are
no narrative signals to give it credence. The succeeding lines, in the third person,
are not very different in character. Perhaps initially poet-protagonist and narrator
were identical, and only later in the draft came the idea to separate them as narrator
and Lionel, that is, under a fictional guise. The problem is compounded by the
chasm between Mary’s transcript and the extant manuscript draft, which provides
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See Crook, BSM XII: 391–370.
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