^{Note 1} Citations of Shelley's verse are to Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977).

^{Note 2} William Royce Campbell touches on the question without ever fully answering it in his remarks on Prometheus (“Shelley's Concept of Conscience,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 19 [1970], 56): “ … the regeneration of Prometheus comes about not merely without the aid of, but in spite of, conscience. Assuredly, he does repent his curse (303) but only after he has seen the error of hatred; he saves himself not through remorse but by never abandoning hope and faith to hatred and despair and by allowing the active power of love to affirm self and all mankind.” Campbell's observation simply puts the process back one stage. How does Prometheus come to see the error of his ways and how does he open himself to “the active power of love”? Leon Waldoff raises this issue in his interesting psychoanalytic reading (“The Father-Son Conflict in Prometheus Unbound: The Psychology of a Vision,” Psychoanalytic Review, 62 [1975], 79–96). “The problem is whether Prometheus or anyone else can will an end to tyranny,” he writes astutely. “Although inner reform is undoubtedly a necessary cause in any significant reform, … it is far from self-evident that it can be a sufficient cause, which is what Shelley makes it in Prometheus Unbound” (p. 86). Waldoff views Prometheus' suffering as masochistic and self-imposed and argues that the Titan's release dramatizes Shelley's largely unconscious realization that aggression only doubles back on the self in various forms of guilt and anxiety. In one sense the argument seems simply to replace a set of conscious with unconscious motives. Waldoff's analysis, however, yields important insights into the poet's psychology.

^{Note 3} The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912). In “The Regeneration of Prometheus,” in Shelley's Later Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 68–69, Milton Wilson also observes the relationship between the Ancient Mariner and Prometheus. Wilson ultimately finds Prometheus partly victimized but still “a responsible victim” who “has to reform the evil in his own will” (p. 69).

^{Note 4} Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 89–118, 251–52.

^{Note 5} Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971 ), p. 306.

^{Note 6} Pottle's essay appears in Shelley: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George M. Ridenour (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 133.

^{Note 7} The most thorough study of the intellectual groundwork of Shelley's doctrine of Necessity appears in Kenneth Neill Cameron's The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951). The fullest exposition of its influence on the poet's verse is in Baker's Shelley's Major Poetry. Frank B. Evans' “Shelley, Godwin, Hume, and the Doctrine of Necessity,” Studies in Philology, 37 (1940), 632–40, stresses the seminal force of Hume. An older but still suggestive account is S. F. Gingerich's “Shelley's Doctrine of Necessity versus Christianity,” PMLA, 33 (1918), 44473. There are many varieties of necessitarian doctrine, but they can be broadly summarized, in their stricter application, as the theory that—given the circumstances that condition all events—nothing could have happened otherwise than it has, that no alternative possibilities have existed in history.

^{Note 8} Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 2nd ed. (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1971), p. 39.

^{Note 9} In The Platonism of Shelley (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 176–78, 324–25, et passim, James A. Notopoulos interprets Shelley's concept of Necessity as a manifestation of the Platonic demiurge in a way that ignores any relationship to the skeptical and deterministic reasoning of Hume, Sir William Drum-mond, and others (see below). Notopoulos' argument is closely followed by Neville Rogers in Shelley at Work, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), p. 27 and n. 3, and the same tendency to subsume Necessity within a Platonic frame of reference is found throughout Ross Greig Woodman's The Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964).

^{Note 10} Rogers, Shelley at Work, pp. 29–30. See also Rogers' note on Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam), 11. 3706–10, in his recent edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), ii, 391: “Notopoulos (Platonism, p. 221) notes that this is the last appearance in Shelley's philosophy of the doctrine of Necessity: from now on it is supplanted by Platonic idealism. The transition had begun during the writing of Queen Mab….”

^{Note 11} See in particular von Wright's Causality and Determinism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974).

^{Note 12} The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), ii, 98. This edition is hereafter referred to as Letters.

^{Note 13} The classic discussion of Shelley's knowledge of Hume and the skeptical tradition in general is C. E. Pulos' The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954). The influence of the tradition on the poet has been further defined by Earl Wasserman in his Shelley: A Critical Reading. I am indebted to both works.

^{Note 14} See esp. “Of the Probability of Chances” and “Of the Probability of Causes,” Sees. 11 and 12 of Bk. i, Pt. iii, of A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), pp. 124–42.

^{Note 13} “Of Liberty and Necessity,” Sec. 8 of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries concerning the Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), p. 87.

^{Note 18} Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Reiman and Powers, p. 133.

^{Note 17} Godwin, “Inferences from the Doctrine of Necessity,” Enquiry concerning Political Justice, ed. K. Codell Carter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 169.

^{Note 18} Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 30. While concerned primarily with fictional technique, Kermode's discussion applies more broadly to the poetic and dramatic genres, especially in his treatment of the way in which we as readers and critics “concern ourselves with the conflict between the deterministic pattern any plot suggests, and the freedom of persons within that plot to choose and so to alter the structure, the relations of beginning, middle, and end” (p. 30).

^{Note 19} The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), p. 271.

^{Note 20} In an early letter, Shelley wrote that “I confess that I think Pope's ‘all are but parts of one tremendous whole’ something more than Poetry, it has ever been my favourite theory” (Letters, I, 35). See also Cameron, Young Shelley, pp. 255–57.

