44 pages • 1-hour read
Prometheus Unbound
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Act IChapter Summaries & Analyses
Act I Summary
Act I opens at night on a ravine in the Indian Caucasus. Prometheus is bound to a mountain face. The Oceanids (ocean nymphs) Panthea and Ione are seated below him.
In a blank verse monologue, Prometheus calls out for Jupiter to recognize the suffering of the people on Earth. Prometheus is willing to endure torment for his rebellion against Jupiter and compares his travails to the suffering of Nature. He does not hate Jupiter but pities him. He wants to remember how he cursed Jupiter. The voices of the mountains, springs, air, and whirlwinds describe witnessing the pain of humanity and Prometheus. The Earth echoes their sentiments.
Prometheus acknowledges these voices. He laments those who have been oppressed by Jupiter (Jove) and calls on them to join him. The Earth replies that they are too afraid to do so. Prometheus asks the Earth to tell him how he cursed Jupiter. The Earth praises Prometheus as “more than God / Being wise and kind” (I.145). She introduces herself to Prometheus as Mother Earth. She once emanated joy until the tyrannical Jupiter oppressed her and chained Prometheus to the cliff. She refuses to tell him the curse, but suggests he ask the Phantasm of Jupiter about it.
In lyric verse, Ione and Panthea herald the coming of the Phantasm of Jupiter, a terrible sight. The Phantasm arrives and recites Prometheus’s curse. Prometheus called Jupiter a “malignant spirit” and wished that Jupiter’s “Infamy shall be / A robe of envenomed agony / And thine Omnipotence a crown of pain” (I.289-290). After hearing his words, Prometheus repents for his hatefulness and says he does not wish pain upon any living thing. The Earth ruefully believes that Prometheus has been vanquished, but Ione encourages her to still have hope. Mercury, the messenger god, arrives on a rainbow. He is accompanied by the Furies, monstrous servants of Jupiter sent to torture Prometheus.
In blank verse, Mercury encourages Prometheus to share with Jupiter the secret of Jupiter’s fate, which only Prometheus knows, in exchange for his freedom. Prometheus reminds Mercury that he “gave all / He has” (I.381-382) in helping Jupiter overthrow the Titan, and yet Jupiter imprisoned him anyway. He refuses to submit to Jupiter’s will. He knows that one day Jupiter’s reign will end and rejects Mercury’s pity. Jupiter issues a thunderclap in anger over Prometheus’s stubbornness; frightened, Mercury returns to Heaven. The Furies terrorize the humans and torture Prometheus physically. As they revel in their creation of misery, fear, famine, and hatred, a Chorus of Spirits expresses support for Prometheus who kindled in man a “thirst” for “hope, love, doubt, desire” (I.544). They believe that Freedom and Love will eventually win.
All of the Furies except one leave. Panthea tells Ione that Prometheus looks weakened after his torture and that the human world suffers as well. The remaining Fury calls Prometheus an example of those who try to make the world better but in so doing only heap more punishment on themselves and others. Prometheus accepts the Furies’ brutality as a marker of his moral upstanding: Their words “are like a cloud of winged snakes; / And yet I pity those they torture not” (I.632-33). The Fury leaves.
Prometheus laments that tyrannical Jupiter has caused division among people who should unite around “Truth, liberty, and love!” (I.651). The Earth commiserates but encourages him to look toward the future. Panthea and Ione announce the arrival of Spirits who introduce themselves as the “gentle guides and guardians […] of heaven-oppressed mortality” (I.673-674). They have a prophecy: Prometheus will rally people around him to overthrow the tyrant with the power of love. Ione sees two shapes in the distance: Love and the shadow of Pain on Death’s horse. The Spirits tell Prometheus he will quell this Pain.
Ione, Panthea, and Prometheus discuss the message of the Spirits and his desire to reunite with his beloved, the Oceanid Asia. Panthea reassures him that Asia waits for him in “her sad exile” (I.827).
Act I Analysis
Prometheus Unbound is a closet drama, meaning that it was not intended to be staged for an audience but imagined by the reader. As such, characters and places are not described in detail, and no stage directions are offered. The play’s settings—the Caucasus Mountains, heaven—outstrip the dimensions and material reality of any possibly production, so they can only be fully pictured in the reader’s imagination, which is similarly boundless. This ethereal quality is typical of closet lyric dramas of this period, such as Manfred (1817) by Lord Byron, but Shelley takes this form to its most extreme. Characters appear and disappear, and disembodied voices ring out from the ether in the uncanny way that heralds the Romantic sublime, contributing to the mythic dimensions of the play. Adding to this lack of materiality, the play’s characters are more representational than corporeal. For instance, Panthea is ostensibly an oceanic nymph, but she has little characterization beyond her symbolic role as a divine female figure interpreted as personifying Faith or Insight. The characters are both larger than life and also quite thinly drawn; they have little in common with the richly characterized figures of Greek drama.
Prometheus Unbound is written in two dominant modes of poetic form. What would be dialogue in a traditional play is in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, as in the opening lines of Prometheus’s monologue:
Monarch of Gods and Dæmons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth (I.1-4).
As is evident here, the lines do not rhyme and each line contains five iambs, or pairs of stressed and unstressed syllables. This poetic form is also called heroic verse, and it is common in English epic poetry, including Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Shelley alternates blank verse with rhymed verses that evoke the function of the Chorus in ancient Greek plays. These sections are most often sung by the ephemeral voices of spirits that typically confirm what the main characters are experiencing, as in this excerpt from the Third Voice from the Air:
I had clothed, since Earth uprose,
Its wastes in colours not their own,
And oft had my serene repose
Been cloved by many a rending groan (I.82-85)
These lines adhere to an ABAB rhyming scheme where alternate lines rhyme (uprose/repose, own/groan), though other stanzas use different rhyming schemes such as ABABB. Although Shelley typically uses iambic pentameter, the scansion is not always perfect. Due to the high variance of language and punctuation between published versions of this work, this guide will not analyze in depth the scansion of Prometheus Unbound. (For more on the scansion of variances of the manuscripts, transcriptions, and published editions, see Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Variorum Edition, edited by Lawrence Zillman. 1959.)
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