-
By the time he came to add act IV to the original
three acts of Prometheus Unbound in late 1819,
Percy Bysshe Shelley had amassed a diverse set of
musical experiences, ranging from the first London
performance of Rossini’s Il barbiere di
Siviglia in March of 1818 to the grand festivities
or funzioni in Rome during Easter week in
1819.[1]
From manuscript evidence, it is not clear what induced
Shelley to add a highly lyrical fourth act as well as
several lyric insertions to act II of Prometheus
Unbound. Nevertheless, it seems probable that
studying the dramas of Calderón with Maria
Gisborne combined with the highly musical atmosphere of
Livorno encouraged Shelley to include further lyrical
elements in his drama. In a letter to his friend,
Thomas Jefferson Hogg on 25 July 1819, Shelley
writes:
Let me recommend you who know Spanish to read some
plays of their great dramatic genius Calderón.
. . . We have a house very near the Gisbornes, and it
is from Mrs. Gisborne that I learnt Spanish enough to
read these plays. . . . We see her every evening. . .
. I have a little room here like Scythrop’s
tower, at the top of the house, commanding a view of
the sea and the Apennines, and the plains between
them. The vine-dressers are singing all day mi
rivedrai, ti revedrò, but by no means in
an operatic style. . . (PSL, II, 105).
Shelley’s reference to peasants singing the
refrain of "Di tanti palpiti," arguably the most famous
aria from Rossini’s Tancredi, reveals both
the extent of the poet’s acquaintance with music
at this time as well as the widespread popularity of
opera and Rossini in Italy. As the sister-in-law of the
composer and pianist Muzio Clementi, Mrs.
Gisborne’s own musical talents and connections
were also considerable. In this regard, it seems
unlikely that Shelley could have read Calderón
with her without being made aware of the musical nature
of many of the Spanish poet’s works, several of
which are classified as semi-operas, including his
version of the Prometheus myth, La estatua de
Prometeo.[2]
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While critics and reviewers of the past two hundred
years have struggled to find a suitable analogy for
Prometheus Unbound in literature, it seems
possible that Shelley had non-literary models in mind
when he was writing what he described to Thomas Love
Peacock as "a lyric & classical drama" (PSL,
II, 43). Indeed, the world of music provides a clear
parallel to Shelley’s lyrical drama in the form
of the Italian opera buffa that so delighted the
poet and his friends during the London seasons in 1817
and 1818. Ronald Tetreault remarks that Prometheus
Unbound is a "lyrical drama whose form derives
ultimately from the union of poetry and music in Greek
tragedy, but whose closest contemporary equivalent was
the opera, especially the musical comedy of Mozart"
(145). Taking Tetreault’s observation one
step further, I would like to argue that the
organization of discourse and the specific dramatic
arrangement of Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound have strong affinities with the Italian
operas of his day, particularly the works of Mozart and
Rossini.
II.
-
In contrast to the more through-composed structure
of the later nineteenth-century Romantic operas of
Verdi and Wagner, yet more continuous in nature than
Baroque opera seria, the opera buffa of
the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century are
composed of numbers (arias, duets, ensembles, etc.),
which are linked together by sections of sung dialogue.
Loosely based on the configuration of dialogue and
chorus in Greek tragedy, the main components of the
Italian opera are "Recitative, by which the
business of action of the Opera, the principal thing in
all dramatic performances, is carried on, and . . .
Airs or Songs, by which the sentiments
and passions of the Dramatis Personae are
expressed" (Brown, Preface). Although in his Letters
on the Italian Opera (1789) John Brown lists seven
types of aria,[3]
most arias of this period possess the same three-part
da capo format: first section, second section,
first section repeated. While this format is generally
non-strophic, the ternary structure of aria makes two
or three stanza poems highly suitable for musical
adaptation. In Shelley’s day, arias provided the
main method through which singers demonstrated their
talent, and indeed, were often the only parts of an
opera to which most of the audience paid attention.
During this time, recitative arguably was of far less
performative import than aria; but, as the principle
method through which action occurred or was related in
the Italian opera, recitative nonetheless formed an
essential element. Indeed, Leigh Hunt, like Joseph
Addison,[4]
finds recitative "more natural, in an Opera, than
common speech" because, in accordance with the supposed
common origin of speech and song, "it is more natural
that [beings in an Opera] should sing always, that that
they should burst out into a song occasionally"
(Fenner, Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism, 135).
In his Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature, A.W. Schlegel writes that the "learned
and artificial modulation" of recitative is less
"measured" than the declamation of Greek tragedy, to
which it is often compared (Schlegel, I, 69-70).
Recitative comes in two main forms, semplice or
secco, which comprises most of the dialogue, and
accompagnato or obbligato, which is
reserved for passages requiring particular dramatic
emphasis, though fully spoken parts (parlante),
were not uncommon, particularly in Mozart.
