Many writers of the British Romantic movement, chief among them Byron, Blake, Keats, and the Shelleys, owed a great debt to Milton’s Paradise Lost, for they were drawn to not only Milton’s beautiful and evocative verses, and not merely to dressing The Bible in Vergilian trappings, but, importantly, to the central, yet ambivalently sketched, character of Satan; in particular, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, an update of the tragedy by Aeschylus, likewise uses Milton as a model by focusing the author’s efforts on creating sympathy for a misunderstood character’s righteous rebellion against an oppressive authority.
Percy Bysshe Shelley first published Prometheus Unbound, his four act lyrical drama “chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla (Shelley Preface),” in 1820. Shelley’s great Miltonian drama reworks another primordial creation myth, that of the Grecian Prometheus, specifically as told by the Athenian dramatist Aeschylus in his Prometheia trilogy, which consists of the surviving first play, Prometheus Bound (first staged in 430 B.C.), and the two lost sequels, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Giver. Fragments of these sequels survive (one of which, notably, is quoted by Cicero and may be his own Latin translation of a passage of the now-lost Prom. Unb.) as well as the bare outline of the plot and resolution. In Prometheus Bound, Zeus has Prometheus chained to the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains for gifting mankind with arts and fire; the Titan there bemoans his lot to a chorus of Oceanids and laments that his only crime was showing sympathy to humanity:
PROMETHEUS: “But for those sad wretched human beings,
[Zeus] showed no concern at all. He wanted
to wipe out the entire race and grow
a new one in its place. None of the gods
objected to his plan except for me. 290
I was the only one who had the courage.
So I saved those creatures from destruction
and a trip to Hades. And that is why
I have been shackled here and have to bear
such agonizing pain, so pitiful to see. [240]
I set compassion for the human race
above the way I felt about myself,
so now I am unworthy of compassion” (Aeschylus).
At the end of the play, Zeus (through his messenger Hermes) threatens further punishment upon the Titan, if Prometheus will not reveal a prophesied threat to the Olympian’s tyrannical rule:
HERMES: [...] If these words of mine
do not convince you, think about the storm,
the triple wave of torment which will fall
and you cannot escape. First, Father Zeus
will rip this mountain crag with thunder claps 1260
and bolts of flaming lightning, burying
your body in the rock, and yet this cleft
will hold you in its arms. When you have spent [1020]
a long time underground, you will return
into the light, and Zeus’ winged hound,
his ravenous eagle, will cruelly rip
your mutilated body into shreds
and, like an uninvited banqueter,
will feast upon your liver all day long,
until its chewing turns the organ black” (Aeschylus). 1270
This threat to Zeus’ rule was his proposed marriage to the sea goddess Thetis, a union which Prometheus foresaw would beget an offspring greater than his father (and thus bringing about Zeus’ end). By the end of The Prometheia, Thetis has married the mortal Argonaut, Peleus (who will become the father of Achilles), and thus averted disaster to Zeus’ reign; therefore, a reconciliation occurs between Zeus and Prometheus, Olympian and Titan, after Herakles frees the captive from his mountaintop prison and eagle torturer.
Shelley’s Prometheus shares many similarities with Aeschylus’ woeful hero, but the Romantic poet casts his rebellious character in the same mold as that of Satan from Paradise Lost; and yet, unlike Milton’s proud and corrupting angel, Shelley’s tormented Titan is “the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends” (Shelley Preface). Like Aeschylus, Shelley’s Prometheus is cast as an all-around good and moral hero, but it is in the ending of their respective works where Shelley diverts most from Aeschylus, for there is no reconciliation at the conclusion of Shelley’s Unbound, as the poet was “averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind” (Shelley Preface). Instead of Olympian and Titan reconciling, Shelley’s Zeus is overthrown in the way prophesied by Prometheus, and not only is “the Champion” freed from “the Oppressor”, but the whole of humanity casts off its own tyrannical leanings and unites together:
SPIRIT OF THE HOUR: “[...] even so the tools
And emblems of its last captivity,
Amid the dwellings of the peopled earth,
Stand, not o'erthrown, but unregarded now.
And those foul shapes,--abhorred by god and man, 180
Which, under many a name and many a form
Strange, savage, ghastly, dark, and execrable,
Were Jupiter, the tyrant of the world,
And which the nations, panic-stricken, served
With blood, and hearts broken by long hope, and love
Dragged to his altars soiled and garlandless,
And slain among men's unreclaiming tears,
Flattering the thing they feared, which fear was hate,--
Frown, mouldering fast, o'er their abandoned shrines.
The painted veil, by those who were, called life, 190
Which mimicked, as with colors idly spread,
All men believed and hoped, is torn aside;
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king
Over himself; just, gentle, wise; but man
Passionless--no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them;” (Shelley Act III).
This liberation here imagined is, strikingly, not unlike how Shelley describes in his Author’s Preface to Prometheus Unbound his own indebtedness he (and the other Romantics) felt towards Milton:
“We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring or is about to be restored” (Shelley Preface).
Treating Paradise Lost as something akin to the very forbidden fruit described within the poem’s verses, the Romantics reworked old mythologies and stories, such as tales about Prometheus, and gave these narratives new life by recasting them with a Miltonian flair and generating sympathy for a tragic and misunderstood creation rebelling against a perceived oppressive authority of its creator.
The result of this “liberated” view of literature afforded the Romantic writers by Milton’s Paradise Lost was that they felt that they were writing and expressing themselves more freely than in previous ages. These authors write as though they had been freed and awakened to a new way of thinking about the world, as if they had been bestowed with hitherto “forbidden” knowledge like the mortals at the close of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound:
THE EARTH: “The lightning is [Man’s] slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! 420
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none’” (Shelley Act IV).
