ABSTRACT
Shelley's decision to respond to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound was linked to his desire to engage and re-deploy Promethean imagery as a rhetoric of liberation. Like Swellfoot and Hellas, Prometheus Unbound is more than a remix of classical drama. Prometheus Unbound depicts an expansive and alternative epic stage of liberation: one that offers audiences ‘spells by which to reassume/An empire o'er the disentangled Doom’ (PU, IV, 568–69). A counter-drama to The Cenci, wherein individuals and their stories remain locked in the vault of history and bound within the closed world of tragedy, Prometheus Unbound, more than Shelley's other dramas, transvalues the cognitive frameworks of slavery and liberty by creating a world where characters constantly move, sequentially abandoning one position after another until they consciously manifest their freedom. In contrast with the period's slave dramas 1 and much of the iconography associated with abolition and emancipation, especially post-1807, when the British Parliament's Act to abolish the slave trade inaugurated the cultural myth that freedom could be granted by a governing body, Shelley embraces and then redeploys the ‘visual rhetorics of disempowerment, stereotypification, and passivity’. 2
