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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Born 4 August 1792(1792-08-04)
Field Place, Horsham, England
Died 8 July 1822 (aged 29)
Viareggio, Grand Duchy of Tuscany
Occupation Poet, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist
Literary movement Romanticism
Percy Bysshe Shelley 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822; pronounced /ˈpɜrsi ˈbɪʃ ˈʃɛli/)
was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the
finest lyric poets in the English language. He is most famous for such classic
anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The
Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed
poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary
poems which included Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam,
and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound
(1820) were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. He also wrote the
Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) and the short works The
Assassins (1814) and The Coliseum (1817).
Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. The
novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife.
Shelley never lived to see the extent of his success and influence in
generations to come. Some of his works were published, but they were often
suppressed upon publication. Up until his death, with approximately 50 readers
as his audience, it is said that he made no more than 40 pounds from his
writings. In 1813, at age 21 Shelley "printed" his first major poem, Queen Mab.
He set the press and ran 250 copies of this radical and revolutionary tract.
Queen Mab was infused with scientific language and naturalizing moral
prescriptions for an oppressed humanity in an industrializing world. He intended
the poem to be private and distributed it among his close friends and
acquaintances. About 70 sets of the signatures were bound and distributed
personally by Shelley, and the rest were stored at William Clark's bookshop in
London. A year before his death, in 1821, one of the shopkeepers caught sight of
the remaining signatures. The shopkeeper bound the remaining signatures, printed
an expurgated edition, and distributed the pirated editions through the black
market. The copies were–in the words of Richard Carlisle– "pounced upon," by the
Society for the Prevention of Vice. Shelley was dismayed upon discovering the
piracy of what he considered to be not just a juvenile production but a work
that could potentially "injure rather than serve the cause of freedom." He
sought an injunction against the shopkeeper, but since the poem was considered
illegal, he was not entitled to the copyright. William Clark was imprisoned for
4 months for publishing and distributing Queen Mab. Between 1821 and the 1830s
over a dozen pirated editions of Queen Mab were produced and distributed among
and by the laboring classes fueling, and becoming a bible for, Chartism.
Education
A son of Sir Timothy Shelley, a Whig Member of Parliament, and his wife, a
Sussex landowner, Shelley was born at Field Place in Horsham, England. He
received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend Evan Edwards of
Warnham. His cousin and lifelong friend Thomas Medwin, who lived nearby
recounted his early childhood in his "The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley". It
was a happy and contented childhood spent largely on country pursuits such as
fishing and hunting.
In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford. In 1804, Shelley
entered Eton College, where he fared poorly, subjected to an almost daily mob
torment his classmates called "Shelley-baits". Surrounded, the young Shelley
would have his books torn from his hands and his clothes pulled at and torn
until he cried out madly in his high-pitched "cracked soprano" of a voice.
On 10 April 1810, he matriculated at University College, Oxford. Legend has it
that Shelley attended only one lecture while at Oxford, but frequently read
sixteen hours a day. His first publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810),
in which he vented his atheistic worldview through the villain Zastrozzi. In the
same year, Shelley, together with his sister Elizabeth, published Original
Poetry by Victor and Cazire. While at Oxford, he issued a collection of verses
(perhaps ostensibly burlesque but quite subversive), Posthumous Fragments of
Margaret Nicholson, with Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
In 1811, Shelley published his second Gothic novel St. Irvyne; or, The
Rosicrucian and a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. This gained the
attention of the university administration and he was called to appear before
the College's fellows, including the Dean, George Rowley. His refusal to
repudiate the authorship of the pamphlet resulted in his being sent down from
Oxford on 25 March 1811, along with Hogg. The rediscovery in mid-2006 of
Shelley's long-lost 'Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things', a long,
strident anti-monarchical and anti-war poem printed in 1811 in London by Crosby
and Company as "by a gentleman of the University of Oxford", gives a new
dimension to the expulsion, reinforcing Hogg's implication of political motives
('an affair of party').Shelley was given the choice to be reinstated after
his father intervened, on the condition that he would have had to recant his
avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling-out with his father.
