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MARINO FALIERO, DOGE of VENICE by Lord Byron

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MARINO FALIERO, DOGE of VENICE by Lord Byron 1 MARINO FALIERO, DOGE OF VENICE AN HISTORICAL TRAGEDY, IN FIVE ACTS. by Lord Byron edited by Peter Cochran with thanks to Gregory Dowling, Jane Stabler, and Valeria Vallucci. Execution of Faliero Faliero’s “portrait”. by Delacroix. The following appendices will be found at the end of this document: I. MCCCLIV. / MARINO FALIERO. / DOGE XLIX. (from Muratori’s Rerum Italicarum Scriptores) II. Translation of I by Francis Cohen. III. Levati, Viaggi di Petrarca, vol.iv. p.323. IV. Translation of III by Valeria Vallucci. V. Extrait de L’Ouvrage Histoire de la République de Venise, par P. Daru de 1’Academie Française, tom. v. livre xxxv. p.95. &c. Edition de Paris MDCCCXIX. VI. Translation of V. VII. Extract from the Literary History of Italy, by P.I.Ginguené. vol.ix. p.144. Paris Edit. 1819. VIII. Translation of VII. 2 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Faliero the myth The first thing that would have struck Byron on discovering Marino Faliero in Venice in November 1816 was that he had no tomb: indeed, nothing to commemorate him in a positive way. In the space where his portrait should be, on the wall of the Great Hall of the Palace of the Doges, there is a painted curtain drawn across (see illustration above). Two years later, Byron tells us in his preface, he sought out the actual tomb, and was shown “a sarcophagus in the wall with an illegible inscription”.1 It would have coincided eerily with the fates of so many of his own protagonists – the Giaour, Conrad, Lara, Kaled, Ezzelin, Alp, Parisina, Hugo … and even the recently-created Astarte – creatures of his own imagining, none of whom are properly buried. No chronicle credits the historical Marino Faliero with anything approaching tragic dignity. He seems to have been a Venetian mafioso who tried, in his senescence, to go too far, and paid the penalty. But, having caught Byron’s imagination, he became for Byron a hero of whom great things might have been expected: “Had the man succeeded, he would have changed the face of Venice, and perhaps of Italy”, he writes, at the end of Appendix III, on no evidence at all. Faliero had (in so far as the scanty record shows), no agenda other than unfocussed revenge and self-aggrandisement – but had not Byron, earlier in the year, been reported as having “gone to the length of strutting about in his peer’s robes, and saying he was like Bonaparte, and the greatest man in the world, not excepting Bonaparte”?2 Faliero, with his arrogance, insane prickliness and absurd manoeuvrings (so readily detected and defeated), might indeed be the stuff of drama – a drama by Massinger, for instance. But Byron thought Massinger and his like “turbid mountebanks”,3 and would not be stopped: . I am aware of what you say of Otway; and am a very great admirer of his, – all except of that maudlin bitch of chaste lewdness and blubbering curiosity, Belvidera, whom I utterly despise, abhor, and detest; but the story of Marino Falieri is different, and, I think, so much finer, that I wish Otway had taken it instead: the head conspiring against the body for refusal of redress for a real injury, – jealousy – treason, with the more fixed and inveterate passions (mixed with policy) of an old or elderly man – the devil himself could not have a finer subject, and he is your only tragic dramatist. Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written even a tolerable tragedy? “Ah (said the Patriarch) the composition of a tragedy requires testicles.” If this be true, Lord knows what Joanna Baillie does; I suppose she borrows them. There is still, in the Doge’s Palace, the black veil painted over Falieri’s picture, and the staircase whereon he was first crowned Doge, and subsequently decapitated. This was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice – more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller’s “Armenian”, a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the “Ghost Seer”, and I never walked down St Mark’s by moonlight without thinking of it, and “at nine o’clock he died!” – But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations for 1: John Julius Norwich, whose A History of Venice (Allen Lane 1982), contains, at pp.223-9, an excellent account of the conspiracy, records that Faliero was “buried in an unmarked grave” (p.228). 2: Hobhouse diary, February 12 1816. 3: See BLJ VIII, 56-7. 