ABSTRACT
The poem after all is called Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem: with Notes. Throughout his authorized edition of Queen Mab, Percy Bysshe Shelley places indicator hands, eight in all. These hands, as Neil Fraistat has argued, send the reader on a number of puzzling and at times hilarious wild-goose chases, since in the days of dangerous radical publication, indicator hands often anonymously referred to another compositor’s work. Reading the notes as a coherent text produces all kinds of resonances, a dance of thinking which Shelley orchestrated by deliberately placing them at the end of the edition he oversaw. Scholars argue that Shelley’s later work was more developed or mature, somehow, and by implication or explicitly relegate Queen Mab to the place given it in the Oxford Standard Authors edition – juvenilia. Shelley’s Spinozism is an expanded materialism that finds little difference between matter and information: ‘the minutest atom comprehends/A world of loves and hatreds’.
