Asia has descended to the realm of Demogorgon and catechizes him. Who created and rules all things? What is behind and beyond even Jupiter. Demogorgon says, “The deep truth is imageless.” We do not know. All we know is Love, and that is all we need to know.

A change of scene to the feminine counterpart of Prometheus, named Asia, Shelley’s invention. She and Panthea, guided by a Dream and Spirits, descend to the cave of Demogorgon in a mysterious Otherworld.

Prometheus calls up the Phantasm of Jupiter to recall the curse he once pronounced on Jupiter, which he now regrets. Mercury arrives with the Furies, who, in this drama of the mind, are the forms of human despair and hopelessness. Other Spirits arrive, sent from a poet’s imagination, saying don’t give up. End of Act 1.

Prometheus’s opening speech indicates that he has changed. He no longer hates, and would recant his curse on Jupiter, but can’t remember it. No one, even his mother, Earth, dares tell him. But Earth tells him to summon someone from a mysterious Otherworld “below” death, in which reside images which are the doubles of all things in this life.

Interest in Prometheus revived in the Romantic revolutionary age. Short poems by Goethe and Byron show his as defiant rebel. Shelley’s famous Preface to his Prometheus Unbound. The influence of Milton’s titanic rebel, Satan.

Christian writers made Pandora the Classical Eve, disobedient the “cause of all our woe.” But in the 17th-19th centuries, Pandora was transvalued as a redemptive figure, especially by Calderón de la Barca and Goethe (influenced by Calderón) in a fragment called Pandora.

The drama ends with a proud, defiant Prometheus. The last play of the trilogy, featuring his reconciliation with Zeus, is lost. The new interest in the Prometheus myth during the Romantic era, the age of revolutions.

Aeschylus brings in Io, not part of the original Prometheus story, as a positive female figure replacing Pandora. Turned into a cow and stung by a gadfly, she wanders the world, an innocent sufferer. But from her line will come Herakles or Hercules, who will release Prometheus.

An “act” in Greek tragedy consists of dialogue between the hero and another character, followed by an interchange with the Chorus and a Choral Ode. In the second “act,” Prometheus speaks to Oceanus, the ocean, who counsels repentance and humble obedience. Prometheus responds by a remarkable speech in which fire becomes the fire of the creative mind.

Greek tragedy was not realistic, but stylized, ritualized, with actors wearing masks and a Chorus that sang and danced. The opening scene: Prometheus bound to the rock by Hephaestus. Key thematic words are repeated. This is a play about “limits” of all kinds.