SOURCE: “The Genre and Politics of Shelley's Swellfoot the Tyrant,” in The Review of English Studies, Vol. XLVII, No. 188, November, 1996, pp. 500-20.

In the following essay, Erkelenz views Shelley's Swellfoot the Tyrant as both an adaptation of Aristophanes's work and a critique of contemporaneous British politics.

In her well-known note on Oedipus Tyrannus; Or Swellfoot the Tyrant, Mary Shelley describes how Percy Shelley first came to conceive of the poem. While reading aloud the ‘Ode to Liberty’ (more likely, in fact, his just completed ‘Ode to Naples’), he soon found himself ‘riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair’ ‘held in the square, beneath [his] windows’.¹ The interruption reminded him of the famous scene in Aristophanes where Dionysus, rowing Charon's boat across the bottomless lake into the Underworld, is infuriated by the dissonant croaking of a chorus of hellish frogs...