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Hellas: A lyrical drama
This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published Published for the Shelley Society by Reeves and Turner in 1886 in 152 pages; English drama; Drama / General; Drama / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; History / General; Literary Criticism / Drama; Literary Criticism / Poetry; Poetry / General; Poetry / American / General; Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh;
- GenresPoetryRomanticism
60 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1822
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About the author
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1,615 books1,397 followersWorks of Percy Bysshe Shelley, British romantic poet, include "To a Skylark" in 1820;
Prometheus Unbound
, the lyric drama; and "Adonais," an elegy of 1821 to John Keats.
The Cenci , work of art or literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley of 1819, depicts Beatrice Cenci, Italian noblewoman.
People widely consider Percy Bysshe Shelley among the finest majors of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias , Ode to the West Wind , and The Masque of Anarchy . His major long visionary Alastor , The Revolt of Islam , and the unfinished The Triumph of Life .
Unconventional life and uncompromising idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley combined with his strong skeptical voice to make an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations, the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and in other languages, such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy . Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and [authorm:Bertrand Russell] also admired him. Famous for his association with his contemporaries Lord Byron, he also married Mary Shelley, novelist.
The Cenci , work of art or literature of Percy Bysshe Shelley of 1819, depicts Beatrice Cenci, Italian noblewoman.
People widely consider Percy Bysshe Shelley among the finest majors of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias , Ode to the West Wind , and The Masque of Anarchy . His major long visionary Alastor , The Revolt of Islam , and the unfinished The Triumph of Life .
Unconventional life and uncompromising idealism of Percy Bysshe Shelley combined with his strong skeptical voice to make an authoritative and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations, the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and in other languages, such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy . Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, and [authorm:Bertrand Russell] also admired him. Famous for his association with his contemporaries Lord Byron, he also married Mary Shelley, novelist.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 16, 2022
Written in 1821 and published in the following year during which he died, this poetic play by Shelley was inspired by the efforts of Greek insurgents to throw off their Turkish overloads. Unfortunately, it falls into what I’ve come to feel is the ‘overwritten’ category of Shelley’s works, which include Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound. In these writings, it seems he allowed his enthusiasms to become so carried away that any central intelligibility for his reader was a lucky afterthought on the rare occasion in which it was allowed to pierce the overflowing visions of moralistic imperatives and cosmological changes. In his ‘underwritten’ works, such as Julian and Maddolo and The Cenci, the narrative story is much clearer but the central thematic import seems at most to be somewhat minor.
Certainly, Shelley was enamoured of the Greeks. A translator of Plato and an ardent reader of Greek dramas, he claims in his Preface to this play that ‘We are all Greeks’, as western laws, literature, religion and art have all developed from bases established in Athens and the other city states of ancient times. Similarly, the battles of Thermopylae, Marathon and Philippi are referred to as precursors of the current struggle and harbingers of the eventual overthrow of those ‘murderers and swindlers called Sovereigns’ who still inhabit the corridors of power throughout Europe. Later in the work Mahmud, the Turkish leader, claims ‘Victory! Victory!’ as ‘Austria, Russia, England,/And that tame serpent that poor shadow, France,/Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.’ In other words, foreign powers were not about to aid in the insurgency but would actually work against it since they sensed a threat to their own autocratic powers.
Other than the recurring Choruses, who are so intent on explaining how clouds and winds moving over mountains and rivers symbolize the ongoing struggle, the major problem I had understanding what he was getting at was Shelley’s insistence on focusing on the Turkish side of the struggle. Mahmud, their purported leader, gets increasingly problematic reports on setbacks from successive messengers and then relies for his ultimate understanding on an ancient Jewish seer, one Ahasuerus, whose cryptic pronouncements seem to confuse rather than enlighten him. For instance, he argues that ‘The Future and the Past are idle shadows/of Thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:/Nought is but that which feels itself to be.’ And later: ‘What has thought/To do with time, or place, or circumstance?/Would thou behold the future? … The coming age is shadowed in the past/As in a glass.’ The best I can make out of this prognostication is that the power of the Turks will be overthrown since the former sway Greeks held over their lands would return and their idea (of democracy?) would overcome any material impediments to hits realization.
