11 - Proserpine and Midas

Summary

When Mary Shelley set out in 1820 to transform Ovid's tale of an overreaching king into “A drama in two acts,” she took liberties with Ovid's narrative, inverting the two main plot lines so that the story of Midas's disastrous wish (in Shelley's version: “Let all I touch be gold, most glorious gold!”) follows the less well-known story of Midas's inopportune intervention in a competition between Apollo and Pan (NSW II 102). In Ovid's tale, Midas gets his wish to be a walking alchemist, learns the sad error of his ways, petitions Bacchus to be freed of his golden touch, and finally, after bungling across the piping competition of Apollo and Pan, acquires donkey ears as punishment for favoring the music of Pan. In Mary Shelley's drama, Midas earns his oversized ears early in Act I, and then makes his fateful wish as the act ends so that its dramatic realization must await Act II's curtain rise.

Mary Shelley meddles with Ovid’s tale to excellent theatrical effect. The interlude between the two acts provides an opportunity for the stage to be transformed, for the quotidian earth tones of Midas’s world to be transformed into a glittering spectacular tableau. When the actor playing Midas enters, a gold rose in his hand, his first soliloquy, with twenty declarations of the word “gold” in forty-four lines, creates a verbal simulacrum of the stage set’s golden excess. Midas invokes, “a golden palace, / Surrounded by a wood of golden trees, / Which will bear golden fruits. – The very ground / My naked foot treads on is yellow gold, / Invaluable gold! my dress is gold! / Now I am great!” (NSW ii 103–04). The reward for Shelley’s manipulation of Ovid’s story line is this transformation scene, a spectacle capable of drawing an audience’s attention back to the stage.