^{Note 21} Canto vi of Queen Mab and the three prose notes pertaining to it constitute the locus classicus of Shelley's youthful necessitarianism. For a discussion of the poet's early commitment to perfectibility and its relation to Godwin, see Cameron, Young Shelley, pp. 63–64.

^{Note 22} Harold Orel supports Baker's contention in “Shelley's The Revolt of Islam: The Last Great Poem of the English Enlightenment?” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 89 (1972), 1204.

^{Note 23} Newton's various contributions to the Monthly Magazine for 1812, esp. March, pp. 107–09, are listed by Baker (p. 66). Newton's full views, based on the

Dendera zodiac and propounded in his later Three Enigmas Attempted to Be Explained (London: Hook-ham, 1821), are more complex, synthesizing classical, Indian, and Middle Eastern mythology and astrology with the research of other mythographers, both acknowledged and unacknowledged. Baker's general discussion of the Newton-Peacock-Shelley relationship (pp. 66–70) and Woodman's (pp. 90–100) must be supplemented by Cameron's commentary in Shelley and His Circle (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), iii, 233–44, which complicates and extends our view of the influence Peacock and Shelley exerted on each other, and by Stuart Curran's- account in Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975), pp. 87–91, 227–29, which reproduces Newton's diagram of the zodiac and discusses its conflation of Indian and Persian mythology within the broader context of Shelley's general knowledge and reading. Shelley met Newton in November 1812 and introducd him the following year to Peacock, whose earlier work is, as Cameron remarks, free of the Zoroastrianism that “drenches” Ahrimanes. As Cameron also notes (Shelley and His Circle, iii, 234–35), the Zoroastrian element is for the most part only implicit in Newton's contributions to the Monthly Magazine, so that its influence on the two poets must have resulted in part from their conversations with Newton.

^{Note 24} The Works of Thomas Love Peacock, Halliford ed., ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith and C. E. Jones (London: Constable, 1924–34), vu, 422. The verses also appear near the middle of the first canto of the longer version of the poem, with the difference that only two gods, Ahrimanes and Oromazes, are mentioned, rather than four. In his discussion of the complex relationship between the longer, twelve-canto version and the shorter, two-canto one and their accompanying prose outlines, Cameron reverses Brett-Smith's chronology, which had been accepted by earlier critics, and concludes that the two-canto version is Peacock's revision (Shelley and His Circle, iii, 234–35). The initial importance accorded Necessity in Peacock's reworking thus assumes added significance.

^{Note 23} See Cameron, “Shelley and Ahrimanes,” Modern Language Quarterly, 3 (1942), 287–95, and Shelley and His Circle, iii, 240–44. Cameron allows the influence of both versions and their outlines but accords greater importance to the later. Among other interesting conjectures, including the influence exerted on and by Byron's Manfred, Cameron infers in his more recent discussion that Peacock virtually turned over his work on Ahrimanes to Shelley, abandoning the project to the youthful poet's superior enthusiasm and talent.

^{Note 26} While I differ with some points of interpretation, in particular the emphasis on the Christian element in Prometheus and on the poet's commitment to free will, I am much indebted to Curran's study.

^{Note 27} Instances are too many to enumerate. Special mention can be made, however, of Albert J. Kuhn's “Shelley's Demogorgon and Eternal Necessity,” Modern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 596–99.

^{Note 28} Shelley's Prose, or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 155.

^{Note 29} See also Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Witt-reich, “The Dating of Shelley's ‘On the Devil, and Devils,‘” Keats-Shelley Journal, 21–22 (1973), 80102, which places the tract in mid-November 1819. One may note that Shelley goes on to declare that “The vulgar are all Manichaeans.” The assertion, however, does not invalidate his earlier statement, for it is the decline of primitive belief into superstition that he proceeds to satirize. As Curran and Wittreich have written, “It is precisely because the problem [the meaning of evil] so deeply troubled Shelley that he documents the inadequacy of the popular religion to cope with it significantly” (p. 94).

^{Note 30} See Norman Thurston's suggestive note, “Shelley and the Duty of Hope,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 26 (1977), 22–28, which, however, avoids making the dichotomy.

^{Note 31} C. Kerényi, Prometheus: Archetypal Image of Human Existence (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), p. 117.

^{Note 32} Shelley, “Essay on the Devil and Devils,” in Clark, p. 267.

^{Note 33} See Hume's misgivings and partly ironic disclaimers in The Treatise, pp. 248–51, 265–74. One can be reminded of Samuel Johnson's assertion that “All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. S. F. Powell [Oxford: Clarendon, 1934–64], iii, 291).

^{Note 34} Cited by Juan Goytisolo from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, in “20 Years of Castro's Revolution,” New York Review of Books, 22 March 1979, p. 17.

^{Note 35} For a reading of the ode different from my own, see Stuart Curran's discussion in Shelley's Annus Mirabilis, pp. 156–72, which interprets the lyric as “a secularized song of Christian triumph” (p. 171 ).

^{Note 36} Drummond, Academical Questions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1805), pp. 192–93.

^{Note 37} This argument is a principal one throughout Alicia Martinez' The Hero and Heroine of Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1976). See also E. B. Murray, “ ‘Elective Affinity’ in The Revolt of Islam,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 67 (1968), 570–85.

^{Note 38} Beer, Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 87.