Today is the birthday of novelist Mary Shelley, but I want to write about the plays of one of her associates, George Gordon Byron, who remained a close friend and colleague of hers until his death in 1824.
While Byron is today known mainly as a poet, the latest issue of The Byron Journal has a couple of articles addressing his dramas Cain and Manfred. Both plays are verse dramas that Byron protested (perhaps too much, methinks) were not intended for the stage, but then they got performed over and over again anyway.
In "Byron in Space" Anthony Howe of Birmingham City University takes a look at cosmology in Cain as well as Byron's mock-epic poem Don Juan. While earlier poets like John Milton could invoke the Ptolemaic universe at least somewhat seriously, that was not the case for Byron in the 19th century. Act II of Cain shows Lucifer taking the title character to "The Abyss of Space" and asking him to point out the Earth. Cain responds:
As we move
Like sunbeams onward, it grows small and smaller,
And as it waxes little, and then less,
Gathers a halo round it, like the light
Which shone the roundest of the stars, when I
Beheld them from the skirts of Paradise...
Howe notes how Cain becomes lost in the vastness of space. He seems to suffer from the pain of the Copernican revolution, no longer able to count on the Earth being a fixed point. Interestingly, though, the cosmos he sees still has elements of the Ptolemaic model of the universe, including not just "ether" also a heaven that is a "blue wilderness" postulated by earlier astronomers who thought the sky only grew dark when the Earth's shadow passed over it.
Flora Lisica of Northeastern University London speculates in "Byron's Manfred and Tragedy in the 'Mental Theatre'" that the tragedies of Byron achieve their greatest intimacy when read. Curiously, she does not include Heaven and Earth with the tragic plays Byron had published. (The play is a sort of sequel to his earlier drama Cain.) However, she does remind readers of the advice--traced back to Roman drama--that Byron gives in his poem Hints from Horace:
Yet many deeds preserved in history's page
Are better told than acted on the stage;
The ear sustains what shocks the timid eye,
And horror thus subsides to sympathy...
Later in the article, Lisica quotes from one of Byron's letters he wrote after seeing Barbarina Wilmot's tragedy Ina, which failed at Drury Lane, probably due to the half-hearted acting of Edmund Kean. Byron lamented Kean's poor performance, and the fact that the epilogue recited by Sarah Bartley could hardly be heard. Alas, the play bombed, in spite of fine performances by Alexander Rae as the villainous monk Baldred and Julia Glover as Princess Edelfleda.
Perhaps it was the fear of failing with a play like Ina that made Byron turn inward when writing Manfred, creating a deeply introspective work. In any case, I enjoyed reading both articles and look forward to the next issue of The Byron Journal when it arrives.
