Matt Kriz's List: Empire

• 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.

•  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.

  • I'm not quite sure what he's getting at here.
• 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.

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      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."

  • This extremely dense paragraph needs to be better examined, because it tries to place Demogorgon in the play. Does it succeed? Hard to say.
• 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.

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