Percy Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet and playwright during the early 19th century.

Biography
He was born in 1792. (PROSE: Managra) Percy abandoned a wife and a child for Mary Shelley when Mary was 16. (AUDIO: Mary's Story) Mary regarded him as her soulmate. (AUDIO: Army of Death) They called each other "husband" and "wife" for several months or years before they were officially married; at the time, Percy had an affair with Claire Clairmont, Mary's half-sister. Percy and Claire found it amusing that Mary knew about their affair.

In June 1816, Percy was spending time with Mary when they encountered the Eighth Doctor, who introduced himself as Dr Frankenstein. When the Doctor appeared to have died, Percy suggested to make an experiment with lightning on the Doctor's body, modelled after the experiments of signor Galvani on frogs. During the experiment, Percy called himself "the modern Prometheus". The experience later inspired Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. (AUDIO: Mary's Story)

Percy's circle of friends, known to Faction Paradox as the "Shelley Cabal", (PROSE: The Book of the War) included John Polidori and the Romantic poet Lord Byron. (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: Mary's Story) Together, the group attacked several of the Star Chamber's political puppets and popularised stories of vampirism and unspeakable science influenced by the Chamber's knowledge of the Homeworld and the war against the Yssgaroth. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Percy often took laudanum. (AUDIO: Mary's Story) In between writing poetry and drinking, Percy liked to read impenetrable scientific journals. (AUDIO: The Silver Turk)

In 1819, (PROSE: The Book of the War, AUDIO: The Peterloo Massacre) Shelley released the work The Mask of Anarchy, (PROSE: The Book of the War) inspired by the Peterloo Massacre. (AUDIO: The Peterloo Massacre) Several lines of the poem had first appeared to Shelley while sleep in Italy; though he later claimed that he dreamt the name of Murder was "Castlereagh", the lines originally read
 * "I met Murder on the way –
 * He had a mask like Dvora –
 * Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
 * Seven blood-hounds followed him." (PROSE: The Book of the War)

The Fifth Doctor recited another excerpt to his companions Nyssa and Tegan Jovanka:
 * "Rise, like lions after slumber
 * In unvanquishable number!
 * Shake your chains to earth like dew
 * Which in sleep had fallen on you:
 * Ye are many — they are few!" (AUDIO: The Peterloo Massacre)

In 1821 or 1822, the Mal'akh attacked the Shelley Cabal in Pisa. Several months later, in 1822, the Mal'akh attacked them again near Massa, and the Shelley Cabal was split up; Shelley and two friends were chased out to sea (PROSE: The Book of the War) in his schooner off the coast of Italy, (PROSE: Managra) and three bodies washed up on shore several miles apart. While the corpses of his two friends were identifiable, his body was missing its face and arms, recognisable only by his clothing and the copy John Keats' Lamia in the pocket.

In a ceremony led by Lord Byron, the three bodies were burned on the beach between Massa and Viareggia, though Shelley's heart appeared to be resistant to the flame. (PROSE: The Book of the War)

Behind the scenes

 * In the real world, Percy and Mary Shelley were married on 30 December 1816.
 * He was played by Lee Cornes in an episode of Blackadder the Third.