44 pages • 1-hour read
Prometheus Unbound
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Background
Literary Context: The Myth of Prometheus and Æschylus’s Prometheus Bound
Prometheus is a character from Greco-Roman mythology. He is one of the Titans, deities that preceded the Olympic pantheon. Feeling pity for humans suffering on Earth in the cold, Prometheus steals fire from Olympus and gives it to people. This fire is often symbolically interpreted as a representation of knowledge or technology. When the king of the gods, Zeus in Greek mythology or Jupiter in the Roman adaptation, discovers the theft, he punishes Prometheus by chaining him to a rock for eternity. Every day, an eagle viciously rips out Prometheus’s liver, which regenerates overnight, only to be eaten again the next day. In most versions of the story, Prometheus is eventually freed by Heracles, or Hercules, a demi-god who represents strength.
Sometime in the mid-5th century BCE, a cycle of plays about Prometheus was written and performed in Greece. These plays have traditionally been attributed to Aeschylus, but this attribution is highly disputed by modern historians. The first and most complete play is Prometheus Bound, which covers the mythology up to Prometheus’s punishment by Zeus. Fragments of plays called Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-Bearer are also extant. It is believed that the plot of these plays concerned Prometheus’s prophecy about Zeus’s downfall: that Zeus’s son with the sea nymph Thetis would overthrow his father. In exchange for Prometheus’s revealing this prophecy, Zeus permits Hercules to free Prometheus, and Zeus and Prometheus reconcile.
Percy Shelley makes many crucial changes to what is known of the plot of Aeschylus’s play. The most crucial of these is that Jupiter and Prometheus do not reconcile at the end of Shelley’s play; instead, Jupiter is dethroned.
Historical Context: Early 19th-Century Republicanism and Revolution
Percy Shelley was born in Sussex, England, in 1792. In the previous two decades, the world had been rocked by two major republican revolutions against the established order. Republicanism is the idea that government should be led by, and with the participation and representation of, the people, rather than by a divinely ordained monarch. Inspired by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the subsequent empowerment of popular movements, American revolutionaries had fought the British monarchy and established an independent republic in 1776. Bolstered by the success of the American experiment, French republicans overthrew the monarchy in that country in 1789. The French revolutionary experiment ended only a few years later with the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804.
Coming of age during this turbulent era, Shelley embraced radical republican politics. He studied Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and historical examples like the French Revolution. He wrote political essays advocating for these beliefs. However, he often had to temper his views so as not to run afoul of the British authorities who were taking increasingly authoritarian measures against sedition and anti-monarchical beliefs. Tensions rose following the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, when 18 civilians were killed and hundreds injured when the British calvary stormed a public meeting of radical republicans.
In response, Shelley shrouded his political beliefs via allegory, symbolism, and reinterpretations of mythology so as to provide a degree of plausible deniability to the charge of sedition. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley uses Prometheus’s conflict with the tyrannical Jupiter to illustrate his belief that love could overthrow monarchical power and let loose Enlightenment knowledge, leading to a utopian world of equality and beauty.
By contrast, Shelley’s wife, the famed English author Mary Shelley, had a much darker view of the use of knowledge and technology, as seen in her novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818).
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