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Similar to the interaction between recitative and
aria in Italian opera, the first two acts of
Prometheus Unbound alternate between straight,
unrhymed blank verse passages and rhymed, or at least
rhythmical, lyric insertions that are typographically
and metrically set apart from the surrounding blank
verse. Although many other plays, including
Byron’s Manfred and Goethe’s
Faust, similarly separate sung portions from the
surrounding dialogue, few dramas outside of opera so
fully—and successfully, one might
add—integrate lyrical and discursive language
together into a comprehensive formula to the effect
that Shelley does in his lyrical drama. The editors of
the recent Longman edition of Shelley’s poetry
note: "[t]his alternation of blank verse with complex
lyric passages shadows the dramatic device of an
alternation between the relatively static dramatic
exchanges, and choric elements, which Shelley adapts
from Greek tragic drama" (TPS, II, 470).Yet, as
Havergal Brian no doubt realized in his now lost
setting of acts I and II,[5]
the alternating pattern of discursive and lyrical
elements in the first half of Shelley’s drama
adapts well into operatic form, and indeed corresponds
to it in many ways. Acts III and IV, however, prove
more difficult, the latter for the profusion of its
lyrical forms, the former for the complete absence of
them. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the four acts of
Prometheus Unbound are structurally coherent:
acts I and II consist of a fairly regular alternation
between discursive and lyrical language; act III, which
is almost fully discursive, balances out act IV, which
is almost entirely lyrical. Also, the middle two
acts are subdivided into five and four scenes,
respectively; whereas, no scene divisions interrupt the
dramatic flow of acts I and IV. In this four act
organization, Asia’s meeting with Demogorgon in
the fourth scene of act II stands directly at the
structural and ideological center of the work.
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From the very beginning of Prometheus
Unbound, Shelley emphasizes the dramatic
force—yet radical limitations—of language,
particularly discursive language, and its
representational powers. Realizing the conceptual
inadequacy of language to relate emotions and, to some
extent, to present the story he is attempting to tell,
Shelley utilizes music to deepen characterization, and
to control dramatic time through "contrast, repetition,
balance, control of pace, and multiple relations among
aural elements" (Corse 15). In this way, music in
Prometheus Unbound has three structural
functions: as a stage device, as an internal dramatic
catalyst, and as simple emotional expression in the
form of song itself.
-
The action of act I revolves around a figuratively
de-voiced and thus disempowered Prometheus pitted
against his own inability to recall and thereby revoke
his curse. Prometheus’s opening speech sets the
tone for a series of lyric episodes and dramatic
exchanges which reverse the traditional dramatic
functions of song and dialogue. Dramatically speaking,
very little changes in the course of act I, with
Prometheus remaining bound to the precipice at the
act’s end. However, instead of being placed on a
stage of physical action, everything occurs on the
figurative stage of the mind, specifically that of
Prometheus. Appropriate to a scene full of dissonance,
for the majority of act I, Shelley’s poetic form
inverts the operatic functions of recitative and aria:
much of the blank verse is static and emotive, whereas
most of the lyrical passages narratively and
structurally drive the "business of action," which is
Prometheus’s mental transformation to a fully
free and liberated mind, foretelling the end of
Jupiter’s reign of tyranny. Ronald Tetreault
compares the structure of Prometheus’s opening
speech to "the large-scale ternary design of the
traditional aria," observing "sustained monologues are
common on the operatic stage, where music encourages
and supports the total expression of the inner being"
(149). Although critics often cite the sustained
monologues of Romantic drama as evidence of its
untheatricality, Stuart Curran comments: "the great age
of the London theater, from Garrick to Kean, treated
such speeches as we do arias in opera" ("Shelleyan
Drama" 72). While Prometheus’ opening lines
demonstrate a strong declamatory impulse, the emotional
outpourings of the Titan’s blank verse
nevertheless functions less like its operatic
equivalent, recitative, and more like aria. The focus
of Prometheus’s discourse is primarily
mentalistic and emotional, whereas the dialogue of Ione
and Panthea, who speak almost exclusively throughout
act I in the lyrical language of rhyme, seems to
fulfill the function of recitative.
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The climax of this inversion between the discursive
and the lyrical occurs during the episode with Mercury
and the antiphonal chorus of Furies. Shelley
deliberately seems to place this part immediately after
the lyrical passage that includes the Phantasm of
Jupiter’s repetition of the curse, a speech that,
as I will discuss, in a staging would almost
necessitate the dramatic emphasis of recitativo
obbligato. It is important to note that
Prometheus’s renunciation of the curse occurs in
lyrical form, not blank verse. Indeed, his response
maintains the stanzaic form of the curse itself, as
does the Earth’s corresponding lament that his
"defence lies fallen and vanquishèd"(I,
311).[6]
Without a break in the lyrical passage, though no
longer following the ten-line format of the curse,
after two Echoes repeat the last phrase of the
Earth’s lament, Ione and Panthea speak their last
sets of lyrical verse for over three hundred lines when
they narrate the arrival of Mercury and the Furies.
Panthea’s final rhymed[7]
statement that Prometheus "looks as ever, firm, not
proud" in the face of these new torments immediately
makes way for a jarring switch to blank verse at the
voice of the First Fury who proclaims: "Ha! I scent
life!"(I, 337). Throughout the subsequent
dialogue between Mercury, Prometheus and the Furies,
while Ione and Panthea ostensibly maintain their
narrative function, the chaotic Furies preempt the
Oceanides of their linguistic vehicle: song. Although
the Furies’ torments are ultimately futile, for a
short while discord and dissonance rule the scene. The
Furies, in their raucousness, subvert the dynamics of
normal choric oration through taunting Prometheus with
a revisionist history of perverted and horrifying
images from the past, present and future (I, 539-77).
Whereas the Furies’ verse maintains a regular
rhyme scheme and forms a coherent antiphonal structure
of response and chorus, the mocking tone of their words
moves their chorus away from the emotiveness of aria
into the narrative realm of fiction that in the
opera buffa is largely the domain of
recitative.
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In contrast to the chorus of the Furies, the
remaining lyrical passages of act I, which comprise the
sextet of "subtle and fair" Spirits who come to comfort
Prometheus, seem to restore the normal dynamics of
narrative and song to the drama. After the Furies
disappear, Prometheus speaks of the mental anguish of
the Furies’ tortures, and warns the Oceanides of
the potential misleadingness of language and the visual
imagination, observing, "[t]here are two woes:/ To
speak, and to behold"(I, 656-7). With the
representational powers of language under question, it
seems logical that the Earth should choose music as the
vehicle to comfort Prometheus. Structurally and
symbolically, the combination of the Furies’
songs immediately followed by the sweet but sad sextet
of Spirits provides balance and resolution to the end
of act I. That is, to take Shelley’s comments on
John Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Revolt
of Islam out of context, the congregation of voices
at the end of act I, as a precursor to the universal
symphony of act IV, functions like a smaller version of
a concerted finale in an opera buffa "when that
tremendous concordant discord sets up from the
orchestra, and everybody talks and sings at once"
(Letter to Charles Ollier, PSL, II, 128). Although this
device was a dying tradition by the early nineteenth
century, Shelley was exposed to the concerted finale
through Mozart, who made extensive use of it,
especially at the end of acts II and IV of Le nozze
di Figaro and the end of act I of Don
Giovanni.[8]
Although in Mozart’s operas, this type of
mechanism involves a rapid succession of voices
interspersed with choric elements, the segmental
structure of the concerted finale makes the distinction
between individual voices readily apparent to the
audience (Robinson 10-11). Shelley’s structuring
of the Furies’ lyrical interlude and the songs of
the Spirits seems to reflect this type of organization
through the mixture of individually sung verses and
alternating chorus. Returning the function of
describing emotions to the aria, the combination of
harmonious voices in the Spirits’ chorus and
their individual verses neatly sum up the main themes
of act I while prefiguring the music of act II that
draws Asia and Panthea towards the cave of Demogorgon.
Reminiscent of the supernatural beings under the
control of Manfred in Byron’s play of that name,
Shelley’s "sweet but sad" Spirits sing—in
turn and then in chorus—of the same evil in the
world that the Furies celebrate, yet the Spirits mourn
it.[9]
Through this acknowledgment, the Spirits move the drama
forward with their hopeful visions of the future. All
of act I, then, concerns the cyclicality of time
through the acts of recalling, revoicing, and
retelling. Thus, while act I superficially seems the
most like Greek tragedy with its alternating choruses
and dialogue, its emphasis on mental action and its
unique lyrical structure more closely resemble the
means and composition of late eighteenth century
opera buffa.
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In act II, Shelley continues—and indeed
amplifies—this operatic alternation between
dialogue and lyric that dominates act I. Although
subdivided into scenes like act III, act II parallels
the dramatic format of act I, beginning with
Asia’s opening speech through her dialogue with
Demogorgon to end with her highly operatic lyrical
exchange with Prometheus in the guise of a "Voice (in
the air, singing)." Yet, while the process of
Asia’s mental transformation mirrors that of
Prometheus, there is a relatively significant amount of
dramatic action during the course of the second act, a
fact which reveals that the process of
Prometheus’ liberation has been set into motion,
even though his unbinding does not occur until act III.