When the one of the choruses declaims later that ‘If Greece must be/A wreck yet shall its fragments reassemble/And build themselves again impregnably/In another clime’ Shelley seems to again fall prey to his over-generalizing penchant for seeing a macrocosm of political change within the particulars of events bounded by specific times and places. His ideals of Liberty, Virtue, Love and Truth are, if presently challenged and subdued, capable of eventual, eternal triumph throughout the entire world and for all time.
However, this is just a supposition as to what Shelley was actually trying to say. It is as if the very strong feelings in his heart for political change invariably transpired to come out of his pen as philosophical, generalized, eternal and more often than not cosmological symbols of eternal yearnings. A peroration close to the end typifies this approach: ‘What Paradise islands of glory gleam!/Beneath Heaven’s cope/Their shadows more clear float by --/The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,/The music and fragrance of their solitudes breath/Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,/Through the walls of your prison;/And Greece, which was dead, is risen!’ Thus, gleaming, shadows, sounds, lights, music and fragrance are somehow translated into political liberty. Maybe in Shelley’s mind they can do so, but I don’t get it.
One cannot help but admire the breadth of such thought, but one can also wish that he had tried harder to refocus this very expansiveness within more intelligible and relatable parameters.
Not recommended.
Certainly, Shelley was enamoured of the Greeks. A translator of Plato and an ardent reader of Greek dramas, he claims in his Preface to this play that ‘We are all Greeks’, as western laws, literature, religion and art have all developed from bases established in Athens and the other city states of ancient times. Similarly, the battles of Thermopylae, Marathon and Philippi are referred to as precursors of the current struggle and harbingers of the eventual overthrow of those ‘murderers and swindlers called Sovereigns’ who still inhabit the corridors of power throughout Europe. Later in the work Mahmud, the Turkish leader, claims ‘Victory! Victory!’ as ‘Austria, Russia, England,/And that tame serpent that poor shadow, France,/Cry peace, and that means death when monarchs speak.’ In other words, foreign powers were not about to aid in the insurgency but would actually work against it since they sensed a threat to their own autocratic powers.
Other than the recurring Choruses, who are so intent on explaining how clouds and winds moving over mountains and rivers symbolize the ongoing struggle, the major problem I had understanding what he was getting at was Shelley’s insistence on focusing on the Turkish side of the struggle. Mahmud, their purported leader, gets increasingly problematic reports on setbacks from successive messengers and then relies for his ultimate understanding on an ancient Jewish seer, one Ahasuerus, whose cryptic pronouncements seem to confuse rather than enlighten him. For instance, he argues that ‘The Future and the Past are idle shadows/of Thought’s eternal flight – they have no being:/Nought is but that which feels itself to be.’ And later: ‘What has thought/To do with time, or place, or circumstance?/Would thou behold the future? … The coming age is shadowed in the past/As in a glass.’ The best I can make out of this prognostication is that the power of the Turks will be overthrown since the former sway Greeks held over their lands would return and their idea (of democracy?) would overcome any material impediments to hits realization.
When the one of the choruses declaims later that ‘If Greece must be/A wreck yet shall its fragments reassemble/And build themselves again impregnably/In another clime’ Shelley seems to again fall prey to his over-generalizing penchant for seeing a macrocosm of political change within the particulars of events bounded by specific times and places. His ideals of Liberty, Virtue, Love and Truth are, if presently challenged and subdued, capable of eventual, eternal triumph throughout the entire world and for all time.
However, this is just a supposition as to what Shelley was actually trying to say. It is as if the very strong feelings in his heart for political change invariably transpired to come out of his pen as philosophical, generalized, eternal and more often than not cosmological symbols of eternal yearnings. A peroration close to the end typifies this approach: ‘What Paradise islands of glory gleam!/Beneath Heaven’s cope/Their shadows more clear float by --/The sound of their oceans, the light of their sky,/The music and fragrance of their solitudes breath/Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death,/Through the walls of your prison;/And Greece, which was dead, is risen!’ Thus, gleaming, shadows, sounds, lights, music and fragrance are somehow translated into political liberty. Maybe in Shelley’s mind they can do so, but I don’t get it.
One cannot help but admire the breadth of such thought, but one can also wish that he had tried harder to refocus this very expansiveness within more intelligible and relatable parameters.
Not recommended.
June 24, 2020
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return.
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles. and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
This lyrical drama was inspired by the Greek declaration of independence followed by the Greek revolt against the Turkish rule (1821). Shelley was full of fervor for the Greek cause and his foretelling of its triumph was fulfilled.
He went wrong in particulars, for, in the poem the English are shown as helping the Turks. The English did favour them in the beginning, but, of course, Shelley could not foresee that ultimately the English Navy would fight for the Greeks.
The play is modelled on the Persae of Aeschylus depicting the Greek victory over the Persians. It is a much better play than the over-praised Prometheus. Being less abstract it comes nearer to human sympathies and its lyrics are among the finest of Shelley's.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh write no more the tale of Troy.
if earth Death's scroll must be
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free.
The golden years return.
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles. and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
This lyrical drama was inspired by the Greek declaration of independence followed by the Greek revolt against the Turkish rule (1821). Shelley was full of fervor for the Greek cause and his foretelling of its triumph was fulfilled.
He went wrong in particulars, for, in the poem the English are shown as helping the Turks. The English did favour them in the beginning, but, of course, Shelley could not foresee that ultimately the English Navy would fight for the Greeks.
The play is modelled on the Persae of Aeschylus depicting the Greek victory over the Persians. It is a much better play than the over-praised Prometheus. Being less abstract it comes nearer to human sympathies and its lyrics are among the finest of Shelley's.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies;
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
Oh write no more the tale of Troy.
if earth Death's scroll must be
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free.
June 6, 2015
A war for Greek freedom
21 April 2013
You may be wondering why I am suddenly writing commentaries on a number of works by Percy Bysshe Shelley all at once when usually I tend to read a different range of writers. The main reason is because I have been reading through a collection of his works and have simply become so engrossed in it that I cannot put it down. Anyway, I am almost fifty pages away from finishing it so I might as well complete it before I move on to another book. Just to think though that I began reading this particular book while sitting beside the Round Pond in Hyde Park (or actually Kensington Gardens, because everything to the east of The Serpantine is Hyde Park while everything to the west is Kensington Gardens – still, when I checked in there on Facebook, I selected Hyde Park, because there is something more literary – or romantic – about Hyde Park).
This is a lyrical drama much like Prometheus Unbound, which means that it was written to be read as opposed to be performed on stage. It seems that Shelley never wrote many stage plays (as far as I can tell, he only wrote one) but that may have something to do with the fact that he died at the age of 29 and most of his works seemed to have been written in the last few years of his life. Even then, it seems that he was an incredibly prolific writer during that period (despite none of them really being published until long after his death).
Hellas is modelled on The Persians by Aeschylus, which is a play about the Persian defeat at the battle of Salamis. However, this particular play (or poem) is about the Greek revolution that was going on at the time. Like the Persians, it is set in the capital of the opposing empire (in this case Istanbul) and is mainly a discussion of the war between the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans ended up losing the war, but it had more to do with interference from European countries such as England, France, and Russia.
It is interesting to note that Shelley takes the English side in the war, accusing Russia of wanting Greece only to expand her empire. There is a belief, and this is clear with Shelley, that the British and the French were more interested in granting Greece her freedom. However, it is also interesting to note that there was a lot of influence from numerous poets, such as Lord Byron, who I suspect had a romantic attachment to Greece due to the legacy of the ancients.
Greece had been under the rule of the Ottomans for around 400 years and no doubt the Greeks had been agitating for freedom all that time. However it is interesting to note that despite the rule of Islam, the Greeks still managed to maintain their national identity. Obviously the Greece of today (or even back then) was much different to the Greece of the Byzantine period, but it is also interesting to note that when the Greeks won the rebellion, a king was installed (though I wonder how they actually chose the king since I am doubtful there would have been any remains of the royal family at the time, and even then the royal family would have had to have come from the line of emperors from Byzantium).