Marriage
Four months after being expelled, the 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland
with the 16-year-old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook to get married. After their
marriage on 28 August 1811, Shelley invited his college friend Hogg to share
their household. When Harriet objected, however, Shelley brought her to Keswick
in England's Lake District, intending to write. Distracted by political events,
he visited Ireland shortly afterward in order to engage in radical
pamphleteering. Here he wrote his Address to the Irish People and was seen at
several nationalist rallies. His activities earned him the unfavourable
attention of the British government.
Unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often left his wife and
child (Ianthe Shelley, 1813–76) alone, first to study Italian with a certain
Cornelia Turner, and eventually to visit William Godwin's home and bookshop in
London. There he met and fell in love with Godwin's eldest daughter, named after
her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the author inter alia of A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman.
On 28 July 1814, Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child when he ran away
with Mary, then also 16, inviting her stepsister Claire Clairmont along for
company. The three sailed to Europe, crossed France, and settled in Switzerland,
an account of which was subsequently published by the Shelleys. After six weeks,
homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England. In the
autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors,
he wrote Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention at
the time, but has now come to be recognized as his first major achievement. At
this point in his writing career, Shelley was deeply influenced by the poetry of
Wordsworth.
Byron
In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. They
were prompted to do so by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had commenced
a liaison with Lord Byron the previous April just before his self-exile on the
continent. Byron had lost interest in her and so she used the opportunity of
meeting the Shelleys to act as bait to lure him to Geneva. The Shelleys and
Byron rented neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular
conversation with Byron had an invigorating effect on Shelley's output of
poetry. While on a boating tour the two took together, Shelley was inspired to
write his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, often considered his first significant
production since Alastor. A tour of Chamonix in the French Alps
inspired Mont Blanc, a poem in which Shelley claims to have pondered questions
of historical inevitability and the relationship between the human mind and
external nature.
Second marriage
After the Shelleys returned to England, Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister and
Claire's stepsister, travelled from Godwin's household in London to kill herself
in Wales in early October. In December 1816, Shelley's estranged wife Harriet
drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On 30 December 1816, a
few weeks after Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were
married. The marriage was intended, in part, to help secure Shelley's custody of
his children by Harriet, but the plan failed: the courts gave custody of the
children to foster parents due to the fact that he was an atheist.
The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where
a friend of Percy's, Thomas Love Peacock, lived. Shelley took part in the
literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period he met John
Keats. Shelley's major production during this time was Laon and Cythna; or, The
Revolution of the Golden City, a long narrative poem in which he attacked
religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily withdrawn
after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The
Revolt of Islam in 1818. Shelley wrote two revolutionary political tracts under
the nom de plume, "The Hermit of Marlowe."
Italy
Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's
daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice.
Contact with the older and more established poet encouraged Shelley to write
once again. During the latter part of the year, he wrote Julian and Maddalo, a
lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations with Byron in
Venice, finishing with a visit to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of
Shelley's "urbane style". He then began the long verse drama Prometheus Unbound,
a re-writing of the lost play by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, which
features talking mountains and a petulant spirit who overthrows Jupiter. Tragedy
struck in 1818 and 1819, when his son Will died of fever in Rome, and his infant
daughter Clara Everina died during yet another household move.
A daughter, Elena Adelaide Shelley, was born 27 December 1818 in Naples, Italy
and registered there as the daughter of Shelley and a woman named Marina Padurin.
However, the identity of the mother is an unsolved mystery. Some scholars
speculate that her true mother was actually Claire Clairmont or Elise Foggi, a
nursemaid for the Shelley family. Other scholars postulate that she was a
foundling Shelley adopted in hopes of distracting Mary after the deaths of
William and Clara. Shelley referred to Elena in letters as his "Neapolitan
ward". However, Elena was placed with foster parents a few days after her birth
and the Shelley family moved on to yet another Italian city, leaving her behind.
Elena died 17 months later, on 10 June 1820.
