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Modern Language Association

Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's Prometheus UnboundAuthor(s): Stuart M. SperrySource: PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Mar., 1981), pp. 242-254Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461991

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STUART M. SPERRY

Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's

PrometheusUnbound

O FALL THE general assertions concerning

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, none is

more common than that the play drama-

tizes, from its commencement, man's ability to

transform himself and his world in the light of

imaginative ideals. The contention, bearing, of

course, different emphases, is so frequent and

widespread from Shelley's own day through theVictorian period down to our own that it scarcely

requires documentation. It is the major assump-tion under which the play is critically presentedand taught. Nonetheless, there have always been

certain ill-concealed difficulties in maintainingsuch a view. Objections, or at least reservations,tend to take one of two forms, naive (in the

better sense of the word) or more sophisticated.Let us begin with the former.

Students who come to the play for the first

time, in or outof

the near schoolroom, arelikely to find the traditional formulation puz-

zling. To summarize their demurs: if Shelley re-

ally intended to dramatize man's powers of self-

regeneration through an act of inward

recognition, repentance, and reform, why did he

do his work so badly? Granted that the move-

ment of the first act describes the hero's changeof heart, from hatred toward love, why is that

movement so halting and unfocused? We first

see Prometheus unrepentant, "eyeless in hate"

(I.9).1 The first real indication of a changecomes, oddly, through his anticipation of his

foe's disastrous downfall, when

these pale feet . . . might trample thee

If they disdainednot such a prostrateslave.Disdain? Ah no! I pity thee. (I.51-53)

Pity, one may argue, is only a first, imperfect

approach to the higher love Prometheus can

never achieve until his reunion with Asia. Still, it

is curious to find a love born out of its opposite,out of contempt. Moreover, the larger change,

revealed almost immediately thereafter, comes

with all the terseness of an imperial declaration:

I speakin grief,Not exultation,for I hate no more,As then, ere miserymade me wise.-The CurseOnce breathedon thee I wouldrecall. (I.56-59)

The lines are, to say the least, perfunctory. Norare they illuminated by the hero's assertion, a

few lines later, that "I am changed so that aughtevil wish / Is dead within" (i.70-71). If the

first three hundred lines of the play are meant to

describe a distinct process of moral rehabilita-

tion, why is that process so spasmodic and in-

scrutable? More important, why does it not

more fully illuminate the grounds for changewithin Prometheus himself?

As readers, we want to know much more than

the opening scene tells us. What impels Pro-metheus now, after so many years of defiance, to

recall his curse? It is not just that our emotional

and intellectual expectations are disappointed bya sense of anticlimax thus early in the drama;there is the deeper problem of intention. For

how can one conceive of genuine moral reforma-

tion that arises unaccountably, that is unpre-

pared for by a process of conscious recognitionand a convincing renewal of the emotions?2 The

problem is closely akin to that which hangs over

the Ancient Mariner when heexperiences

his

sudden, inexplicable upsurge of love for the

water snakes at a turning point in the structure

of Coleridge's ballad:

A springof love gushedfrom my heart,And I blessed them unaware:

Suremy kindsaint took pityon me,And I blessedthemunaware.

(11.284-87; emphasisadded)

The problem, however, is even more pointedlyobvious in Shelley's play, for at least the effect

242



Stuart M. Sperry

of the Mariner's change is dramatic and in-

stantaneous:

The self-same momentI could pray;And frommyneck so freeThe Albatrossfell off, and sankLike lead intothe sea.

(11.288-91; emphasisadded)3

By comparison, the movement, over several

hundred lines, between Prometheus' initial re-orientation and the repetition of the curse by the

Phantasm of Jupiter proceeds as slowly as the

hours and ends with an effect of singular under-

statement, not to say flatness:

PrometheusWere these my words,O Parent?...

It dothrepentme: words arequickandvain;Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine.

I wish no living thing to sufferpain.(1.302-05)

How can we account for this motiveless be-

nignity? We cannot explain it adequately simply

by falling back on notions of classical decorum

or arguing that Shelley's conception of his hero

is abstract and ideal and not to be judged by

customary assumptions about human motiva-

tion. If Shelley's play asserts the power of

human self-regeneration through love, why doesit not more effectively dramatize the source and

growth of that realization in the protagonist'smind and heart? The question seems central

both to the integrity of Prometheus as a charac-

ter and to our ability to sympathize with him, a

capacity essential to the moral catharsis of the

drama.

The questions that unsettle undergraduatereaders have also troubled seasoned critics of

the play who, in their efforts to deal with its

problemsof cause and

motivation,have some-

times been led to consider the action in a partlydeterministic way. Carlos Baker, for example,whose analysis of the play remains among the

most illuminating on record, has likened the ac-

tion of the drama to the operation of a greatmachine set in motion by Prometheus' change ofheart. The dispatch of Panthea to Asia, the lat-

ter's transformation, her descent to the cave of

Demogorgon, his ascent to the throne of Jupiter,the tyrant's futile resistance and downfall, the

unbinding of Prometheus, and so on-all follow

from the hero's initial reformation.4 Similarly,

Earl Wasserman, in a judgment that places

greater emphasis on the issue of free will, has

declared that

Withdrawingthe curse whereby evil subsists and

resolvingto endurepain patientlyrather than sub-mit to evil are Prometheus'only moral decisions,the only assertionsof his will. Thereafter he doesnot act, but is actedfor and upon, and the courseof events is determinedby otheragencies.5

Such reasoning, of course, only intensifies our

questions concerning the initial cause and cir-

cumstances of the hero's vital regeneration.Baker's argument that Prometheus' words be-

ginning "Disdain? Ah no! I pity thee" (i.53)mark a recovery from a momentary backsliding

rather than the moment of recantation itself (p.97) consequently implies, according to Milton

Wilson, that the conversion has taken place off-

stage before the play even begins. Wilson finds

such a notion "unlikely," while admitting that"the moment of regeneration has, of course,been imminent for some time" (p. 57). Suchconfusion about the sequence of causal relation-

ships inspired Frederick Pottle's influential essay"The Role of Asia in the Dramatic Action of

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound," an essay writ-

ten directly to counter the opinion "that there isonly one action in the whole so-called drama,and that that action is completed before the FirstAct has hardly got under way." It is maintained,Pottle continues, that the play consists "merelyof the unrolling necessary consequences of that

action, and of jubilation over those conse-

quences. This does not at all accord with what Ifind the text saying."6Pottle rushes gallantly tothe cause of Asia to claim for her as heroine "an

independent and essential part" (p. 136). If"Prometheus's action was to

repentof his

curse,to stop hating the manifested evil he continued

unyieldingly to resist" (p. 141), Asia is no mereautomaton. From the moment that she and Pan-thea are solicited by the chorus of Echoes in ActII, "she wills to follow, she wills to continue tofollow" (p. 137), and such self-determinationcharacterizes her conduct throughout the play.Pottle's argument is fallacious in that it ap-proaches the problem from the wrong direction.In claiming parity for Asia, Pottle-like virtu-

ally every critic of the play before him-assumes

the autonomy of Shelley's hero. The time has

243



Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound

come to inquire more closely into the groundsfor this assumption.

The doctrine of Necessity is, of course, one ofthe most familiar chestnuts of Shelley scholar-

ship. That the poet was familiar with, and inter-

ested in, a broad spectrum of necessitarian ideashas long been well documented,7 but it has nev-

ertheless become customary to denigrate andeven to deride the notion that they exercised anymore than a transitory influence on him. Ken-

neth Cameron complained a number of years

ago that the "ridiculingof the doctrine of Neces-

sity has been so long practiced by Shelley's crit-

ics that the fact of its 'absurdity' has by now

become sanctified into a kind of dogma"

(Young Shelley, p. 272). Far from subsiding,

the detraction has in fact increased, its persis-tence undoubtedly attributable to several differ-

ent kinds of prejudice. There is, first, the

conviction that the doctrine of a strict or univer-

sal Necessity is innately absurd, "a conceptwhich has now lost its urgency and is frequentlywritten off as a mere quillet in terminology."8In

its denial of free will and human responsibility,it is, in any case, a hopeless and demeaning doc-

trine that Shelley was bound to outgrow. That he

ever took up with it at all is slightly shameful;

but, having done so, he rapidly abandoned it:"Soon after finishing Queen Mab Shelley seemedto realize that Necessity was a barren concept,and we hear very little more about it" (King-Hele, p. 39). Some scholars are unwilling to givethe notion any genuine standing even in the

poet's early development.9 Otherwise there iswell nigh universal consent that Shelley moved

rapidly and steadily toward such ideals as

activity, free will, faith, and love and away fromthe trammels of a philosophy of "cold, unrelieved

gloom."'"Toward clearing the mind of such bias, onecan begin by recalling that necessitarian ideas,while deriving, like virtually everything else,from the Greeks, underwent a major evolution inthe Enlightenment and were, as Cameron has

pointed out, basic to much of the scientific, so-

cial, and historical thinking of Shelley's age.Today we are all too apt to lump these ideas

together crudely under the rubricof three or fourconvenient axioms. If we read Hume, Holbach,Sir William Drummond, and Godwin, to cite

only four of Shelley's principal sources, we dis-

cover a rich and diverse pattern of broadly

skeptical thinking conducive to quite different

ends and emphases. Holbach's radical deter-

minism springs logically from an atheistic ma-

terialism that visualizes the human race as the

product of vast, impersonal natural forces.Hume's challenge to the traditional concept of

free will, the outgrowth of his criticism of the

principle of causality, is by contrast tentative

and more nearly skeptical, abounding in a playof irony carried even further in the deliberate

casuistry of Drummond's arguments. While in-

debted in many respects to Hume's thinking,Godwin's Necessity is more nearly a fixed, in-

variable principle of universal reason, approxi-

mating ultimately to the will of God and making

any concept of the individual will an absurdaberration.

Such ideas had extraordinary excitement in

Shelley's day; and if we imagine them outmodedin our own, we err badly. Anyone who examines

the recent work of the eminent Finnish philoso-

pher and editor of Wittgenstein, Georg Henrikvon Wright (1916- ), for example, will dis-

cover that the idea of Necessity remains of vitalinterest in contemporary thinking.1l To follow

such investigations in any depth is to perceive

how much Shelley was, within his own genera-tion, in the forefront of a tradition that contin-ues to our own day and how much the logic ofhis mature work can sometimes be illuminated

by methods of analysis that, while modern, havetheir roots in a style of thinking familiar to him.To return, however, to a more basic issue, wefind simply untrue the often repeated assertionthat at least by the completion of The Revolt ofIslam Shelley had totally abandoned the doctrineof Necessity. At work on The Cenci in the sum-mer of

1819,he

complained of "that everpresent Malthus Necessity."12 Despite Shelley'sknown antipathy to Malthus' economic deter-

minism, the remark suggests, as Carlos Bakerhas put it, that "he still regarded some form of

Necessity as a strong and perhaps ineluctableforce in human social organization" (p. 142).

Prometheus Unbound depicts both a changein the mind of its hero and a change in the na-ture of the universe, and it is difficultnot to infersome connection between these events. Criticswho leap to the assumption of a

simplecausal

relationship, however, might well pause to take

244



Stuart M. Sperry

warning from Hume's skeptical arguments

against the whole notion of "cause" and "ef-

fect," arguments that Shelley thoroughly under-

stood.l3 What we designate by those terms,Hume argued, are in reality only occurrences

that we find constantly conjoined in nature andthat we grow to expect through a kind of condi-

tioned reflex attributable to association of ideas;but we cannot legitimately postulate the opera-tion of any invariable causal principle or

"power."14 Hume, of course, did not deny a

principle of connection between events, but he

argued that it needed to be carefully deduced

from empirical experience rather than based on

any absolute or necessary law. While he founded

his own definition of cause on the principles of

succession and contiguity, he warned of the"vast variety of springs and principles, which are

hid, by reason of their minuteness or remote-

ness" and of the possible "secret operation of

contrary causes."15Now, the question of causal-

ity in Prometheus Unbound is more interestingand complex than has heretofore been allowed.If only for the sake of the fullest objectivity, it

may be useful to reconsider the issue with the

help of a recent theorist whose habits of analysishave a great deal in common with Hume's.

GeorgHenrik

von Wrighthas written:

Whenspeakingof causalrelationsbetweenevents,we must also pay attention to the negations of

events, the constancies. That this is necessary is

very clearlyseen when we consider the interrelated-ness of causally sufficient and causally necessaryconditions....

Consideringthat both changes and constancies,i.e. events and their negations, may be terms incausal relations, we can distinguishthe followingfour possibilities for relations of sufficient con-

ditionship: 1. A change is a sufficientcondition ofanother change. 2. A change is a sufficient condi-tion of a constancy. 3. A constancy is a sufficientcondition of a change.4. A constancyis a sufficientcondition of anotherconstancy. (p. 72)

In considering the action of Prometheus Un-

bound, virtually every critic has thought exclu-

sively in terms of the first possibility: a willful

change in the mind and determination of

Prometheus brings about the change in the uni-

verse the play proceeds to dramatize. What,

however, of the third contingency? What if

Prometheus represents not a change (althoughhe changes during the course of the play) but a

constancy that permits a greater change to come

into being?This possibility, of course, prompts a flood of

questions. In what sense can a constancy bringabout a change? If Prometheus' primary func-

tion is to remain constant, what happens to our

conception of his heroic role and character?

