Israel Knox defines it as "playful chaos in a serious [and coercive] world." (25) Such a world is characterized by a serious chaotic condition such as the post-colony promises--"disarray, bewilderment, the incompatibility of means and ends, the pervasiveness of evil, the
abortiveness of hope and happiness." (26) Comedy, however, carves a world of its own playful and make-believe chaos out of this serious and coercive chaos of life and nature as a liberatory necessity, in Knox's words.
Time and again, Mary Shelley saves her project from charges of
abortiveness by reconstructing the now-vanished Percy Shelley into a monument of textual wholeness: I do not know whether the critics will reprehend the insertion of some of the most imperfect among [Shelley's works]; but I frankly own that I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader.