The Violence of Form in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy

Rise like lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number—Shake your chains to earth like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on you—Ye are many—they are few.¹

There has been much debate over Shelley’s intentions in the The Mask of Anarchy, his longest poetic and political response to the Peterloo Massacre: does he call for violence and revolution in the name of radical reform? or does he rather call for a collective effort of passive, nonviolent resistance in a way that anticipates the kind of civil disobedience later advocated by Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi?² Most critics have either adopted the latter position or chosen to read the poem as ultimately ambivalent or ambiguous: the poem, they conclude, wavers between these two positions in a skeptical Shelleyan dance, with nonviolence winning out in the end.³ For instance, Matthew Borushko’s recent essay, “Violence and Nonviolence in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,” argues that the poem turns in upon itself in a recursive repetition of passive resistance. In this reading of the poem, Shelley directs the protestors to “rise like lions” not to do violence but to perform repeated acts of nonviolent resistance.⁴ Although the peacefully-assembled protestors were “slashed, stabbed, maimed, and hewed” by the yeomanry and Hussars, Shelley seems to maintain, as did William Godwin before him, that pacifism is the best means for political change.

Borushko sheds new light on significant aspects of The Mask of Anarchy and of Shelley’s critical thinking, but I believe his analysis may be counterbalanced usefully by a different reading of the poem’s evidence. Borushko explores a “natural alliance between the aesthetic and nonviolence” in Mask through the writings of Theodor Adorno, and he concludes that the poem “dramatizes the necessity of integrating aesthetic experience and political practice in order to achieve the critical self-reflection required for nonviolent praxis. … The Mask highlights the special contribution of the aesthetic: its singular effect on the imagination can foster a cognitive engagement potentially undeceived by fraud and misrepresentation” (Borushko, p. 97). Borushko thus joins a growing number of Shelleyans who stress poetry as a kind of cognition in which the aesthetic attains political force through critical reflection. Borushko’s fresh, illuminating reading nevertheless preserves the critical consensus that Mask is one of Shelley’s most powerful assertions of the necessity of nonviolence.

However, the poem itself may suggest otherwise. Its final lines evoke a barely contained violence, an almost-explicit incitement to revolution. The oppressed people are compared to ravenous beasts whose “unvanquishable number” threatens the ruling powers. Composing the poem while still “boiling” with “indignation,” Shelley intended to publish Mask in an unrealized “volume of popular songs wholly political, & destined to awaken & direct the imagination of the reformers”⁵ because “something must be done … What yet I know not” (PBSL, ii, 117).⁶ His call in the poem for the reformers to “rise” coupled with the final line—“Ye are many—they are few”—can thus be read not as a repeated call to passivity but as a rejection of the reformers’ nonviolent tactics based on Shelley’s recognition of the failure of the Godwinian principles from which his nonviolent beliefs had derived.

Three interrelated elements account for the unprecedented violence of Mask: (1) Shelley’s association with Godwin; (2) Shelley’s construction and rejection of a nascent negative dialectic; and (3) the poem’s relationship to Queen Mab. In essence, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem and The Mask of Anarchy: Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester are sequential incarnations of Shelley’s Godwinian class outrage. Shelley translates Godwinianism into his poetry, yet he modifies this Godwinianism according to his intended or “virtual” audience.⁷ While Godwin’s philosophy seems wholly intact in Mab, an esoteric drama intended for an elite, Shelley makes significant changes in Mask, an exoteric poem intended for a less educated audience.⁸ The poetic form of each poem reflects these changes: Mab is a complex “philosophical poem” with alternating meters and forms and extensive footnotes with independent textual...