As a result, Shelley turns to actual music in act II in
order to not only set the scene, but also to explain
the meaning of the text and thus to establish dramatic
action. Here, the unique relationship between words and
music in opera provides useful dramatic comparison
because "[p]erhaps the single most powerful resource of
opera as a dramatic form is its capacity to use musical
means not only to advance the action in time, but to
deepen it" (Williams). For example, in the fifth scene
of act II, Shelley utilizes the expressiveness of music
to counterbalance and emphasize the narrative weight of
Asia’s pivotal encounter with Demogorgon in scene
four. Although Asia, like Prometheus, speaks mainly in
blank verse, Shelley’s consistent connection of
Asia with images of music, and in turn, with love,
prepares the reader for her aria-like lyrical discourse
with the spirit of Prometheus at the end of the fifth
scene. Suspending the action at its highest point of
dramatic tension, Asia’s love song becomes a form
of music itself as it depicts the sensual immediacy of
her love and spiritual blending with Prometheus. In
their duet, the songs of Asia and Prometheus in
combination symbolize their status as a spiritual
whole, a lyrical microcosm of the universal symphony of
act IV. Stuart Curran observes: "The entire act is
epitomized by Asia’s song about singing, a
lyrical contemplation of the nature of lyricism,
endlessly creative, spontaneous, timeless, the type of
paradise. . ." ("Poetic Form" 201). Through this,
Shelley seems to borrow from opera buffa the
function of aria to convey emotions, utilizing music as
pure emotional effusion but also as a more effective
means through which to express his metaphysical ideas
of time and the universe. Perceiving the
representational limits of language, Shelley makes use
of music as a structural tool to expand the expressive
capacity of language in poetry. Joseph Kerman writes:
"in spite of all the flexibility and clarity of poetry,
even the most passionate of speeches exists on a level
of emotional reserve that music automatically passes.
Music can be immediate and simple in the presentation
of emotional status or shades. In an opera, people can
give themselves over to sensibility; in a play nobody
ever quite stops thinking. . ." (Kerman 6).
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Throughout acts I and II, Shelley’s use of
lyrical and discursive elements thus exposes the
tenuous balance between dialogue and song within
Prometheus Unbound, revealing a fundamental
tension between words and music that his drama shares
with the Italian opera of his time (Conrad 4). Lyrical
parts provide Shelley with a unique, almost modernist,
method through which to play with narrative perspective
and control dramatic timing. Shelley’s careful
organization of lyrical insertions in these first two
acts among elements of blank verse emphasizes
music’s intimate relation to language and poetry,
and, in the realm of his play, music’s potential
power to affect and indeed direct the soul towards its
destiny.
III.
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More explicit operatic elements come into play in
the later acts of Prometheus Unbound. By act III
of Shelley’s mental drama, music moves out of the
realm of the drama, and indeed of the theater itself,
into the larger external world. In act III, music
shifts from being a mere dramatic catalyst or
atmospheric ornament to be the literal mode through
which change and action occurs. To call attention to
the universal transformation at work, Shelley keeps the
language of this act entirely discursive. In keeping
with this alteration in the depiction of music, I will
move my analysis up a level to consider thematic and
stylistic correspondences between the opera
buffa and elements of act III and of
Shelley’s lyrical drama as a whole. Despite the
contention of an entry in a recent edition of the
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
that the utilization of music in Romantic poetry has
little or nothing in common with the "logical, witty"
music being written by the composers of their day, such
as Mozart, Haydn and Rossini, I argue that the
aesthetics and structure of Romantic drama are more
closely related to the works of their musical
contemporaries than critics generally allow (Winn 805).
Although choice of subject matter and mode of
dramatization greatly differs from work to work, dramas
like Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,
Byron’s Don Juan and the opera
buffa of Mozart, particularly Le nozze di
Figaro and Don Giovanni, share a similar
aesthetic through their methods of characterization,
their ironic presentation of the oppressiveness of
tyrannical social systems, and their use of multiple
genres to add narrative complexity.
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At the height of its popularity in England in 1817
to 1818, the Italian opera buffa offered
audiences a different kind of dramatic experience than
anything else found in the London theaters, adding
stress to crisis for both legitimate and non-legitimate
playhouses. The lack of successful native-born British
playwrights, especially after the death of Sheridan in
July of 1817, had already forced managers to
reintroduce old favorites instead of new plays.
These often included Shakespeare, a straightforward
Sheridanian comedy of manners like School for
Scandal (1777), which Shelley disliked (Peacock
45), or one of the gothic German tragedies, like
Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), which
Coleridge reviled and Wordsworth called "sickly and
stupid" (249). In the rare case of a new hit, a theater
would stage repeat performances of the same play for
many nights running. It was the age of the great
actors, like Kean, Garrick and Siddons, and for the
operatic stage, of Catalani, Ambrogetti, Naldi and
Fodor. Of the few British writers whose plays made it
to the stage, the works of Byron, Coleridge and Maturin
enjoyed some degree of success, though reviews were
mixed concerning their dramatic merits. Calling
Coleridge and Maturin "the most ambitious writers of
the modern romantic drama," William Hazlitt comments
that in Remorse, "Coleridge’s metaphysics
are lost in moonshine," while in Maturin’s
Bertram and Don Manuel, "the genius of
poetry crowned with faded flowers, and seated on the
top of some high Gothic battlement, in vain breathes
its votive accents amidst the sighing of the forest
gale and the vespers of midnight monks" ("The Conquest
of Taranto," CWWH). Although he deplores the
atmosphere of the opera as fake and elitist and
considers it linguistically and musically inaccessible
to the average listener, Hazlitt celebrates the
beauties of Mozart’s operas, remarking, "[his]
music should seem to come from the air, and return to
it" ("The Italian Opera," CWWH). However, for
Hunt, Peacock and Shelley, like Augustus Schlegel
before them, it is the very refinement and
artificiality of the Italian opera that makes it such
an attractive spectacle. Schlegel writes:
The fantastic magic of the opera consists altogether
in the luxurious competition of the different means,
and in the perplexity of an overpowering superfluity.