What does such a suggestion do, moreover, to

our ethical premises about the play, wherein a

willful change in the temperament of the hero

has always been seen as the precondition of uni-

versal regeneration? Anyway, since both con-

stancy and potentiality for change are parts of

Prometheus' character, what is the point of dis-

tinguishing narrowly between them? Is not suchlogic another example of the familiar anachro-

nism of applying twentieth-century ideas and

methods of analysis to Romantic texts?

To suggest that Prometheus represents a con-

stancy rather than a change is, of course, to

imply the operation of a greater change in the

background of Shelley's drama. In von Wright's

analysis of causality, a constancy may not prop-

erly be considered a cause, but it can neverthe-

less form part of what von Wright terms the

"frame" of any cause, that is, the conditions thatmust remain stable if the cause is to take effect.

Indeed, his elaboration of the concept of a nec-

essary frame for causal law derives from his

consideration of the possibility of "counteract-

ing" or "preventive" causes (see pp. 79-83), a

consideration closely reminiscent of Hume's

warning, in his brilliant discussion of probabil-

ity, of a seeming "contrariety of events" pro-

ceeding not from happenstances but from "the

secret operation of contrary causes" (see Trea-

tise, p. 132; and Enquiry, pp. 58, 86-87). Now

we know that when Shelley began Prometheus, a

work founded in good part on "the operations of

the human mind,"16 he was intimately ac-

quainted with the complexities of skeptical rea-

soning and capable of a metaphysical subtlety

equal to that of any other writer in the Romantic

period, with the possible exception of Coleridge.If, nevertheless, it should be argued that he

could not possibly have envisioned the distinc-

tions that, partly with von Wright's help, we

have been following, we need only point to some

statements made by Shelley's intellectual men-

245



246 Necessity and the Role of thi

tor, William Godwin, in discussing the vulgarnotions of contingency and accident:

First then it appears,that, in the emphatical andrefinedsense in which the word has sometimesbeen

used, there is no such thing as action. Man is in nocase, strictly speaking, the beginner of any eventor series of events that takesplace in the universe,but only the vehicle through which certain ante-cedentsoperate,which antecedents,if he were sup-posed not to exist, would cease to have that opera-tion.17

Godwin, of course, knew, and was strongly in-

fluenced by, Hume's arguments concerningcausation and Necessity; and we need to ask

whether Godwin's statements might not have

had an important bearing on Shelley's play. Bywhat right can one assume that Shelley, at least

by the time of Prometheus Unbound, had

"parted company" with Godwin on such sub-

jects as Necessity and free will (Wilson, p. 54,n. 2)?

In the light of our inquiry, the ambiguities(some would say failings) in the dramatic action

at the opening of Prometheus assume renewed

significance. In view of Hume's skeptical analy-sis of the whole problem of causation, the ques-tions of

motivation, change, and successionseem all the more striking. The point is that

Shelley's presentation leaves open the view of hishero as the necessary medium and earliest ex-

pression of universal change, as distinct from the

primary cause of that change. The notion that

Prometheus, through a process of deliberate self-

inquiry and self-recognition, has acquired the

power to transform himself is one that we maysupply as readers but that the play itself nevereither fully dramatizes or illuminates. All we

really know is that, after

steadfastly defyingJu-

piter's tyranny through countless ages, Pro-metheus is granted the impulse to rehear and torecall his own curse. The distinction, admittedlya difficult one, is nevertheless vital to the inter-

pretation of Shelley's play. It also goes to theheart of another problem that concerns the

poet's choice of Prometheus as the prototype ofhis hero. To study the recurrence of the arche-

type throughout the annals of art and literatureis to discover that defiance and resistance are theessence of the character, that forgiveness is fun-

damentally alien to him. Of course it was Shel-

e Hero in Prometheus Unbound

ley's achievement, as most critics would claim,

to transcend or transform that stereotype, a

prerogative he claims for himself at the outset of

his Preface. It is still possible to argue, however,

despite critical attempts to convert Prometheus

into a Christ figure virtually from the opening ofthe play, that Shelley's view of his hero adheres

more closely to the traditional conception than

such criticism suggests. It is Prometheus' task to

endure, to preserve the vital spark of human in-

dependence from extinction. It is not in his

power either to release himself or to kindle the

new blaze. The action at the beginning of Shel-

ley's play suggests the importance of such dis-

tinctions.

If Prometheus is only a link in a larger chain

of causality, if his reformation is a manifestationof universal change rather than its proper cause,what is the greater force that works behind and

through him? To revert to the term "Necessity"would be correct but undeniably anticlimactic.

The power is best revealed in the prevailing

imagery of both the play and Shelley's Preface,the power of vernal rejuvenation, the vigorous

awakening of the Roman spring, which, with its

intoxicating influence, the playwright proclaims"the inspiration of this drama" (Preface, p.

133). In a larger sense, Shelley's hope is thatamid the undeniable flux of revolution and

change the golden years will at last return, the

good time will come-"Il buon tempo verra,"the motto of a ring he cherished (Letters, II,

177). At the same time it would be wrong to

overestimate the force of Shelley's belief, espe-

cially as he matured, in the proximity of such

fulfillment. At its strongest his trust was in an

apocalypse that was, to adopt the distinction of

Frank Kermode, "immanent rather than immi-

nent."18Though Mary Shelley's

note on the

play tells us "Shelley believed that mankind had

only to will that there should be no evil, and

there would be none,"19her statement has longbeen recognized as a misleading oversimplifica-tion. Nevertheless, critics, insofar as they have

been willing to grant a place to the doctrine of

Necessity in Shelley's thinking, have often linked

it to a naive perfectibilism. (Even for Godwin

the doctrine of human perfectibility meant notthe ability to achieve perfection in any absolute

sense but, on the contrary, the capacity for per-petual improvement.) In the early Queen Mab,



Stuart M. Sperry

to be sure, we find a strict determinism in con-

junction with an optimism close in some ways to

Pope's argument in the Essay on Man that "all

is for the best,"20the belief in a universal alter-

ation for the better, reflected even in certain

climactic and geophysical improvements Shelleyforesees in the cosmos.21 But this sanguine view

of destiny was not long-lived. In the summer of

1816 Shelley described the tortured alpine land-

scape around Chamonix in a letter to his friend

Thomas Love Peacock, who was constitutionally

disposed to assert "the supremacy of Ahriman,"the Persian or Zoroastrian personification of the

evil principle. Shelley likened the terrifying gla-ciers and "their periods of increase & decay" to

a continuous struggle between the powers of evil

and good. Following Buffon's "gloomy theory"of another ice age, Shelley was even moved to

imagine Ahriman triumphantly enthroned amid

desolating snows "by the unsparing hand of

necessity" (Letters, I, 499). Shelley's letter is

partly playful, but its imagery reappears in theview of Necessity as an at best indifferent and

inscrutable force in "Mont Blanc," a majorachievement of that summer and, more than anyother work of the poet, a preliminary sketch for

Prometheus. The same loss of optimism is re-flected in the

continuously vacillating strugglefor supremacy between the powers of good andevil in his major work of the following year, TheRevolt of Islam, his longest poem. As CarlosBaker has succinctly put it, "WhereverNecessityis alluded to in The Revolt, it is evidently re-

garded as an amoral force; it cannot be trusted,as it was in Queen Mab, to produce the millen-nium" (p. 85).22 In view of this development in

Shelley's thinking, it is surprising to find criticsstill pointing to Prometheus Unbound as an in-stance of Shelley's "unshakable ... faith that the

universe is good and radically beneficent" (Pot-tle, p. 142).

