Shelley’s Oppositional Songs

ABSTRACT

Analyzing the function of song as a genre can clarify debates over how Shelley’s more visionary mode of poetry might intervene in politics and whether his overtly political popular songs betray the philosophical claim to a revolution in subjectivity made by those visionary works. Because the genre of song originates in communal, oral performance, yet is also a subgenre of the larger category of lyric, its intrinsic oppositions or tensions mediate between political action and lyric subjectivity. Tracing two streams of song, the “urbane” and the “marginal,” that offer models for Shelley’s experiments in song, the essay then conducts a census of songs in the volumes that Shelley published or intended to publish. Applying a description of oral song performances as representing a “bodily economy,” it examines Shelley’s three revisionary Greek dramas, especially the two published in 1820, to interpret the drafts of songs intended for his “little volume of popular songs, wholly political.”

KEYWORDS:

• song
• lyric
• lyrical drama
• political songs
• orality
• urbane
• marginal
• performance
• bodily economy
• Shelley

Notes

1. Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre, 19–21.

2. See Quillin, Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, chap. 2.

3. See “Reading Shelley’s Interventionist Poetry,” ed. and intro. Michael Scrivener, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2001; “The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form,” ed. and intro. Matthew C. Borushko, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, 2015; both accessed August 6, 2018.

4. I adapt this phrase from Kaufman’s essay for the 2001 “Praxis” collection, “Intervention & Commitment Forever! Shelley in 1819, Shelley in Brecht, Shelley in Adorno, Shelley in Benjamin,” 8: “experiment in lyric—lyric as experiment.”

5. See Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, 191 (#563), May 1, 1820.

6. See Quillin, Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, chap. 2.

7. In From Song to Print, 210, Hoagwood terms all such unaccompanied song texts “pseudo-songs”; I prefer Keats’s phrase “songs unheard,” to recognize their continuity in a different medium.

8. Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 12, 25–26; McLane, Balladeering, 215, n. 10.

9. Booth, Experience of Songs, 5, 7.

10. See Newman, Ballad Collection, chap. 1.

11. For more details of this background, see Quillin, Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, chap. 1.

12. Ibid.

13. Deane, Strange Country, 55; cited by Davis in “‘At Sang About’,” 188.

14. See Davis, “‘At Sang About’,” 189; Hoagland, From Song to Print, xi; and McLane, Balladeering, on mediation in transcribing from oral informants.

15. Davis, “‘At Sang About’,” 190ff.

16. An additional factor in this ignoring of tunes, McLane explains, was the expense of engraving music to be included in a printed book, a difficulty overcome toward the end of the eighteenth century (Balladeering, 94–97).

17. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism.

18. See Groom, Making of Percy’s ‘Reliques’.

19. See Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy.

20. Sorensen, “Varieties of Public Performance,” 135.

21. Scrivener, Poetry and Reform.

22. See Moody, Illegitimate Theater in London; and Worrall, Theatric Revolution.

23. Newman, Ballad Collection, 7, quoting from The Idea of Universal Poetry.

24. Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture.

25. See Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (hereafter CPPBS), vol. 1, 157. The editors identified Shelley as accountable for all but three of the songs (#6–8), as well as the ballads. In 2013, however, an additional copy appeared with pencil annotations probably in Shelley’s hand marking each poem’s author; assigning #7, “Hope,” to Percy, it leaves #3, “Cold, cold is the Blast,” unattributed. See Duff, “Harps, Heroes,” 52–53.

26. For the revision from Moore, see Duff, “Harps, Heroes,” 68. As Reiman and Fraistat had noted, “St. Edmund’s Eve” is the ballad overtly plagiarized from a volume edited and written by Matthew “Monk” Lewis, yet that volume, Duff elaborates, was itself a collection of plagiarized works; CPPBS, vol. 1, 157–59; see also Duff, “Harps, Heroes,” 57.

27. Hogg’s phrase, 1833, cited in CPPBS, vol. 1, 236.

28. Because Shelley recycles Wolfstein’s song from his “original” songs (#17), Reiman and Fraistat suggest that he now views it as trash (a critique available only to himself and his most diligent readers); Megalena’s song, too, has a previous textual existence―from Byron (CPPBS vol. 1, 269).

29. Jones, Shelley’s Satire, 38–48, esp. page 43 for the urbane devil.

30. See Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 2, 324–39.

31. See Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 2, 324; and Duff, “Lyric Development,” 244.

32. Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 2, 451.