. . . This fairy world is not peopled by real men,
but by a singular kind of singing creatures. Neither
is it any disadvantage to us that the opera is
conveyed in a language which is not generally
understood; the text is altogether lost in the music,
and the language the most harmonious and musical. . .
(I, 69-79).
The fact that only a select part of the audience
held this view of the opera did nothing to destroy its
popularity, and indeed, served to bolster its
reputation amongst the aristocracy. Theodore Fenner
notes that between 1816 and 1818, performances of
Mozart made up well over fifty-percent of all
performances at the King’s Theatre ("Opera in
London," 140). In the early nineteenth century, to
watch an Italian opera thus "was to be immersed in a
world of artifice, a town pleasure as opposed to a
country pursuit. On the operatic stage, painting,
music, and poetry came together with architecture,
sculpture, and the dance in a sublime interfusion of
the abstract and plastic arts" (Tetreault 146).
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In this world of artifice, the comic operas of
Mozart and Rossini play upon the simple human divisions
of class and gender, presenting a highly stylized
atmosphere wherein wit and intelligence rule and the
good always win. Less straightforward than the comedy
of manners in which characters generally can be
classified as either good or evil, the opera
buffa or dramma giocoso contains three types
of characters of varying moral tendencies: parti
serie or "serious" characters, usually of the upper
class, who display "qualities like earnestness,
courage, steadfastness, sensitive and passionate
feelings concerning love and honour[;]" parti
buffe or "comic" characters, often from the lower
class, who demonstrate "inconstancy, cowardice, coarse
feelings, deviousness and/or servility[;]" and one or
two mezzi caratteri, or "middle" characters, who
possess "either no facets of personality that
identified them as serious or comic or else facets of
both" (Robinson 9). While these divisions of character
can be found in literature, in opera the music adds
dimension and depth to language, establishing a method
of characterization that is more stylistically complex
than spoken drama. In opera buffa, perhaps not
surprisingly, it is the mezzi caratteri whom
audiences and critics find intriguing, the most famous
example being il dissoluto, Mozart’s Don
Giovanni. A character whom critics have likened to
figures ranging from Milton’s Satan to Hamlet,
the aristocratic, dissipated Don Giovanni is morally
ambiguous and chameleon-like, able to mingle equally
with upper and lower classes, altering his attitude
depending upon the company he is with. As Leporello
tells Elvira in his aria "Madamina, il catalogo e
questo," Giovanni is a true democrat, wooing and
seducing women of all classes, shapes and sizes. While
Byron’s poem Don Juan presents a youthful,
merry Juan at the height of his profligacy, Da
Ponte’s story to Mozart’s music details the
events leading up to Giovanni’s death, as he
willingly goes to hell, refusing to repent for his
crimes, including his seductions and the murder of the
Commendatore. Despite his licentiousness, Don Giovanni
is a well-educated man of the Enlightenment, an
egotistical hedonist yet a skeptic, who fervently
believes things are as he can perceive within the reach
of his senses, a trait that fuels his lack of remorse
towards any of his evil deeds.
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Many critics have compared the character of Don
Giovanni to Prometheus, who also suffers because he
refuses to give into a higher power. As Stuart Curran
has argued, the Titan Prometheus, depicted in
Aeschylus’ Prometheus Vinctus, is a
particularly pervasive political icon for the Romantic
period, representing the ultimate triumph of liberty
through steadfastness and courage against the evils of
a tyrannical regime (Curran, "The Political
Prometheus," 260-284). Goethe, Byron, Shelley, and
other artists such as Salvatore Víganò
and Beethoven all wrote or composed significant works
on the subject. In a letter to Murray in 1816, Byron
notes the significant impact of the Titan upon
Manfred and his other works: "The Prometheus if
not exactly in my plan has always been so much in my
head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all
or anything that I have written" (Letter to John
Murray, BLJ, IV, 174, n.1). While seemingly a
large conceptual jump, Coleridge points out in chapter
23 of Biographia Literaria that the figure of
Prometheus in chains and the unrueful Don Giovanni are
similarly unyielding and noble in the face of torment.
Commenting on the final scene of Shadwell’s
Jacobean drama The Libertine (1676), Coleridge
writes: "[w]ho also can deny a portion of sublimity to
the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the
last fearful trial, like a second Prometheus?" (II,
219) Although Coleridge is speaking of
Aeschylus’s drama, it is nearly impossible to
read excerpts from Shadwell’s play of Don John
(Giovanni), which is based upon the same sources in
Tirso and Molière as Da Ponte’s libretto,
and not think of Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound. Like other dramas of the seventeenth
century, Shadwell’s drama bears much resemblance
to the masques of Ben Jonson, and in this capacity
contains many musical elements, including a dancing
chorus of devils who sing in a verse structure similar
to that of Shelley’s Furies: "Let 'em come, let
'em come,/ To an eternal dreadful doom,/ Let 'em come,
let 'em come."
