An online global event presented by the Keats-Shelley House, Rome and the Keats-Shelley Association of America and featuring film director Jane Campion and actor Julian Sands.
On July 8th, 1822, Percy Shelley, then just 29 years old, perished at sea off the northwest coast of Italy. Earlier that year, he, Mary Shelley, and their only surviving child, Percy Florence, had begun sharing a house near the fishing village of Lerici with their friends Edward and Jane Williams. On the 1st of July, Percy and Edward Williams, along with a young English boathand, Charles Vivian, had sailed Percy’s yacht the Don Juan down the coast from Lerici to Livorno to meet Byron and Leigh Hunt and continue the planning for the latter’s new political journal The Liberal. A week later, Shelley, Williams, and Vivian embarked on the return voyage to Lerici. It seems they ignored warnings about the bad weather. It is thought that the Don Juan, which was carrying, observers reported, a dangerous amount of sail, overturned in a squall. Williams’s and Shelley’s bodies were not found until July 18th, washed ashore near Viareggio. (Shelley’s was recognizable only because of the books by Sophocles and by Keats that he had been carrying in his pockets.) Three more weeks passed before Vivian’s remains were found.
Two hundred years later, on July 8th, 2022, Shelley’s death in Italy was commemorated in an all-day, on-line, global event that was organized by Neil Fraistat and Anna Mercer of the K-SAA and Guiseppe Albano, curator of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. The commemoration had three parts.
The first was the online premiere of the video story with immersive sound, “The Last Days of Shelley,” featuring the voice of British actor and Keats-Shelley200 Ambassador Julian Sands and directed by Giulio Boato. Produced by 313 film production, it follows Shelley in Rome, released in December 2021.
Next, to sublime effect, twenty-six readers read aloud “The Triumph of Life,” Shelley’s final visionary poem. Those readers, zooming in from various points across the world, took turns reading the successive sections of the poem and read them in English, Albanian, Cantonese, Danish, French, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish—in some cases from translations that had been commissioned especially for this event. The film director Dame Jane Campion launched the reading with the first twenty lines of The Triumph of Life, and past-president of the K-SAA Stuart Curran read aloud the last of the lines that survive. (Because of Shelley’s untimely death, Triumph was left incomplete in July 1822 and after 548 lines, the poem breaks off abruptly, just after its main speaker asks “Then, what is Life?””)
Finally, a roundtable on the topic of “Shelley’s Last Days” was held “inside” a virtual recreation of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, featuring thought-provoking contributions on Shelley’s life, thought, and politics and on his relations with Byron and Leigh Hunt, from Serena Baiesi, Nora Crook, Mathelinda Nagubodi, Andrew Stauffer, and Fernando Valverde.
If you weren’t able to join us on July 8th, you can nonetheless get a sense of the occasion from this recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co8skXffV1I
Shelley’s memory is preserved in the work of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, a museum which houses many manuscripts, relics, and art works related to the poet and overseen by UK charity the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, and through the academic outreach of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Learn more about past events by writing to info@keats-shelley-house.org