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Byron's Dramas The thirty-fourth Byron Foundation Lecture was delivered on Friday, 2nd March, 1962, the Chairman being PROFESSOR J. KINSLEY, M.A., PH.D., D.LITT., F.R.S.L., F.R.HIST.S.. Published in 2009 by The Byron Centre for the Study of Literature and Social Change School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD http://byron.nottingham.ac.uk This electronic edition digitized and edited by Nicola Bowring Byron Foundation Lectures Online Series Editor, Matthew J.A. Green ‘Byron’s Dramas’ Byron Foundation Lecture by Professor Bonamy Dobree (Bonamy Dobree 1962) is reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of The Estate of Bonamy Dobree This is a revised version of the Byron Foundation Lecture delivered by Professor Bonamy Dobree in March 1962. ISBN: 978-1-906808-02-0 This lecture was founded in 1912 by public subscription. In accordance with the terms of the Foundation, the subject of the Lecture need not be confined to Byron, but must be on some aspect of English literature. 1919 Byron THE HON. WHITELAW REID 1920 Shakespeare in War and Peace SIR FRANK BENSON 1921 Byron the Poet ALDERMAN E. HUNTSMAN 1922 Byron and English Society PROFESSOR H. J. C. GRIERSON, M.A., LL.D. 1923 Byron PROFESSOR W. MCNEILE DIXON, LITT.D. 1924 Byron the Poet H. J. SPENCER, M.A., LL.D. 1925 Byron’s Melancholy PROFESSOR R. M. HEWITT, M.A. 1926 Poetic Drama in the Age of Byron PROFESSOR LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, M.A. 1927 Byron and Europe PRINCE D. S. MIRSKY *1928 Byron and Ossian ROBIN FLOWER, D.LITT. 1929 Byronism REBECCA WEST 1930 Byron the Unromantic LORD DAVID CECIL 1931 Poetry and Rhetoric PROFESSOR J. CROFTS, M.A. 1932 The Material of Fiction WALTER DE LA MARE 1933 Byron as a Satirist PROFESSOR J. WIGHT DUFF, M.A., D.LITT., F.B.A. 1934 Byron and some Poets of his Time EDMUND BLUNDEN, M.A. 1935 Byron in the Nineteenth Century PROFESSOR B. IFOR EVANS, M.A. 1936 Byron as a Satirist WILLIAM CONNELY, M.A. 1937 Byron and the Byronic BERTRAND RUSSELL, M.A., F.R.S. 1938 Byron as seen by his Contemporaries and Successors DESMOND MACCARTHY, LL.D. F.R.S.L. 1944 Byron and Liberty PROFESSOR VIVIAN DE SOLA PINTO, M.A., D.PHIL., F.R.S.L. 1946 Don Juan as a European Figure PROFESSOR S. DE MADARIAGA, M.A. *1946 The, Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy C. M. BOWRA, M.A., D.LITT., F.B.A. *1948 Byron’s Lyrics L. C. MARTIN, M.A., B.LITT. *1948-9 Byron and Switzerland PROFESSOR HEINRICH STRAUMANN *1949-50 Goethe and Byron MISS E. M. BUTLER, M.A. *1951 Byron and Shelley PROFESSOR D. G. JAMES, M.A. *1952 The Grand Manner C. DAY LEWIS 1952 The Epic of Don Juan PROFESSOR J. ISAACS, M.A. (not printed) *1953 Bvron’s Dramatic Prose G. WILSON KNIGHT, M.A., F.R.S.L. *1956 Two exiles: Lord Byron and D. H. Lawrence. GRAHAM HOUGH, M.A. *1958 Byron and Italy PROFESSOR G. MELCHIORI *1959 Byron and the Greek Tradition PROFESSOR T. J. B. SPENCER *Copies of these lectures were printed and are available from the University, Nottingham. BYRON’S DRAMAS The place we are to give in our hearts or our esteem to Byron’s dramas has always been a matter of differing opinion. In his own day, such orthodox critics as Jeffrey and Bishop Heber, while according them certain great qualities, judge them, we might think, on grounds that are often solid enough, but equally often irrelevant: on the other hand, Lockhart and Wilson give them such unstinted praise, as we in our turn may feel to be too uncritical. Bulwer Lytton regarded them as the best things that Byron ever wrote,( 1) and in our own day, Professor Wilson Knight, in his brilliant essay in The Burning Oracle has embraced them wholeheartedly. For the most part, however, commentators have judged them harshly, even finding them ‘unreadable’, though now and again we hear a wilderness-crying voice pleading that they should have a place in our national repertory. What I on my part would wish to do on this occasion is to try to fit them into a Byronic pattern, and also, as far as may be, to appraise them as actable drama, aware of what would normally militate against them as such. I will say at the outset that in a sense I am inclined to agree with Lytton, for it seems to me that in some of his plays Byron is expressing more poignantly than anywhere else what he most deeply feels: and I suggest that he chose the drama as being the most concentrated form available to his self-searching genius. Perhaps the doing freed him for the writing of Don Juan. I feel it necessary in the first place to note at what period of his life they were written, for this is of primary significance. Manfred, begun in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, when