The doctrine of Necessity clearly did not sim-

ply disappear from Shelley's thinking; it alteredand matured over a period of years. Althoughthere is no need to discount the importance oftime and personal experience, the Indian andZoroastrian researches of his friend John Frank

Newton, the vegetarian, had a major influenceon the direction of his views. In Newton's in-

triguing explication of the Hindu zodiac, the

four powers Creation, Preservation, Destruction,

and Renovation, each presided over by an In-

dian deity and corresponding to a quarter of the

calendar months and their signs, alternate per-

petually throughout the course of history in a

way roughly analogous to the waxing and wan-

ing moons in Yeats's more complex Vision.Peacock took up Newton's formulation and in-

corporated it in the Zoroastrian framework ofhis unpublished Ahrimanes,23 the shorter ver-

sion of which opens:

I.

Parentof being,mistressof the spheres,SupremeNecessityo'er alldoth reign.Sheguidesthe course of the revolvingyears,Withpowerno prayerscan change,no force

restrain:Bindingall naturein hergoldenchain,WhoseinfiniteconnectionlinksafarThe smallestatom of the sandyplain,And the lastrayof heaven'sremoteststar,That round the verge of space wheels its refulgent

car.

II.

Hersovereignlaws four rivalgodsfulfil:Each holds in turn herdelegatedsway.. .24

Peacock's accompanying outline for the poembegins, "Necessity governs the world. Subordi-

nate to her are four principal genii: the creating,the preserving, the destroying and the restoring

spirits" (Brett-Smith and Jones, vII, 428). Now

we know that Peacock's Ahrimanes-in particu-lar the second version with its account of Daras-

sah and Kelasris, as further elaborated in the

prose outline-was the model for Shelley's story,in the Revolt, of the trials of Laon and Cythnaset against the greater Manichaean struggle for

supremacybetween the

eagleand the

serpent,Ahrimanes and Oromazes, the principles of evil

and good.25 It is also clear from the list of

names and sources in the notations Peacock

made for his shorter version that he did not de-

pend on Newton alone but drew freely on a wide

variety of mythological hypothesis and research.

The same sources were available to Shelley'svoracious appetite for reading, and he was un-

questionably free to make his own independentassessment and use of them. In his recent, il-

luminating study of Shelley's annus mirabilis,

Stuart Curran has drawn attention in particular

247




to the extent and diversity of such mythological

inquiry and to its broadly syncretic tendency asa background for Prometheus Unbound.26What seems clear is that when, partly with the

guidance of Newton and Peacock, Shelley was

led into a deeper study of comparative mythol-

ogy, a massive body of cult and lore subject to a

variety of different emphases and interpretationsfrom Manichaean to Christian, the problem of

Necessity remained a major focus. The sys-tematic mythology of Newton and Peacock andtheir sources coalesced in his imagination withthe broad current of skeptical and deterministic

thinking he had inherited from such writers as

Hume, Godwin, and Drummond.

When, if ever, critics have been willing to

consider Necessity as a vital force in Pro-metheus, it is to the character of Demogorgonthat they have turned. Indeed, this controversial

and mystifying figure has been commonly iden-

tified as Shelley's personification of the principleof Necessity itself.27 To be sure, Ross Wood-man is not alone in interpreting the bondage ofPrometheus to Jupiter as an allegory of Shelley'searlier acceptance of Necessity, a servitude

dramatically abolished, in Woodman's view, bythe poem's larger Neoplatonic vision of a uni-

verse ruled by love and the creative imagination(pp. 113-15). Personified by Demogorgon,Necessity represents the inexorable power avail-able to the positive forces in the play once cer-tain conditions, whether of self-reform or

recommitment, have been met. Though still

mighty, however, Necessity here appears farsunken from its former controlling eminence,

remaining little more, indeed, than a vestige of

Shelley's original conception, a kind of Necessitymanque. The principle, in fact, is harnessed tothe

presumably overridingmillennial imperativesof the drama. Critics treading so closely on

Mary Shelley's footsteps might have been de-terred by Demogorgon's final speech, the last inthe play, in which the character warns that De-struction may at length reassume its lost su-

premacy, that Eternity, the "Mother of manyacts and hours," may, through her infirmity,permit another revolution in the cycle and allowthe dark ages to return. Admittedly he offers,should such a destiny occur, the means "toreassume / An empire o'er the disentangledDoom," the principal means being hope. One

may wonder, however, whether such "spells" bythemselves constitute proof of Shelley's convic-tion of the ability of human beings, whether byfaith, repentance, free will, or the all-sufficiencyof love, to control their own destinies. Equally

important, one may question whether Demogor-

gon affords our only clue to the operation and

importance of Necessity in the play.

Demogorgon represents, it is true, a source of

power akin to Necessity set in motion by thecourse of events at the center of Shelley's play.There are grounds, however, for seeing a larger

conception of Necessity active in and beyond the

very framework of the drama, a destiny withwhich Prometheus himself fully cooperates butto which he remains subordinate. Such a concep-

tion corresponds, as we have partly seen, to thetenor of Shelley's thinking throughout his career.One of the arguments employed in his earlier

essay against capital execution, "On the Punish-ment of Death," involves a sense of "those oper-ations in the order of the whole of nature, tend-

ing, we are prone to believe, to some definite

mighty end to which the agencies of our peculiarnature are subordinate."28A broad and poten-tially benign conception of Necessity was quali-fied by his deepening involvement in the problem

of evil and by the cyclical or Manichaean notionsof Newton, Peacock, Byron, and others. Much

later, near the end of 1819, when he was con-

cluding the final act of Prometheus, he declaredin the essay "On the Devil and Devils":

The Manichaeanphilosophy respectingthe originand governmentof the world, if not true, is at leastan hypothesis conformable to the experience ofactualfacts. To supposethat the worldwas createdand is superintendedby two spirits of a balanced

power and opposite dispositions is simply a per-sonification of

the struggle which we experiencewithin ourselves, and which we perceive in the

operations of external things as they affect us,between good and evil. The supposition that the

good spirit is, or hereafter will be, superior, is a

personificationof the principleof hope, and thatthirst for improvementwithout which presentevilwould be intolerable. (Shelley's Prose, p. 265)29

In the Manichaean schemes of Newton and Pea-cock one recalls both an interdependence and adivision between the zodiac's preserving and re-

storingfunctions, separated, as

theyare,

bythe

rule of Destruction. Shelley apparently sought to

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Stuart M. Sperry

maintain the distinction in the roles assigned toPrometheus and Demogorgon. Indeed his play

recaptures something of the momentum of the

cycle, proceeding from Prometheus (Preserva-

tion) to Jupiter (Destruction) to Demogorgon(Restoration) to renewed Creation in the final

act, although it would be dangerous to push the

parallel too far. The point is, however, that allthese functions are subservient to a greater im-

pulse roughly corresponding to the power of fatethat stands behind the gods themselves in

Aeschylus' universe. They are all subsumed by avision that is fundamentally deterministic.

