Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/13

Rh of his Examination may be named Marenghi, Prince Athanase, The Witch of Atlas, To Constantia, the Ode to Naples, and (last, not least) Prometheus Unbound. Full use has been made in this edition of Mr. Locock’s collations, and the fragments recovered and printed by him are included in the text. Variants derived from the Bodleian MSS. are marked B. in the footnotes.

On the state of the text generally, and the various quarters in which it lies open to conjectural emendation, I cannot do better than quote the following succinct and luminous account from a Causerie on the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian Library, contributed by Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B., to the columns of The Speaker of December 19, 1903:—

‘From the textual point of view Shelley’s works may be divided into three classes—those published in his lifetime under his own direction; those also published in his lifetime, but in his absence from the press; and those published after his death. The first class includes Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, and Alastor with its appendages, published in England before his final departure for the continent; and The Cenci and Adonais, printed under his own eye at Leghorn and Pisa respectively. Except for some provoking but corrigible misprints in The Revolt of Islam and one crucial passage in Alastor, these poems afford little material for conjectural emendation; for the Alexandrines now and then left in the middle of stanzas in The Revolt of Islam must remain untouched, as proceeding not from the printer’s carelessness but the author’s. The second class, poems printed during Shelley’s lifetime, but not under his immediate inspection, comprise Prometheus Unbound and Rosalind and Helen, together with the pieces which accompanied them, Epipsuchidion, Hellas, and Swellfoot the Tyrant. The correction of the most important of these, the Prometheus, was the least satisfactory. Shelley, though speaking plainly to the publisher, rather hints than expresses his dissatisfaction when writing to Gisborne, the corrector, but there is a pretty clear hint when on a subsequent occasion he says to him, “I have received Hellas, which is prettily printed, and with fewer mistakes than any poem I ever published.” This also was probably not without influence on is determination to have The Cenci and Adonais printed in Italy. . . . . . Of the third class of Shelley’s writings—those which were first published after his death—sufficient facsimiles have been published to prove that Trelawny’s graphic description of the chaotic state of most of them was really in no respect exaggerated. . . . . The difficulty is much augmented by the fact that these pieces are rarely consecutive, but literally disiecti membra poetae scattered through various notebooks in a way to require piecing together as well as deciphering. The editors of the Posthumous Poems, moreover, though diligent according to their light, were neither endowed with remarkable acumen nor possessed of the wide knowledge requisite for the full intelligence of so erudite a poet as Shelley, hence the perpetration