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Yet, it is Mozart’s operatic treatment of the
character of Don Giovanni which more closely registers
with Shelley’s Prometheus and, also, his mirror
opposite, Jupiter, especially in the latter’s
descent into Hell at the beginning of act III. Like
Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound includes characters of
differing depth and moral inclination that fit well
into the comic formula of the opera buffa. Asia,
Panthea, Ione, and the unearthly Spirits and Hours
strewn throughout the drama clearly are "serious"
characters representing the affirmative forces of love
and hope, whereas the Furies, as the representatives of
evil and tyranny, are "comic" figures. However, the
characters of Prometheus, Jupiter, and Demogorgon are
more dramatically complex and ambiguous: in their
doubling of each other, they qualify more definitively
as mezzi caratteri like Don Giovanni than any of
the more serious or comic characters that surround
them. For instance, Jupiter’s final speech in act
III, scene i, which relates his descent into the abyss
with Demogorgon, mimics the progression of
Prometheus’ dialogue throughout act I. With his
cries "Ai! Ai!/ . . . I sink . . . /Dizzily
down—ever, forever, down," a disempowered Jupiter
is cast down from his throne, the subject rather than
the tyrant of fate embodied in the figure of Demogorgon
or "Eternity" (III, i, 79-83;52). Throughout
Jupiter’s dialogue, Shelley continues to make use
of the volcanic imagery associated throughout act II
with Demogorgon and revolutionary change. Although the
scene is serious, Shelley’s presentation of
Jupiter’s descent is ironic, further revealing
Prometheus and Jupiter as essentially opposite versions
of the same character. Stuart Curran calls
Jupiter’s dialogue "the stuff of grand heroic
drama, full of pomp and posture, whose false style
betrays the true nature of the despot. . . . It is the
fall of tragedy itself" (Curran, Poetic Form and
British Romanticism, 201). Indeed, in the face of
his punishment, Jupiter, the tyrant, suddenly becomes a
slave, appealing for mercy from Prometheus, who, at
this point, still remains enchained in the Caucasus.
Once he realizes that mercy is impossible, Jupiter,
like Prometheus, is ultimately noble, resolving himself
to his fate, even as he is slowly swallowed up by flame
and smoke.
-
Both the tone and the imagery of Shelley’s
depiction of Jupiter’s fall from power are
reminiscent of Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell
in the penultimate scene of Mozart’s opera. In
this scene, Don Giovanni, refusing to repent for his
crimes, willingly accompanies the Ghost-Statue of the
Commendatore to Hell:
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(Scene 17. Don Giovanni, Leporello and the
statue of the Commendatore; then off-stage
chorus. Don Giovanni returns followed by the
Commendatore.)
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Commendatore
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. . . So answer me—will you dine
With me, in your turn?
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. . . Rispondimi: verrai.
Tu a cenar meco?
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Leporello
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(from a distance,
trembling, to the Commendatore)
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Oh no!
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Oibó!
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Too busy – please excuse him.
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Tempo no ha. . . scusate.
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Don Giovanni
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And why should I refuse him?
For fear I do not know.
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A torto di viltate
Tacciato mai saró!
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. . .
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No man shall call me coward,
I have resolved: I’ll go!
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Ho fermo il core in petto,
No[n] ho timor: verró!
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. . .
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...I despise repentance.
Off with you! Leave my sight!
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No, no, ch'io non mi pento:
Vanne lontan da me!
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. . .
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Commendatore
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Now dawns your endless night!
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Ah, tempo più non v'è!
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(Fire and earthquake all around. The
Commendatore disappears.)
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. . .
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Don Giovanni
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Who rends my soul with suffering?
Who turns my blood to bitterness?
Must madness, pain, and terror
Possess me evermore?
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Chi l'anima mi lacera! . . .
Chi m'agita le viscere! . . .
Che strazio! ohimé! che smania!
Che inferno! . . . che terror! . . .
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. . .
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Invisible Chorus
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Take the reward of evil.
Worse yet remains in store!
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Tutto a tue colpe è poco.
Vieni: c'è un mal peggior!
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(The flames increase. Don Giovanni sinks
into them.)(102-4).
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When staged, the effect of Don Giovanni being
engulfed by the flames of Hell is dramatically
formidable, as the D-minor chords of the orchestra
reinforce the happenings on the stage with a powerful
crescendo of blaring brass. It is worth noting that in
the scene of Mozart’s opera previous to Don
Giovanni’s fall, a similar ominous clamor of
D-minor chords accompanies the voice of the
Ghost-Statue of the Commendatore, whose entrance and
dramatic recitative are analogous to the arrival and
speech of the Phantasm of Jupiter in act I of
Shelley’s lyrical drama. Although Peacock lists
Figaro as Shelley’s favorite opera,
Shelley saw Don Giovanni at least six times
between 1817 and 1818. Seated in a box at the
King’s Theatre in 1817, it would have been
difficult for Shelley to ignore this impressive ending.
