Abstract
On the walls of Sir Timothy Shelley’s study at Field Place hung two pictures, an Italian print of Vesuvius erupting and a version of Christ crucified.l No doubt imprinted early on his son’s mind, these twin images became associated at some point with opposed responses to oppression, and thus they prefigure central mythic polarities in Shelley’s mature poetry and drama. The paired pictures are the earliest visual correlative for the tension generated in his writing by portrayals of forbearance and nonviolence set against explosive embodiments of overthrow and retaliation. Ideologically inflected with a divided view of social and political change, these images shape Shelley’s fictional representations of passive resistance and gradualism on the one hand and the volcanic force of popular insurrection on the other. In the years through 1819, Shelley’s writing embodies and advocates change in elusive ways, alternately emphasizing one or the other mode, but increasingly creating ambiguous compounds of the two. This instability is resolved only under great pressure, as a poem like ‘Sonnet: England in 1819’ reveals. Here Shelley suddenly transmutes the portent of a revolution — all but inevitable as the poem surveys the hopeless present — into the ‘glorious Phantom’ desperately envisioned in the final couplet (Reiman, p. 311).
Who hesitates to destroy a venomous serpent that has crept near his sleeping friend, except the man who selfishly dreads lest the malignant reptile should turn his fury on himself? And if the poisoner has assumed a human shape, if the bane be distinguished only from the viper’s venom by the excess and extent of its devastation, will the saviour and avenger here retract and pause entrenched behind the superstition of the indefeasible divinity of man?
(Shelley, The Assassins; Julian, VI, 163)
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Notes
Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Penguin, 1974), p. 2.
P.M.S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 8, 54–75.
For discussions of this phase in the development of Shelley’s political thought, see Harry White, ‘Relative Means and Ends in Shelley’s Social-Political Thought,’ Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 22 (1982), 629–30; and Pamela Clemit, ‘Shelley’s Godwin,’ Durham University Journal, 85 (1993), 193–5.
See Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: George Braziller, 1967), pp. 133–4, who suggests that Shelley’s Assassins are a snake-worshipping sect, the Ophite Gnostics, which Shelley might have known about from Saint Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses. Bryan Shelley mentions another Gnostic group, the Peratae, who conflated the Christian Logos with the wisdom of the tempting serpent (Shelley and Scripture: The Interpreting Angel, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 5–6).
Shelley had some knowledge about this legendary figure from Le Vieux de la Montagne. For information on him, see Edward Burman, The Assassins: Holy Killers of Islam (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), pp. 110–30.
See Geoffrey Carnall, ‘DeQurncey on the Knockrng at the Gate,’ Revtew of English Literature, 2 (1969), 54–5.
‘Myth and mythmaking in the Shelley Circle,’ p. 8. On the influence of Peacock’s abortive epic, Ahrimanes, on the Manichean structure of The Revolt of Islam, see Butler pp. 8–10 and Cameron, ‘Shelley and Ahrimanes,’ Modern Language Quarterly, 3 (1942), 287–95.
Shelley’s mythic construction of the serpentine Spirit of Good is grounded in the infidel mythography of Ruins of Empires, II, 120–1). To this mythic cluster Shelley added contemporary political associations: the identification of the serpent shedding its skin with the French Revolution, found in the Abbe Barruel’s Memoires pour servir a l’histoire du Jacobinisme (1798–99) (see Gerald MacNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. 196) and the American revolutionary emblem (‘Don’t Tread on Me’).
The Esdaile Notebook, ed. Kenneth Neill Cameron (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 40.
For this view, see Kyle Grimes, ‘Censorship, Violence, and Political Rhetoric: The Revolt of Islam in its Time,’ Keats-Shelley Journal, 43 (1994), 100–1.
On the affinities between Cobbett and Shelley, see Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 137–49.
Richard Cronin notes the influence of Cobbett on the rhetoric of Shelley’s essay, which swings between appeals for moderation and bellicose, epigrammatic utterance (‘Peter Bell, Peterloo, and The Politics of Cockney Poetry’ Essays and Studies, 45 (Percy Bysshe Shelley: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Kelvin Everest, Cambridge: The English Association/D.S. Brewer, 1992), 80–1).
George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ in Works, 30 vols (New York: Wm. H. Wise & Company, 1931), XIX, 233.
Neville Rogers conjecturally dates it between 1817 and 1819 (Poetical Works, 2 vols, ed. Neville Rogers, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), II, 410. No holograph survives; Mary Shelley’s transcript contains some minor differences from the version in Hutchinson. See Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d.7, Vol. II of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, Irving Massey, ed. (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 169.
Mary A. Quinn, ed., The Mask of Anarchy Draft Notebook: a Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 2177, Vol. IV of The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics (New York and London: Garland, 1990), pp. 54–5.
On the manuscript of the fragmentary prologue and the problems of editing and interpretation, see The Hellas Notebook: Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e.7, Vol. XVI of The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, Donald H. Reiman and Michael J. Neth (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. xxxiii–ix. Since the passages I discuss do not involve any textual variants (except for the conclusion of Satan’s speech), for convenience I quote Hutchinson.
Marilyn Butler, ‘Shelley and the Empire in the East’ in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 160, 168.
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© 2003 Peter A. Schock
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Schock, P.A. (2003). Savior and Avenger: Shelleyan Satanism and the Face of Change. In: Romantic Satanism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230513303_5
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