Proserpine and Midas

About

Mary Shelley's two mythological dramas — Proserpine and Midas — were written in 1820 in the company of Percy Shelley and Keats and published posthumously. Both treat Greek mythology with a lightness and lyric facility that shows a side of Shelley usually overshadowed by Frankenstein: a gifted poet working within the masque tradition. Proserpine follows Persephone's abduction to the underworld; Midas turns the Dionysus myth into a meditation on artistic judgment. The plays are slight but charming, and their value as creative work by one of the period's most important writers has been consistently undervalued.