Modern Language Association

Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

Author(s): Stuart M. Sperry
Source: PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Mar., 1981), pp. 242-254
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461991
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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 the
Victorian period down to our own that it scarcely
requires documentation. It is the major assump-
tion under which the play is critically presented
and taught. Nonetheless, there have always been
certain ill-concealed difficulties in maintaining
such 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 out of the near schoolroom, are
likely 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 change
of 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 change
comes, 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,
242
STUART M. SPERRY
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 misery made me wise.-The Curse
Once breathedon thee I would recall. (I.56-59)
The lines are, to say the least, perfunctory. Nor
are they illuminated by the hero's assertion, a
few lines later, that "I am changed so that aught
evil 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 change
within 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 by
a 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 recognition
and a convincing renewal of the emotions?2 The
problem is closely akin to that which hangs over
the Ancient Mariner when he experiences 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 kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessedthem unaware.
(11.284-87; emphasisadded)
The problem, however, is even more pointedly
obvious in Shelley's play, for at least the effect
 Stuart M. Sperry
of the Mariner's change is dramatic and in-
stantaneous:
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatrossfell off, and sank
Like lead into the 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:
Prometheus
Were these my words, O Parent?...
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.
(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 does
it not more effectively dramatize the source and
growth of that realization in the protagonist's
mind 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 undergraduate
readers have also troubled seasoned critics of
the play who, in their efforts to deal with its
problems of cause and motivation, have some-
times been led to consider the action in a partly
deterministic 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 great
machine set in motion by Prometheus' change of
heart. 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,
243
Earl Wasserman, in a judgment that places
greater emphasis on the issue of free will, has
declared that
Withdrawingthe curse whereby evil subsists and
resolving to endure pain patiently rather than sub-
mit to evil are Prometheus'only moral decisions,
the only assertionsof his will. Thereafterhe does
not act, but is acted for and upon, and the course
of events is determinedby other agencies.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). Such
confusion 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 is
only one action in the whole so-called drama,
and that that action is completed before the First
Act has hardly got under way." It is maintained,
Pottle continues, that the play consists "merely
of the unrolling necessary consequences of that
action, and of jubilation over those conse-
quences. This does not at all accord with what I
find the text saying."6 Pottle rushes gallantly to
the cause of Asia to claim for her as heroine "an
independent and essential part" (p. 136). If
"Prometheus's action was to repent of his curse,
to stop hating the manifested evil he continued
unyieldingly to resist" (p. 141), Asia is no mere
automaton. From the moment that she and Pan-
thea are solicited by the chorus of Echoes in Act
II, "she wills to follow, she wills to continue to
follow" (p. 137), and such self-determination
characterizes 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
244 Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound
come to inquire more closely into the grounds
for this assumption.
The doctrine of Necessity is, of course, one of
the most familiar chestnuts of Shelley scholar-
ship. That the poet was familiar with, and inter-
ested in, a broad spectrum of necessitarian ideas
has long been well documented,7 but it has nev-
ertheless become customary to denigrate and
even to deride the notion that they exercised any
more than a transitory influence on him. Ken-
neth Cameron complained a number of years
ago that the "ridiculing of 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 concept
which has now lost its urgency and is frequently
written off as a mere quillet in terminology."8 In
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 seemed
to realize that Necessity was a barren concept,
and we hear very little more about it" (King-
Hele, p. 39). Some scholars are unwilling to give
the notion any genuine standing even in the
poet's early development.9 Otherwise there is
well nigh universal consent that Shelley moved
rapidly and steadily toward such ideals as
activity, free will, faith, and love and away from
the trammels of a philosophy of "cold, unrelieved
gloom."'"
Toward clearing the mind of such bias, one
can begin by recalling that necessitarian ideas,
while deriving, like virtually everything else,
from the Greeks, underwent a major evolution in
the 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 rubric of three or four
convenient 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 play
of 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 absurd
aberration.
Such ideas had extraordinary excitement in
Shelley's day; and if we imagine them outmoded
in our own, we err badly. Anyone who examines
the recent work of the eminent Finnish philoso-
pher and editor of Wittgenstein, Georg Henrik
von Wright (1916- ), for example, will dis-
cover that the idea of Necessity remains of vital
interest 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 of
his mature work can sometimes be illuminated
by methods of analysis that, while modern, have
their roots in a style of thinking familiar to him.
