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Burdon, Christopher. The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700-1834. Houndsmills: Macmillan P, Ltd., 1997.

REWRITING APOCALYPSE: SHELLEY AND BLAKE

     Christopher Burdon opens his chapter "Rewriting Apocalypse: Shelley and Blake" with a discussion of the reincarnation of Prometheus in early nineteenth-century England. He describes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus as the "(m)ost enduring – and raising many of the most acute moral questions about the ‘Promethean’ spirit" (174). In Mary Shelley’s version, "Prometheus is a destroyer, and this is an apocalypse without redemption" (174).

      It is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, however, that is Burdon’s focus. Burdon argues that "the whole of Prometheus Unbound can be seen as a rewriting of John’s Apocalypse" (175). Burdon makes the same argument about Prometheus Unbound that Morton Paley makes about Mary Shelley’s The Last Man that while it is a reworking of the Christian apocalypse, it is "still being haunted by the old one" (175).

      Burdon compares the dialogue of the first act of Prometheus Unbound to the release of the four horsemen in the Book of Revelation. In Shelley’s version, however, "revelation comes from the human mind to the immortals, not the other way around" (176). Burdon argues that the image of the crucified Prometheus aligns him with Jesus despite Shelley’s comparison with Satan. Shelley and Blake, however, locate the triumph of Prometheus "through resistance and forgiveness, not through the military conquest of the Apocalypse" (177).

      Burdon also discusses the biblical elements in Blake’s poetry and refers to Leslie Tannenbaum’s focusing on Blake’s "episodic narration, use of digressions, chronological disruptions and discursive elaboration" (190). Blake rewrites the apocalypse by his coding of God as tyrant whose death is necessary: "(t)o Blake all other gods are false and all worship pathological; only with the death of ‘God’ is the apocalyptic reconciliation that ends Jerusalem possible" (200).