CHAPTER - IV

SHELLEY’S PROMETHEUS: A REBEL WITH A

DIFFERENCE

According to a number of critics, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound

is a piece of allegory, where Shelley shows a picture of contemporary

Europe. Although Shelley’s sub-title calls it ‘A Lyrical Drama’, there

is little doubt that it is a play about ‘ideas’. It is interesting to note in

this connection that in spite of the fact that this play deals with Titans

and gods, the world that we find here is the Europe of the early

nineteenth century. It would "be worthwhile to recall what David B.

Pirie says;

Prometheus Unbound is about ‘ideas’.... As Shelley gloomily

observed:

the mighty advantages of the French Revolution have been almost

completely compensated by a succession of tyrants (for demagogues,
oligarchies, usurpers and legitimate Kings are merely varieties of the
same class) from Robespierre to Louis XVIII.

97
 We must have that dreary ‘succession’ of literal ‘tyrants’ in mind as we
read Shelley’s allegorical drama of Titans and gods.1

If we accept this observation, it would suggest that Shelley chose

the subject of Prometheus because he sought to express his political

beliefs and ideas through his drama. However, we may look at the

issue from another point of view - the point of view of Shelley’s poetic

creed. Speaking about Shelley’s poetic creed, Graham Hough

comments:

Writing to Peacock in January 1819, at the time of the composition of

Prometheus, Shelley says quite bluntly, T consider poetry very
subordinate to moral and political science’. In similar vein he
confesses in the preface to Prometheus to ‘a passion for reforming the
world’: yet adds ‘it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my
compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform.... Didactic
poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in
prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse.’ A contradiction
is apparent, but it is reconciled in the passage that follows.

My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined

imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful
idealisms of moral excellence, aware that until the mind can love and
admire and trust, and hope and endure, reasoned principles of moral
conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious
passengers trample into dust, although they would bear the harvest of
his happiness.

Poetry is to work by its own imaginative processes, but the aim is still
to awaken and stimulate the moral sense. From this point of view
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 Shelley never departed, and the Defence of Poetry is largely an
expansion of it.2

This appears to be an adequate analysis of Shelley’s poetic creed.

There is no denying that Shelley insists on the moral value of poetry,

for he believes that a higher state of civilization can be achieved

through insight into the moral problems facing man. D.L. Clark says:

... poetry, in the broad sense in which Shelley uses the word, is the
sine qua non of the Good Life. Thus Shelley, in the main current of
thought in his day, and particularly as seen in the philosophy of Adam
Smith and David Hume, exalts imagination to the level of reason.3

If we remember this, it becomes easy for us to understand why

Shelley chose the subject of Prometheus: it suited his ‘passion for

reforming the world’ and his desire to usher in a ‘high state of

civilization’. It also becomes easy for us to understand why Shelley

actually departed from Aeschylus. In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,

Demogorgon defeats Jupiter (Zeus), frees Prometheus, and an era of

love dawns, in which all cruelty and oppression are banished, and

... the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
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 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; ...4

The original Greek myth in which Zeus and Prometheus are finally

reconciled (through Heracles and Centaur Chiron) is thus transformed

into a political allegory of modem revolution by Shelley. While in

Aeschylus Prometheus is portrayed as the saviour of man and a rebel

against an oppressive god, who stole fire from the gods in order to

preserve mankind and who - comforted by the foreknowledge that

Zeus will ultimately change - stands defiant and firm in his

disobedience till the end, in Shelley’s lyrical drama, Prometheus

becomes a champion of the cause of liberty, who rebels against an

oppressive ruler. Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound formed one third of a

trilogy - like the Oresteia trilogy - and it was followed by Prometheus

Unbound, which is now lost. In the Preface to Prometheus Unbound,

Shelley himself says that he does not attempt here simply to restore the

lost play of Aeschylus, and so his play is different. In Aeschylus’s lost

play, Aeschylus supposed a detente between Prometheus and his

powerful adversary as Prometheus revealed his secret - that the son of

Thetis would be stronger than his father - immediately before Zeus

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was about to copulate with her. Shelley, however, does not want to

follow that line. As he says in his preface:

...I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the

Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the
fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and
endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive
of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his
successful and perfidious adversary.5

Indeed, it is extremely difficult not to notice the difference

between Aeschylus’s play and Shelley’s. In Aeschylus, we do not find

any symbolic meaning in Prometheus’s final deliverance. Shelley’s

play, however, is different. As James E. Barcus says:

In Shelley’s play, the deliverance of Prometheus is ‘a symbol of the

peaceful triumph of goodness over power; of the subjection of might to
right ... To represent vividly and poetically this vast moral change is
... the design of the drama.’6

Michael Ferber too dwells on Shelley’s deviation from Aeschylus.

