Censoring Marino Faliero

The latest issue of The Byron Journal recently arrived, including my article "Shaping a New Marino Faliero for Drury Lane."

I first encountered the censored version of Marino Faliero, the only one of George Gordon Byron's plays to be performed during his lifetime, when I was in California for a reading of my play Bones of the Sea at Pasadena Playhouse.

Technically, the play was self-censored, as there is no indication that John Larpent, the Examiner of Plays at the time, demanded any more cuts than the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane willingly provided. Still, the theatre was effectively forced to make some of the most devastating cuts for political reasons.

You can read all about it in the article, which appears alongside some other brilliant pieces, including an analysis of Byron and slavery by Christine Kenyon Jones. She was the co-author of a great book on portraits of Byron, and recently wrote a new book on Jane Austen and Lord Byron.

Other articles in the issue include Ioannes P. Chountis on Byron and Edmund Burke and Konstantina Georganta on the Victorian reception of Byron's "The Isles of Greece."