After a point it is unnecessary, perhaps even

improper, to argue the necessitarian bias ofPrometheus Unbound. It is sufficient, but never-

theless important, to point out the play's sus-ceptibility to such a reading. In his Preface

Shelley freely acknowledges his "passion for re-

forming the world" yet denies that his composi-tion contains "a reasoned system on the theoryof human life," and we have good reason for

taking at face value his declaration that "Didac-tic poetry is my abhorrence." At the same timethe play is among the most thoughtfully con-trived of his works, its intellectual subtlety con-

stituting, it is increasingly clear, a principal at-traction

for the modern reader. The quality thatmediates between these partly contradictory as-

pects and impulses, between design and intrinsic

tentativeness, reflects something of the man him-self and the resiliency of his mature skepticism.In composing Prometheus Unbound Shelley wasnot advancing a program for revolution; rather,he was seeking, in phrases often ridiculed butnevertheless exact, "to familiarise the highly re-fined imagination of the more select classes of

poetical readers with beautiful idealisms ofmoral excellence" (p. 135). The distinction, likesome other vital discriminations, goes to theheart of Shelley's conception of the purpose and

capability of his work. Thus readers often as-sume that faith, hope, and charity, the Christian

trilogy of virtues, are all equally characteristic of

Prometheus, the hero, and fail to notice thatfaith is almost invariably suspect in Shelley'swriting, while hope, especially when vitalized bylove, emerges as the cardinal value.30 But it is

hardly adequate to an understanding of Shelleyto stop here; one must go on to ask how it is

possible to distinguish hope at its most intense

from faith. Do not the two, in practice, overlapand merge into each other? The distinction andits difficulty provide a major clue to Shelley's

insight into the knife-edge terror of the Pro-methean situation. Before Mercury's ironic and

insistent questioning-"Alas! / Thou canst notcount thy years to come of pain?"-Prometheuscan only cling to his knowledge that the prom-ised hour will ultimately arrive. He has no

understanding how or when. What, then, of the

truly terrifying prospect that his tormentor pro-ceeds to open before him?

Yet pause,andplungeIntoEternity,whererecordedtime,Even all thatwe imagine,age on age,Seemsbut a point,andthe reluctantmind

Flagswearilyin its unendingflightTill it sink,dizzy,blind,lost, shelterless;Perchanceit has not numberedthe slow yearsWhichthou mustspendin torture,unreprieved?

(1.416-23)

The argument adapts the design of the asymp-tote or of Zeno's paradox in which time and

eternity, though theoretically distinct, appear in-

separable. Of what use to Prometheus is the

promise of an end if he has not the means ofsomehow anticipating it, of actually foreseeing

it? As Kerenyi has written in his classic study ofthe Prometheus legend, "The prophecies losetheir value if [Prometheus] would rather die atonce than await their fulfillment."31

Prometheus is a hero on whom all else de-

pends, and therefore he endures. Yet he does notsurvive through the power of faith, which at its

strongest is closest to what Shelley most of alldetested: "the cold security of undoubted tri-

umph" of the God of Paradise Lost and his ab-solute foreknowledge.32 Such an attribute Shel-

ley's Prometheus, despite his name ("one whoknows by foreseeing"), does not possess. In hisclimactic speech at the end of the first act, fol-

lowing his comforting by the chorus of propheticspirits, the hero exclaims, "I feel / Most vain all

hope but love" (I.807-08). The lines distill theessence of both his triumph and his humility.For Shelley was here discriminating-with what

Mary Shelley, commenting on the particularsubtlety of the play, justly called an "abstractionand delicacy of distinction" (Hutchinson, p.272)-between the hope that in its

highestform

characterizes Prometheus and the kind of cer-

249




tainty he is denied. Similar to the difficult butcrucial distinction between hope and faith withinthe play is Shelley's treatment of the balancebetween free will and Necessity. Even as Pro-metheus cannot foresee the actual moment or

conditions of his release, neither can he simplytransform himself through a deliberate act ofwill. Merely in the realm of political thinking,

Shelley's postrevolutionary idealism was too

qualified by a skepticism founded in history and

personal experience for his hero's position to beotherwise. In May 1821 we find Shelley writing

sadly to Byron: "my disappointment on publicgrounds has been excessive. But I cling to moraland political hope, like a drowner to a plank"(Letters, II, 291). The sentiment expresses the

growing strain of a long-standing tension. Forti-tude, endurance, hope, love are all of vital

consequence; but they are not by themselves de-

termining. The mood must coincide with the mo-

ment, the spirit with the hour. To urge or reason

beyond this limit of affirmationis to risk betray-ing the opening buds of human renewal to the

witheringblasts of untimely disappointment.Did Shelley hold steadfastly to a doctrine of

unqualified Necessity? Did he, in fact, believe inthe inefficacy of will and the general futility

of human exertion? Virtually every page of hisletters denies such suppositions. The apparentparadox is closely akin to the contradiction thatHume and others following him so keenly per-ceived at the heart of skeptical philosophy be-tween the conclusions of refined reasoning andthe demands of practical behavior and the com-mon life.33 If we attack Shelley for inconsis-

tency we must also challenge the oft-repeateddefinition of "the test of a first-rate intelligence"as "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in themind at the same time, and still retain the

abilityto function."34 The truth is that the ambiguitysurrounding the whole question of causation inPrometheus Unbound reflects Shelley's resource-fulness in dramatizing a long tradition of debateand uncertainty about the exact balance to bestruck between free will and Necessity in humanaffairs. Our natural impulse as readers is tomake of Shelley's hero more than a passiveagent of some greater power, to see him, rather,as an independent and self-determining cause ofall that follows in the drama. The more carefully

we study the play, however, the more we see thatwe cannot justifiably maintain this view. The

question of determination in the drama is,

moreover, a vital one. Those who seek a moreaffirmativeinterpretation and who read the work

as an act of self-transformation through self-

reformrationand its millennial aftermath inevita-

bly betray something of Shelley's brilliant graspof the tenuousness of man's existential situation.In oversimplifying the play, they may also unin-

tentionally misrepresent the shape of Shelley'spoetic and intellectual career. It is no secret thatthose intent on special pleading have usuallyawarded Prometheus a preeminentplace in Shel-

ley's development. Even Milton Wilson, in the

closing pages of his flexible and discerning

study, argues the special maturity of the dramaby comparison with a later work like Adonais:

In PrometheusUnboundtherewas somethingto do;and I mean not only to perfect the will by castingout hate, self-contempt,and despair, by returninggood for evil, and by maintainingan independentandresolutewill in the face of persecution;but also(it is surely implied) by such political action astime, power, and opportunity permit. In Adonaisthere is nothing for the mourners to do but waituntil death shatters the many-coloreddome. Theethical will has shrunkto

insignificance. (p. 299)Wilson's comments are, one can agree, respon-sive to a discernible shift of emphasis. But in

drawing a sharp distinction between the concep-tions of the ethical will in the two works, he doesnot do justice to the subtlety of a more gradualreweighting. Equally important, is it clear, giventhe depth of Shelley's involvement with the phil-osophical problem of Necessity, that the driftWilson perceives is manifestly away from ethical

maturity?

One way to validate my view of Shelley'sdrama is to compare my interpretation with the

argument of his greatest lyric, the "Ode to theWest Wind," which he composed in October

1819, between the writing of the third and lastacts of Prometheus, and published in the Pro-metheus Unbound volume (1820). In the firststanza of the lyric, whose mood is above all peti-tioning, the poet entreats the wind to drive thedead leaves of autumn, symbolically the sibyllineleaves of his verse, to "their dark wintry bed,"whence they may ascend like seeds into renewed

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Stuart M. Sperry

life when spring rewakes them. The poet's leaves

are thus the seeds of a new generation, and the

ode is indeed, as its tone deepens and expands in

the course of its deliberate development, grandly

prophetic. The seeds, however, cannot progen-erate themselves. The process depends on

greater powers: the "Wild Spirit," which as

"Destroyer and Preserver" buries the seeds and

thereby safeguards them, and his "azure sister of

the Spring," whose summons into new life theymust await. The same logic qualifies the force of

the ode's triumphant Promethean imagery,which, prefigured earlier perhaps, is reserved for

the final stanza. Like the partly contradictory

images of withered leaves and seeds, the ashes

and sparks are potentially either dead or alive.

They are indeed indistinguishable except for thepower of the wind, which, passing over them,first reveals the hidden glow in the dormant em-

bers, then scatters and rekindles it. Undoubtedlya major lyric like this ode, which demands as

much as any work in English to be read for its

effect, responds, like a score in music, to a vari-

ety of interpretations.35 Any genial reading,however, must surely do justice to that tone

which, in its peculiar combination of urgencyand submission, is quite unlike anything else in

English verse. Even at the end, when the poet,though still petitioning, at last imagines that he

speaks through his own lips as the "trumpetof a

prophecy," it is the wind itself that speaksthrough him. There is throughout a wrestling be-tween the poet's desire to identify with the wind,indeed to command it, and his recognition thathe must submit to a power he cannot direct orunderstand: "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit!Be thou me, impetuous one!" (11.61-62). The

struggle between contradictory impulses, betweenself-assertion and submission, is

movingly

sus-

tained, but in the end Shelley remains subdued inheart to the mysterious quality of the power he

serves, the terrible inscrutability that Yeats wasto recapture and intensify in some of his own

greatest lyrics. More than any other poem he

composed, the "Ode to the West Wind" is the

lyric expression of that conflict between free willand Necessity which finds a deeper philosophicalreflection in the dramatic premises of Prome-theus Unbound.

Undoubtedly questions remain, and the most

fascinating of them proceed from our perceptionof the intensity of Shelley's inner struggle. If

Prometheus is the oracle of a new order and the

instrument of its dispensation, is he not yet

something more than the passive agent of its re-

alization? Does he not, simply by his fortitude in

extremis, reach out to summon forth the powersof change and deliverance? Similarly, is hope no

more than perseverance? Does it not at its most

intense, as Prometheus personifies it, approach a

"faith so mild, / So solemn, so serene" ("Mont

Blanc," 11.77-78) that it can reconcile man to

destiny? Is not hope of more vital influence, so

that it actually "creates" even "From its own

wreck the thing it contemplates" (PrometheusUnbound iv.573-74)? Shelley undeniablypresses

these possibilities. "If faith is a virtue in anycase," he wrote Leigh Hunt in May 1820, "it

is so in politics rather than religion; as havinga power of producing that a belief in which is at

once a prophecy & a cause" (Letters, II, 153).The ambiguities and qualifications of such an

affirmationare, however, obvious. In the end the

structure of his poem rests on the bedrock of

Necessity. Critics who continue to treat the playas a stock drama of self-emancipation throughmoral recognition and repentance must face the

truth that such areading fails to do justice to amodern sense of the play or to our sense of Shel-

ley's intellect and craftsmanship. The caveat for

such critics is best expressed in a paragraphfrom the end of Sir William Drummond's con-

sideration of the problem of causality in his

Academical Questions, a paragraph that, how-

ever different from the brilliant lucidity of Shel-

ley's mature prose, one can only imagine the

poet readingwith delight:

The doctrine ofnecessity

has beenseverelystigma-tised by many writersof great authority.It may be

questioned, however, whether the blame do notrest in considerabledegree with themselves. Had

they been less strenuousin assertingthe necessaryconnexion between causes and effects-had theynot insisted on that occult operation,by which one

thing is said to act upon another---hadthey not, inshort, supposed the existence of powers, whichcan never be contingent,whereverthey wished toaccount for the phaenomena of nature and the

world-they would not have been so much embar-rassed by the dangerous conclusions, which are

251




made by necessarians,and which, upon the princi-ples admittedby both parties, are more easily de-

nied,thanprovedto be false.36

Those who deny the doctrine of Necessity in

Shelley'swork in an effort to rescue what

theysee as the more affirmativeor ideal element of

his nature diminish the poet and his power of

testimony. In Shelley's mature thinking an ex-

treme idealism draws its strength from an ex-

treme skepticism; the two reinforce rather thancounteract each other.