After observing that Shelley took Prometheus “as a symbol of

enlightenment, of resistance to tyranny, of republicanism, even of

America and George Washington”,7 Ferber says:

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 Shelley set himself a different task: to rewrite the missing play as

Aeschylus ought to have written it, with the outcome reversed. He

rethought the Prometheus legend in its entirety, retaining Aeschylus’

dramatic framework but drawing freely from classical and Christian

myth and from the whole of human history up to the French
Revolution.8

In Shelley’s Prometheus therefore we see a rebel who is not

engaged in “unsaying his high language and quailing before his

successful and perfidious adversary”,9 as Shelley has said in the

Preface to his drama. However, even though Shelley’s Prometheus is a

rebel against the tyrannical Jupiter, he is not tainted by the thought of

revenge. Instead, his idea is that of love and forgiveness. “Through the

whole poem [.Prometheus Unbound]”, writes Mrs Shelley, “there

reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and

is hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and Love,

untainted by any evil, becomes the law of the world.”10 It would be

interesting to note, however, that in 1820 - the year when Prometheus

Unbound was published - Shelley was lambasted by some

commentators for his departures from Aeschylus and for the spirit of

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rebellion that we find in his play. John Gibson Lockhart, for instance,

wrote in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in September 1820:

Whatever may be the difference of men’s opinions concerning the

measure of Mr. Shelley’s poetical power, there is one point in regard to
which all must be agreed, and that is his Audacity.... It appears too
plainly, from the luscious pictures with which his play terminates, that
Mr. Shelley looks forward to an unusual relaxation of all moral rules -
or rather, indeed, to the extinction of all moral feelings, except that of a
certain mysterious indefinable kindliness, as the natural and necessary
result of the overthrow of all civil government and religious belief.11

This kind of hostile criticism vindicates Mrs Shelley’s position when

she argues that the contemporary intellectual scenario in England was

opposed to liberal opinions:

England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by

the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in the
Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life.

The myth of Prometheus, however, had had several

interpretations before Shelley took it up, and people had looked at this

Titan in different ways. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Hesiod largely

103
reports the myth, and here and there he has some didactic tone - the

lesson he teaches is that man must work. But he certainly does not

trouble himself with the issue of Prometheus’s redemption. Aeschylus

- as we have seen - adheres to prophecy and patience, and waits for

the advent of Heracles who would mediate between men and gods, or

between death and eternity. Goethe’s Prometheus appears to be a

model of man as the original rebel, as an antigod - the Lord of the

Earth. Even after Shelley, writers like Mary Shelley {Frankenstein) and

Gerald Feinberg {The Prometheus Project) have taken up this myth.

The Promethean archetype therefore is a focus of convergences that

reappear in our midst from time to time.

Michael Ferber writes thus to show the different interpretations of

the Prometheus myth:

Among ancient gnostic allegorists, for instance, Prometheus was seen

as a ‘philosopher’ superior to fate, one who spumed the gifts and
threats of Zeus, just as gnostic Christians spumed the false god
Jehovah and tried to rise above the world he governs. Orthodox
Christians interpreted Prometheus as a rebel like Lucifer against the
high god, though it was also possible to take Prometheus as a type of
Christ crucified by a satanic Zeus; Shelley was to deploy both of these
readings.13

104
 Jerrold E. Hogle too shows us how the figure of Prometheus has been

seen differently in different periods by different groups of people;