The Shelleys moved around various Italian cities during these years. In later
1818 they were living in a pensione on the Via Valfonde (which now runs
alongside Florence train station). The pensione was destroyed in World War II
but there is a plaque on the building which replaced it. Here, they received two
visitors, a Miss Sophia Stacey and her much older travelling companion, Miss
Corbet Parry-Jones (to be described by Mary as 'an ignorant little Welshwoman').
Sophia had for three years in her youth been ward of the poet's aunt and uncle.
Hitting it off the pair moved into the same pensione and stayed for about two
months. During this period Mary gave birth to her son and Sophia is credited
with suggesting that he be named after the city of his birth, so he became Percy
Florence Shelley, later Sir Percy. Shelley also wrote his 'Ode to Sophia Stacey'
now in all complete collections of his work.
Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and he spent the summer of 1819
writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Livorno. In this year, prompted among other
causes by the Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known political poems: The
Masque of Anarchy and Men of England. These were most likely his most-remembered
works during the 19th century. Around this time period, he wrote the essay The
Philosophical View of Reform, which was his most thorough exposition of his
political views to that date.
In 1820, hearing of John Keats' illness from a friend, Shelley wrote him a
letter inviting him to join him at his residence at Pisa. Keats replied with
hopes of seeing him, but instead, arrangements were made for Keats to travel to
Rome with the artist Joseph Severn. Inspired by the death of Keats, in 1821
Shelley wrote the elegy Adonais.
In 1822, Shelley arranged for Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had
been one of his chief supporters in England, to come to Italy with his family.
He meant for the three of them — himself, Byron and Hunt — to create a journal,
which would be called The Liberal. With Hunt as editor, their controversial
writings would be disseminated, and the journal would act as a counter-blast to
conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Magazine and The Quarterly Review.
Leigh Hunt's son, the editor Thornton Leigh Hunt, when later asked whether he
preferred Shelley or Byron as a man, replied:-
"On one occasion I had to fetch or take to Byron some copy for the paper which
my father, himself and Shelley, jointly conducted. I found him seated on a
lounge feasting himself from a drum of figs. He asked me if I would like a fig.
Now, in that, Leno, consists the difference, Shelley would have handed me the
drum and allowed me to help myself."
Death
Shelley's grave in RomeOn 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th
birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to
Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger,
foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with
the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name "Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was
chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle.
However, according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley changed it to "Ariel".
This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words "Don Juan" on the
mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look
much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat, was custom-built in Genoa for
Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on
Poems of 1822" (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never
seaworthy. In fact the boat was seaworthy, the sinking was due to the storm and
poor seamanship of the three on board.
There were those who believed his death was not accidental. Some said that
Shelley was depressed in those days and that he wanted to die; others that he
did not know how to navigate; others believed that some pirates mistook the boat
for Byron's and attacked him, and others have even more fantastical stories. There is a mass of evidence, though scattered and contradictory,
that Shelley may have been murdered for political reasons. Previously, at his
cottage in Tann-yr-allt in Wales, he had been surprised and apparently attacked
by a man who may have been an intelligence agent.
The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889); pictured in the centre
are, from left, Trelawny, Hunt and ByronIn the days before he died, he was
almost shot on two separate occasions. A British consul
defended the shooter from the first of these two incidents, keeping him from all
legal consequence.
Two other Englishmen were with Shelley on the boat. One was a retired Navy
officer, Edward Ellerker Williams; the other was a boatboy, Charles Vivien.
The boat was found ten miles (16 km) offshore, and it was suggested that one
side of the boat had been rammed and staved in by a much stronger vessel.
However, the liferaft was unused and still attached to the boat. The bodies were
found completely clothed, including boots.
Edward Onslow Ford's sculpture in the Shelley Memorial at University College,
OxfordIn his 'Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron', Trelawny
noted that the shirt that Williams's body was clad in was 'partly drawn over the
head, as if the wearer had been in the act of taking it off [...] and [he was
missing] one boot, indicating also that he had attempted to strip.' Trelawny
also relates a supposed deathbed confession by an Italian fisherman who claimed
to have rammed Shelley's boat in order to rob him, a plan confounded by the
rapid sinking of the vessel. The day after Shelley's death, the Tory newspaper
The Courier gloated: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been
drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or not."