To return, however, to a more basic issue, we
find simply untrue the often repeated assertion
that at least by the completion of The Revolt of
Islam Shelley had totally abandoned the doctrine
of Necessity. At work on The Cenci in the sum-
mer of 1819, he complained of "that ever
present Malthus Necessity."12 Despite Shelley's
known antipathy to Malthus' economic deter-
minism, the remark suggests, as Carlos Baker
has put it, that "he still regarded some form of
Necessity as a strong and perhaps ineluctable
force in human social organization" (p. 142).
Prometheus Unbound depicts both a change
in the mind of its hero and a change in the na-
ture of the universe, and it is difficult not to infer
some connection between these events. Critics
who leap to the assumption of a simple causal
relationship, however, might well pause to take
 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 and
that 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 interesting
and 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 analysis
have a great deal in common with Hume's.
Georg Henrik von Wright has written:
When speakingof causal relationsbetweenevents,
we must also pay attention to the negations of
events, the constancies. That this is necessary is
very clearly seen when we consider the interrelated-
ness of causally sufficient and causally necessary
conditions....
Considering that both changes and constancies,
i.e. events and their negations, may be terms in
causal relations, we can distinguish the following
four possibilities for relations of sufficient con-
ditionship: 1. A change is a sufficientcondition of
another change. 2. A change is a sufficient condi-
tion of a constancy. 3. A constancy is a sufficient
condition of a change. 4. A constancyis a sufficient
condition 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
245
Prometheus represents not a change (although
he 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 bring
about 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 such
logic 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 that
must 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-
246 Necessity and the Role of thie Hero in Prometheus Unbound
tor, William Godwin, in discussing the vulgar
notions of contingency and accident:
First then it appears, that, in the emphatical and
refinedsense in which the word has sometimesbeen
used, there is no such thing as action. Man is in no
case, strictly speaking, the beginner of any event
or series of events that takes place in the universe,
but only the vehicle through which certain ante-
cedents operate, 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 concerning
causation and Necessity; and we need to ask
whether Godwin's statements might not have
had an important bearing on Shelley's play. By
what 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 succession
seem all the more striking. The point is that
Shelley's presentation leaves open the view of his
hero 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 may
supply as readers but that the play itself never
either fully dramatizes or illuminates. All we
really know is that, after steadfastly defying Ju-
piter's tyranny through countless ages, Pro-
metheus is granted the impulse to rehear and to
recall his own curse. The distinction, admittedly
a difficult one, is nevertheless vital to the inter-
pretation of Shelley's play. It also goes to the
heart of another problem that concerns the
poet's choice of Prometheus as the prototype of
his hero. To study the recurrence of the arche-
type throughout the annals of art and literature
is to discover that defiance and resistance are the
essence of the character, that forgiveness is fun-
damentally alien to him. Of course it was Shel-
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 of
the 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 manifestation
of 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 that
amid 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."18 Though 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,"19 her statement has long
been 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 not
the 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,"20 the belief in a universal alter-
ation for the better, reflected even in certain
climactic and geophysical improvements Shelley
foresees 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 the
view of Necessity as an at best indifferent and
inscrutable force in "Mont Blanc," a major
achievement of that summer and, more than any
other work of the poet, a preliminary sketch for
Prometheus. The same loss of optimism is re-
flected in the continuously vacillating struggle
for supremacy between the powers of good and
evil in his major work of the following year, The
Revolt of Islam, his longest poem. As Carlos
Baker has succinctly put it, "Wherever Necessity
is 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 critics
still 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 altered
and matured over a period of years. Although
there is no need to discount the importance of
time and personal experience, the Indian and
Zoroastrian researches of his friend John Frank
Newton, the vegetarian, had a major influence
on the direction of his views. In Newton's in-
triguing explication of the Hindu zodiac, the
four powers Creation, Preservation, Destruction,
247
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 of
his unpublished Ahrimanes,23 the shorter ver-
sion of which opens:
I.
Parentof being, mistressof the spheres,
SupremeNecessity o'er all doth reign.