Prometheus ... before Shelley takes him up, has transferred several
human longings toward each other... To later Neoplatonists, he can be
Nous or mind entering the body from an ‘upper’ level that only certain
initiates can apprehend; to Renaissance humanists, he can be the good
will of the cultured, rational man trying to drive through and beyond
the confusions of fallen existence, as well as the laboring classes; to
vegetarians, such as Shelley (for a time) and John Frank Newton (when
Shelley knew him), the Titan can embody the sad transition from
natural eating to cooking animal food with fire ... and to the syncretists
who would make the gentile Bible the Ur-myth, Prometheus can point
either to Jehovah descending to create man from the earth, to our
Savior on the cross (God-in-man) suffering for the sins of the mankind
he made, or to a form of Noah, who recreated the human race after the
pattern wiped out by the Fall and the Deluge.14

There is a remarkable similarity between Prometheus and

Faustus; both ‘overstepped’ their ‘limits’ for which they were

punished. Moreover, going by what Ferber has said, we may also

observe that, in Shelley’s Prometheus, we can discern a combination of

both Satan and Christ. Like Milton’s Satan, Shelley’s Prometheus rises

in rebellion against an omnipotent god; but, like Christ, he believes in

the virtues of love and forgiveness, as we will later see. Shelley, it may
105
also be argued, took up the legend of this Titan because it suited his

purpose of reforming the world through literature. Thus it has been

well said that “A Defence ofPoetry offers a penetrating analysis of ‘the

mind in creation’ of which Prometheus Unbound is but one enactment

among an infinite number....”15 It is easy for us to understand then the

reason for Shelley’s selection of the myth of Prometheus as the subject

matter of his lyrical drama. As Mrs Shelley tells us:

... [while in Italy] the poetical spirit within him [Shelley] speedily
revived with all the power and with more than all the beauty of his first
attempts. He meditated three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical
dramas. One was the story of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song
of Tasso remains. The other was one founded on the Book of Job,
which he never abandoned in idea, but of which no trace remains
among his papers. The third was the Prometheus Unboundf

That Shelley finally chose the myth of Prometheus aptly proves that

he, the devotee of liberty as he was - he wrote the Ode to Liberty -

looked upon the figure of Prometheus not only as a rebel against

Jupiter, but also as a champion of the spirit of human liberty. It is

important for us to understand that although Shelley’s Prometheus is a

rebel, he is no ordinary revenger; therefore in spite of all the torments

that he is subjected to, he refuses to adopt the violent measures. We,

106
however, should not be in any kind of doubt about the severe and

painful punishment imposed on him by his oppressor, Jupiter. In the

opening act of the play, Prometheus himself describes his position in

this way:

No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.

I ask the Earth, have not the mountains felt?
I ask yon Heaven, the all-beholding Sun,
Has it not seen? The Sea, In storm or calm,
Heaven's ever-changing Shadow, spread below,
Have its deaf waves not heard my agony?
Ah me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!

(I. 24-30)

But, soon afterwards, he says that in spite of Jupiter’s tyrannical rule,

he does not hate his adversary. Therefore he says:

...I speak in grief,

Not exultation, for I hate no more.
As then ere misery made me wise.

(I. 56-58)

The Earth too appreciates her son’s wisdom, as she says to him;

Subtle thou art and good, and though the Gods

Hear not this voice, yet thou art more than God,

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 Being wise and kind: earnestly hearken now.

(I. 143-145)

It does not mean, however, that Prometheus had never in the past

shown his anger with his adversary. He comes to know from the

Phantasm of Jupiter that he had said the following to his adversary in

the past:

But thou, who art the God and Lord: 0, thou,

Who fillest with thy soul this world of woe,
To whom all things of Earth and Heaven do bow
In fear and worship: all-prevailing foe!
I curse thee! let a sufferer's curse
Clasp thee, his torturer, like remorse;
Till thine Infinity shall be
A robe of envenomed agony;
And thy Omnipotence a crown of pain.
To cling like burning gold round thy dissolving brain.

(I. 282-291)

However, he later withdraws his curse and says:

It doth repent me: words are quick and vain;

Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.

(I. 303-305)

108
This clearly shows that - although grief had blinded Prometheus for a

while - he never really wants to heap pain and sufferings on any living

thing in this universe, not even to his adversary who has caused him to

suffer pains that have no end. He truly believes in the power of love.

