Prometheus Unbound

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This article is about the plays. For the episode of the television show Stargate SG-1, see "Prometheus Unbound".

There are two plays named Prometheus Unbound. Both are concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus.

[edit] Aeschylus

The first Prometheus Unbound was a sequel to Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus. It depicted the release of Prometheus from his torments by Heracles. Unfortunately, it, and a third play, Prometheus Pyrphoros, are lost. Certain fragments have survived, however, and from these we can glean a general cast: Prometheus, a chorus of Titans and Hercules. In the appendix of James Scully and C. John Herington's translation of Prometheus Bound it is hypothesized that the cast also included Earth and/or Sky, as part of an elemental cycle across the entire trilogy.^[1]

[edit] Shelley

The second Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820. It is inspired by Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and concerns the final release from captivity of Prometheus. However, unlike Aeschylus's version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus in Shelley's narrative. Instead, Zeus is overthrown, which allow Prometheus to be released.

Shelley's own introduction to the play explains his intentions behind the work. He defends his choice to adapt Aeschylus' myth - his choice to have Jupiter overthrown rather than Prometheus reconciled - with:

In truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.

Shelley compares his Romantic hero Prometheus to Milton's proto-Romantic hero Satan from Paradise Lost.

The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest.

Shelley finishes with an evocation of his intentions as a poet:

My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.

Essentially, Prometheus Unbound, as re-wrought in Shelley's hands, is a fiercely revolutionary text championing free will, goodness, hope and idealism in the face of oppression. The Epilogue, spoken by Demogorgon, expresses Shelley's tenets as a poet and as a revolutionary:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

[edit] References

1. ^ Aeschylus, Scully, J., (Trans.) Herington, C.J. (Trans.) (1975) Prometheus Bound. Oxford: Oxford University Press