Shelley's body washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations,
was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. A reclining statue of Shelley's body,
depicting him washed up onto the shore, created by sculptor Edward Onslow Ford
at the behest of Shelley's daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, is the
centerpiece of the Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. An 1889
painting by Louis Edouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley (also known as The
Cremation of Shelley), contains inaccuracies. In pre-Victorian times it was
English custom that women not attend funerals for health reasons. Mary Shelley
did not attend but was featured in the painting, kneeling at the left-hand side.
Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured.
Also, Trelawney, in his account of the recovery of Shelley's body, records that
"the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were
fleshless," and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the
cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the
cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to
the beach.
Shelley's heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny; Mary
Shelley kept it for the rest of her life, and it was later buried with the body
of Sir Percy Florence Shelley, their son. Shelley's ashes were interred
in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome under an ancient pyramid in the city walls.
His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium ("Heart of Hearts"), and, in
reference to his death at sea, a few lines of "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's
The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change /
Into something rich and strange." The grave site is the second in the cemetery.
Some weeks after Shelley had been put to rest, Trelawny had come to Rome, had
not liked his friend's position among a number of other graves, and had
purchased what seemed to him a better plot near the old wall. The ashes were
exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny had purchased the adjacent
plot, and over sixty years later his remains were placed there.
Shelley was eventually memorialized at the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey,
along with his old friends, Lord Byron and John Keats.
Family history
Ancestry
Shelley was a seventeenth generation descendant of Richard Fitzalan, 10th Earl
of Arundel through his son John Fitzalan, Marshall of England (d. 1379). John
was married to Baroness Eleanor Maltravers (1345 – 10 January, 1404/1405). Their
eldest son succeeded them as John FitzAlan, 2nd Baron Arundel (1365 – 1391). He
was himself married to Elizabeth le Despenser (d. 1 April/ 10 April 1408).
Elizabeth was a great-granddaughter of Hugh the younger Despenser by his second
son Edward Despenser of Buckland (d. 30 September 1342). Her parents were Sir
Edward Despenser, 1st Lord Despenser (24 March 1336 – 11 November 1375) and
Elizabeth Burghersh (d. 26 July 1409).
The eldest son of Elizabeth by Baron Maltravers was John Fitzalan, 13th Earl of
Arundel. Their third son was Sir Thomas Fitzalan of Beechwood. His own daughter
Eleanor Fitzalan was married to Sir Thomas Browne of Beechworth Castle. They had
four sons and one daughter, Katherine Browne, who in 1471 married Humphrey
Sackville of Buckhurst (1426 – 24 January 1488).
Their oldest son Richard Sackville of Buckhurst (1472 – 18 July 1524) was
married in 1492 to Isabel Dyggs. Their oldest son Sir John Sackville of
Buckhurst (1492 – 5 October 1557) was married to Margaret Boleyn. Margaret was a
sister to Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire. His younger brother Richard
Sackville had a less prominent marriage which resulted in the birth of Anne
Sackville. Anne herself was later married to Henry Shelley.
Henry became father to a younger Henry Shelley. This younger Henry had at least
three sons. The youngest of them Richard Shelley was later married to Joan Fuste,
daughter of John Fuste from Ichingfield. Their grandson John Shelley of Fen
Place was married himself to Helen Bysshe, daughter of Roger Bysshe. Their son
Timothy Shelley of Fen Place (born c. 1700) married widow Johanna Plum from New
York City. Timothy and Johanna were the great-grandparents of Percy.
Family
Percy was born to Sir Timothy Shelley (7 September 1753 – 24 April 1844) and his
wife Elizabeth Pilfold following their marriage in October, 1791. His father was
son and heir to Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet of Castle Goring (21 June 1731 –
6 January 1815) by his wife Mary Catherine Michell (d. 7 November 1760). His
mother was daughter of Charles Pilfold of Effingham. Through his paternal
grandmother Percy was great-grandson to Reverend Theobald Michell of Horsham.
