]
The manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS. Shelley, d. 2) looks like a
cheap exercise-book, originally of 40, now of 36 leaves, 8 1/4 x 6
inches, in boards. The contents are the dramas here presented, written
in a clear legible hand--the equable hand of Mrs. Shelley. [Footnote:
Shelley's lyrics are also in his wife's writing--Mr. Locock is surely
mistaken in assuming two different hands to this manuscript (_The
Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).]
There are very few words corrected or cancelled. It is obviously a
fair copy. Mr. C. D. Locock, in his _Examination of the Shelley
Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library_ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903,
pp. 24-25), has already pointed out the valuable emendations of the
'received' text of Shelley's lyrics which are found here. In fact the
only mystery is why neither Shelley, nor Mary in the course of her
long widowed years, should have published these curious, and surely
not contemptible, by-products of their co-operation in the fruitful
year 1820.
II.
For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these
writings of Mrs. Shelley's. The fact that the same mind which had
revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of
Frankenstein's abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy
fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and
delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism--this fact has its
significance.
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