“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
When fear is the only thing holding you back.
This line comes on
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About this line
The Creature says it the night Victor destroys the companion he’d promised to make him. With nothing left to lose, he has nothing left to fear. Shelley published Frankenstein anonymously in 1818, at twenty.
Why we carry this line
Just in case you need a reminder. Be fearless.
The design
Beware; with Mary Shelley’s own semicolon, straight from the 1818 text. It’s the pause where the warning ends and the reason begins. The warning is loud. The reason is quiet, and that’s where the power is.
What happened next
In 1823 Frankenstein reached the London stage. T. P. Cooke played the Creature, and the reviews were all for him.
The playbill didn’t give the Creature a name. It listed him as a dash: “——— by Mr. T. Cooke.”
Mary Shelley saw the play and wrote to a friend about that dash. She liked it: “this nameless mode of naming the unnameable.”
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →