Proserpine (play) - Composition and Publication

Composition and Publication

Mary Shelley composed Proserpine in 1820, finishing it on 3 April according to her journal. Percy Shelley contributed two lyric poems: "Arethusa" and "Song of Proserpine While Gathering Flowers on the Plain of Enna". A fragment of the manuscript survives, housed in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library, and demonstrates the couple working side-by-side on the project. According to their friend Thomas Medwin, Percy enjoyed the play, sometimes altering the manuscript as he was reading. In her biography of Mary Shelley, Miranda Seymour speculates that both Midas and Proserpine were written for two young girls Mary Shelley met and befriended, Laurette and Nerina Tighe, daughters of friends of the Shelleys in Italy. Their mother was also a former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's mother. That same year, Mary Shelley wrote the children's story Maurice for Laurette.

In 1824 Mary Shelley submitted Proserpine for publication to The Browning Box, edited by Bryan Walter Procter, but it was rejected. The play was first published in 1832 in the London periodical The Winter's Wreath. She cut one-fifth of the play—about 120 lines—for this version, deleting some of the stories from the first act, including Percy's poem "Arethusa", and rewrote individual lines. (She included "Arethusa" in her collection of Posthumous Poems of Percy Shelley in 1824.) Mary Shelley also added an ominous dream to the play, foreshadowing Proserpine's abduction. Her efforts to publish the play in these periodicals and journal entries written during the play's composition suggest that Proserpine was meant to be children's literature.