Midas (Shelley)
Encyclopedia
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...
by the Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
writers Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
. Mary wrote the drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems to it. Written in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, Mary Shelley tried unsuccessfully to have the play published by children's magazines in England in the 1830s; however, it was not published until A. Koszul's 1922 scholarly edition. Whether or not the drama was ever meant to be staged is a point of debate among scholars. The play combines the stories of the musical contest between Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
and Pan
Pan (mythology)
Pan , in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein , meaning "to pasture." He has the hindquarters, legs,...
and that of King Midas
Midas
For the legend of Gordias, a person who was taken by the people and made King, in obedience to the command of the oracle, see Gordias.Midas or King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. This was called the Golden touch, or the...
and his ability to turn everything he touches to gold.
Largely concerned with gender issues, Midas comments on the definitions of femininity and masculinity in the early nineteenth century and the developing ideology of separate spheres which encouraged women to restrict themselves to domestic affairs and men to political affairs. Part of the Romantic interest in rewriting classical myths
Classical mythology
Classical mythology or Greco-Roman mythology is the cultural reception of myths from the ancient Greeks and Romans. Along with philosophy and political thought, mythology represents one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later Western culture.Classical mythology has provided...
, Midas focuses on challenging patriarchy
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
and satirizing
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
the unbounded accumulation of wealth.
The genre of Midas bears the marks of gender debates, as well, with Percy writing in the traditionally male-dominated form of the lyric and Mary focusing on the details of everyday life in her verse drama. Since the play's first publication in 1922, critics have paid more attention to Percy Shelley's lyrics than Mary Shelley's drama. However, in the last fifteen years or so, this trend has reversed itself as scholars explore works of Mary Shelley other than Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
(1818).
Background
Percy Florence Shelley
Sir Percy Florence Shelley, 3rd Baronet was the son and only surviving child of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his second wife, Mary Shelley. He was thus the only grandchild of Mary Wollstonecraft...
later in 1819.
Despite the overwhelming grief caused by the death of her two children, Mary Shelley continued to study and read as she had throughout her life. Between 1818 and 1820, she exposed herself to quite a bit of drama. She read many of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's plays, some with Percy Shelley. Percy believed that Mary had a talent for drama and convinced her to study the great English, French, Latin, and Italian plays as well as drama theory. He even sought her advice regarding his play The Cenci
The Cenci
The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the Cencis . Shelley composed the play at Rome and at Villa Valsovano near Livorno, from May to August 5, 1819...
. Less glamorously, Mary transcribed the manuscript of Percy's drama Prometheus Unbound
Prometheus Unbound
Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820, concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus. It is inspired by Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and concerns Prometheus' release from captivity...
. The Shelleys also attended operas, ballets, and plays.
Mary Shelley's studies were broad during these years. She began to study Greek in 1820 and read widely on education. For example, she read Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
's philosophical work on education, Emile
Emile: Or, On Education
Émile, or On Education is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best and most important of all my writings”. Due to a section of the book entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,” Émile was be...
, and his sentimental novel, La Nouvelle HéloÏse as well as Thomas Day
Thomas Day
Thomas Day was a British author and abolitionist. He was well-known for the children's book The History of Sandford and Merton which emphasized Rousseauvian educational ideals.-Life and works:...
's children's book The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton
The History of Sandford and Merton was a bestselling children's book written by Thomas Day. He began his book as a contribution to Richard Lovell and Honora Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy, a collection of short stories for children that Maria Edgeworth continued some years after Honora died...
.
Writing and publication
Mary Shelley wrote Midas in 1820. Miranda Seymour, a Mary Shelley biographer, speculates that she wrote Midas and ProserpineProserpine (play)
Proserpine is a verse drama written for children by the English Romantic writers Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary wrote the blank verse drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems. Composed in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, it is often considered a partner to the...
for two young girls she met and befriended, Laurette and Nerina Tighe. They were the daughters of friends of the Shelleys in Italy and their mother was a former pupil of Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
. The same year, she wrote the children's story Maurice
Maurice (Shelley)
Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot is a children's story by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley. Written in 1820 for Laurette Tighe, a daughter of friends of Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley tried to have it published by her father, William Godwin, but he refused...
for Laurette.
Mary Shelley submitted the play for publication to The Browning Box, edited by Bryan Walter Procter, in 1824; it was rejected. In 1830, she submitted it to Rudolph Ackermann
Rudolph Ackermann
Rudolph Ackermann was an Anglo-German bookseller, inventor, lithographer, publisher and businessman.- Biography :...
for publication in his children's magazine Forget-Me-Not; it was again rejected. In 1832, she sent it to Alaric Alexander Watts
Alaric Alexander Watts
Alaric Alexander Watts , British poet and journalist, born in London. His life was dedicated to newspaper creation and edition and was seen as a conservative writer...
for consideration in his annual Literary Souvenir, however in her letter she suggested that the drama may be more appropriate for the juvenile publications edited by his wife, Priscilla Maden Watts. The drama was first published in 1922 by literary scholar A. Koszul.
