Mary Shelley evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream", her ghost story: She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I
Prometheus Morgan Library in New York City. In the drawing, a very noble rendering of Prometheus is presented which evokes the memory of Michelangelo's works portraying Jehovah. This drawing is perhaps one of the most intense examples of the visualization of the myth of Prometheus from the Renaissance period. Writing in the late British Renaissance, William Shakespeare uses the Promethean allusion in the famous death scene of Desdemona in his tragedy of "Othello". Othello in contemplating the death of Desdemona asserts plainly that he cannot restore the "Promethean heat" to her body once it has been extinguished. For Shakespeare, the allusion