He was the eldest of seven children. His younger siblings were:
John Shelley of Avington House (15 March 1806 – 11 November 1866; married on 24
March 1827 Elizabeth Bowen (d. 28 November 1889)
Mary Shelley (not his wife, née Godwin)
Elizabeth Shelley (d. 1831)
Hellen Shelley (d. 10 May 1885)
Margaret Shelley (d. 9 July 1887)
Shelley's uncle, brother to his mother Elizabeth Pilfold, was Captain John
Pilfold, a famous Naval Commander that served under Admiral Nelson during the
Battle of Trafalgar.
Descendants
Three children survived Shelley: Ianthe and Charles, his daughter and son by
Harriet; and Percy Florence, his son by Mary. Charles, who suffered from
tuberculosis, died in 1826 after being struck by lightning during a rain storm.
Percy Florence, who eventually inherited the baronetcy in 1844, died without
children. The only lineal descendants of the poet are therefore the children of
Ianthe.
Ianthe Eliza Shelley was married in 1837 to Edward Jeffries Esdaile of
Cothelstone Manor. The marriage resulted in the birth of two sons and a
daughter. Ianthe died in 1876.
Shelley's son Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife Jane, adopted Jane's niece
Bessie Florence Gibson. Bessie married Leopold James Yorke Campbell Scarlett,
and so the Scarletts (later the Scarlett/Abingers after their son, Shelley
Leopold Laurence Scarlett, succeeded his second cousin to become the fifth Baron
Abinger in 1903) became heirs to the Shelleys. Several members of the Scarlett
family were born at Percy Florence's seaside home 'Boscombe Manor', in
Bournemouth. The 1891 census shows Lady Shelley living at Boscombe Manor with
several great nephews.
Idealism
Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his
strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure
during his life and afterward. He became an idol of the next two or three or
even four generations of poets, including the important Victorian and
Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as Lord Byron, Henry David
Thoreau, William Butler Yeats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and poets in other
languages such as Jan Kasprowicz, Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy.
Nonviolence
Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's
passive resistance were influenced and inspired by Shelley's nonviolence in
protest and political action.It is known that Gandhi would often quote Shelley's
Masque of Anarchy, which has been called "perhaps the first modern statement of
the principle of nonviolent resistance."
Vegetarianism
Shelley wrote several essays on the subject, the most prominent of which being
"A Vindication of Natural Diet" and "On the Vegetable System of Diet".
Shelley, in heartfelt dedication to sentient beings, wrote: "If the use of
animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human society, how
unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised toward these
miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they
may drag out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their
bodies may be mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better
that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have
existed only to endure unmitigated misery"; "Never again may blood of bird or
beast/ Stain with its venomous stream a human feast,/ To the pure skies in
accusation steaming"; and "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by
culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or
digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not
excite intolerable loathing and disgust."
Shelley was a strong advocate for social justice for the 'lower classes'. He
witnessed many of the same mistreatments occurring in the domestication and
slaughtering of animals, and he became a fighter for the rights of all living
creatures that he saw being treated unjustly.
Legacy
Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his
passing. This differed from Lord Byron, who was popular among all classes during
his lifetime despite his radical views. For decades after his death, Shelley was
mainly only appreciated by the major Victorian poets, the pre-Raphaelites, the
socialists and the labour movement. One reason for this was the extreme
discomfort with Shelley's political radicalism which led popular anthologists to
confine Shelley's reputation to the relatively sanitised 'magazine' pieces such
as 'Ozymandias' or 'Lines to an Indian Air'.
He was admired by Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Nobel, C. S. Lewis, Karl Marx, Henry
Stephens Salt, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Isadora Duncan, Jiddu Krishnamurti ("Shelley is as sacred as the Bible."),
Upton Sinclair and William Butler Yeats. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergei
Rachmaninoff, Roger Quilter, John Vanderslice and Samuel Barber composed music
based on his poems.
Critics such as Matthew Arnold endeavoured to rewrite Shelley's legacy to make
him seem a lyricist and a dilettante who had no serious intellectual position
and whose longer poems were not worth study. Matthew Arnold famously described
Shelley as a 'beautiful but ineffectual angel'. This position contrasted
strongly with the judgement of the previous generation who knew Shelley as a
skeptic and radical.
