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David Bromwich - Love Against Revenge in Shelley's Prometheus - Philosophy and Literature 26:2

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shelley ? on 2009-04-23
- Shelley was a member of the first generation to accept the French
  Revolution as an accomplished change in the world.
- in Prometheus Unbound above all, Shelley
  was looking at revolution from the point of view of a creator no longer
  interested in contest, a creator who is not a light-bringer. That is
  why Prometheus is not the hero of the work that bears his name. He is
  the name of a mental power that creates a possibility of action in others.
- 15 more annotations...
- - I argue that Shelley's Prometheus becomes a possible example of
    reform—the agent of a revolution so far beyond political upheaval
    as to deserve a different name—by passing from self-pity to
    love.
  - His
    sense that he owed the change to someone else is dramatized in the
    presence of Asia, the lover of Prometheus. By feeling, as she does,
    a sympathy free of pity, Asia performs the action of the play.
  - In these opening lines, Prometheus has already triumphed over his
    misery. He is sure that he does not envy Jupiter's power. What he has
    not yet conquered is his hunger for revenge.
  - What the
    character of Prometheus must accomplish, it seems, is to overcome a
    tendency of the mind to balance faults against wrongs, a tendency that
    may be inseparable from our habit of treating life as a series of acts
    for praise or blame.
  - Prometheus does ask that his curse
    of Jupiter be repeated—but now (to preserve his retraction) by no
    one resembling himself; appropriately, it will be done by the "writhing
    shade" of that other world who has the shape of Jupiter. So Prometheus
    retains the effects of his hatred, without appearing to have created
    those effects. The distinction is casuistical, the more so as Jupiter
    is his rival and double in the contest of agonies.
  - With this retraction at line 305 of the
    first act, the dramatic possibilities of the play would seem to be
    exhausted—a puzzle that every commentator has remarked on.
  - That Prometheus retracts
    his curse out of love, and that love itself carries the germ of a
    revolution: these are assumptions that still await proof.
  - 
    
    This recollection of Prometheus is enough to dispatch Asia on the quest
    that takes her to the cave of Demogorgon. There she will pose a riddle
    to which the answer has already been given by her presence—the
    answer to Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change—that to them
    "All things are subject but eternal Love." Literally, Asia's question to
    Demogorgon regards the term of Jupiter's reign: "When shall the destined
    hour arrive?" So far, it is an echo of her question about the coming of
    Panthea with the dream of Prometheus: "This is the season, this the day,
    the hour." And Demogorgon's answer is as ostensive as that of Panthea
    when she allows the dream to be read by Asia through her eyes. He will
    simply say: "Behold!"—an imperative that is also a metaphor,
    whose true vehicle appears in Asia's song,
  - It says simply
    Follow, and that is the figurative stage direction for the rest
    of the play. Follow, in the sense of freely obey, and in the sense of
    deliberately read and interpret.
  - The deep
    truth is imageless," says Demogorgon to Asia: a Platonic aphorism of great
    instinctive power. Truth has this in common with love. By contrast, the
    face of revenge—both the action and its object—is always
    "imaged" to the point of obsession. If one asks how the change of
    Prometheus can have radiated so far, into Panthea's dream and what Asia
    could see of the dream as well, the answer must be that having given up
    revenge, Prometheus for the first time was free to extend himself with
    unselfish pleasure.
  - A power of the mind founded on nothing but human recognition—this,
    for Shelley, is another name for love, and the idea he links it with
    most often is hope.
  - It
    is this intuition of freedom that Demogorgon will invoke in the last
    verses of Act IV. Freedom in this sense is almost identical with hope:
    it differs as much from defiance as courage differs from resentment; it
    does not forget the past, knowing everything an agent of repetition or
    revenge would know; yet, at last, it creates "From its own wreck the thing
    it contemplates."
  - There is an incidental flaw in the dramatic machinery of the play which
    I do not see how an admirer of Shelley can avoid mentioning. For the
    author has so contrived his ending that the emotions of revenge should
    be satisfied in some degree. At the start of the third act, we see
    Jupiter torn from his throne by Demogorgon, and we hear the cries of
    pain. Yet something in the conception of Demogorgon may reconcile us to
    the catastrophe. He is, like the "necessity" he represents, a figure
    
    [End Page 256]
    
    both irresistible and inert, a most unpromising fomenter of passion
    against any human antagonist. He makes for this reason an excellent
    minimal allegory of the conditions that allow a great change of the
    world to appear to have been inevitable in retrospect. He is modest and
    dull. He is without ideas. When Jupiter asks who he is, he relieves the
    burden of anxious care at once: "Eternity—demand no direr name."
  - It is an appeal Christian in temper, but without the image of agonistic
    suffering and the suppressed desire for revenge that must deform a
    Christian as much as a pagan morality.
  - Nothing could be less accurate than to suppose that Shelley wrote these
    words of the play in a fanciful or a richly exaggerating mood. He meant
    them literally. For him, the turn from Promethean knowledge to love
    is not a turn away from reform.
JSTOR: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 613-631

Hmm

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shelley on 2009-04-23
ProQuest Document View - The Shelleys and empire: 'Prometheus Unbound', 'Frankenstein', 'A Philosophical View of Reform', and the modern African fictions of liberation (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ghana)

Dissertation - probably worth looking at if possible

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shelley maybe on 2009-04-23
Preface to Prometheus Unbound

Better find something here

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shelley on 2009-04-29

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Matt Kriz's List: Empire

David Bromwich - Love Against Revenge in Shelley's Prometheus - Philosophy and Literature 26:2

JSTOR: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 613-631

ProQuest Document View - The Shelleys and empire: 'Prometheus Unbound', 'Frankenstein', 'A Philosophical View of Reform', and the modern African fictions of liberation (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ghana)

Preface to Prometheus Unbound

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