Shelley's preoccupation with the problem of

Necessity is reflected not just in his Prometheus

but throughout his work and, indeed, throughoutthat of the Romantic poets generally. His failure

to dramatize his hero's change of heart and mind

as a fully deliberate and self-conscious action

stems, I maintain, from philosophic scruples ofthe highest importance, not from artistic inabil-

ity. Shelley attempted to represent in his dramaan ideal balance between the active and passivepowers of human nature. But how and wherewas that balance to be struck?The same concernis reflected in The Revolt of Islam, where, as hasbeen persuasively argued, Shelley sought to por-tray in his hero and heroine, Laon and Cythna,the male and female principles, reason and love,

in ideal cooperation.37 The issue is a majortheme in all the poet's political writing, where he

urges both the right, indeed the necessity, of pro-test and (at first partly under Godwin's insis-

tence) a strict adherence to nonviolence. "The

great thing to do," he wrote to Hunt in Novem-ber 1819, "is to hold the balance between popu-

lar impatience and tyrannical obstinacy; to in-

culcate with fervour both the right of resistance

and the duty of forbearance" (Letters, II, 153).Yet how is it possible in periods of crisis to

dramatize effectively one's sense of outrage at

injustice without at times violating the ideal of

complete forbearance? The dilemma, in itsbroadest terms, was manifest to Shelley and

those others who sought to perpetuate the revo-

lutionary spirit in the aftermath of the 1790s,

long before the convulsive days of Vietnam. AsJohn Beer has written in another context:

In some way, it seems, one has to be actively pas-sive in order to acquire virtue-but is that not acontradictionin terms?

The dilemma is so fundamental in romanticismthat it is rareto find any romanticwritermanagingto deal with it squarely. He is more likely to be

brought up against it obliquely, skirmish with it

briefly,and then leave it. Coleridge,moreconsciousof the problem than most of his contemporaries,did not have any greatersuccess. It can be said,however,that he dealt with it more patiently,more

subtly,andat greaterlength.38

Perhaps Beer was right in awarding the palm to

Coleridge. We do an injustice, however, to the

subtlety, patience, and maturity of Shelley's

treatment of the problem by perpetuating thetradition of oversimplifying the intellectual and

psychological dramaof his masterpiece.

Indiana University

Bloomington

Notes

1

Citations of Shelley's verse are to Shelley's Poetryand Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Pow-ers (New York: Norton, 1977).

2 William Royce Campbell touches on the questionwithout ever fully answering it in his remarks on Pro-metheus ("Shelley's Concept of Conscience," Keats-

Shelley Journal, 19 [1970], 56): " ... the regenerationof Prometheus comes about not merely without the aid

of, but in spite of, conscience. Assuredly, he does re-

pent his curse (303) but only after he has seen theerror of hatred; he saves himself not through remorsebut by never abandoning hope and faith to hatred and

despair and by allowing the active power of love toaffirm self and all mankind." Campbell's observation

simply puts the process back one stage. How does

Prometheus come to see the error of his ways and howdoes he open himself to "the active power of love"?Leon Waldoff raises this issue in his interesting psycho-analytic reading ("The Father-Son Conflict in Prome-

theus Unbound: The Psychology of a Vision," Psycho-analytic Review, 62 [1975], 79-96). "The problem iswhether Prometheus or anyone else can will an end to

tyranny," he writes astutely. "Although inner reform is

undoubtedly a necessary cause in any significant reform,. . it is far from self-evident that it can be a sufficient

cause, which is what Shelley makes it in PrometheusUnbound" (p. 86). Waldoff views Prometheus' sufferingas masochistic and self-imposed and argues that theTitan's release dramatizes Shelley's largely unconsciousrealization that aggression only doubles back on the

252



Stuart M. Sperry

self in various forms of guilt and anxiety. In one sensethe argument seems simply to replace a set of con-scious with unconscious motives. Waldoff's analysis,however, yields important insights into the poet's psy-chology.

3 The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford:Clarendon, 1912). In "The Regeneration of Prome-

theus," in Shelley's Later Poetry (New York: Columbia

Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 68-69, Milton Wilson also ob-serves the relationship between the Ancient Marinerand Prometheus. Wilson ultimately finds Prometheus

partly victimized but still "a responsible victim" who"has to reformthe evil in his own will" (p. 69).

4 Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a

Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), pp.89-118, 251-52.

5 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUniv. Press, 1971), p. 306.

6Pottle's essay appears in Shelley: A Collection ofCritical Essays, ed. George M. Ridenour (Englewood

Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1965), p. 133.7 The most thoroughstudy of the intellectualground-

work of Shelley's doctrine of Necessity appears inKenneth Neill Cameron's The Young Shelley: Genesis

of a Radical (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951). The

fullest exposition of its influence on the poet's verse isin Baker's Shelley's Major Poetry. Frank B. Evans'

"Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Neces-

sity," Studies in Philology, 37 (1940), 632-40, stressesthe seminal force of Hume. An older but still suggestiveaccount is S. F. Gingerich's "Shelley's Doctrine of

Necessity versusChristianity,"PMLA, 33 (1918), 444-

73. There are many varieties of necessitariandoctrine,but they can be broadly summarized, in their stricterapplication,as the theory that-given the circumstancesthat condition all events-nothing could have happenedotherwise than it has, that no alternative possibilitieshave existed in history.

8 Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and

Work, 2nd ed. (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh DickinsonUniv. Press, 1971), p. 39.

9 In The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniv. Press, 1949), pp. 176-78, 324-25, et passim,James A. Notopoulos interprets Shelley's concept ofNecessity as a manifestation of the Platonic demiurge

in a way that ignores any relationshipto the skepticaland deterministicreasoningof Hume, SirWilliamDrum-mond, and others (see below). Notopoulos' argumentis closely followed by Neville Rogers in Shelley atWork, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 27 andn. 3, and the same tendency to subsume Necessitywithin a Platonic frame of reference is found through-out Ross Greig Woodman's The Apocalyptic Vision inthe Poetry of Shelley (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto

Press, 1964).10

Rogers, Shelley at Work, pp. 29-30. See also

Rogers' note on Laon and Cythna (The Revolt ofIslam), 11.3706-10, in his recent edition of The Com-plete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford:

Clarendon, 1975), ii, 391: "Notopoulos (Platonism,

p. 221) notes that this is the last appearancein Shelley's

philosophy of the doctrine of Necessity: from now onit is supplantedby Platonic idealism.The transition had

begun duringthe writingof QueenMab...."11See in particular von Wright's Causality and De-

terminism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974).12 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick

L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), II, 98. This edi-tion is hereafter referredto as Letters.

13 The classic discussion of Shelley's knowledge ofHume and the skeptical tradition in general is C. E.Pulos' The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism

(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954). The in-fluence of the tradition on the poet has been further de-fined by Earl Wasserman in his Shelley: A Critical

Reading.I am indebted to both works.14See esp. "Of the Probabilityof Chances"and "Of

the Probability of Causes," Secs. 11 and 12 of Bk. I,Pt. IIi, of A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-

Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), pp. 124-42.15"Of Liberty and Necessity," Sec. 8 of An Enquiryconcerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries con-

cerning the Human Understanding and concerning the

Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed.