The other thing that is interesting with regards to the Greek rebellion is that there ended up being a massive population shift. Basically all of the Muslims ended up moving over to Turkey and all of the Greek orthodox ended up moving over the Greece to the point that you actually do not see many Muslims in Greece, and I suspect that most of the mosques have also been destroyed. I also suspect that this rebellion could have had the potential of spilling over into Turkey (which never happened) because the Greeks could have easily claimed that Anatolia and Istanbul were also traditionally theirs.
21 April 2013
You may be wondering why I am suddenly writing commentaries on a number of works by Percy Bysshe Shelley all at once when usually I tend to read a different range of writers. The main reason is because I have been reading through a collection of his works and have simply become so engrossed in it that I cannot put it down. Anyway, I am almost fifty pages away from finishing it so I might as well complete it before I move on to another book. Just to think though that I began reading this particular book while sitting beside the Round Pond in Hyde Park (or actually Kensington Gardens, because everything to the east of The Serpantine is Hyde Park while everything to the west is Kensington Gardens – still, when I checked in there on Facebook, I selected Hyde Park, because there is something more literary – or romantic – about Hyde Park).
This is a lyrical drama much like Prometheus Unbound, which means that it was written to be read as opposed to be performed on stage. It seems that Shelley never wrote many stage plays (as far as I can tell, he only wrote one) but that may have something to do with the fact that he died at the age of 29 and most of his works seemed to have been written in the last few years of his life. Even then, it seems that he was an incredibly prolific writer during that period (despite none of them really being published until long after his death).
Hellas is modelled on The Persians by Aeschylus, which is a play about the Persian defeat at the battle of Salamis. However, this particular play (or poem) is about the Greek revolution that was going on at the time. Like the Persians, it is set in the capital of the opposing empire (in this case Istanbul) and is mainly a discussion of the war between the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans ended up losing the war, but it had more to do with interference from European countries such as England, France, and Russia.
It is interesting to note that Shelley takes the English side in the war, accusing Russia of wanting Greece only to expand her empire. There is a belief, and this is clear with Shelley, that the British and the French were more interested in granting Greece her freedom. However, it is also interesting to note that there was a lot of influence from numerous poets, such as Lord Byron, who I suspect had a romantic attachment to Greece due to the legacy of the ancients.
Greece had been under the rule of the Ottomans for around 400 years and no doubt the Greeks had been agitating for freedom all that time. However it is interesting to note that despite the rule of Islam, the Greeks still managed to maintain their national identity. Obviously the Greece of today (or even back then) was much different to the Greece of the Byzantine period, but it is also interesting to note that when the Greeks won the rebellion, a king was installed (though I wonder how they actually chose the king since I am doubtful there would have been any remains of the royal family at the time, and even then the royal family would have had to have come from the line of emperors from Byzantium).
The other thing that is interesting with regards to the Greek rebellion is that there ended up being a massive population shift. Basically all of the Muslims ended up moving over to Turkey and all of the Greek orthodox ended up moving over the Greece to the point that you actually do not see many Muslims in Greece, and I suspect that most of the mosques have also been destroyed. I also suspect that this rebellion could have had the potential of spilling over into Turkey (which never happened) because the Greeks could have easily claimed that Anatolia and Istanbul were also traditionally theirs.
July 13, 2024
This 1822, lyrical drama in Greek dramatic form was modeled upon ‘The Persians’, an ancient Greek tragedy written during the Classical period of Ancient Greece by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. Inspired by the Greek declaration of independence from the Turkish yoke, Shelley describes the story of Salamis in terms of modern-day warfare, and makes a foretelling of Hellenic freedom. This work is negligible as drama. The only reason it is widely praised, is for the beauty of its choruses. The preface of this work recognises that English laws, literature, and arts have their roots in Greece.
October 4, 2020
En rigtig god kilde ifb. med et semesterfag på engelskstudiet.
- Brugt på universitetet (engelsk)
- Brugt på universitetet (engelsk)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews