Talk:Proserpine (play)

Thanks!
Thanks to all those vandal fighters who are working tirelessly today, as the article appears on the main page! Awadewit (talk) 18:12, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Pictures
I'm the person that changed the captions to the pics, and wrote an explanation in the edit summary, but with all the vandalism that goes on, you may not have noticed.

The reasons for my changes to those pics are:
 * You don't identify either of the people who are portrayed, even though you use their names. At the top of the article is a female representing Proserpine. The two other pics might also be representations of the character, rather than the writers. Percy B. is not clearly male. Mary Shelley and Percy, as the authors, are interesting in their own right.
 * The captions, interesting though they may be, do not relate directly to the pictures. They do relate to the individual portrayed. But they do not enhance in any way ones reading of the pic. And the picture is not useful in understanding the caption that you have chosen.
 * The entire content of the caption that you are using is the subject matter of the article. It doesn't need to be repeated under a picture. Doing so amounts to a kind of sensationalist journalism, where everything has to grab you.
 * Leaving out the name of the author of the painting (if known) is unacceptable. Those two pictures are first and foremost, painted portraits of two people by two artists. There is a correct way of doing it, and putting the author of the artwork in brackets is not acceptable. It is no more acceptable than it would be to give the title of the play in your first paragraph and bracket the name of Mary Shelley. If you are going to use a painting, it needs proper acknowledgement if possible.

I also made a few minor changes to the text, in terms of structure, not matter. Some of the sentences were very long and lost sense in the reading. Another sentence had a word ("with" or some such) that didn't make sense. I presumed that you had changed the sentence several times and accidentally left it behind from a previous edit.

Amandajm (talk) 08:48, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Myth and myth origins
I brought up some of this at FAC and I never got around to providing this specific stuff before the FAC closed. It was floating around until I rediscovered it among various papers (as I was trying to find stuff on Percy's use of myth). I previously sent this to Awadewit:

"In his edition of Mary Shelley's classica dramas, M. Koszul quotes a fragmentary 'draft of an Essay, which occurs, in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting, as an insertion in her Journal for the Italian period.' Its thesis is that heathen mythology rests of as good proofs as Christianity, that they do not contradict one another, and that therefore a person who believes in one must believe in the other. M. Koszul thinks the intention is more conciliatory than destructive. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Shelley was setting down a theory of equal 'inspiration' original with herself, or suggested by her husband, or developed in conversation." pp. 133-134 Douglas Bush Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry

He also mentions Orpheus as hers and as an "attempt at imitating the improvisations of Sgricci"

On the next page, he mentions "the perfect little Song of Proserpine were written for Mrs. Shelley's drama Proserpine, the Hymn of Pan and the Hymn of Apollo for her Midas. See M. Koszul's elaborate edition of these dramas; the notes in Mr. Newman I. White's The Best of Shelley (New York, 1932), pp. 494-97; and my few remarks on the dramas at the beginning of the next chapter.

There is more, but this should make an interesting start. Ottava Rima (talk) 22:42, 10 November 2009 (UTC)