THE UNFAMILIAR SHELLEY Proof Copy in gratitude for his major contribution to the understanding of Shelley To Don Reiman Proof Copy The Unfamiliar Shelley Edited by ALAN M. WEINBERG University of South Africa, RSA TIMOTHY WEBB University of Bristol, UK Proof Copy © Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 101 Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Hampshire GU11 3HR USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The unfamiliar Shelley. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822 – Criticism and interpretation I. Webb, Timothy II. Weinberg, Alan M. (Alan Mendel) 821.7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The unfamiliar Shelley / edited by Timothy Webb and Alan M. Weinberg. p. cm. – (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6390-4 (alk. paper) 1. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792–1822–Criticism and interpretation. I. Webb, Timothy. II. Weinberg, Alan M. (Alan Mendel) PR5438.U64 2008 821'.7–dc22 2007052262 ISBN 978-0-7546-6390-4Proof Copy Contents General Editors’ Preface vii List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xv List of Abbreviations xvii Editorial Note xix Introduction 1 Timothy Webb and Alan M. Weinberg Poetry 1 Reading as Flight: Fragment Poems from Shelley’s Notebooks 21 Michael Bradshaw 2 ‘The Casket of My Unknown Mind’: The 1813 Volume of Minor Poems 41 David Duff 3 Happily Ever After? The Necessity of Fairytale in Queen Mab 69 Christopher R. Miller 4 Laon and the Hermit: Connection and Succession 85 Jack Donovan 5 ‘Peter Bell the Third’, Contempt and Poetic Transfiguration 101 Stephen C. Behrendt 6 Scratching at the Door of Absence: Writing and Reading ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ 119 Timothy Webb 7 Shelley’s Neapolitan-Tuscan Poetics: ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’ and the ‘Republic’ of Benevento 137 MichaelProof Rossington Copy Art 8 Shelleyan Inspiration and the Sister Arts 159 Nancy Moore Goslee vi The Unfamiliar Shelley Prose 9 Noises On: The Communicative Strategies of Shelley’s Prefaces 183 Hugh Roberts 10 Contemplating Facts, Studying Ourselves: Aspects of Shelley’s Philosophical and Religious Prose 199 Merle A. Williams 11 A Place to Stand: Questions of Address in Shelley’s Political Pamphlets 221 Martin Priestman 12 Emulating Plato: Shelley as Translator and Prose Poet 239 Michael O’Neill 13 ‘These Catchers of Men’: Imposture and Its Unmasking in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ 257 Alan M. Weinberg Drama 14 Porcine Poetics: Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant 279 Timothy Morton 15 Shelley’s Late Fragmentary Plays: ‘Charles the First’ and the ‘Unfinished Drama’ 297 Nora Crook Afterword: Tracking Shelley 313 Donald H. Reiman Bibliography 327 Index Proof Copy 349 The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester Proof Copy List of Illustrations 1.1 MS draft of ‘Eagle why soarest thou …’, with sketch of eagle Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 8, p. 147 rev. 37 2.1 MS draft of ‘If it were possible’, with sketch of trees Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, fol. 184r 42 7.1 MS fair copy of ‘Sonnet: Political Greatness’ Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 5, fol. 132v 141 8.1 Title page of A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote, with sketch of trees Bodleian MS Shelley e. 3 [title-page] 162 8.2 MS draft from Laon and Cythna, with sketch of trees in river scene Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 14, p. 27 164 8.3 MS draft from Laon and Cythna, with sketch of classical temples and semi-human figure Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, fol. 2v 165 8.4 MS draft from Laon and Cythna, with sketch of tree Bodleian MS Shelley adds. e. 19, p. 29 166 8.5 MS draft from ‘The Triumph Life’, with boat sketch Bodleian MS Shelley adds. c. 4, fol. 26v 177 Proof Copy Notes on Contributors Stephen C. Behrendt is George Homes Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Among his books are Shelley and His Audiences (1989), Reading William Blake (1992) and Royal Mourning and Regency Culture (1997), as well as several collections of original poetry, including most recently History (2005). His newest book, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (2008), reflects his continuing interest in Romantic-era women writers. He is also the author of many interdisciplinary essays and articles on Romantic-era literature, art and culture, and on the relations among the arts generally. Michael Bradshaw is the author of Resurrection Songs: the Poetry of Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2001), the editor of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book: the 1829 text (2003), co-editor of Beddoes’s Selected Poetry (1999) and co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes (2007). He has also published critical articles on George Darley, John Keats, Water Savage Landor and Mary Shelley, and on Romantic fragments. He is currently Principal Lecturer in English at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Nora Crook is a professor of English at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published widely on both Shelleys. She has edited two volumes of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, and is General Editor of twelve volumes of the novels and works of Mary Shelley. She is currently one of the general editors of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with responsibilities largely in the area of Shelley’s posthumous poetry. Jack Donovan is Reader in English at the University of York. He edited Shelley’s Laon and Cythna in volume 2 of The Poems of Shelley (2000) in the series Longman Annotated English Poets and is currently one of the editors completing volumes three and four of that edition. David Duff is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen. Author of Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994) and other work on Shelley, he has also edited an anthology of Modern Genre Theory (2000) and co-edited a volume of essays on Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (2007). He has published widely on the history and theory of literary forms, and recently completedProof a new book entitled Archaists Copyand Innovators: Genre Theory and British Romanticism. He is currently editing a collection of Romantic political prose and writing a Coleridgean history of bad poetry. xii The Unfamiliar Shelley Nancy Moore Goslee, Humanities Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, is currently completing a book on the interplay of visual and verbal elements in Shelley’s draft notebooks, focusing on poems in which allegorical personification plays a central role. In addition to editing one of those draft notebooks for the BSM series, she has also published Uriel’s Eye: Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, and Shelley (1985) and Scott the Rhyme (1988). She continues to publish widely on English and Scottish Romanticism. Christopher R. Miller teaches English at Yale University. He is the author of The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (2006); and he is currently writing a book on surprise in the prose fiction, poetry and criticism of the long eighteenth century. Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007), The Poetics of Spice (2000) and Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (1994). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (2006) and a Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Frankenstein (2002), and has published eight essays on Percy and Mary Shelley. Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. He is currently a Director of the University’s Institute of Advanced Study. He has published books, editions, chapters and articles on Shelley, and he has also published widely on many aspects of Romantic and twentieth-century poetry. A published poet, he received a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His latest books are The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007) and (with Charles Mahoney) Romantic Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (2007).