Nor is he an ordinary revenger. Like the Prince of Denmark, Shelley’s

Prometheus too does not believe in violence. It does not mean,

however, that he - like Aeschylus’s hero - is willing to reach some sort

of a compromise with Jupiter. For example, Mercury first threatens

him and then tempts him thus:

... Wise art thou, firm and good,

But vainly wouldst stand forth alone in strife
Against the Omnipotent; as yon clear lamps
That measure and divide the weary years
From which there is no refuge, long have taught
And long must teach. Even now thy Torturer arms
With the strange might of unimagined pains
The powers who scheme slow agonies in Hell,
And my commission is to lead them here,
Or what more subtle, foul, or savage fiends
People the abyss, and leave them to their task.
Be it not so! there is a secret known
To thee, and to none else of living things.
Which may transfer the sceptre of wide Heaven,
The fear of which perplexes the Supreme:
Clothe it in words, and bid it clasp his throne
In intercession; bend thy soul in prayer,
And like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane,
Let the will kneel within thy haughty heart:
For benefits and meek submission tame
The fiercest and the mightiest.

(I. 360-380)

109
But in reply, Prometheus says that he is not prepared to go by what

Mercury has desired:

Evil minds
Change good to their own nature. I gave all
He has; and in return he chains me here
Years, ages, night and day: whether the Sun
Split my parched skin, or in the moony night
The crystal-winged snow cling round my hair:
Whilst my beloved race is trampled down
By his thought-executing ministers.
Such is the tyrant's recompense: 'tis just;
He who is evil can receive no good;
And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude:
He but requites me for his own misdeed.
Kindness to such is keen reproach, which breaks
With bitter stings the light sleep of Revenge.

(I. 380-394)

Again, soon afterwards, he adds:

Let others flatter Crime, where it sits throned

In brief Omnipotence: secure are they:
For Justice, when triumphant, will weep down
Pity, not punishment, on her own wrongs,
Too much avenged by those who err. I wait,
Enduring thus, the retributive hour
Which since we spake is even nearer now.

(I. 401-407)

This unmistakably suggests that Prometheus believes in the power of

love, which - he believes - will be able to usher in a new dawn, putting

no
an end to the tyranny of Jupiter. This “Immortal Titan” and “Champion

of Heaven's slaves”17 is truly a saviour of the oppressed and the

downtrodden, but he does not believe in the violent means. In this, he

meaningfully comes close to Jesus Christ. Indeed, there is a reference

to the Christ image in the opening Act of the play, when Panthea refers

to Prometheus in this way;

... A woful sight: a youth

With patient looks nailed to a crucifix.

(I. 584-585)

Shelley’s Prometheus then does not believe in revenge or

punishment. There is a principle involved in it. David B. Pirie points it

out when he says the following:

Jupiter represents what Shelley elsewhere calls ‘the philosophy of

slavery and superstition’, in which we kneel to gods and kings,
accepting rules which ‘we should in no manner be bound to obey,
unless some dreadful punishment were attached to disobedience’.
Genuinely benevolent morality cannot be motivated by either ‘the
anticipation of hellish agonies or the hope of heavenly reward’. Truly
good acts, Shelley argues, are performed, not when one feels ‘ bound or
obliged’, but ‘willing’. Prometheus cannot be unbound so long as his
!o
thoughts are chained to Jupiter’s system of reward and punishment.

Ill
 Asia brings out the nature of love that Prometheus holds dear

when she speaks to Panthea:

... Common as light is love,

And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God:
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still, after long sufferings,
As I shall soon become.

(II.5. 40-47)

From this, it is clear that like Prometheus, Asia too believes in the

power of love to eradicate all evils from life. It may be argued

therefore that the Omnipotent in this play is not Jupiter, but Love itself.

We should, however, never forget that in this play love also

means light, wisdom, knowledge and power. If Faustus strives for

knowledge and power, and Hamlet for wisdom - both trying to find out

the light which would ultimately lift men above the pettiness of life -

Prometheus too struggles to make this world a better place to live in

with the power of love. When Asia castigates the scheme of the things

in this universe, her principal allegation is that the creatures of the

112
universe have been denied their rightful due - “knowledge, power... and

the majesty of love”.19 It would be worthwhile to look at what she says:

There was the Heaven and Earth at first,

And Light and Love; then Saturn, from whose throne
Time fell, an envious shadow: such the state
Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway.
As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves
Before the wind or sun has withered them
And semivital worms; but he refused
The birthright of their being, knowledge, power.
The skill which wields the elements, the thought
Which pierces this dim universe like light,
Self-empire, and the majesty of love;
For thirst of which they fainted.

