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ABSTRACT
Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s earnest goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu.
Notes
All italics in quotations cited in the essay and the notes are in the original.
1. As recounted in Horace Smith, “A Graybeard’s Gossip,” Part 3, 239. Rept. in Beavan, James and Horace Smith, 137.
2. Marchand, Byron’s Letters & Journals, vol. 9, 189–90.
3. Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington, 66–67.
4. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, vol. 2, 484.
5. Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre, 191.
6. Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 116.
7. Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts, 36.
8. The Greeks began practicing eidography―descriptive classification of works by genre (Greek eidos)―during the Hellenistic era, especially in ordering the contents of the Alexandrian Library; Apollonius Eidographos, head librarian there during the second half of the second century BCE, is the most famous of the eidographers. But full-fledged theorizing about genre is a product of the Renaissance mind. On the beginnings of generic theory in Renaissance Italy, initially from the study of Horace’s Ars Poetica, see Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1, 71ff.
9. On Laon and Cythna as epic, see, for example, the chapter on Shelley (“Holy and Heroic Verse”) in Wilkie, Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition, 112–44. Duff treats both Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna as a reconfiguration of Spenserian narrative in Romance and Revolution, 54–114 and 154–216. Most recently, Donovan has reassessed the epic elements in these two poems in his chapter, “Epic Experiments,” 256–71.
10. Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 198–203, considers Prometheus Unbound and Byron’s Don Juan as “the major experiments in extended mixed genres published during the Romantic period” (198). For a discussion of both Prometheus Unbound and Hellas as “radical experiments concerned with the very nature of the dramatic,” see Curran’s chapter “Lyrical Drama,” 289–98. On Shelley’s evident decision when drafting his discarded opening to Hellas to abandon his initial generic models, the Prologue in Heaven at the outset of Goethe’s Faust I as well as the Book of Job, in favor of the Greek-inflected choruses of Aeschylus’ Persians, see my contribution (on pages xxxiii–xxxix, xlii–xlvii) to the Introduction to Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, vol. 16.
11. To date, the best edition of his translation of The Banquet remains that in James Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley, 381–461. A recent edition by David O’Connor, The Symposium of Plato: The Shelley Translation, contains a long and helpful introduction, xi–xliv.
12. Perhaps the earliest figure to point to the blending of these two Greek sources in Swellfoot is Medwin, who, in The Shelley Papers (1833), writes that “[m]any passages in this drama are parodied from Sophocles, and the choruses are truly Aristophanic” (95).
13. For a concise biography of the younger George, see Smith’s George IV. For a sympathetic portrait of the Queen, see Robins’s Rebel Queen. For a detailed official account of the trial itself, see Minutes of Evidence.
14. Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, Journals of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, 330.
15. Mary Shelley, ed., Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839, second edition), 191. Carlos Baker pointed out that the poem recited by Shelley was probably his recently composed Ode to Naples rather than Ode to Liberty (Shelley’s Major Poetry, 176 and n.). The former poem celebrates the Neapolitan proclamation of a government by constitution earlier that year. Mary’s retrospective note was written two decades after the event, so her memory may have been faulty.
16. Horace Smith, “A Graybeard’s Gossip,” Part 4, 293. Rept. in Beavan, James and Horace Smith, 176. Smith may be mistaken here about the radical publisher and printseller John Johnston’s fear of legal sanction and financial ruin. In the Introduction to her magisterial Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires…, Mary Dorothy George lays out a case for Johnston’s having been paid by George’s ministry to suppress publications under his own imprint and to become an informant against other radical publishers and pamphleteers; she speculates that, in this instance, Johnston may have turned in Swellfoot, which he had published under his own imprint, by “‘convey[ing] information’ about it to someone who acted through the Society for the Suppression of Vice” and being “paid for the copies he surrendered” (1).
17. Horace Smith, “A Graybeard’s Gossip,” Part 3, 229.
18. Reiman used the phrase as the subtitle for his indispensable monograph-length essay on the play, “Shelley’s Swellfoot: Critics’ Stepchild,” 772–812. For Reiman’s editorial transcription and analysis of the sole surviving bifolium of fair copy of the play in Shelley’s hand, see pages 813–25 of the same volume.
19. This list is certainly not exhaustive. As a boy, Shelley avidly consumed the “annual strains” (in Byron’s sarcastic phrase in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers) of Southey’s numerous epics and also knew other contemporary poems with epic traits, such as Scott’s The Vision of Don Roderick. And he eventually read the major Italian Renaissance epic poets, including Tasso and Ariosto.
20. Page numbers for all citations from Swellfoot will appear in the text and are taken from Shelley’s Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson.
