Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Other Lyrical Drama and the Inception of Hellas

Hellas, a Lyrical Drama (1822), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s response to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, remains one of the most neglected of his major works. Even less attention has been paid to Shelley’s series of attempts to write about the Greek cause, which he then abandoned before he began work on Hellas in the autumn of 1821. This essay seeks to redress that neglect. It examines a range of Greek-related fragments composed by Shelley in 1821 and offers not only a fresh contextualization and assessment of the so-called “Prologue” to Hellas, first published by Richard Garnett in 1862, but also a revised understanding of the compositional background to Hellas itself.