Plot summary
Pan (mythology)
Pan , in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein , meaning "to pasture." He has the hindquarters, legs,...
challenges Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
to a musical contest, with Tmolus
Tmolus
Tmolus was a King of Lydia and husband to Omphale. He is the eponymous namesake of Mount Tmolus , which lies in Lydia with the Lydian capital at its foot and Hypaepa on its southern slope...
as the judge. Tmolus awards the victory to Apollo. Pan challenges his decision, asking the mortal King Midas
Midas
For the legend of Gordias, a person who was taken by the people and made King, in obedience to the command of the oracle, see Gordias.Midas or King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. This was called the Golden touch, or the...
to decide the contest. Midas has a bias towards Pan and decides in favor of him. Apollo, upset at this mortal's interference in immortal affairs, punishes Midas by turning his ears into ass's ears, saying "thus to the world / Wear thou the marks of what thou art, / Let Pan himself blush at such a judge". Zopyrion, Midas's prime minister, helps the king figure out to hide his ears: they design a crown to hide them. Although Zopyrion is determined to keep the king's secret, he still finds the situation hysterical. When he encounters Asphalion, a courtier
Courtier
A courtier is a person who is often in attendance at the court of a king or other royal personage. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together...
, he misunderstands him and thinks that Asphalion also knows the secret. Asphalion discovers he has a secret, but not what it is. After Asphalion leaves, Zopyrion whispers the secret to the "greenest reeds that sway / And nod your feathered heads beneath the sun". Bacchus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
then arrives, searching for Silenus
Silenus
In Greek mythology, Silenus was a companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus.-Evolution of the character:The original Silenus resembled a folklore man of the forest with the ears of a horse and sometimes also the tail and legs of a horse...
. Bacchus decides to reward Midas for his hospitality and offers to grant him any wish he wants. Although his prime minister suggests that he wish for his original ears back, Midas wishes that everything he touches be turned to gold. During this conversation, Midas is convinced he hears Zopyrion whispering his secret, but it is really the reeds saying "Midas, the king, has the ears of an ass."
Act II begins with Midas enamored with his new power of turning things to gold. However, his courtiers complain of being forced to wear heavy golden clothing. Midas rebukes them, saying "I am a God!". But Midas himself begins to experience the problems of turning everything he touches to gold: he cannot eat, for example. He starts to regret his wish, saying "Oh! fool! to wish to change all things to gold! / Blind Ideot that I was!". Midas prays to Bacchus to take away his power, begging "Make me a hind, clothe me in ragged skins— / And let my food be bread, unsavoury roots, / But take from me the frightful curse of gold". Midas has his courtiers sacrifice to the gods to see if he can be relieved of his curse; Bacchus relents and tells him to bathe in the river. The courtiers find it strange that he does not remove his crown while he swims; one of them resolves to peek under his crown while he is sleeping. Returning from his swim, Midas celebrates nature, saying gold "is a sordid, base and dirty thing;— / Look at the grass, the sky, the trees, the flowers, / These are Joves treasures & they are not gold".
Genre
Children's literature
Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...
. At this time, "instructional" literature for children was most often written by women, who were viewed as having superior knowledge regarding the raising of the young. While placing women in a traditional maternal role, this literature also allowed them the opportunity to participate in the public sphere as authors and directors of morality. Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...
, had written two such works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education...
(1787) and Original Stories from Real Life
Original Stories from Real Life
Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness is the only complete work of children's literature by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Original Stories begins with a frame story, which sketches out...
(1788) that she undoubtedly knew. As Purinton writes, "Mary Shelley's seemingly simple plays are complicated by their position with this context of 'instructional' literature at a historical moment when the boundaries of private and public discourse are blurred."
Scholars have disputed whether or not Shelley meant for her play to be staged. Alan Richardson, for example, argues that the play is "lyrical drama" or "mental theater" in the style of Romantic closet drama
Closet drama
A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group. A related form, the "closet screenplay," developed during the 20th century.-Form:...
"with its emphasis on character over plot, on reaction over action, and its turn away from the theater". However, Judith Pascoe challenges this conclusion, pointing to manuscript evidence such as stage directions; she argues that Mary Shelley intended her play to be staged. Literary scholar Jeffrey Cox
Jeffrey N. Cox
Jeffrey N. Cox is a Professor of English literature and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Cox specializes in English and European Romantic literature, cultural theory, and cultural studies...
has argued that Midas, along with Proserpine
Proserpine (play)
Proserpine is a verse drama written for children by the English Romantic writers Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary wrote the blank verse drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems. Composed in 1820 while the Shelleys were living in Italy, it is often considered a partner to the...
, Prometheus Unbound and other plays written by the Leigh Hunt
Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt , best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist, poet and writer.-Early life:Leigh Hunt was born at Southgate, London, where his parents had settled after leaving the USA...
circle, were "not a rejection of the stage but an attempt to remake it". Turning from tragedy
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
and the comedy of manners
Comedy of manners
The comedy of manners is a genre of play/television/film which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters, such as the miles gloriosus in ancient times, the fop and the rake during the Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young...
, these writers reinvented drama by writing masque
Masque
The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...
s and pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
dramas. He argues that Midas and Proserpine are "a mythological diptych that indites on stage the forces of oppression". For him, Midas "ends appropriately with Midas giving up his golden touch and turning to celebrate a pastoral world of simplicity and equality".