Many of Shelley's works remained unpublished or little known after his death,
with longer pieces such as A Philosophical View of Reform existing only in
manuscript till the 1920s. This contributed to the Victorian idea of him as a
minor lyricist. With the inception of formal literary studies in the early
twentieth century and the slow rediscovery and re-evaluation of his oeuvre by
scholars such as K.N. Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Harold Bloom, the modern
idea of Shelley could not be more different.
Paul Foot, in his Red Shelley, has documented the pivotal role Shelley's works,
especially Queen Mab, have played in the genesis of British radicalism. Although
Shelley's works were banned from respectable Victorian households, his political
writings were pirated by men such as Richard Carlile who regularly went to jail
for printing 'seditious and blasphemous libel' (ie material proscribed by the
government) and these cheap pirate editions reached hundreds of activists and
workers throughout the nineteenth century.
In other countries such as India, Shelley's works both in the original and in
translation have influenced poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda
Das. A pirated copy of Prometheus Unbound dated 1835 is said to have been seized
in that year by customs at Bombay.
In 2005 the University of Delaware Press published an extensive two-volume
biography by James Bieri. In 2008 the Johns Hopkins University Press published
Bieri's 856-page one-volume biography, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography.
The rediscovery in mid-2006 of Shelley's long-lost 'Poetical Essay on the
Existing State of Things', as noted above and in footnote 6 below, has not been
followed up by the work being published or being made generally available on the
internet or anywhere else. At present (November 2009), its whereabouts is not
generally known. An analysis of the poem by the only person known to have
examined the whole work, appeared in the Times Literary Supplement: H. R.
Woudhuysen, "Shelley's Fantastic Prank", 12 July 2006.
In 2007, John Lauritsen published his book The Man Who Wrote "Frankenstein"
in which he argued that Percy Bysshe Shelley's contributions to the novel were
much more extensive than had previously been assumed. It has been known and not
disputed that Shelley wrote the Preface, although uncredited, and that he
contributed at least 4,000 words to the novel. Lauritsen sought to show
Shelley's role and contributions in the writing of the novel.
Shelley in fiction
Julian Rathbone's 2002 novel A Very English Agent, about a 19th century
government spy Charles Boylan, carries a lengthy section on Shelley's time in
Italy, in which Boylan tampers with Shelley's boat on orders from the British
government, thus causing his death. Rathbone though has stated that he is "a
novelist, not a historian" and that his work is very much a piece of fiction.
Shelley also features prominently in The Stress of Her Regard, a 1989 novel by
Tim Powers which proposes a secret history connecting the English Romantic
writers with the mythology of vampires and lamia.
He also makes an appearance in Jude Morgan's 2005 novel Passion, along with
Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and a wealth of other English Romantic
figures, though the novel's main focus is the lives of the women behind the
famous poets: Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley, and Fanny Brawne.
Mary and Percy Shelley also appear in a 2006 novel AngelMonster, by Veronica
Bennet. This book is a fictional version of Mary's and Percy's elopement and the
series of depressing events.
Shelley appears in Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. The book is a time
travel romance featuring Mary Shelley. A movie was made, based on the novel,
directed by Roger Corman and starring John Hurt and Bridget Fonda, in 1990.
Shelley makes an appearance in the alternative history novel The Difference
Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Only referenced in passing by
another character, in the novel's story he does not drown in Italy, but lives to
become a fierce critic (and perhaps saboteur) of Lord Byron's pro-industrial
'Radical party' government, for which he is arrested, declared insane, and
placed in a madhouse.
Shelley is portrayed as befriending cavalry officer Matthew Hervey while the
latter is in Rome with his sister trying to cope with the death of his wife, in
the 4th of Allan Mallinson's novels in the Hervey canon, A Call to Arms (2002).
A friendship between Shelley (social subversive, atheist, moral outcast) and
Hervey (pattern of martial loyalty and religious rectitude, albeit questioned in
his bereavement) seems at first view unlikely. But each sees in the other a good
man, and ultimately their agreement, often unspoken, on the travails and truths
of the human condition cements the bond between them.
Events in Shelley's and Byron's relationship at the house on Lake Geneva in 1816
have been fictionalized in film three times. He plays minor roles in: a 1986
British production, Gothic, directed by Ken Russell, and starring Gabriel Byrne,
Julian Sands, and Natasha Richardson; and a 1988 Spanish production, Rowing with
the Wind (Remando al viento), starring Lizzie McInnerny as Mary Shelley and Hugh
Grant as Lord Byron. Both these movies deal mostly with Mary Shelley's creation
of the Frankenstein novel, while Percy tends to be quite a minor character in
both films.
Shelley is, however, the main character in a movie entitled Haunted Summer, made
in 1988, starring Laura Dern and Eric Stoltz. It is set in the same time frame
as Rowing with the Wind. Though somewhat sensationalistic in some scenes,
Haunted Summer's strength has been called its three-dimensional characterization
of Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The psychology of these three is quite
accurate, realistic and vivid, and the movie uses words for its dialogue that
the three actually said during their lives. The movie also does a good job of
recreating Switzerland in 1816, where the four exiles lived.
Howard Brenton's play, Bloody Poetry, first performed at the Haymarket Theater
in Leicester in 1984, concerns itself with the complex relationships and
rivalries between Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Byron. Shelley's
cremation at Viareggio and the removal of his heart by Trelawny are described in
Tennessee Williams' play Camino Real by a fictionalized Lord Byron.
Percy, Mary and her sister Claire are some of the main characters in the novel,
The Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron, by Tom Holland (1995). The story
concerns Lord Byron, poet and friend of Percy Shelley. Their meeting and the
growth of their friendship are described, along with a hypothetical account of
the time the foursome shared in Switzerland. Holland provides a fictional
conclusion to the mysteries that surround Shelley's death.
Shelley's strange death and his claims of having met a Doppelganger served as
inspiration for the 1978 short story "Paper Boat", written by Tanith Lee.
Shelley is also the main character in Bulgarian poet Pencho Slaveykov's
philosophical poem, Heart of Hearts. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound is quoted by
Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode "Skin
of Evil". "A great poet once said, All spirits are enslaved that serve things
evil."
Shelley appears as himself in Peter Ackroyd's novel The Casebook of Victor
Frankenstein. In this, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as one of
Shelley's close friends during his early life and marriage to Harriet, in an
entertaining fictional nod to the doppelganger rumour.
Shelley is also the principal model for Marmion Herbert, one of the two male
protagonists in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Venetia (1837); the other protagonist
Lord Cadurcis is based on Lord Byron. Shelly's poem, "The Indian Serenade", is
recited in Chosen, a House of Night novel by P.C. Cast.
In the 1995 novel "Shelley's Heart" by Charles McCarry, Shelley is the
inspiration for a secret society that operates at the highest levels of
government and is responsible for stealing a presidential election. The members
of the society identify each other with the question and answer: What did
Trelawny snatch from the funeral pyre at Viareggio? ¬– Shelley’s heart.
Shelley in music
Many of Shelley's works have been the bases for musical compositions.
In 1852, German composer Robert Schumann set Shelley's poem "The Fugitives"
(1824) to music, as "Die Flüchtlinge", Op. 122, no. 2 (1852).
In 1895, American composer Charles Ives set the Shelley poem "The World's
Wanderers" (1824) to music.
In 1902, British composer Sir Granville Bantock wrote a tone poem for orchestra
based on the Shelley poem, The Witch of Atlas: Tone Poem for Orchestra No.5
after Shelley, based on The Witch of Atlas (1824), which was first performed on
September 10, 1902.
In 1910-11, English composer Sir Edward Elgar wrote a symphony (Symphony No. 2
in E flat major, Op. 63) inspired by the Shelley poem, "Song" (1821). On his
score of the symphony Elgar wrote the first line of Shelley's first stanza in
two different lines, at the bottom of Page 1. The score is now exhibited at the
Elgar Birthplace Museum in Broadheath near Worcester, England.
