Reading Shelley's Interventionist
Poetry, 1819-1820

* 12.40. 

1  Steven E. Jones appreciates the importance of Swellfoot to Shelley's oeuvre, and he regards the satire "as a transitional work in Shelley's career, as he moves away from the confident, exhortative energies of The Mask of Anarchy and toward the darker, more deeply ironic vision of The Triumph of Life" (148).
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2  One speech by the Semichorus of Swine in Swellfoot echoes Shelley's sentiments rather closely:

I vote Swellfoot and Iona
Try the magic test together;
Whenever royal spouses bicker,
Both should try the magic liquor.
(1.128-131)

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3   Here, I follow traditional binary distinctions in coding revolution as feminine since it is deployed in opposition to hegemonic, or masculine, authority: in patriarchal societies, authority is always masculine, and alternatives to authority must, by their very oppositional status, be feminine.
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4   Jones points to Shelley's letter of 30 June 1820 to the Gisbornes as "the germ of Swellfoot the Tyrant, including all the salient topics—the perceived financial crisis, the carnivalesque violence, the display of the royal domestic dispute, [. . .] and the seriousness of the people's plight [. . .] incongruously mixed in with the ridiculous events" (128).
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5  White reports that A Speech From the Throne went through an astonishing 50 editions in 1820 ("Shelley's Swell-Foot" 339). The sheer popularity of the pamphlet suggests that Shelley probably knew it. In addition to its use of the phrase "swinish multitude," the following lines from the pamphlet seem to resonate throughout Shelley's satire:

Reform, reform the swinish rabble cry,
Meaning of course, rebellion, blood and riot.
Audacious rascals! you, my Lords, and I
Know 'tis their duty to be starved in quiet.
(qtd. in White, "Shelley's Swell-Foot" 339)

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6  White points to an article in the 30 June 1820 Examiner in which a chorus of pigs "was used as an instrument of satire against George IV by Professor Porson" (225).
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7  The use of the pig as a symbol for the abuse of power is, of course, not specific to the nineteenth century; indeed, George Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1945) employs pigs to the same end.
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8  The sedition trials involving a number of radical pressmen—among them William Hone, Thomas Jonathan Wooler, and Richard Carlile—were topics of much discussion in early nineteenth-century radical circles, and Shelley would certainly have been aware of these well-publicized contests between the government and the radical press. His decision to pit pressmen against the government in Swellfoot the Tyrant may thus have arisen from contemporary contests for authority.
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9  See Irigaray (192-197).
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10  Jones argues that Iona's exit "suggests that any deeper and more extensive [political] change is yet far in the future" (143). His reading of the satire's end aligns Swellfoot the Tyrant with what I will characterize in my (book-length) readings of Epipsychidion, Laon and Cythna, and Prometheus Unbound as the political pessimism that pervades Shelley's so-called "visionary" works.
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11  In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Francis Grose defines the phrase "green bag" as follows: "An attorney; those gentlemen carry their clients’ deeds in a green bag, and, it is said, when they have no deeds to carry frequently fill them up with an old pair of breeches, or any other trumpery, to give themselves the appearance of business."
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