ABSTRACT
The binary nature of Queen Mab, the traditional and the radical, the real and the visionary, romance and revolution, has been seen by critics as both internal conflict and fruitful intersection. This chapter presents the fairytale frames of the poem overlap with the instruction they contain. As a fairytale of sorts, Queen Mab also serves as a counter-text to what Shelley saw as another improbable fiction: biblical narrative. Like Shelley’s later god-like entities and powers, Mab exceeds the wildest imaginings of ‘the visioned poet in his dreams’. Mab’s battlements hark back to the heaven of Paradise Lost, which becomes a theatre of war between rebel angels and God’s forces. Shelley offers a fairly confident and succinct definition of life in ‘Mab’; and yet there is a discontinuity between the philosophically abstract way that he defines it and the visually specific way that he seeks to minimize death.