She guidesthe course of the revolvingyears,
Withpower no prayerscan change, no force
restrain:
Bindingall naturein her golden chain,
Whose infiniteconnectionlinks afar
The smallestatom of the sandy plain,
And the last ray of heaven'sremoteststar,
That round the verge of space wheels its refulgent
car.
II.
Her sovereignlaws four rival gods fulfil:
Each holds in turn her delegatedsway.. .24
Peacock's accompanying outline for the poem
begins, "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 Cythna
set against the greater Manichaean struggle for
supremacy between the eagle and 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's
voracious appetite for reading, and he was un-
questionably free to make his own independent
assessment and use of them. In his recent, il-
luminating study of Shelley's annus mirabilis,
Stuart Curran has drawn attention in particular
248 Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound
to the extent and diversity of such mythological
inquiry and to its broadly syncretic tendency as
a background for Prometheus Unbound.26
What 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 interpretations
from Manichaean to Christian, the problem of
Necessity remained a major focus. The sys-
tematic mythology of Newton and Peacock and
their sources coalesced in his imagination with
the 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 Demogorgon
that they have turned. Indeed, this controversial
and mystifying figure has been commonly iden-
tified as Shelley's personification of the principle
of Necessity itself.27 To be sure, Ross Wood-
man is not alone in interpreting the bondage of
Prometheus to Jupiter as an allegory of Shelley's
earlier acceptance of Necessity, a servitude
dramatically abolished, in Woodman's view, by
the 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 far
sunken from its former controlling eminence,
remaining little more, indeed, than a vestige of
Shelley's original conception, a kind of Necessity
manque. The principle, in fact, is harnessed to
the presumably overriding millennial imperatives
of the drama. Critics treading so closely on
Mary Shelley's footsteps might have been de-
terred by Demogorgon's final speech, the last in
the play, in which the character warns that De-
struction may at length reassume its lost su-
premacy, that Eternity, the "Mother of many
acts and hours," may, through her
infirmity,
permit another revolution in the cycle and allow
the dark ages to return. Admittedly he offers,
should such a destiny occur, the means "to
reassume / An empire o'er the disentangled
Doom," the principal means being hope. One
may wonder, however, whether such "spells" by
themselves constitute proof of Shelley's convic-
tion of the ability of human beings, whether by
faith, repentance, free will, or the all-sufficiency
of 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 the
course 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 with
which Prometheus himself fully cooperates but
to which he remains subordinate. Such a concep-
tion corresponds, as we have partly seen, to the
tenor 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 peculiar
nature 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 notions
of Newton, Peacock, Byron, and others. Much
later, near the end of 1819, when he was con-
cluding the final act of Prometheus, he declared
in the essay "On the Devil and Devils":
The Manichaean philosophy respecting the origin
and governmentof the world, if not true, is at least
an hypothesis conformable to the experience of
actual facts. To suppose that the world was created
and is superintendedby two spirits of a balanced
power and opposite dispositions is simply a per-
sonification of the struggle which we experience
within 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 principle of hope, and that
thirst for improvementwithout which present evil
would be intolerable. (Shelley's Prose, p. 265)29
In the Manichaean schemes of Newton and Pea-
cock one recalls both an interdependence and a
division between the zodiac's preserving and re-
storing functions, separated, as they are, by the
rule of Destruction. Shelley apparently sought to
 Stuart M. Sperry
maintain the distinction in the roles assigned to
Prometheus 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 all
these functions are subservient to a greater im-
pulse roughly corresponding to the power of fate
that stands behind the gods themselves in
Aeschylus' universe. They are all subsumed by a
vision that is fundamentally deterministic.