21. Falk and Brogan, “Mock Epic, Mock Heroic,” 791.
22. Warren, “Alexander Pope,” 40.
23. Shelley’s query to himself about which edition of Homer might include Batrachomyomachia (since the poem was usually ascribed to Homer in that era) is written on the endpaper of the notebook used by Mary Shelley to record entries for her journal between July 1816 and June 1819: Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, Journals of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, xxxii, 285. He mentions the Homeric edition of Ernesti (1759) which included the poem in its fifth volume. Based upon a revised notation in the list of books owned by Shelley during his 1817 residence at Marlow (now in the Pforzheimer Collection), Nora Crook has conjectured a possible English language edition of Homer that Shelley may have owned which also included the poem: the four-volume Englished Homer of Pope published in London, 1806. “List of Books Shelley left with [Thomas Love] Peacock in 1818 in Marlow” (Pfz. Shelleyana 1082; author’s correspondence with Nora Crook, who is preparing an edition of this list for publication).
24. The Englished names are furnished by Henry Nelson Coleridge, Introductions to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets, 184.
25. Voltaire, An Essay, 114.
26. Swift accomplished a similar commixture of human misery captured in the language of domestic livestock in A Modest Proposal…, for similarly grave purposes of political and social amelioration.
27. Warren, “Alexander Pope,” 38.
28. Frederick Jones, ed., Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, 508, 507.
29. Harsh, Handbook of Classical Drama, 299.
30. Nesselrath, “Comedy, Greek: Old Comedy,” Oxford Encyclopedia…, vol. 2, 271.
31. Smith, George IV, 206–11.
32. Nesselrath, “Comedy: Greek,” vol. 2, 271.
33. Reiman, “Shelley’s Swellfoot: Critics’ Stepchild,” 772; Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre, 4; Van Kooy, Shelley’s Radical Stages, 18; Morton, “Porcine Poetics,” 279; Erkelenz, “Genre and Politics,” 501.
34. Steven Jones, Satire and Romanticism, 105.
35. Ibid., 184. Jones first noted Lysistrata’s influence on Swellfoot in his earlier book, Shelley’s Satire, 192 n. 40.
36. Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy, 234–35.
37. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Peter Green, bk. 1, 517–70. Subsequent citations to Iliad will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number and are taken from this elegant and very recent (2015) verse translation.
38. Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, vol. 2, 547.
39. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry, 1448b–1449a.
40. Pope, note to his translation of Iliad V, line 517. The “Twickenham” Pope, 7, page 293.
41. Seidensticker, Palintonos Harmonia… Hypomnemata, no. 72 (1982): 46–64.
42. Boileau, Art of Poetry, Chant III.219. See also Pocock, Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism, 110.
43. See Boileau, Art of Poetry, Chant III.401–2: “Le comique, ennemi des soupirs et des pleurs, / N’admet point en ses vers de tragiques douleurs” (“The comic wit, born with a smiling air / Must tragic grief and pompous verse forbear”). The translation is that of Sir William Soame as revised by Dryden.
44. Blair, Lectures, 498. Though Blair denies Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso the designation of a proper epic because Ariosto “appears to have despised all regularity of plan, and to have chosen to give loose reins to a copious and rich but extravagant fancy,” he at once concedes its epic subject matter. Earlier, he asserts Homer’s unrivaled blend of heroic narrative with dramatic dialogues (483).
45. Mori, Epic Grandeur, 14. Mori’s remark derives from his discussion of Schiller’s fluid conception of genre, based upon his highly original division of all modern (“sentimental,” i.e., civilized) poets’ work into one of three einzelner Gedichtarten (species) of poetry: satiric, idyllic, or elegiac. In a note to his essay, Schiller explains that these species represent three distinct “modes of perception” (Empfindungsweise) that can yield a poem in any “genre [Gattung] of composition”: “[T]he epic, the novel, the tragedy, etc… as individual genres of composition can be executed in more than one mode of perception, consequently in more than one of the species of poetry I have established.” In German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 294.
46. Highet, Classical Tradition, 421.
47. Ehrenberg, People of Aristophanes, 64.
48. For Frere’s English versions of Birds, Frogs, Knights, and Acharnians, see vol. 2 of Works of John Hookham Frere. During his life these translations were printed in small quantity for private circulation but are fully reprinted in this volume. Coleridge greatly admired them.
49. Frere, Works of John Hookham Frere, vol. 1, clxx n., clxxii n.
50. Odyssey of Homer, bk. 5, 517–20. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text by book and line numbers.
51. Wordsworth, The Prelude, bk. 1, lines 1–3, and from line 35, a poem which Shelley of course could not have known. The description of The Prelude as a “personal epic” is taken from the identically-titled chapter 6 in Karl Kroeber’s Romantic Narrative Art.
52. Herrero Jáuregui, “Priam’s Catabasis,” 63.
53. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 567–69; Virgil, Georgics, iii.146 ff.
54. Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, iii.64–66.
55. Interestingly, in Odyssey bk. 11, Odysseus also “does not cross the threshold into Hades or appear before the thrones of the gods of the Underworld. The souls of the dead approach him, or are seen in the distance.” Heubeck and Hoekstra, Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, vol. 2, 76.