Byron had left England for good soon after the disastrous collapse of his marriage, was finished in the spring of the next year, when he had moved to Venice. It was not until four years later that he embarked upon the actual writing of Marino Faliero. In the mean time he had published—among other things, such as Mazeppa—the third and fourth Cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, markedly different in tone from the first two; Beppu, and the first two Cantos of the work he could refer to, 5 with characteristic assumed carelessness, as Donny Johnny. Emergence from the pit? Yet when in the autumn of 1818 Shelley paid him a visit in Venice, the younger poet felt impelled to write Julian and Maddalo, to wit, Shelley and Byron. In his Preface he describes Maddalo as consumed by concentrated and impatient feelings, trampling on his own hopes and affections. What, in that fine and terrible poem Shelley tells us about Byron may well be read as an illuminat- ing gloss on the most striking of Byron’s plays. It is clear that during the period he was brooding over and writing them, Byron was prey to the most intense emotions of pride, regret, and remorse. More than one of his characters might utter from Part III of Childe Harold: There is a very life in our despair, Vitality of poison—a quick root That feeds these deadly branches; for it were As nothing that we die; but Life will suit Itself to sorrow’s most detested fruit, Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore All ashes to the taste. (St. xxxiv) Luckily there was a vitality other than poison, a rapturous response to the beauty of multifarious existence that nourished the branches of Byron’s abundantly creative tree. As we all know, Byron was emphatic in stating that his dramas were designed without the remotest notion of production, his ‘intercourse’ with Drury Lane—as one of the Committee of Management—having given him, he declared, ‘the greatest contempt’ for the theatre. Manfred, he insisted, he composed ‘actually with a horror of the stage, and with a view to render the thought of it impracticable’, (it was, however, acted at Covent Garden in 1834), and he was furiously annoyed when Marino Faliero—clumsily adapted—was put on at Drury Lane in April, 1821, soon after its publication. Nevertheless they offer tempting possibilities as stage plays, and some are occasionally embodied; for instance The Two Foscari at the Madder- market Theatre, Norwich, Marino Faliero by a society in London a few years ago, and Cain in Edinburgh. Werner at one time enjoyed considerable popularity with Macready as Werner, while Sardanapalus had a vogue in Germany enthusiastically supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II. If a wish to consider them as viable drama may seem impertinent to the memory of Lord Byron, one may plead in excuse a profound admiration for his far-ranging genius. 6 Byron’s plays, we have to recognize from the outset, are philosophic statements, they are about something, some dominating idea, though they are divisible into two groups, which I might call the ‘supernatural’ and the ‘human’. This is apparent from what he entitled them. Manfred he called ‘a dramatic poem’, Cain and Heaven and Earth he classified as ‘mysteries’, using the mediaeval name for plays dealing with Biblical events. The Deformed Transformed, to be sure, though the Devil plays an active part in it, he dubbed simply ‘a drama’. But this play has less profoundly philosophic thought in it than have the others, also less poetry, and one may, with Shelley, like it the least of all the things that Byron had written. It was never finished. The, other plays, called ‘tragedies’, are peopled wholly by human beings. Although it is with these that I shall chiefly be concerned (I can deal with only one of them at all fully), the others cannot be ignored, since they would seem to state in direct terms ideas that in the ‘human’ plays remain as implications. I shall begin then with Manfred. This, though ‘super- natural’ seems to have inspired, in varying degrees, the ‘human’ plays. Byron called it ‘a kind of Poem in dialogue (in blank verse) or Drama . but of a very wild, meta- physical, and inexplicable kind’ (To Murray, 15 Feb. 1817). Manfred himself is the personification of metaphysical questing rather than a person. ‘Tormented by a species of remorse’, he is obsessed by his craving for knowledge of ultimate things—the meaning of life, of death, for a solution also of the problem of evil, crying out, as others in later plays will echo: Must crimes be punish’d but by other crimes, And greater criminals ? (III.
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