Double Damnation

Quiz — Double Damnation by Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. Recall – Form & Context: What larger satirical work is Double Damnation drawn from, and who is the real-life poet that the character "Peter" is widely understood to represent?

1. Recall – Plot: What does the Devil arrange for Peter at the beginning of this excerpt, and what satirical name is given to the lord who helps broker the deal?

1. Recall – Key Image: What physical transformation does Peter undergo when he receives his government position, and what does this gesture satirically suggest about his character?

1. Recall – Key Image: Which two classical/legendary references does Shelley invoke to illustrate the extreme power of Peter's dullness — one from a famous work of prose fiction and one from ancient history?

1. Comprehension – The Devil's Death: How does the Devil die after securing Peter's reward, and what does the manner of his death suggest about the nature of the corrupt bargain that has been struck?

1. Comprehension – "Double Damnation": According to the analysis, what are the two specific things Peter loses, and why does this make his government sinecure a curse rather than a reward?

1. Comprehension – Dullness as Plague: Trace the progression of Peter's dullness as a contagion. In what order does it move outward from Peter himself, and what is the most extreme natural consequence described?

1. Analysis – Symbolism: What does the symbol of the sifted gravel driveway and the purchased silverware reveal about Peter's relationship to his own artistic identity?

1. Analysis – Tone: The analysis describes Shelley's tone as "gleefully savage" and notes that the satirist "turns into the elegist" in the later stanzas. Explain how both of these tones can coexist in the same poem, using specific details from the analysis to support your answer.

1. Analysis – Themes: Double Damnation engages with the themes of artistic freedom, money, and failure. Choose two of these themes and explain how Shelley uses the character of Peter to develop each one.

Answer Key

1. The excerpt is drawn from Peter Bell the Third (1819); Peter represents William Wordsworth, who Shelley believed had betrayed his radical origins by accepting government patronage.

1. The Devil arranges a government sinecure — a comfortable, do-nothing post funded by public money — for Peter; the lord who helps is satirically named Lord MacMurderchouse, a name blending murder, political corruption, and Scottish aristocratic convention.

1. Peter's back bends in a fawning, almost shoe-kissing gesture; Shelley uses this to show that corruption manifests as physical sycophancy, and that moral compromise quickly becomes an embodied, humiliating habit.

1. Shelley invokes the Struldbruggs from Swift's Gulliver's Travels (prose fiction) — immortal beings so wretched no one can bear their company — and Guatimozin, the Aztec emperor tortured on a burning grill, who would supposedly fall asleep mid-agony if exposed to Peter's writing.

1. The Devil dies suddenly and undramatically, almost like a punchline, with no illness or ceremony; this suggests that once the corrupt deal is sealed the corruptor becomes redundant — Peter's damnation is now self-sustaining and no longer requires a devil to maintain it.

1. Peter loses both his soul and his creative gift; the sinecure is a curse because financial and social reward comes at the total cost of his inner life and artistic worth, leaving him prosperous in appearance but spiritually and creatively hollow.

1. The dullness spreads from Peter himself → to his family and social circle → to literary reviewers → to animals (including the kitten) → to the natural elements (earth, air, wind); the most extreme consequence is that reproduction itself ceases near his house — birds stop nesting and creatures stop breeding, meaning his dullness actively suppresses life.

1. The gravel driveway and silverware represent a façade of middle-class respectability that Peter uses to replace, and distance himself from, his authentic artistic identity; they signal that he has traded creative selfhood for the performance of social status.

1. The "gleefully savage" tone operates through mock-epic comedy — treating dullness as a cosmic plague, piling up absurd hyperboles — which keeps the poem entertaining and pointed. The elegiac shift occurs in the later stanzas where nature itself dies around Peter; here Shelley mourns what creative compromise destroys, revealing that beneath the jokes lies genuine grief over the loss of imaginative vitality.

1. Artistic freedom / Money: Peter's sinecure illustrates that accepting financial patronage from the establishment requires surrendering political and creative independence; money, in Shelley's view, does not liberate the artist but instead purchases their silence and complicity. Failure: Although Peter appears outwardly successful — healthy, housed, and employed — Shelley presents this as the deepest form of failure: the inability to produce meaningful work and the gradual death of everything vital around him, suggesting that artistic failure is more catastrophic than worldly misfortune.