American composer Samuel Barber wrote the orchestral work Music for a Scene from
Shelley, Op. 7, in 1933, after reading Prometheus Unbound (1820).
The German-born composer Berthold Goldschmidt composed an opera in three acts
based on the Shelley play The Cenci in 1949 entitled Beatrice Cenci with a
libretto by Martin Esslin "after Shelley's verse drama The Cenci". The opera won
first prize in the Festival of Britain opera competition in 1951. The opera was
first performed in 1988. The first staged production of Beatrice Cenci in the UK
was by the Trinity College of Music on July 9–11, 1998.
In 1951, British classical composer Havergal Brian composed an opera based on
the Shelley play entitled The Cenci, an opera in eight scenes. The opera
premiered in 1997 in the UK.
In 1958, English composer Benjamin Britten published his song cycle Nocturne,
Op.60, which featured the song "On a poet's lips", with lyrics by Shelley from
Prometheus Unbound.
In 1971, Beatrix Cenci was premiered, an opera in two acts by Alberto Ginastera
to a Spanish libretto by the composer and William Shand, based on the Shelley
play.
Before an audience estimated at 250,000 to 300,000, Mick Jagger of The Rolling
Stones read a part of Adonais at the Brian Jones memorial concert at Hyde Park
on July 5, 1969. Jones, founder and guitarist of the Stones, had drowned July 3,
1969 in his swimming pool.
The English rock band The Cure has recorded a song entitled "Adonais" based on
the Shelley elegy as a B side single and on the collection Join The Dots: B
Sides and Rarities, 1978-2001 (2004). "Adonais" was originally the B-side to
"The 13th", released in 1996.
American art-rock collective The Pretty Petty Thieves released a limited-edition
(only 250 copies ever made available) EP entitled Percy Shelley's Heart in 2006.
The English psychedelic rock band of Arrowe Hill recorded a song called "Cor
Cordium (Bysshe Goes to Bel-Air)" based on the death of Shelley, which was
included on their fourth LP 'A Few Minutes in the Absolute Elsewhere' in
February 2010.
Major works
(1810) Zastrozzi
(1810) Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire
(1810) Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson: Being Poems Found Amongst the
Papers of That Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786
(1811) St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian
(1811) The Necessity of Atheism
(1812) The Devil's Walk: A Ballad
(1813) Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
(1814) A Refutation of Deism: in a Dialogue
(1815) Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude
(1815) Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit (chapbook)
(1816) Mont Blanc
(1817) Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (text)
(1817) Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City
(1817) The Revolt of Islam, A Poem, in Twelve Cantos: A Vision of the Nineteenth
Century
(1817) History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland,
Germany, and Holland (with Mary Shelley)
(1818) Ozymandias (text)
(1818) Plato, The Banquet (or Symposium) translation from Greek into English
(1818) Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Preface and uncredited
contributions to the text)
(1818) Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue
(1819) The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts
(1819) Ode to the West Wind (text)
(1819) The Masque of Anarchy
(1819) Men of England
(1819) England in 1819
(1819) The Witch of Atlas
(1819) A Philosophical View of Reform
(1819) Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation
(1820) Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts
(1820) To a Skylark
(1820) Oedipus Tyrannus; Or, Swellfoot The Tyrant: A Tragedy in Two Acts
(1821) Adonaïs
(1821) Hellas, A Lyrical Drama
(1821) A Defence of Poetry (first published in 1840)
(1822) The Triumph of Life (unfinished, published in 1824 after Shelley died)
(1822) The Cloud
Short prose works
"The Assassins, A Fragment of a Romance" (1814)
"The Coliseum, A Fragment" (1817)
"The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment"
"Una Favola (A Fable)" (1819, originally in Italian)
Essays
Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811)
A Defence of Poetry
On Love
On Life in a Future State
On The Punishment of Death
Speculations on Metaphysics
Speculations on Morals
On Christianity
On the Literature, the Arts and the Manners of the Athenians
On the Symposium, or Preface to The Banquet Of Plato
On Friendship
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