Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Unbound:

The Quintessential Philosophy of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Three years before his death, Shelley wrote what many consider his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound. Considering Shelley's rebellious nature, the choice of the authority defying Prometheus as hero is not surprising. For Shelley, Prometheus came to symbolize the mind or soul of man in its highest potential. Two of Shelley's favorite themes lie at the heart of Prometheus Unbound: the external tyranny of rulers, customs, or superstitions is the main enemy, and that inherent human goodness will, eventually, eliminate evil from the world and usher in an eternal reign of transcendent love. It is, perhaps, in Prometheus Unbound that Shelley most completely expresses these ideas.

C.S. Lewis deemed Prometheus Unbound the best long poem written in English in the 19th century, the poem was Percy Bysshe Shelley's attempt to fulfill an ambition general to the Romantic poets: to write a great long poem(Pittock). Written in 1818-19, Prometheus Unbound was in part designed as an implicit comment on counter-revolutionary politics in Britain. However, the poem also reflects Shelley's aversion to authority in his personal life. In his seminal work, The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams comments on this aspect of Shelley's personality asserting,

Shelley's own life was a classic case history of

rebellion[...] primarily against the father and

deriviatively against those projected father imagos,

kings and the Diety.(254)

Therefore, both the political and personal rebellion lie at the thematic heart of the lyric drama. However, the poems greatness transcends these earthly themes. It sets itself apart with its portrayal of the eternal rather than the merely temporal struggles between the forces of tyranny and liberty in the persons of Jupiter and Prometheus.

Based loosely on the legend of the Titan of Aeschylus's play, Shelley's Prometheus befriends humankind and is punished for his friendship by a jealous Jupiter. Yet, Shelley's Prometheus also bears a close relationship to Milton's Satan. Indeed Shelley juxtaposes the characteristics of Prometheus with Milton's Satan in the preface of Prometheus Unbound:

The only imaginary being resembling in any degree

Prometheus is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my

judgment, a more poetical character than Satan,

because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and

firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he

is susceptible of being described as exempt from the

taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for

personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of

Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. (Shelley

207)

Indeed, Shelley's hero Prometheus differs substantially from Milton's Satan. First, his hero is purged of ambition, envy, and revenge. Additionally, Prometheus ultimately succeeds in overthrowing the ruling deity, Jupiter.

In his preface to Prometheus Unbound Percy Shelley admits: "I have a passion for reforming the world" (209). In his 1813 work, Queen Mab, the poet chose three epigraphs; the first of these, printed in capital letters, was Voltaire's battle cry "Erasez l'infame"-kill the monster- and the heart of the poem reflects Shelley's vision of universal regeneration through revolution (Reiman 16). However, by the time Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound in 1818 he no longer regarded social or political change as a means for inaugurating a new golden age (Cameron 589). While still zealous for reformation, Shelley's new vision for reform shifted: he now saw love as the agent of universal change. In Prometheus Unbound, internal renewal leads to external betterment.

Indeed, the lyric drama is a valuable key to understanding Shelley's philosophy. It is interesting that Shelley chose the playwright, Aeschylus, rather than the philosopher, Plato, as his model. The poet did this because he wanted to do more than merely present his ideas. Shelley observed that "didactic poetry is my abhorrence," and though Prometheus Unbound strikes one reading it as having instructional undertones, it transcends political or moral propaganda (Shelley 209). The work not only describes transformation of the world but also seeks to create the environment that will allow reform to occur. Since each person's heart and mind must change before the world experiences regeneration, Shelley attempts to move as well as educate in his lyric drama - prose could accomplish only the later.

The ostensibly dramatic form of Prometheus Unbound, however, suggests a different radical of presentation: one in which the poet is absent and the audience observes the characters speaking and acting in relation to one another. Characters can talk of silence as an attribute of an object in the same way the lyric speaker can attribute silent qualities to an object of meditation, but in the dramatic medium, silence is also given an added dimension as an aspect of character interaction; it can be depicted through dramatic representations of indirect modes of communication used between characters. Throughout Prometheus Unbound, a silent discourse based on thought, feeling and dreams becomes the essence of signification. Representing such nonverbal discourse in writing or speech, however, can only be achieved by violating silence, and particularly in the dramatic medium.

Yet in Prometheus Unbound Shelley achieves some compromise in this linguistic paradox - the paradox that language negates silence in articulating it - by classifying his work as a "lyrical drama." As Tilottama Rajan points out, "Shelley's play is a lyrical drama, by definition impossible to stage in the theatre of the world, and acknowledging for itself a merely private and subjective status" (319). In addition, Shelley's own belief that Prometheus Unbound "was never intended for more than 5 or 6 persons" attests to his feeling that the work was not to be staged (Berthin 132). Thus, Shelley affords himself a dual freedom: the ability to speak of silence as an attribute through the work as text and to represent it as enacted between characters through the work as performance.

In spite Shelley's