After a point it is unnecessary, perhaps even
improper, to argue the necessitarian bias of
Prometheus 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 theory
of human life," and we have good reason for
taking at face value his declaration that "Didac-
tic poetry is my abhorrence." At the same time
the 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 that
mediates 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 was
not advancing a program for revolution; rather,
he was seeking, in phrases often ridiculed but
nevertheless exact, "to familiarise the highly re-
fined imagination of the more select classes of
poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of
moral excellence" (p. 135). The distinction, like
some other vital discriminations, goes to the
heart 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 that
faith is almost invariably suspect in
Shelley's
writing, while hope, especially when vitalized by
love, emerges as the cardinal value.30 But it is
hardly adequate to an understanding of Shelley
to stop here; one must go on to ask how it is
possible to distinguish hope at its most intense
249
from faith. Do not the two, in practice, overlap
and merge into each other? The distinction and
its 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 not
count thy years to come of pain?"-Prometheus
can 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, and plunge
Into Eternity,where recordedtime,
Even all that we imagine,age on age,
Seemsbut a point, and the reluctantmind
Flags wearilyin its unendingflight
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numberedthe slow years
Which thou must spend in 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 of
somehow anticipating it, of actually foreseeing
it? As Kerenyi has written in his classic study of
the Prometheus legend, "The prophecies lose
their value if [Prometheus] would rather die at
once than await their fulfillment."31
Prometheus is a hero on whom all else de-
pends, and therefore he endures. Yet he does not
survive through the power of faith, which at its
strongest is closest to what Shelley most of all
detested: "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 who
knows by foreseeing"), does not possess. In his
climactic speech at the end of the first act, fol-
lowing his comforting by the chorus of prophetic
spirits, the hero exclaims, "I feel / Most vain all
hope but love" (I.807-08). The lines distill the
essence of both his triumph and his humility.
For Shelley was here discriminating-with what
Mary Shelley, commenting on the particular
subtlety of the play, justly called an "abstraction
and delicacy of distinction" (Hutchinson, p.
272)-between the hope that in its highest form
characterizes Prometheus and the kind of cer-
250 Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound
tainty he is denied. Similar to the difficult but
crucial distinction between hope and faith within
the play is Shelley's treatment of the balance
between free will and Necessity. Even as Pro-
metheus cannot foresee the actual moment or
conditions of his release, neither can he simply
transform himself through a deliberate act of
will. 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 be
otherwise. In May 1821 we find Shelley writing
sadly to Byron: "my disappointment on public
grounds has been excessive. But I cling to moral
and 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 affirmation is to risk betray-
ing the opening buds of human renewal to the
withering blasts of untimely disappointment.
Did Shelley hold steadfastly to a doctrine of
unqualified Necessity? Did he, in fact, believe in
the inefficacy of will and the general futility
of human exertion? Virtually every page of his
letters denies such suppositions. The apparent
paradox is closely akin to the contradiction that
Hume and others following him so keenly per-
ceived at the heart of skeptical philosophy be-
tween the conclusions of refined reasoning and
the demands of practical behavior and the com-
mon life.33 If we attack Shelley for inconsis-
tency we must also challenge the oft-repeated
definition of "the test of a first-rate intelligence"
as "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the
mind at the same time, and still retain the ability
to function."34 The truth is that the
ambiguity
surrounding the whole question of causation in
Prometheus Unbound reflects Shelley's resource-
fulness in dramatizing a long tradition of debate
and uncertainty about the exact balance to be
struck between free will and Necessity in human
affairs. Our natural impulse as readers is to
make of Shelley's hero more than a passive
agent of some greater power, to see him, rather,
as an independent and self-determining cause of
all that follows in the drama. The more
carefully
we study the play, however, the more we see that
we cannot justifiably maintain this view. The
question of determination in the drama is,
moreover, a vital one. Those who seek a more
affirmativeinterpretation 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 grasp
of the tenuousness of man's existential situation.
In oversimplifying the play, they may also unin-
tentionally misrepresent the shape of Shelley's
poetic and intellectual career. It is no secret that
those intent on special pleading have usually
awarded Prometheus a preeminent place in Shel-
ley's development. Even Milton Wilson, in the
closing pages of his flexible and discerning
study, argues the special maturity of the drama
by comparison with a later work like Adonais:
In PrometheusUnboundthere was somethingto do;
and I mean not only to perfect the will by casting
out hate, self-contempt, and despair, by returning
good for evil, and by maintainingan independent
and resolutewill in the face of persecution;but also
(it is surely implied) by such political action as
time, power, and opportunity permit. In Adonais
there is nothing for the mourners to do but wait
until death shatters the many-colored dome. The
ethical will has shrunk to 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 does
not do justice to the subtlety of a more gradual
reweighting. Equally important, is it clear, given
the depth of Shelley's involvement with the phil-
osophical problem of Necessity, that the drift
Wilson perceives is manifestly away from ethical
maturity?