56. Erkelenz, “Genre and Politics,” 504.
57. The “translator” ends the “Advertisement” by assuring readers that, “[s]hould the remaining portions of this Tragedy be found, entitled Swellfoot in Angaria, and Charité, the Translator might be tempted to give them to the reading Public” (431).
58. Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, Journals of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, 198–99.
59. Ibid., 103.
60. Frederick Jones, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, 17 and note.
61. Schlegel, Dramatic Art and Literature, vol. 2, 234–35.
62. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 304. A recent commentator who confirms Schlegel’s definitive influence on Tillyard’s reading of the history plays as a “national epic” is Hart, Theater and World, 207; see also 219.
63. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays, 313.
64. Merchant, The Epic, 78–82. Merchant argues that the label “epic drama” is better applied to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Troilus and Cressida, than to the histories, for Troilus “contains in a single play most of the essential elements of epic” (81).
65. See Curran, “The Epic,” chap. 7 of Poetic Form and British Romanticism, 158–79. Curran is obviously correct that, either as inspirational paradigm or as the occasion for revolt against his example, Milton (who himself refashioned the epic in novel ways in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) looms large for the aspiring heroic poets of the Romantic era.
66. See my Commentary in Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, 932–33.
67. An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer [by Thomas Blackwell, published anonymously], 2d ed. (1736), 66–67. Although there is no surviving record of Shelley reading this book, he did know Blackwell’s three-volume Memoirs of the Court of Augustus (1753–63; third volume completed by John Mills). Given Shelley’s interest in the subject of the Enquiry―the factors of climate, geography, and social organization that conspired to produce Homer’s unique genius―this may be one of those unrecorded books familiar to Shelley’s vast erudition and curiosity.
68. In Dennis’s Remarks on… Prince Arthur: “the action, which is the Subject of an Epick Poem, must be… a Fable compounded of Truth and Fiction. … [T]he Action is only fram’d for the Instruction; and… is design’d for a proof of the Moral.” In Critical Works, vol. 1, 57.
69. Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic in England, 17. The quote from Le Bossu also comes from this source.
70. “Preface” to Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 209.
71. Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic, 17. This view of the didactic genesis and purpose of epics and of their identifying traits sets Shelley against some of the major epic theorists of the Romantic age, including Blake’s occasional patron, William Hayley, who scorns Le Bossu’s tenet in his Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), Epistle 1, 13–14: “When grave Bossu by System’s studied laws / The Grecian Bard’s ideal picture draws, / And wisely tells us, that his Song arose / As the good Parson’s quiet Sermon grows,” Hayley remarks in his notes at the back of his poem upon “[t]he absurdity of [Bossu’s] advice concerning the mode of forming the fable, by chusing a moral, inventing the incidents, and then searching history for names to suit them” (122).
72. Produced in 405 BCE, Frogs is the last play by Aristophanes to exhibit the parabasis. With the defeat of Athens by Sparta and the end of the Peloponnesian Wars the following year, such overt political editorializing by dramatists ceased. This change, among others, signals the decline of the Athenian Old Comedy and the rise of the “Middle Comedy.”
73. G. M. Sifakis persuasively argued in Parabasis and Animal Choruses that parabasis as understood today is a characteristic of the nineteenth-century “theatre of illusion” anachronistically applied to the comic dramatists of ancient Athens. For Sifakis, “illusion as a psychological phenomenon was entirely alien to Greek theatrical audiences” (7). Were this Shelley’s view, the theriomorphic chorus would be even more germane to his message: the actors speak directly as pigs because the King’s cruelty and indifference has literally made them just as expendable as the animals Shelley observed in the marketplace at Pisa.
74. Frederick Jones, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, 207.
75. In preparing my upcoming edition of Swellfoot for The Complete Poetry… I have examined dozens of prints and poetic pamphlets published in 1820 on both sides of the Caroline Affair; although many of them contain similarly exaggerated imagery, none that I have seen remotely approaches the learning and generic complexity of Swellfoot. One must return to the mordant irreverence of The Anti-Jacobin two decades earlier to find a comparably erudite use of satire for political purposes.
76. Robins, Rebel Queen, 212–13.
77. Hirsch distinguished new genres formed by such “amalgamation” from other new genres created by an author “extending” an existing generic type. See the chapter “The Concept of Genre” in his Validity in Interpretation, 104–9.
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Michael J. Neth
Michael J. Neth earned his PhD from Columbia University and is Professor of English and Faculty Advisor to the Great Books Interdisciplinary Minor at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has published essays and reviews on the English Romantic poets, with special emphasis on Percy Bysshe Shelley. His edition of Shelley’s longest poem, the epic Laon and Cythna, was published in volume 3 of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), which won the 2011–2012 Richard J. Finneran Award of the Society for Textual Scholarship. With Donald H. Reiman, he co-edited the Hellas Notebook volume in The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts series (Garland Press/Routledge, 1994). He is presently at work editing Swellfoot the Tyrant for a forthcoming volume of The Complete Poetry and is slated to edit Hellas as well for a later volume.