THE BYRONIC HERO AND THE RENAISSANCE HERO-VILLAIN ANALOGUES AND PROTOTYPES APPROVED: Graduate Committee: ajotf Profes f'S. Minor Professor Comihittee Member Committee Member UmJUa-v+v -7. hjLzJlJL^ Chairman of Graduate Studies in English Deari^of the Graduate School Howard, Ida Beth, The Byronic Hero and the Renaissance Hero-Villain: Analogues and Prototypes. Doctor of Philoso- phy (English), August, 1973, 346 pp., bibliography, 141 titles. The purpose of this study is to suggest the influence of certain characters in eighteen works by English Renais- sance authors upon the Byronic Hero, that composite figure which emerges from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales, the dramas, and some of the shorter poems. Chapter I presents an expanded statement of the overall aim of this entire work and a preliminary projection of the problems to be considered in the succeeding chapters. Prerequisite to the thesis of this study is the assump- tion that Byron was familiar with the English Renaissance authors. Chapter II is an inquiry into the nature of Byron's reading through an examination of the extant catalogues of the books Byron owned, his statements regarding the books he had read, the references to Renaissance literature in his poetry and in his conversations, letters, and journal entries, and the recorded comments by his contemporaries on the nature and extent of Byron's reading. It is possible to conclude from this investigation that Byron's knowledge of these Renaissance works was considerable. Chapter III is a discussion of the nature of Byron's literary borrowings and includes a consideration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century comments on this subject. There are in Byron's work many influences from other writers, which may be explained in part by Byron's remarkable memory and natural imitativeness and in part by Byron's extreme susceptibility to the ideas of others, either in books or in real life. However, the Byronic style is so distinctive that such influences are completely adapted by Byron's creativity and cannot be regarded as either direct plagiaries or imitations. Chapter IV, a survey of critical commentary on the Byronic Hero from 1812 to the present, indicates, among other things, that the widespread tendency to regard the Byronic Hero as a literary extension of Byron has never been unanimous among critics. A strictly biographical interpreta- tion also ignores the many emphatic denials by Byron that he was the hero of his poetry. The Byronic Hero is assuredly unique in that he was colored by Byron's personality and the spirit of the age, but the many ambivalent traits commingled in the Byronic Hero are not in themselves unique, for similar comminglings are found in many characters in Renaissance literature. In Chapter V, a comparative analysis of the appearance of Byron's heroes and of a number of Renaissance characters indicates that Byron, in the delineation of his melancholy, passion-driven heroes, frequently adopted the Renaissance writers' technique of emphasizing a character's dominant passions—such as hatred, vengeance, remorse, love, and ambitions—by the character's physical appearance. Chapter VI, an analysis of the Gothic elements in Byron's work and in Renaissance tragedy, suggests that the influence upon Byron's work of eighteenth-century Gothic fiction was immediate but comparatively superficial. For the basic ingredients of Gothicism in his poetry, Byron turned to the Renaissance dramatists, finding in their works Gothic elements which became a part of the Byronic Hero and his environment. Chapter VII examines the Promethean and Luciferian elements in Byron's heroes and in a number of Renaissance characters. These elements represent respectively the in- domitable will and the defiant spirit of each of these types of heroes. Chapter VIII presents a brief summary of the findings of the preceding chapters and suggests in conclusion that the analyses in this study should provide additional insight into the nature of the Byronic Hero which might be signifi- cant in the study of many characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. THE BYRONIC HERO AND TtfE! RENAISSANCE HERO-VILLAIN: ANALOGUES AND PROTOTYPES DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Ida Beth Howard, B.A., M.A. Denton, Texas August, 1973 Copyright by Ida Beth Howard 1973 To Laurel and her Great-Grandfather ! TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE NATURE OF BYRON'S READING 20 III. THE NATURE OF BYRON'S LITERARY BORROWINGS 68 IV. THE BYRON IC HERO AND BYRON HIMSELF 121 V. THE BYRONIC HERO AND HIS OUTWARD MANIFESTATIONS OF CHARACTER 167 VI. THE BYRONIC HERO AND HIS GOTHIC ANCESTRY 204 VII. THE NATURE OF THE BYRONIC HERO'S WILL 267 VIII. CONCLUSION 321 APPENDIX 327 BIBLIOGRAPHY 333 1X1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The primary purpose of this study is to establish the influence of certain Renaissance dramatic heroes upon the Byronic Hero, that composite figure which emerges