(II.4. 32-43)

Furthermore, Asia also underlines that while Prometheus had asked

Jupiter to “Let man be free”, the latter has chosen instead to fill the

life of man with famine, toil, disease and all sorts of evil. This is what

she says to describe Jupiter’s betrayal and Prometheus’s struggle to lift

human beings above the sufferings that they endure in the regime of an

oppressive ruler:

Then Prometheus
Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter,
And with this law alone, 'Let man be free'.
Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven.
To know nor faith, nor love, nor law; to be
Omnipotent but friendless is to reign;
And Jove now reigned; for on the race of man
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 First famine, and then toil, and then disease,
Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before.
Fell; and the unseasonable seasons drove
With alternating shafts of frost and fire,
Their shelterless, pale tribes to mountain caves:

(II.4. 43-54)

Jupiter too - it seems - knows the value of love, and so he has

decided to build his empire on ‘fear’ - which is opposite to love. He

seems to know that as long as he is able to sustain fear in the minds of

men, his empire is secure. In his speech that he delivers to Thetis and

other deities assembled in the Heaven, Jupiter shows his cruelty and

oppressive bent of mind, and - as he has learnt that Prometheus has

recalled his curse - Jupiter calls upon the gods to rejoice, since he now

feels that he is omnipotent:

Ye congregated powers of heaven, who share

The glory and the strength of him ye serve,
Rejoice! henceforth I am omnipotent
All else had been subdued to me; alone
The soul of man, like unextinguished fire,
Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt,
And lamentation, and reluctant prayer,
Hurling up insurrection, which might make
Our antique empire insecure, though built
On eldest faith, and hell's coeval, fear;
And though my curses through the pendulous air.
Like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake,
And cling to it; though under my wrath's night
It climbs the crags of life, step after step,
Which wound it, as ice wounds unsandalled feet.
It yet remains supreme o'er misery.
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 Aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:

(III.l. 1-17)

In this speech, we should not miss to notice, there is a note of sadism,

as Jupiter - like all oppressive rulers - seems to enjoy the sufferings

that he has heaped on the mankind. According to Harold Bloom, here

“Jupiter has summoned all heaven to hear the boast that henceforth he

is to be omnipotent, for the lingering Promethean resistance in

■y *
mankind is now to be repressed”. It is but natural that to such a

person, the most detested word would be ‘love’, and hence it is small

wonder that Prometheus, with his mission of love, would rise in

rebellion against him. Like all tyrants, Jupiter ultimately learns that

oppression and tyranny do not pay dividends in the long run, and when

the final retributive hour comes - in the form of Demogorgon - Jupiter

cries in agony:

... Ai! Ai!

The elements obey me not. I sink
Dizzily down, ever, for ever, down.
And, like a cloud, mine enemy above
Darkens my fall with victory! Ai, Ai!

(III.l. 79-83)

115
It is important for us to remember that Jupiter’s fall at the hands of

Demogorgon not only signifies the end of an oppressive and cruel

regime, but it also signifies the dawn of an age when all men would be

free and happy, “such as spirits love”.22 For this, the greatest glory goes

to Prometheus, and Hercules says as much when he says to

Prometheus:

Most glorious among Spirits, thus doth strength

To wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love.
And thee, who art the form they animate.
Minister like a slave.

(III.3.1-4)

It is also necessary to understand that the dawn of this age of love

fills everyone with joy. The Earth bursts into exultation:

The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!

The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.

(IV. 319-324)

The Moon too joins in the celebration:

The snow upon my lifeless mountains

Is loosened into living fountains,
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 My solid oceans flow, and sing, and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! It must be thine
On mine, on mine...
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
Tis love, all love!

