Percy Bysshe Shelley - Legacy - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• 1837 – Shelley is the principal model for Marmion Herbert, one of the two male protagonists in Benjamin Disraeli's novel Venetia; the other protagonist Lord Cadurcis is based on Lord Byron.
• 1888 – Henry James' novella, "The Aspern Papers" is based on a struggle to obtain some letters by the poet Shelley years after his death. The theme of the story centres on the conflicts involved when a biographer seeks to pry into the intimate life of his subject, a topic of great importance to James, who valued his privacy very highly and ordered his own papers burned after his death. "The Aspern Papers" was made into a stage play and an opera (The Aspern Papers (opera)).
• 1915 – Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters includes the poem "Percy Bysshe Shelley" as the namesake of the speaker and that his ashes "were scattered near the pyramid of Caius Cestius / Somewhere near Rome."
• 1963 – Shelley's strong views on vegetarianism are a major plot device in P.G. Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.
• 1969 – Shelley's poem Adonais is recited by Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones at a concert in Hyde Park, London as hundreds of white butterflies were released before the crowd as a dedication to the band's guitarist Brian Jones who had died two days earlier.
• 1973 – Shelley appears in Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss, a time-travel romance featuring Mary Shelley. A film adaptation was made in 1990, directed by Roger Corman and starring John Hurt and Bridget Fonda.
• 1975 – Shelley's poem Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill... was set to music (in English) by Soviet/Russian composer David Tukhmanov (cult album On a Wave of My Memory).

Mehrdad Badie — Good Night on YouTube

• 1978 – Shelley's death and his claims of having met a Doppelgänger served as inspiration for the short story "Paper Boat", written by Tanith Lee.
• 1984 – Howard Brenton's play, Bloody Poetry, first performed at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, is about the complex relationships and rivalries between Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Byron. Shelley's cremation at Viareggio and the removal of his heart by Trelawny are described in Tennessee Williams's play Camino Real by a fictional Lord Byron.
• 1986 – A visit to Lord Byron's estate by Shelley and Mary Shelley is the basis for Ken Russell's film Gothic, in which Julian Sands plays Shelley, Natasha Richardson plays Mary and Gabriel Byrne plays Byron.
• 1988 – Shelley is the main character in the film Haunted Summer, starring Laura Dern and Eric Stoltz.
• 1989 – Shelley also features prominently in The Stress of Her Regard, a novel by Tim Powers which proposes a secret history connecting the English Romantic writers with the mythology of vampires and lamia
• 1992 In Sally Potter's film Orlando, characters quote The Revolt of Islam and "Indian Serenade."
• 1995 – In the novel Shelley's Heart by Charles McCarry, Shelley is the inspiration for a secret society that operates at the highest levels of government and is responsible for stealing a presidential election. The members of the society identify each other with the question and answer: What did Trelawny snatch from the funeral pyre at Viareggio? — Shelley’s heart.
• 1995 – Percy, Mary and her sister Claire are some of the main characters in the novel, The Vampyre: The Secret History of Lord Byron, by Tom Holland. The story concerns Lord Byron, his meeting with Shelley and the growth of their friendship, along with a hypothetical account of the time the foursome shared in Switzerland. Holland provides a fictional conclusion to the mysteries that surround Shelley's death.
• 2002 – Shelley is portrayed as befriending cavalry officer Matthew Hervey while the latter is in Rome with his sister trying to cope with the death of his wife, in the fourth of Allan Mallinson's novels in the Hervey canon, A Call to Arms. A friendship between Shelley (social subversive, moral outcast) and Hervey (pattern of martial loyalty and religious rectitude, albeit questioned in his bereavement) seems at first view unlikely. But each sees in the other a good man, and ultimately their agreement, often unspoken, on the travails and truths of the human condition cements the bond between them.
• 2002 – Julian Rathbone's novel A Very English Agent, about a 19th-century government spy Charles Boylan, carries a lengthy section on Shelley's time in Italy, in which Boylan tampers with Shelley's boat on orders from the British government, thus causing his death. Rathbone though has stated that he is "a novelist, not a historian" and that his work is very much a piece of fiction.
• 2008 – Shelley appears as himself in Peter Ackroyd's novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. In this, Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as one of Shelley's close friends during his early life and marriage to Harriet, in an entertaining fictional nod to the Doppelgänger rumour.
• 2011 – Shelley's poem Prometheus Unbound is featured in a Homicide case of the Black Dahlia Murders in the video game L.A. Noire.
• 2012 – Shelley is played by Ben Lamb in Shared Experience's 2012 production, "Mary Shelley" by Helen Edmundson, at the Tricycle Theatre, London
• -2013 Shelley is played by Sabrina Diane Poole in an all-female production of Sean Lang's "The Necessity of Atheism" based on Shelley's expulsion from Oxford. The play is due to be performed at the Cambridge Drama Festival.