Prometheus Unbound

Panthea is a deity Shelley invested. Her name comes from the Greek for “all gods,” suggesting that Panthea is a representation of faith and insight. The notion of faith here is distinct from traditional Christian monotheistic belief tied to specific dogma. Instead, Panthea embodies deism, or faith in the divine, free from any form of institutional hierarchy.

Panthea is an Oceanid, or sea nymph, with wings, like an angel. Along with her younger counterpart, Ione, Panthea acts as a protagonist who both comments on the events of the narrative and acts on Prometheus’s behalf. For instance, when the Phantasm of Jupiter appears, she comments that he looks “cruel […] but calm and strong” (I.238). Absent other stage directions in the work, her comments are the basis for understanding the entrances and exits, as well as the appearance, of the other characters.

Panthea is driven by her love and affection for Prometheus and for her sisters, Ione and Asia. When she learns of Prometheus’s desire to see his beloved, Asia, she goes to retrieve her for him. When Asia looks into Panthea’s eyes, her insight seemingly enters Asia’s being: Through Panthea, Asia perceives Prometheus “arrayed in the soft light of his own smiles” (II.1.121). This prompts Asia’s radiant transformation. She then bravely accompanies Asia into the abyss to visit Demogorgon. These actions suggest that Panthea acts as an avatar for Prometheus while he is in bondage.

Asia is an Oceanid who represents Love and Beauty. She can also be seen as a personification of the Far East more generally, in keeping with the setting of the work in the Indian Caucasus. In Prometheus Unbound, Asia is Prometheus’s beloved. At the end of Act I, Prometheus tells Panthea that he feels “most vain all hope but love; and thou art far, / Asia! who, when my being overflowed, / Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine” (I.808-810). In using the simile of “golden chalice” to describe Asia, he draws a parallel between Asia and the Holy Grail, a mythical chalice that symbolizes eternal life in Christian mythology. The love of and for Asia has sustained him in his eternal torment in captivity.

Panthea then resolves to find Asia in her “sad exile” where her powers will “fade / if it were mingled not with thine [Prometheus’s]” (I.832-833). This line introduces the idea that Prometheus and Asia, that is knowledge and love, are only powerful when they are joined together.

Asia is an idealized beauty “whose footsteps pave the world / with loveliness” (II.1.69-70). When she learns from Panthea of Prometheus’s suffering, Asia’s love for him serves as the impetus for her journey to the abyss of Demogorgon to ask for advice on how to free Prometheus. This journey is notable because it reinforces Prometheus’s lack of agency compared to the strength and bravery of Asia as a representative of love. Where in a typical mythic plot, the male protagonist is the primary actor, here it is Asia who ventures to the fearsome Demogorgon and learns of her power.

After Prometheus’s release, Asia and Prometheus are reunited and go to live together in a cave near his temple. Asia then communes with the Earth and the Spirit of the Earth, celebrating the new life that is springing forth.

Jupiter, the king of gods, is the antagonist of Prometheus Unbound. Before the opening of the play, Jupiter, who is repeatedly described as a tyrant by other characters, punished Prometheus for stealing fire for humans by chaining him to the mountain to be tormented. In Shelley’s Myth Rewritten as Political Allegory, Jupiter symbolizes absolutist monarchy: By condemning Prometheus for sharing language and knowledge with people, Jupiter personifies the English monarchy’s censorship of radical republican writers like Shelley.

Shelley’s Jupiter is reduced from supremacy to helplessness through the passive resistance of his victims. In the beginning of the play, he sends a sort of good-cop bad-cop team to persuade Prometheus to earn his freedom by revealing the prophecy he knows about Jupiter’s downfall. While the messenger god, Mercury, entreats Prometheus to give up, the monstrous winged Furies torture Prometheus for his continued defiance. When Prometheus still refuses to yield, Jupiter threatens the humans that Prometheus been championing, sending a lightning bolt that splits “to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar; / How fearfully God’s thunder howls behind!” (I.433-434). However, by the opening of Act III, Jupiter is shown to be impotent against the power of his son, Demogorgon.

Jupiter is depicted as the stereotypical tyrannical monarch. In the opening scene of Act III, the only time he appears, Jupiter monologues about his “omnipoten[ce]” before being ousted by Demogorgon. When Jupiter falls, he swears that he will bring Demogorgon down with him: “we two will sink on the wide waves of ruin” (III.1.71). However, even this curse proves to be ineffective, as Demogorgon returns in Act IV.