The parallels between Giovanni’s descent and
Jupiter’s fall are striking. While no scene
directions accompany Jupiter’s descent in act
III, Shelley’s imagery suggests the eruption of
earthquake and fire. Also, while Prometheus
Unbound contains few, if any, sexual overtones, the
dissolute Don Giovanni, like Jupiter, represents a kind
of tyranny—in his case, an excess of the
appetites of the senses over reason. Through the moral
of Mozart’s opera— "Questo è il fin
di chi fa mal" ("Sinners end as they begin")
(106) found in the final chorus of act II, "[t]he
enlightenment is making its point that seduction leads
inevitably to more violently anti-social consequences.
. ." (Brophy 84). Although Prometheus is the hero of
suffering and strength for the Romantics,
Shelley’s addition of the anti-hero Jupiter to
the equation of the drama makes a sharply skeptical
warning of its own. As many critics have noted, through
the doubling of the human qualities of Prometheus and
Jupiter, Shelley subtly emphasizes the lack of distance
between the tyrant and the slave, and also the cyclical
nature of time through periods of liberty and
tyranny.
-
When he first saw Don Giovanni at the
King’s Theatre with Peacock in 1817, Shelley,
like many opera-goers of the past two centuries, found
the opera’s designation as a "dramma
giocoso" slightly misleading, though Peacock
informed him that the opera "was composite, more comedy
than tragedy" (Peacock 45-6). Reporting on what was
probably Shelley’s first attendance at one of
Mozart’s operas, Peacock writes: "[a]fter the
killing of the Commendatore, [Shelley] said, ‘Do
you call this comedy?’ By degrees, he became
absorbed in the music and action. . ." (45-6). Although
critics, like Peacock, tend to discuss Don
Giovanni as a "tragi-comic" opera, Michael Robinson
observes that the opera possesses all the elements of a
comic opera, "according to the 18th-century
understanding of the term, and Mozart and da Ponte
might have been puzzled had they had any premonition of
the future debates that were to take place over whether
they thought their opera was comic or tragic" (Robinson
9). Nevertheless, as Robinson points out,
Mozart’s Don Giovanni, like
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, relies on a
blending of genres, making use of tragedy, comedy,
pastoral and romance to tell a story through words,
music and drama. In the hands of Mozart, this blending
of genres creates a powerful aesthetic effect through
the means of music that makes an often ironic
commentary on the tyrannies and inequalities of human
society. For instance, the mocking tone of
Figaro’s rebellious aria "Se vuol ballare, signor
Contino" ("If you want to dance, sir Count") in act I
of Le nozze di Figaro immediately sets the
barber Figaro apart as a sympathetic character against
the adulterous, authoritarian Count Almaviva even
before the latter enters the stage:
[Figaro’s aria] is a direct expression of the
will to revolt. Even so, it is not the substance of
what he says but the form in which he says it that is
of prime importance. In the course of the opera, it
is not the revolt of servants against master that
brings about the comic resolution, but the very
convention of comedy itself that love conquers all. .
. . Mozart’s aesthetic form has this advantage
over that of Beaumarchais: Mozart makes social change
appear not only desirable but harmonious by disarming
his audience with music that penetrates their very
being. (Tetreault 157)
In this way, music, contributing "pacing, control,
point of view, and ironic commentary," allows Mozart to
create new dimension and "mold new meanings for the
opera" from the original play by Beaumarchais (Corse
18).
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Similarly, Shelley’s manipulation of genres
throughout Prometheus Unbound creates a
controlled sense of expectation and contrast that
permits him to expand the area of his drama
progressively towards his vision of universal harmony
in act IV. Shelley’s lyrical drama "begins on the
stage of high tragedy" in act I, then moves on, in and
out of the pastoral and the epic in acts II and III,
before erupting into the lyrical profusion of act IV.
Yet, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Le
nozze di Figaro, Prometheus Unbound poises
between the tragic and the comic, making use of tragic
elements at different moments for serious or ironic
effect. With the fall of Jupiter and Prometheus’
official reunification with Asia, by the end of act III
Shelley’s lyric drama moves towards the comic as
it embraces the resolution of a happy ending. After the
music of the "curvèd shell" generates the
reformation of the human world, Shelley turns to the
tropes of pastoral drama to illustrate the idyllic
bower-like cave to which Prometheus, Asia, Ione and
Panthea retire. Proclaiming the end of the masque that
marked Jupiter’s reign and the beginning of a new
pastoral age of liberty for humanity, the Spirit of the
Hour declares: "The loathsome mask has fallen, the man
remains/ Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless. .
. "(III, iv, 193-5). Yet, like his ultimate vision of
harmony in act IV, a register of skepticism marks the
otherwise positive ending of act III. Despite
identifying humanity’s potential to "oversoar/
The loftiest star of unascended Heaven" if it were not
for "chance, and death, and mutability," the Spirit of
the Hour also warns that human beings, though "yet free
from guilt or pain," are not "[p]assionless[,]"
suggesting that they still can succumb to the will for
power and deceit that leads to tyranny (III, iv,
198-204).