One way to validate my view of Shelley's
drama is to compare my interpretation with the
argument of his greatest lyric, the "Ode to the
West Wind," which he composed in October
1819, between the writing of the third and last
acts of Prometheus, and published in the Pro-
metheus Unbound volume (1820). In the first
stanza of the lyric, whose mood is above all peti-
tioning, the poet entreats the wind to drive the
dead leaves of autumn, symbolically the sibylline
leaves of his verse, to "their dark wintry bed,"
whence they may ascend like seeds into renewed
 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 they
must 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 the
power of the wind, which, passing over them,
first reveals the hidden glow in the dormant em-
bers, then scatters and rekindles it. Undoubtedly
a 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 urgency
and 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 "trumpet of a
prophecy," it is the wind itself that speaks
through him. There is throughout a wrestling be-
tween the poet's desire to identify with the wind,
indeed to command it, and his recognition that
he must submit to a power he cannot direct or
understand: "Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit!
Be thou me, impetuous one!" (11. 61-62). The
struggle between contradictory impulses, between
self-assertion and submission, is movingly sus-
tained, but in the end Shelley remains subdued in
heart to the mysterious quality of the power he
serves, the terrible inscrutability that Yeats was
to 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 will
and Necessity which finds a deeper philosophical
reflection in the dramatic premises of Prome-
theus Unbound.
Undoubtedly questions remain, and the most
251
fascinating of them proceed from our perception
of 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 powers
of 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" (Prometheus
Unbound iv.573-74)? Shelley undeniably presses
these possibilities. "If faith is a virtue in any
case," he wrote Leigh Hunt in May 1820, "it
is so in politics rather than religion; as having
a 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
affirmation are, however, obvious. In the end the
structure of his poem rests on the bedrock of
Necessity. Critics who continue to treat the play
as a stock drama of self-emancipation through
moral recognition and repentance must face the
truth that such a reading fails to do justice to a
modern 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 paragraph
from 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 reading with delight:
The doctrine of necessity has been severely stigma-
tised by many writers of great authority.It may be
questioned, however, whether the blame do not
rest in considerable degree with themselves. Had
they been less strenuous in asserting the necessary
connexion between causes and effects-had they
not insisted on that occult operation,by which one
thing is said to act upon another---hadthey not, in
short, supposed the existence of powers, which
can never be contingent, wherever they wished to
account for the phaenomena of nature and the
world-they would not have been so much embar-
rassed by the dangerous conclusions, which are
252 Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Prometheus Unbound
made by necessarians,and which, upon the princi-
ples admitted by both parties, are more easily de-
nied, than provedto be false.36
Those who deny the doctrine of Necessity in
Shelley's work in an effort to rescue what they
see as the more affirmative or 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 than
counteract each other.
Shelley's preoccupation with the problem of
Necessity is reflected not just in his Prometheus
but throughout his work and, indeed, throughout
that 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 of
the highest importance, not from artistic inabil-
ity. Shelley attempted to represent in his drama
an ideal balance between the active and passive
powers of human nature. But how and where
was that balance to be struck? The same concern
is reflected in The Revolt of Islam, where, as has
been 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 major
theme 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-
Notes
1 Citations of
Shelley's verse are to Shelley's Poetry
and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Pow-
ers (New York: Norton, 1977).
2 William
Royce Campbell touches on the question
without ever fully answering it in his remarks on Pro-
metheus ("Shelley's Concept of Conscience," Keats-
Shelley Journal, 19 [1970], 56): " ... the regeneration
of 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 the
error of hatred; he saves himself not through remorse
but by never abandoning hope and faith to hatred and
despair and by allowing the active power of love to
affirm self and all mankind." Campbell's observation
simply puts the process back one stage. How does
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 its
broadest 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. As
John 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 a
contradictionin terms?
The dilemma is so fundamental in romanticism
that it is rare to find any romanticwriter managing
to deal with it squarely. He is more likely to be
brought up against it obliquely, skirmish with it
briefly,and then leave it. Coleridge,more conscious
of the problem than most of his contemporaries,
did not have any greater success. It can be said,
however, that he dealt with it more patiently, more
subtly,and at 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 the
tradition of oversimplifying the intellectual and
psychological drama of his masterpiece.
