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.

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[edit] Aeschylus

This first Prometheus Unbound is thought to have followed Prometheus Bound in the Prometheia trilogy attributed to the 5th-century BC Greek tragedian Aeschylus; The text of the Unbound is lost to us except for eleven fragments preserved by later authors.[1] Nevertheless, these fragments, combined with prophetic statements made in the first play, allow us to reconstruct a broad outline of the play. Based upon a lengthy fragment translated into Latin by the Roman statesman Cicero, it has been argued that the play opens with Prometheus visited by a chorus of Titans. Though Zeus had imprisoned them in Tartarus at the conclusion of the Titanomachy, he has at long last granted them clemency. This perhaps foreshadows Zeus' eventual reconciliation with Prometheus in the trilogy's third installment. Prometheus complains about his torment just as he had to the chorus of Oceanids in Prometheus Bound. As the dramatis personae of Prometheus Bound erroneously lists Gaea, it has been suggested that she is next to visit Prometheus in this play, in a sympathetic role that echoes Oceanus' turn in the first play. Finally, the faulty dramatis personae mentioned above and several fragments indicate that Heracles visits the Titan just as Io had in Prometheus Bound. Heracles frees Prometheus from his chains and kills the eagle that had been torturing Prometheus by eating his regenerating liver every day. Again mirroring events in the previous play, Prometheus forecasts Heracles' travels as he concludes his Twelve Labours. The play thus concludes with Prometheus free from the torments of Zeus, but the Titan and Olympian have yet to reconcile. This play was presumably followed by Prometheus the Fire-Bringer.

[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 Prometheus' release from captivity. However, unlike Aeschylus' version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus in Shelley's narrative. Instead, Jupiter (Zeus) is overthrown, which allows Prometheus to be released. Shelley's play is closet drama, meaning it was not intended to be produced on the stage. In the tradition of William Wordsworth and the other poets creating what we now call Romantic Poetry, Shelley wrote for the imagination, intending his play's stage to reside in the imaginations of his readers. Shelley wrote another play called The Cenci at almost the same time - perhaps moving from one text to the other. This other play was meant to be produced and has been done in New York[1] and elsewhere from time to time. What is remarkable about Shelley writing both plays and at the same time is that while Prometheus Unbound is an exalted, idealistic vision of a perfect bloodless revolution, The Cenci is a horror-stricken Macbeth-like drama of injustice, showing that Shelley was not naive about the realities he sought to change through his writing.

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. ”

In other words, while Milton's Satan embodies a spirit of rebellion, that character is flawed because his aims are not humanistic. In his Prometheus, Shelley seeks to create a perfect revolutionary in an ideal, abstract sense (thus the difficulty of the poem). Shelley's Prometheus could be loosely based upon the Jesus of both the Bible, Christian orthodox tradition (which Shelley despised - he was kicked out of Oxford for publishing an atheist tract), as well as Milton's character of the Son in Paradise Lost. While Jesus or the Son sacrifices himself to save mankind, this act of sacrifice does nothing to overthrow the type of tyranny embodied, for Shelley, in the figure of God the Father. Prometheus resembles Jesus in that both uncompromisingly speak truth to power, and in how Prometheus overcomes his tyrant, Jupiter; Prometheus conquers Jupiter by "recalling" a curse Prometheus had made against Jupiter in a period before the play begins. The word "recall" in this sense means both to remember and to retract, and Prometheus, by forgiving Jupiter, removes Jupiter's power, which all along seems to have stemmed from his opponents' anger and will to violence.[2] Prometheus, then, is also Shelley's answer to the mistakes of the French Revolution and its cycle of replacing one tyrant with another. Shelley wished to show how a revolution could be conceived which would avoid doing just that, and in the end of this play, there is no power in charge at all; it is an anarchist's paradise.

Shelley finishes his "Preface" to the play 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] Miscellaneous

It should also be noted here that Mary Shelley, who was the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, was the author of another novel named after Prometheus. The novel Frankenstein is actually more accurately titled Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. This extended title refers to the fact that the character of Victor Frankenstein is a type of 'modern Prometheus', since Prometheus is credited with the creation of man in a god-like image. In such a way, Victor, too, was the creator of a man (or rather, what he calls a wretch or a monster), and can thus be paralleled with Prometheus (Shelley, 1992). However, the reader might choose to identify Frankenstein's monster as exhibiting the true Promethean spirit in the tradition of Percy Shelley. Although Victor rebels against nature to create his monster and refuses to make him a mate to save mankind (suffering punishment as a result), his monster also rebels against Frankenstein, a creator far more tyrannical whose scientific control of natural forces makes him a more fitting representation of Zeus.

[edit] External Links


[edit] References

  1. ^ By the Cocteau Theater Company, among others
  2. ^ See Susan Hawk Brisman's. '"Unsaying His High Language": The Problem of Voice in Prometheus. Unbound' (Studies in Romanticism).

[edit] Sources

  • Shelley, M. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. England: Penguin Classics, 1992.