from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales, the dramas, and some of Byron's shorter poems. The Oriental Tales and dramas are now read less frequently than Byron's satires, but they constitute a significant portion of Byron's canon and have never been totally ignored by scholars. While Byron's heroes are assuredly unique in that they were colored by the poet's own personality and the spirit of his age, the commingling of ambivalent traits in the Byronic Hero—heroic valor and rebellious nonconformity, tenderness and vengeful cruelty, brooding self-absorption and innate human compassion, philosophical thoughtfulness and near- deliration, triumphant personal integrity and ineluctable doom—is not in itself unique, for similar blendings are found in certain characters in Renaissance literature. There is no book-length work devoted to a consideration of the influence upon the Byronic Hero of the heroes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, and other Renaissance writers. Samuel C. Chew, an outstanding Byron scholar in the first quarter of this century, provides in his The Dramas of Lord Byron perceptive and thorough analyses of the characters in Byron's dramas.1 His study, however, excludes the Oriental Tales, and these must certainly be taken fully into account in an examination of the Byronic Hero and his literary an- cestors. The Byronic Hero, by Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., is an excellent historical study of origins and developments of pre-Romantic and Romantic hero-types related to and culminat- ing in Byron's heroes. Thorslev's major concern is with universal hero-types as reflected in the Byronic Hero rather than with specific characters as progenitors, and, except for a brief discussion of the significance of Milton's Satan, he touches but negligibly upon the contributions of other Renaissance heroes. In Byron and Shakespeare (1966), G. Wilson Knight traces and analyzes similarities, both 3 general and detailed, between Shakespeare and Byron. Knight's emphasis on the Shakespearean influence as reflected in the Byronic Hero, however, is only incidental to his dis- cussion of the correspondences between Shakespeare and Byron, and he is not concerned about the possible influence of 1Samuel C. Chew, Jr., The Dramas of Lord Byron, A Critical Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Presif, T9T5) . 2 Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., The Byronic Hero (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1962). 3 G. Wilson Knight, Byron and Shakespeare (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1966). other Elizabethan dramatists. Although this present study is limited to pre-Restoration figures who are reflected in the Byronic Hero, it should be noted that Laura B. Kennelly, in an unpublished thesis (1969), discusses the parallels 4 between the heroes of Byron and Dryden. Among the numerous shorter studies of Byron's dramas and Oriental Tales, none is concerned chiefly with the literary influence of Renais- sance heroes upon the Byronic Hero. The Byronic Hero's lasting influence upon literature and the other arts is noted by Jacques Barzun, who says that "From Goethe, Pushkin, Stendhal, Heine, Balzac, Scott, Carlyle, Mazzini, Leopardi, Berlioz, George Sand, and Delacroix down to Flaubert, Tennyson, Ruskin, the Brontes, Baudelaire, Becque, Nietzsche, Wilde, and Strindberg, one can scarcely name a writer who did not come under the spell of Byronism and turn it to some use in his own life or work."^ Thorslev extends the list to include Melville's Ahab,6 and William R. Harvey argues that James Steerforth, Sidney Carton, and Eugene Wrayburn display Charles Dickens' most 4 Laura B. Kennelly, "Significant Parallels in the Heroes of John Dryden and Lord Byron," Thesis North Texas State University 1969. 5 George Gordon Lord Byron, The Selected Letters of Lord Byron, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), p. xiii. Hereafter cited as Barzun. g Thorslev, p. 3. 7 successful attempts at Byronism. In view of this general acknowledgment of a "vast post-Byron literary and cultural 8 influence/" any work that illuminates another facet of the most seminal product of Byronism—the Byronic Hero—has a significance beyond the study of the poet himself. For this reason particularly, an investigation of the Byronic Hero's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears seems long overdue. Although he was doubtless a highly subjective artist, creating to a great extent from within the vortex of his own personality, Byron was intensely aware of the social, cul- tural, political, and religious milieu of nineteenth-century Europe. Moreover, his correspondence and journals, as well as his poetry, reveal that he was acutely interested in and sensitive to human passions as the impelling and directive force of man's overt actions. Finally, and more to the point of this work, Byron was from early boyhood an avid reader with remarkable powers of memory, both quantitative and conceptual, as well as of assimilation.