Abstract
In September 1821 Byron sent John Murray the manuscript of a rhapsody in three acts, ‘in my gay metaphysical style’. To Thomas Moore he confided in a letter of 19 September that Cain was to be subtitled A Mystery, ‘according to the former Christian custom, and in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader’. Like most of Byron’s jokes, this one about the impenetrability of Cain was fundamentally serious. Although Manfred, a dramatic poem which approximated to a familiar Gothic mode, developing attitudes already made popular by Childe Harold and the verse tales, was praised and on the whole comprehended in its own time, Byron’s seven other plays — with the significant exception of Werner— proved thorny and baffling from the start. In this same September he confessed to Murray that Gifford’s adverse criticism of The Two Foscari and Sardanapalus had wounded him: ‘to be sure, they are as opposite to the English drama as one thing can be to another; but I have a notion that, if understood, they will in time find favour (though not on the stage) with the reader.’ Byron did not often appeal in this way to ‘the Avenger, Time’ to vindicate literary works which his contemporaries had misprized or misunderstood.
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Notes
Boleslaw Taborski, Byron And The Theatre(Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Salzburg, 1972) 229–56.
David Erdman, ‘Byron’s Stage-Fright’, in English Literary History, VI (1939) 219–43.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum For the Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (London, 1964) 188.
William Hazlitt, from his unsigned review of Marino Faliero, London Magazine(May 1821). Quoted in Byron: The Critical Heritage, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London, 1970) 208–9.
Reginald Heber, from his unsigned review in the Quarterly Review(November 1822). Quoted in Rutherford, op. cit., 239.
Jerome McGann, in his otherwise admirable account of The Two Foscari, states that Loredano ‘saves the council from public embarrassment by poisoning the Doge’ (Fiery Dust(Chicago, 1968) 224). This is a misunderstanding of the last scene of the play, as the text itself — and Byron’s own note on the subject of Foscari’s death appended to Marino Faliero— make plain. (Works, ed. Page and Jump, 910)
Anne Barton, Byron And the Mythology of Fact (Nottingham Byron Lecture, 1968).
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© 1975 John D. Jump
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Barton, A. (1975). ‘A Light to Lesson Ages’: Byron’s Political Plays. In: Jump, J.D. (eds) Byron. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02482-7_8
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