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Proserpine was first published in the 1832
Winter's Wreath, which is similar to this volume of the
Friendship's Offering and the Winter's Wreath from 1840
Proserpine is a 1820 verse drama by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley, based on the Roman myth of the abduction of Proserpine from Ceres by Pluto. According to the editors of the most recent collection of Mary Shelley's works, the drama was probably written for children.[1]
[edit] Publication details
Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, contributed two lyric poems to the play: "Arethusa" and "Song of Proserpine While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna". The manuscript, housed in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, is a fragment and shows Mary and Percy working side-by-side on the project. A fair copy is owned by the Bodleian Library. In 1921, Walter Edwin Peck published a transcription of the fragment as part of his article "Shelley's Corrections in the Original draft of Mary's Two-Act Drama of "Proserpine" (1820)" in the Nation & The Athenaeum.[2] A more recent transcription has been published in Clemit and Markley's Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings.[3]
- ^ "Introduction", Literary Lives, xl.
- ^ "Shelley Corrections in the Original draft of Mary's Two-Act Drama of "Proserpine" (1820)". Nation & The Athenaeum 28 (19 March 1921): 876-77.
- ^ "Introduction", Literary Lives, xl-xli.
[edit] Bibliography
- Caretti, Laura. "'Dear Mother, Leave Me Not!' Mary Shelley and the Myth of Proserpine". Mary versus Mary. Ed. Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Giovanna Silvani. Naples: Liguori, 2001.
- Carlson, Julie. "Coming After: Shelley's Proserpine". Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41.4 (1999).
- Cox, Jeffrey N. "Staging Hope: Genre, Myth, and Ideology in the Dramas of the Hunt Circle". Texas Studies in Language and Literature 38 (1996).
- Gubar, "Mother, Maiden and the Marriage of Death: Woman Writers and an Ancient Myth". Women's Studies 6 (1979): 301-315.
- Pascoe, Judith. "Proserpine and Midas. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
- Peck, Walter Edwin. "Shelley Corrections in the Original draft of Mary's Two-Act Drama of "Proserpine" (1820)". Nation & The Athenaeum 28 (19 March 1921): 876-77.
- Petronella, Vincent F. "Mary Shelley, Shakespeare, and the Romantic Theatre". Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Ed. Laura Dabundo. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000.
- Purinton, Marjean D. "Purinton. "Polysexualities and Romantic Generations in Mary Shelley's Mythological Dramas Midas and Proserpine". Women's Writing 6.3 (1999): 385-411.
- Richardson, Alan. "Proserpine and Midas: Gender, Genre, and Mythic Revisionism in Mary Shelley's Dramas". The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein. Eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195077407.
- Shelley, Mary. Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings. Vol. 4. Eds. Pamela Clemit and A. A. Markley. London: Pickering and Chatto. 2002.
[edit] External links
