A dramatic reading of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound will take place on Wednesday, October 25, 3:00 -5:00 pm at the Cafritz Foundation Theatre. The show is directed by MITH’s intern and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies graduate student Victoria Scrimer. Victoria has been working closely with extant draft and fair copy manuscripts of Prometheus Unbound by encoding them for the Shelley-Godwin Archive. The show will feature digital images and transcriptions from the Archive to highlight poignant passages and unused textual variants.
From the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies department blog:
In collaboration with the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), TDPS presents a dramatic reading of Percy Shelley’s rarely-performed lyric drama, Prometheus Unbound featuring digital imagery of Shelley’s original manuscripts.
William Godwin, Percy Shelley’s father-in-law, is famously quoted as saying “God himself has no right to be a tyrant” and in many ways that is what Prometheus Unbound movingly professes. A condemnation of slavery in all forms, Prometheus Unbound is perhaps Shelley’s best-known and most beloved work. Inspired by Aeschylus’ classical Prometheia trilogy, Shelley adapts the mythological story of the Titan who gave man fire, refiguring the fate of mankind’s champion and the fall of the tyrant, Jupiter. It is a drama of Romantic ideals– suffering, endurance, and freedom– that is as relevant in today’s socio-political climate of resistance as it was two centuries ago.
Wednesday, October 25, 3-5PM, Cafritz Foundation Theatre