ABSTRACT
The response among Shelley scholars to ‘Peter Bell the Third’ has historically ranged from disappointment to distaste. Dazzled by the brilliance of the canonical ‘great’ works of his annus mirabilis of 1819, critics have typically had little patience with what seems by comparison to Prometheus Unbound or The Cenci to be crude work that has been called ‘rancorous and slightly spiteful’. Shelley’s own difficult relationship with Wordsworth has received much attention, most notably from G. Kim Blank, who has traced how Shelley confronted in Wordsworth’s poetry both the poetic output and the authorial presence of a powerful precursor who formed the other ‘half’ of a complicated attraction-repulsion relationship with the younger poet. One of the difficulties that ‘Peter Bell the Third’ poses for its readers is rhetorical in nature. The poem is alternately ‘playful’ and serious, light-hearted in its satirical effects at one moment and brutal in its mockeries at the next.