3 me: but Pierre has. There should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric, and pure invention is but the talent of a liar . (BLJ V 203: letter to Murray, April 2 1817). He wrote to Murray on January 27 1821, confessing, “I am convinced that I should have done precisely what the Doge did on those provocations.”4 Alessandro Guiccioli, and Vittorio Alfieri By 1820 Byron was still thinking about a play on the subject of Faliero; and had met, briefly befriended, and then, at great length, cuckolded Alessandro Guiccioli. Guiccioli, a theatre fanatic, had earlier in his life known and admired the playwright Vittorio Alfieri, and assisted him in mounting and acting in some of his plays. He had said (and not to Byron’s face), how much Byron reminded him of the dramatist: I have seen myself compared personally or poetically, in English, French, German (as interpreted to me), Vittorio Alfieri. Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to … [about twenty proper nouns follow] … to Alfieri, &c., &c., &c. The likeness to Alfieri was asserted very seriously by an Italian, who had known him in his younger days: it of course related merely to our apparent personal dispositions. He did not assert it to me (for we were not then good friends), but in society.5 Alfieri’s plays are not at all like those of Otway or Massinger. Their diction is pure, chaste and dignified, no comedy is allowed, and they adhere scrupulously to the Unities. Byron wished to write plays of this sort, and from a mixture of motives. Firstly, he had personal experience of Alfieri’s excellence as a dramatist: Last night [August 11th 1819, at Bologna] I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra – the two last acts of which threw me into convulsions. – I do not mean by that word – a lady’s hysterics – but the agony of reluctant tears – and the choaking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction. – This is but the second time for anything under reality, the first was on seeing Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach.6 Notice, however, the other dramatist who had sent Byron into a “choaking shudder”: it was Massinger. Byron’s second reason for trying to emulate Alfieri was his paradoxical dislike of the English dramatic tradition which Massinger (with Shakespeare at his back), represented. This despite the fact that William Gifford, his “literary father”, admired and edited many of the old dramatists, and had even persuaded him to re-write the third of Manfred with Dr Faustus as a model. He thought Shakespeare himself “the worst of models – though 4: BLJ VIII, 69. 5: BLJ IX, 11. 6: BLJ VI, 206. 4 the most extraordinary of writers”;7 which did not prevent him from quoting Shakespeare more often in his letters – and in Don Juan – than any other writer. The third reason was the fact that, though he was himself an excellent actor (amateur, of course), and a frequent theatre-goer, sitting for a while on the Management Committee of Drury Lane, and sifting through dozens of bad play-scripts, he despised the London theatre and thought success there constituted a degradation. A brief and squalid liaison with a Drury Lane actress called Susan Boyce – while his marriage was disintegrating – would have increased his prejudice. This had not stopped him from writing his first play, Manfred, as a script tailored to the requirements of Drury Lane. It was not too long, so that it could go on a bill with shorter pieces, like farces and ballets: it has a leading role designed (I believe) with Edmund Kean’s voice and personality in mind: and it calls, in the Alpine scenery in its first act and the Hall of Arimanes in its second, for the sort of spectacular scenery that Drury Lane handled well. However, Byron never says that he’d like Manfred staged. Had anyone tried to, I have no doubt he would have protested. A patrician disdain for mere professionalism underlies much of this nonsense (and a fear of failure in the vulgarity of the market): but his seeming rejection of the central tradition of English literature does also indicate an uncertain judgement. We have to remember that the way Shakespeare was performed in Byron’s day, with huge cuts, massive pauses for scene-changes, slow, non-conversational delivery, and much money spent on costume and scenery, would have given no great indication of his stagecraft – but we still expect something less conventional from one with Byron’s insight. Three plays resulted from Byron’s determination to be as much like Alfieri, and as unlike Shakespeare, as possible: two are Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari, and the first is Marino Faliero. There is much speculation possible as to how much of Byron is in the character of Faliero. The way Faliero surrounds himself with a gang of admiring bully-boy inferiors reminds us of a recurring “homosocial” fantasy on Byron’s part.
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