More about Mary Shelley's two brief plays--her "mythological dramas."
Well, if you
know the story of Proserpine (Persephone), you know things don’t go too well
for her. In Mary’s Proserpine we
learn that Pluto, “the King of Hell” (not
the Disney dog), has abducted her and, in a “black car” (carriage—not a
Porsche: don’t get excited), swept her off to the underworld.[1] Poor
distraught Ceres gets some help from Jove—but her daughter can return to the
upper world (this one) only if she’s not eaten any food down there.
Oops. She had
some pomegranate seeds. So for that trifling offense she can spend only six
months each year with Mom, six with Pluto. And Ceres cries at the end—the
play’s final line: He seizes half the
Earth when he takes thee.[2]
When I read
the play back on July 21, 1997, I wrote in my journal just this phrase: some moving lines and moments. Not very
helpful right now, nearly twenty years later—but as I’ve skimmed over it again,
I do concur with that long-ago judgment. Still, I remember being surprised,
much later, when I read that Mary had perhaps intended these two plays for a
younger audience. Seems kind of scary, doesn’t it? Pluto whisking a young girl
away, forcing her to live in the underworld (and what else he demanded of her we do not learn—and could not learn in a play from 1820 or so). All for some
pomegranate seeds—the Food Violation something she’d not been aware of while
she was Down There.
I see in my
notes that I read Mary’s second “mythological drama,” Midas, A Drama in Two Acts, on the same day. (In Clemit’s scholarly
edition, Proserpine is only eighteen
pages of text; Midas, the same.) And I said not a word in my journal about Midas—other
than to note that I finished it. Written in the same flurry of work in Pisa, Midas, I recall, I enjoyed quite a bit—and
even considered recommending it to the theater department at Western Reserve
Academy later on. (But I didn’t—I don’t think.)
In Act I, Midas—not
yet he of fabled wealth—stumbles across a singing contest between Pan and
Apollo (happens all the time, you know?). They ask Midas to judge; he does; he
picks Pan; Apollo, annoyed, judges the judge. … thy punishment shall be / But as a symbol of thy blunted sense. /
Have asses’ ears! and thus to the whole world / Wear thou the marks of what thou
art ….[3]
That’s not
good, as Bottom the Weaver would discover, oh, a couple of thousand years later
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mary,
of course, knew that play from the mid-1590s (she loved Shakespeare), and when
she decided to include the ears-of-an-ass story in her Midas, she must have issued
one of her smiles—a rare look for her in those Italian days of grief and loss.
 |
| Midas with the ears of an ass. |
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