2 - Mab's metamorphoses

Summary

As Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman have discovered, the 1813 printing of Queen Mab bears evidence of the poet's personal supervision and creative play with typeface and icons to manipulate audience response. The most obvious example is the iconic pointing hand in the large-type notes to Shelley's anonymous text, a hand used so frequently by Leigh Hunt that it almost constitutes a signature; its presence here suggests a false attribution of the notes to Hunt. It is particularly ironic, then, that we have no remaining draft manuscripts for Mab in Shelley's own hand, through which we might trace the emergence of its figurations either as visual sketches or as early verbal drafts testing its frequent personifications. Moreover, very few copies remain of the suppressed 1813 printing. In the late summer of 1815, however, Shelley began working in one of those copies, canceling sections and drafting new passages designed to salvage this incendiary poem for publication in his Alastor volume. Inserted into margins or the white space between cantos are a few vividly grotesque visual sketches, early evidence for his habit of intertwined visual and verbal compositional practices. Further, by tracing his polemical deployment of allegorical personifications from the 1813 text through his more cautious but still liberal 1815 revisions, we can see how Shelley learns to exploit and to control the ambiguous yet potentially positive agencies of such personifications even as he attacks or breaks the icons of a corrupted or misled society.