Blurring the Lives: Plutarch's Didactic Comparisons and Shelley's Romantic Synthesis

Philosophy and Literature 48 (2):308-328 (2024)
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Abstract

In May 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley broke away from work on his lyric Prometheus Unbound in order to compose The Cenci —a tragedy. What precipitated this? I argue that in pausing between acts 3 and 4 of the former in order to construct the latter, Shelley was engaging in the Greco-Roman tradition of moralizing by means of sketching twinned lives. While Shelley follows Plutarch, specifically, in allowing for, among other things, the mythological and the apocryphal, I suggest that his own normative project transcends his ancestor's prototype in important ways related to both form and content.

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Roman Briggs
Cochise Community College

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