In the early nineteenth century, lyric poetry
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
was associated with male poets and quotidian poetry (i.e., the poetry of the everyday) with female poets. The division of labor in Midas reflects this trend: Percy contributed the two lyric poems in the drama while Mary's play contains the kind of detail found in the poetry of other women. However, Mary Shelley does not simply accept these gender-genre distinctions. As Richardson explains, "soliloquy is resisted in the first act and exposed in the second act as a questionable and implicitly masculine mode". Furthermore, the disjunction between Percy Shelley's poems, spoken by Apollo and Pan in the first act, and Mary Shelley's verse drama has often bothered critics. Yet, Richardson argues that this was intended, to highlight the difference in poetic mode.
Style and themes
Mary Shelley's gender concerns did not cease with generic issues. In the musical contest between ApolloApollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
and Pan
Pan (mythology)
Pan , in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein , meaning "to pasture." He has the hindquarters, legs,...
in the first act, Apollo is associated with masculine characteristics, such as philosophy, science, and reason, and Pan is associated with feminine characteristics, such as sheep and nature. however, as Purinton notes, "both sing egocentric lyrics that boast of their 'instruments' and their deeds". When Apollo wins, the play appears to celebrate "male superiority". However, Pan appeals the decision to King Midas
Midas
For the legend of Gordias, a person who was taken by the people and made King, in obedience to the command of the oracle, see Gordias.Midas or King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. This was called the Golden touch, or the...
, who reverses the decision in Pan's favor, for which he is then punished. Purinton argues that the play therefore breaks down traditional gender distinctions, portraying characters with mixed gender signals. In this way, she writes, "as cross-dressed dramaturgy, then, Midas is a comedy about women's issues played out on male bodies". For her, the play dramatizes the problems with the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, where women were expected to remain in the private, domestic sphere and men were expected to participate in the political, public sphere.
Shelley also uses the figure of Midas to comment on capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
. Midas's initial joy in acquiring gold is symbolic of contemporary England, "racing headlong into its new identity as an industrialized, consumerist society financed by political and mercantile imperialism". For Shelley, these commercial efforts are particularly masculine; Midas's ears, which symbolize emasculation, are juxtaposed to masculinizing gold. Furthermore, Shelley suggests that when political leaders become feminized, they lose their political power. She draws an analogy between Midas and George III
George III of the United Kingdom
George III was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of these two countries on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death...
and George IV
George IV of the United Kingdom
George IV was the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and also of Hanover from the death of his father, George III, on 29 January 1820 until his own death ten years later...
, British kings who were often viewed as feminized.
Like Percy Shelley, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley was rewriting the classical myths; however, like other Romantic women writers, she was challenging patriarchy
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which the role of the male as the primary authority figure is central to social organization, and where fathers hold authority over women, children, and property. It implies the institutions of male rule and privilege, and entails female subordination...
in particular. Midas is not just a commentary on Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
's version of the tale in the Metamorphoses; it is also a commentary on Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
's version in The Wife of Bath's Tale. In Ovid's version it is Midas's barber who cannot keep the secret of his ears; in Chaucer's version, it is his wife. In Mary Shelley's version, it is Midas's prime minister who cannot keep the secret; however, Midas is convinced a woman has revealed his secret and a courtier explicitly states "There is no woman here".
Proserpine and Midas are often seen as a pair of contrasting plays. Proserpine is a play of female bonding, while Midas is a male-dominated drama; male poets participate in a contest in Midas while in Proserpine female characters participate in communal storytelling; "where Midas lives in his golden palace imagining himself at the center of an all-powerful court, Ceres laments leaving the pastoral enclave she shares with Proserpine
Proserpina
Proserpina or Proserpine is an ancient Roman goddess whose story is the basis of a myth of Springtime. Her Greek goddess' equivalent is Persephone. The probable origin of her name comes from the Latin, "proserpere" or "to emerge," in respect to the growing of grain...
for Jove's court"; Midas focuses on gold, while the women in Proserpine enjoy flowers; and "where the society of Midas is marked by egotism, greed, and strife, the female society of Proserpine values community, gift-giving, and love".
Reception
When A. Koszul first published an edited version of Midas in 1922, he argued "that the little classical fancies which Mrs. Shelley never ventured to publish are quite as worthy of consideration as her more ambitious prose works". However, his "Introduction" to the play speaks mostly of Percy Shelley and his contribution to Mary Shelley's works. In fact, as he explains, he has decided to publish in order to contribute to the Percy Shelley centenary. Since their original publication, neither Midas nor Prosperine has received much critical attention. Critics have either only paid attention to Percy Shelley's poems or dismissed the plays. Literary critic Elizabeth Nitchie wrote that the plays are "distinguished only by the lyrics that [Percy] Shelley wrote for them" and Sylva Norman contends that they "do not really call for analytical and comparative study". However, in the last fifteen years or so, beginning with the publication of The Other Mary Shelley, more attention has been paid to Mary Shelley's "other" works, such as her dramas.External links
- Prosperine and Midas at Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...