Uncovering the Archive - ‘Prometheus Unbound’ by Percy Shelley, Bodleian Library and Shelley-Godwin Archive

Although the Romantic poets lived two hundred years ago, a remarkable number of their manuscripts, belongings, and other assorted ephemera still survive and are preserved in archives and collections across the globe. Most of the time, these artefacts are tucked away in museum collections, or specially stored in boxes to preserve the delicate paper or materials used to make them. Generally only a select few are allowed access to these items, predominantly the archivists and custodians of these wonderful remnants and the researchers who are lucky enough to be working on them. Therefore, the aim of this new and exciting series on the K-SAA Blog is to bring to the fore the hidden and hidden-in-plain-sight artefacts of the Romantic poets, particularly those belonging to the Shelleys, Keats, Byron and their circles. We also aim to provide you, the reader, with behind-the-scenes access to these collections, along with insider knowledge from archivists and scholars.

We begin with a ground-breaking ‘lyrical drama’ published almost exactly two hundred years ago. We are talking, of course, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts. Inspired by the work of the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus, the mountainous terrain of France which surrounded Les Eschelles, plus the exotic locales of Rome, and the Baths of Caracalla, Shelley began his masterpiece in spring 1818 and completed the drama a year and a half later. As suggested by the title, it concentrates on the plight of the Titan Prometheus, who gave the gift of fire to humans and consequently suffered the wrath of the Greek god Zeus for eternity. Incidentally, talk of Prometheus must have inspired Percy’s wife, Mary Shelley, as the subtitle for her most famous work is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 

The first three acts of Prometheus Unbound were drafted by spring 1819, and sent to Shelley’s publishers, the Ollier brothers for inspection. Later in December 1819, Percy Shelley finished the fourth and final act of the poem, which was transcribed by Mary Shelley before being dispatched via his friend John Gisborne to the publishers. August 1820 saw the publication of Prometheus Unbound, although due to their residence in Italy, the Shelleys did not receive a copy of the poem until November of that year. On arrival, Shelley found the volume riddled with printing errors, for which he sent to Ollier a long list of corrections and amendments. For more on the composition and genesis of the piece, see here.  A number of surviving manuscripts, both fragments and longer copies of Prometheus Unbound, are held in prominent collections worldwide, including the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK; British Library, London, UK; Huntington Library, California, USA; and in the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library, USA. It appears that Shelley used a variety of notebooks and fragments to jot down his ideas and early drafts for the poem. These fragments also contain copies of other poems written during this period, including his 1819 Mask of Anarchy, alongside scraps of Italian translations of Prometheus Unbound.  The manuscript we are most interested in, however, is the fair copy (or final version) of Prometheus Unbound contained in three nondescript notebooks, otherwise known as Bodleian Manuscripts Shelley e.1, e.2, and e.3, which are held in Oxford. Luckily for those of us who cannot easily access Oxford and the Bodleian’s holdings, digital versions of this manuscript are available here online at the Shelley-Godwin Archive. 

The Shelley-Godwin Archive is the result of the first online collection of manuscripts written by Percy and Mary Shelley, plus Mary’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. The website contains digitized versions of manuscripts held in prominent archives in the UK and USA. The online archive is an excellent resource which provides not only the digitisations of the manuscripts, but also information including the state of the manuscript, whether draft, final, or corrected copy, the dates written, shelfmark and location, and most usefully, easy-to-understand transcriptions of the documents, with all insertions, deletions, and amendments transcribed faithfully. Uniquely, the Shelley-Godwin Archive also has the ability to be searched in granular ways, including when a word has been added or deleted within  the manuscript.  We spoke to Neil Fraistat, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and one of the General Editors of both the Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Shelley-Godwin Archive. Professor Fraistat gave us a little insider information on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound manuscript and told us that:

The fair copy of Prometheus Unbound is particularly important for two reasons. Firstly, Shelley was dismayed by the first edition, which contained many errors and a systematic changing of his punctuation by his friend Peacock, who corrected the press – this in a poem where punctuation is crucial. In these Bodleian manuscripts the punctuation exhibited therefore represents our best guide to Shelley’s preferred version of the poem.

Professor Fraistat also pointed out that ‘this fair copy is vital for researchers as the press transcript – which would have provided the best evidence of Shelley’s intentions for the poem – is not extant, therefore the Bodleian’s fair copy contains the best evidence of those intentions, especially in regards to the punctuation. Similarly, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, revisions to the fair copy demonstrate that the lyrical style of Acts II and IV were first developed through the writing of Act IV itself’. 

All of these revisions, edits and crossings out are visible on this final copy, and it truly is incredible to see these documents in an accessible and easy-to-use way – far easier than transcribing them for yourself! To see Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound fair copy for yourself, please click here.  For further reading on Prometheus Unbound and Percy Shelley in general, see Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York and London: Norton, 2002), and check out this post by former K-SAA Communications Fellow, Dr Amanda Blake Davis on the British Association of Romantic Studies’ blog. 

Amy Wilcockson

Amy Wilcockson is a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham. Her thesis focuses on editing the letters of the neglected Scottish Romantic poet, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844). She is also one of the K-SAA Communications Fellows for 2020-21. You can find her on Twitter @WilcocksonAmy.

With thanks to the General Editors of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, Neil Fraistat, Elizabeth Denlinger, and Raffaele Viglianti for their assistance with this blog post.