Indiana University
Bloomington
Prometheus come to see the error of his ways and how
does 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 is
whether 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 Prometheus
Unbound" (p. 86). Waldoff views Prometheus' suffering
as masochistic and self-imposed and argues that the
Titan's release dramatizes Shelley's largely unconscious
realization that aggression only doubles back on the
 Stuart M. Sperry
self in various forms of guilt and anxiety. In one sense
the 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 Mariner
and Prometheus. Wilson ultimately finds Prometheus
partly victimized but still "a responsible victim" who
"has to reform the 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:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), p. 306.
6 Pottle's essay appears in Shelley: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. George M. Ridenour (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 133.
7 The most
thorough study of the intellectual ground-
work of Shelley's doctrine of Necessity appears in
Kenneth 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 is
in 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, stresses
the seminal force of Hume. An older but still suggestive
account is S. F. Gingerich's "Shelley's Doctrine of
Necessity versus Christianity,"PMLA, 33 (1918), 444-
73. There are many varieties of necessitarian doctrine,
but they can be broadly summarized, in their stricter
application, as the theory that-given the circumstances
that condition all events-nothing could have happened
otherwise than it has, that no alternative possibilities
have existed in history.
8 Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and
Work, 2nd ed. (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson
Univ. Press, 1971), p. 39.
9 In The Platonism of
Shelley (Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 176-78, 324-25, et passim,
James A. Notopoulos interprets Shelley's concept of
Necessity as a manifestation of the Platonic demiurge
in a way that ignores any relationship to the skeptical
and deterministicreasoningof Hume, Sir William Drum-
mond, and others (see below). Notopoulos' argument
is closely followed by Neville Rogers in Shelley at
Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 27 and
n. 3, and the same tendency to subsume Necessity
within a Platonic frame of reference is found through-
out Ross Greig Woodman's The Apocalyptic Vision in
the 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 of
Islam), 11.3706-10, in his recent edition of The Com-
plete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1975), ii, 391: "Notopoulos (Platonism,
253
p. 221) notes that this is the last appearancein Shelley's
philosophy of the doctrine of Necessity: from now on
it is supplantedby Platonic idealism. The transition had
begun duringthe writing of Queen Mab...."
11 See 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 of
Hume 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 indebtedto both works.
14 See esp. "Of the Probability of 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 Enquiry
concerning 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: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966),
p. 30. While concerned primarily with fictional tech-
nique, Kermode's discussion applies more broadly to
the poetic and dramatic genres, especially in his treat-
ment of the way in which we as readers and critics
"concern ourselves with the conflict between the de-
terministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom
of 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: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1934), p. 271.
20 In an early letter, Shelley wrote that "I confess
that I think Pope's 'all are but parts of one tremendous
whole' something more than Poetry, it has ever been
my favourite theory" (Letters, I, 35). See also Cameron,
Young Shelley, pp. 255-57.
21 Canto vi of Queen Mab and the three prose notes
pertainingto it constitute the locus classicus of Shelley's
youthful necessitarianism.For a discussion of the poet's
early commitment to perfectibility and its relation to
Godwin, see Cameron, Young Shelley, pp. 63-64.
22 Harold Orel supports Baker's contention 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
254 Necessity and the Role of thte Hero in Prometheus Unbound
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 astrology
with 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 mythology
within 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" A hrimanes. As Cameron
also notes (Shelley and His Circle, III, 234-35), the
Zoroastrian element is for the most part only implicit
in 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 longer
version of the poem, with the difference that only two
gods, Ahrimanes and Oromazes, are mentioned, rather
than four. In his discussion of the complex relationship
between 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 reworking
thus assumes added significance.
25 See
Cameron, "Shelley and Ahrimanes," Modern
Language Quarterly, 3 (1942), 287-95, and Shelley
and 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 more
recent discussion that Peacock virtually turned over his
work on Ahrimanes to Shelley, abandoning the project
to 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 in
Prometheus and on the poet's commitment to free will,
I am much indebted to Curran's study.
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 of
Human 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 experience
for 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's
The 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.