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), p. 87.16 Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Reiman and

Powers,p. 133.17 Godwin, "Inferences from the Doctrine of Neces-

sity," Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. K.

Codell Carter(Oxford: Clarendon,1971), p. 169.18 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the

Theory of Fiction (Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press, 1966),

p. 30. While concerned primarily with fictional tech-

nique, Kermode's discussion applies more broadly tothe poetic and dramaticgenres, especially in his treat-ment of the way in which we as readers and critics"concern ourselves with the conflict between the de-terministicpattern any plot suggests, and the freedomof persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the

structure,the relations of beginning, middle, and end"

(p. 30).19 The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe

Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: OxfordUniv. Press, 1934), p. 271.

20In an early letter, Shelley wrote that "I confessthat I think Pope's 'all are but parts of one tremendous

whole' something more than Poetry, it has ever beenmy favouritetheory" (Letters, I, 35). See also Cameron,Young Shelley, pp. 255-57.

21 Canto vi of Queen Mab and the three prose notes

pertainingto it constitutethe locus classicusof Shelley'syouthful necessitarianism.For a discussionof the poet'searly commitment to perfectibility and its relation to

Godwin,see Cameron,Young Shelley, pp. 63-64.22 Harold Orel supports Baker'scontention in "Shel-

ley's The Revolt of Islam: The Last Great Poem of the

English Enlightenment?" Studies on Voltaire and the

Eighteenth Century, 89 (1972), 1204.23 Newton's various contributions to the Monthly

Magazine for 1812, esp. March, pp. 107-09, are listed

by Baker (p. 66). Newton's full views, based on the

253



254 Necessity and the Role of tht

Dendera zodiac and propounded in his later Three

Enigmas Attempted to Be Explained (London: Hook-

ham, 1821), are more complex, synthesizing classical,

Indian, and Middle Eastern mythology and astrologywith the research of other mythographers, both ac-

knowledged and unacknowledged. Baker's general dis-

cussion of the Newton-Peacock-Shelley relationship (pp.

66-70) and Woodman's (pp. 90-100) must be supple-mented by Cameron's commentary in Shelley and His

Circle (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), III,

233-44, which complicates and extends our view of

the influence Peacock and Shelley exerted on each other,and by Stuart Curran's account in Shelley's Annus

Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino:

Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 87-91, 227-29, which

reproduces Newton's diagram of the zodiac and dis-

cusses its conflation of Indian and Persian mythologywithin the broader context of Shelley's general knowl-

edge and reading. Shelley met Newton in November

1812 and introducd him the following year to Peacock,whose earlier work is, as Cameron remarks, free of the

Zoroastrianism that "drenches" Ahrimanes. As Cameron

also notes (Shelley and His Circle, III, 234-35), the

Zoroastrian element is for the most part only implicitin Newton's contributions to the Monthly Magazine,so that its influence on the two poets must have resulted

in part from their conversations with Newton.24 The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, Halliford

ed., ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (Lon-don: Constable, 1924-34), vni, 422. The verses also

appear near the middle of the first canto of the longerversion of the poem, with the difference that only two

gods, Ahrimanes and Oromazes, are mentioned, rather

than four. In his discussion of the complex relationshipbetween the longer, twelve-canto version and the

shorter, two-canto one and their accompanying prose

outlines, Cameron reverses Brett-Smith's chronology,which had been accepted by earlier critics, and con-cludes that the two-canto version is Peacock's revision

(Shelley and His Circle, III, 234-35). The initial im-

portance accorded Necessity in Peacock's reworkingthus assumes added significance.

25 See Cameron, "Shelley and Ahrimanes," Modern

Language Quarterly, 3 (1942), 287-95, and Shelleyand His Circle, iII, 240-44. Cameron allows the in-

fluence of both versions and their outlines but accords

greater importance to the later. Among other interest-ing conjectures, including the influence exerted on and

by Byron's Manfred, Cameron infers in his morerecent discussion that Peacock virtually turned over hiswork on Ahrimanes to Shelley, abandoning the projectto the youthful poet's superior enthusiasm and talent.

26 While I differ with some points of interpretation,in particular the emphasis on the Christian element inPrometheus and on the poet's commitment to free will,I am much indebted to Curran's study.

e Hero in Prometheus Unbound

27 Instances are too many to enumerate. Special

mention can be made, however, of Albert J. Kuhn's

"Shelley's Demogorgon and Eternal Necessity," Mod-

ern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 596-99.28 Shelley's Prose, or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed.

David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico

Press, 1954), p. 155.

2' See also Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Witt-

reich, "The Dating of Shelley's 'On the Devil, and

Devils,'" Keats-Shelley Journal, 21-22 (1973), 80-

102, which places the tract in mid-November 1819. One

may note that Shelley goes on to declare that "The

vulgar are all Manichaeans." The assertion, however,does not invalidate his earlier statement, for it is the

decline of primitive belief into superstition that he pro-ceeds to satirize. As Curran and Wittreich have written,"It is precisely because the problem [the meaning of

evil] so deeply troubled Shelley that he documents the

inadequacy of the popular religion to cope with it

significantly" (p. 94).30 See Norman Thurston's suggestive note, "Shelley

and the Duty of Hope," Keats-Shelley Journal, 26

(1977), 22-28, which, however, avoids making the

dichotomy. -

31 C. Kerenyi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image ofHuman Existence (London: Thames and Hudson,

1963), p. 117.32 Shelley, "Essay on the Devil and Devils," in Clark,

p. 267.33 See Hume's misgivings and partly ironic disclaim-

ers in The Treatise, pp. 248-51, 265-74. One can be

reminded of Samuel Johnson's assertion that "All

theory is against the freedom of the will; all experiencefor it" (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill,rev. S. F. Powell [Oxford: Clarendon, 1934-64], II,

291).34 Cited by Juan Goytisolo from F. Scott Fitzgerald's

The Crack-Up, in "20 Years of Castro's Revolution,"New York Review of Books, 22 March 1979, p. 17.

'3rFor a reading of the ode different from my own,see Stuart Curran's discussion in Shelley's Annus Mira-

bilis, pp. 156-72, which interprets the lyric as "a secu-

larized song of Christian triumph" (p. 171).36 Drummond, Academical Questions (London:

Cadell and Davies, 1805), pp. 192-93.37 This argument is a principal one throughout

Alicia Martinez' The Hero and Heroine of Shelley'sThe Revolt of Islam (Salzburg: Institut fur englische

Sprache und Literatur, Universitat Salzburg, 1976).See also E. B. Murray, "'Elective Affinity' in The Re-

volt of Islam," Journal of English and Germanic Phi-

lology, 67 (1968), 570-85.

38 Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto

and Windus, 1959), p. 87.

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