(IV. 356-362, 366-369)

It is important, again, to understand that this celebration of love would

not have been possible had Prometheus not shown the way to freedom

and happiness through love. Here lies the final victory of Prometheus

as a rebel with a difference, with a mission of love. Finally, we cannot

afford to miss the final observation in the play, made by Demogorgon,

where he describes the achievements of Prometheus, who has defeated

the tyranny of the omnipotent ruler with his power of love and

forgiveness:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

(IV. 570-578)

117
In these final lines, as Harold Bloom says, there is a “majestic firmness

and assurance”.

We started discussing Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound with the

observation that Shelley here deviates from Aeschylus. Now we have

perhaps been able to understand the reasons for his deviation.

Prometheus, in Shelley’s drama, is in no mood to accept the tyranny let

loose by Jupiter on mankind, nor is he prepared to reach a sort of

rapprochement with Jupiter. He is a rebel against the oppressive regime

of Jupiter, but he is a rebel with a difference: notwithstanding his firm

opposition to the tyrant, he believes in the power of love and

forgiveness, as opposed to the voices of “envy, revenge, and personal

aggrandisement”.24 Thus he truly typifies “the highest perfection of

moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest

motives to the best and noblest ends”,25 as Shelley has said in the

Preface to his drama. This is a major departure from Aeschylus,

although the latter’s lost drama might have inspired Shelley to write

Prometheus Unbound. In Shelley’s Prometheus therefore we find

another dimension of a rebel hero, whose mission of love ushers in a

new dawn of hope and freedom in the world.

118
 NOTES
David B. Pine, Shelley, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, Philadelphia, p 84.
2 Graham Hough, “Shelley’s Defence of Poetry”, John Spencer Hill (ed) The Romantic
Imagination: A Casebook, Macmillan, Houndmills, 1977, pp 216-217.
3 D.L. Clark, “Imagination in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry”, John Spencer Hill (ed) op cit,
p 222.
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Shelley: Poetical Works, ed Thomas
Hutchinson, OUP, London, 1970, III.4. 194-198. All the subsequent references to this play
are to this edition.
5 Thomas Hutchinson (ed) op cit, p 205.
6 “Introduction”, James E. Barcus (ed) Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Critical Heritage,
Routledge, London, 1995 reprint, pp 27-28.
7 Michael Ferber, The Poetry ofShelley, Penguin Books, London, 1993, p 66.
8 Ibid, p 67.
9 See n5 above.
10 Thomas Hutchinson (ed) op cit, p 273.
Shelley, it may be mentioned here, wrote the following about love:
“Thou demandest what is love. It is that powerful attraction towards all... when we seek
to awaken in all things that are, a community, with what we experience within ourselves
... This is love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man,
but with everything which exists.” See “On Love”, John Showcross (ed) Shelley’s Literary
and Philosophical Criticism, Humphrey Milford, London, 1932, p 43.
11 James E. Barcus (ed) op cit, pp 235-236,237-238.
12 Thomas Hutchinson (ed) op cit, 273-274.
13 Michael Ferber, op cit, pp 64-65.
14 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Unchaining Mythography: Prometheus Unbound”, Michael O’Neill
(ed) Shelley, Longman Group UK Limited, Essex, 1993, p 74.
15 Ross G. Woodman, “Metaphor and Allegoiy in Prometheus Unbound”, G. Kim Blank
(ed) The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, Macmillan Academic and
Professional Ltd, Houndmills, 1991, p 166.
16 Thomas Hutchinson (ed) op cit, pp 270-271.
17 Prometheus Unbound, I. 443.
18 David B. Pirie, op cit, p 86.
19 Prometheus Unbound, II.4 11 39,42.
20 Ibid, II.4. 45.
21 Harold Bloom, op cit, p 315.
22 Following Jupiter's fall. Ocean expresses his satisfaction in this way:
"Henceforth the fields of heaven-reflecting sea
Which are my realm, will heave, unstained with blood,...
Tracking their path no more by blood and groans,
And desolation, and the mingled voice
Of slavery and command; but by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices.
That sweetest music, such as spirits love."
(III.2.11 18-19, 29-34)
23 Harold Bloom, op cit, p 322.
24 As we have earlier seen, Shelley has said this in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound.
See n5 above.
25 See ns above.
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