33. Cited by Reiman and Fraistat, CPPBS, vol. 2, 357.

34. Matthews, in “Shelley’s Lyrics,” notes the disappearance of personal lyrics, presumably including songs, from his published work; cited by Duff, “Lyric Development,” 242 n.

35. Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 2, 450.

36. See Shelley, CPPBS, vol. 3, 561–62.

37. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d ed., 107, citing Chernaik’s discovery of its publication and her discussion in Lyrics of Shelley. See also Quillin, Musico-Poetics of Romanticism, 137–39.

38. See Pite’s headnote to Julian and Maddalo, 655.

39. See Journals of Mary Shelley, 296.

40. See Jones, Shelley’s Satire, chap. 5, and chap. 5 in my Shelley’s Visual Imagination. For publication, see Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d ed., 314.

41. See Jones, Shelley’s Satire, 49–64, and Donovan, ed., Peter Bell the Third, 70–82.

42. See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d ed., 366, 391, and 408.

43. See Curran, “Lyrical Drama,” 290–91.

44. Ibid., 294.

45. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2d ed., 234.

46. Beginning in HM 2176 and continuing in Bod. MS. Shelley adds. e. 12.

47. See Laqueur, “The Queen Caroline Affair,” 417–66; Clark, “Queen Caroline,” 47–68; and Samuelian, Royal Romances.

48. See Morton, “Porcine Poetics,” 284. See also Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, 204–6; Jones, Shelley’s Satire, chap. 6; Erkelenz, “Genre and Politics of Shelley’s Swellfoot,” 500–520; and Rossington, “Tragedy: The Cenci and Swellfoot,” 299–308.

49. See Baer, Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 158ff.

50. See Gladden, “Shelley’s Agenda Writ Large.”

51. See “Hellas” Notebook, Introduction, xlii ff.

52. O’Neill most recently, in “‘Wrecks of a Dissolving Dream’,” chap. 12.

53. See Curran, “Lyrical Drama,” 294–95.

54. I have worked directly with Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 6, though not recently; for this essay, I have used Adamson’s facsimile edition, Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 5: “The Witch of Atlas” Notebook, ed. Carlene A. Adamson (1997). I have also used Reiman’s facsimile edition of Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, vol. 5: The Harvard Shelley Poetic Manuscripts (1991).

55. Adamson, textual notes, xlvi, citing Shelley’s letters and Claire Clairmont’s journal.

56. For his reading of Malthus in October 1818, see Journals of Mary Shelley, vol. 2, 661.

57. Scrivener, Radical Shelley, 228.

58. Those pages, too, were torn out but made their way eventually to the Bodleian Library; see Adamson’s textual notes, xxxiv–xxxvii. The lines below thus come from Bod. MS. Shelley adds. c.4, f75v,76r, in Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, ed. Reiman, 102–3.

59. Wolfson, “Popular Songs and Ballads,” 353–55.

60. See Donovan, headnote to #313, 342–43, citing Percy Scholes, God Save Our Queen (1954).

61. See Russell, Theatre of War, 109.

62. “Covent-Garden Theatre,” Times (London), November 15, 1820; The Times Digital Archive, 2008; re-accessed March 19, 2016; European Magazine, and London Review, 78 (November 1820), 452.

63. Published by Mary Shelley as the second stanza, presumably because it continues to describe the Queen’s triumphal approach. MWS also reads the cramped word “approvative” (Adamson’s transcription) as “approaching.” Donovan follows MWS but with a question mark.

64. See Harvard MS. Eng. 258.2 [quire VII, fol. VII verso = page [153] in Harvard larger Silsbee notebook, pages 150ff. in facsimile]; Adamson’s textual note, xxxvi–xxxvii; and Donovan’s headnote for #333, 485-89.

65. Wolfson, “Popular Songs and Ballads,” 352.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Moore Goslee

Nancy Moore Goslee is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, where she also held a Distinguished Humanities professorship and chaired the Women’s Studies Program. She has published essays and monographs in two broad areas: visual and verbal relationships in Romantic poetry, including aspects of material textuality, and Scottish Romanticism. Editing one of Shelley’s draft notebooks for the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts facsimile series led to Shelley’s Visual Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Recently she has published an essay on Shelley’s compositional practices in his manuscript notebooks for The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe in 2013, and also completed an essay on sculpture and painting in Keats’s poems for a Cambridge collection edited by O’Neill. Turning back to Scottish studies, she is now finishing a book that traces aesthetic and ideological refigurings of the Scottish hero William Wallace in the work of British Romantic writers.