IV.
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While in aim a closet drama, Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound does not signify the
poet’s retreat either from the theater or the
theatrical. Mixing genres and blending the lyrical with
the discursive, Shelley creates a narrative structure
that is at once internalized and theatrical as it
paradoxically performs itself inside the mind of the
reader. Jeffrey Cox argues that Shelley’s lyrical
drama, like Hunt’s masque, The Descent of
Liberty, "draws upon a strong theatrical tradition
to imagine a stage beyond the theater. . . where [there
can be] a proper balance between word and stage effect"
(127). For Shelley, the Italian opera offered a
decisive method through which to visualize a new way in
which poetry could come together with music, drama and
stagecraft to form a more mentalistic, imaginative kind
of dramatic experience. In Prometheus Unbound,
the most fervent realization of this type of
internalized staging occurs in the final act, a
jubilatory anti-masque that illustrates the literal
de-masking of an ancien régime and the
introduction of a new world order. Although Peter
Conrad notes that act IV "defies the stage and
abstracts itself into music . . . render[ing] the drama
lyrical" through a "symphon[y] of science[,]" the
fourth act of Shelley’s lyrical drama nonetheless
derives many of its elements and devices from musical
and gestural drama, particularly the ballet
d’action, oratorio and masque, and thus is
fundamentally performative (Conrad 72). Indeed, as
Stuart Curran and Ronald Tetreault have explored at
length,[10]
both the thematic conception and dramaturgical
arrangement of act IV of Prometheus Unbound have
strong affinities with the tradition of ballet
d’action found in the works of Jean-Georges
Noverre and also its Italian cousin in the
coreodramme of Salvatore Viganò, whose
choreography the Shelleys and Claire admired in
Otello, ossia Il Moro di Venezia in Milan at La
Scala in 1818.[11]
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In act IV, the profusion of lyric forms gives the
impression that time itself has been suspended while
the Spirits and Hours sing. Yet, the "dark Forms and
Shadows" who dance "by confusedly, singing" do not
symbolize the ending of time itself, but rather the end
of Jupiter’s reign, and the commencement of a new
time in "Shelley’s post-revolutionary vision [in
which] humanity can bring time under a measure of
control."[12]
A larger-scale version of the sextet of spirits which
closes act I, act IV moves with the quickness and
confusedness of a full Mozartian concerted finale. The
variety of lyrical forms contained with the act reveals
its function as an immense bridal song to Asia and
Prometheus, beginning with the complex choreography of
Hours and Spirits to the love duet between the Earth
and Moon to Demogorgon’s final epilogic blessing.
The lyrical harmonization of the universe pervades all
levels of the drama, uniting the mental drama of
Prometheus with the external drama of a transformed
world, signaling the affirmative revolutionary edict of
a new age for humanity. Evocative of Beethoven’s
majestic choral setting of Schiller’s "O Freunde,
nicht diese Töne" in the final movement (Presto)
of his ninth symphony, the assemblage of voices in act
IV of Prometheus Unbound achieves a vivid effect
through the combination of music, poetry and dance,
enticing the reader to imagine a cosmological stage
upon which Shelley places his drama of universal
harmony.
-
Ultimately, the poetic form of Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound demonstrates the poet’s
ability to combine music and poetry to create a mental
drama that is nonetheless radically performative.
Utilizing music as a dramatic tool, Shelley’s
operatic employment of discursive and lyrical language
and his opera-like methods of characterization all
coalesce in a project that strains the limits of poetic
form into the realm of musical drama. Yet,
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound thrives upon
the same "unremitting, invigorating tension" that Peter
Conrad identifies as the driving force of opera between
the "basic incompatibilities of nonverbal imagery of
music and the tendency of words to try to pin down
meaning" (Qtd. in Corse 13). That is, in his lyrical
drama, Shelley turns to music and musical themes when
language is no longer an effective mode of aesthetic
mediation to communicate the desired dramatic spectacle
and revolutionary ideals to the reader’s
imagination. The lyrical drama in its various forms,
whether the opera, ballet or oratorio, provides Shelley
with a design through which to establish the
revolutionary ethos of a transformed world. Despite its
seeming anti-theatricality, Jeffrey Cox points out that
Prometheus Unbound and the other "mythological
plays of the Hunt circle are not a rejection of the
stage but an attempt to remake it" through imagining a
different kind of dramatic experience in which music,
poetry, and the other sister arts can be combined (Cox
127). In this way, the expressive capacity of
music and its links to both language and thought
provides Shelley with a unique method through which to
imagine poetry’s power to effect change. As a
result, through Shelley’s use of a
characterization and mode akin to opera and other forms
of musical drama, the poetic form of Prometheus
Unbound defines and determines the dramatic action,
making the reader complicit in a closet drama that is
nonetheless theatrical in origin, treading the borders
between the tragic and the comic.
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