In the opening scene of the play, Manfred tells the spirits to appear “in your accustom’d forms” (I.i.180).

In response, they ask him to “choose a form –” and Manfred replies: “I have no choice” (I.i.183-4). This is not only an expression of doomed fatefulness (because the shape can only be Astarte), but also a world-weary “I don’t care” or, as my teenage son would say, just before he gets grounded, “I don’t give ––.”

This paper examines the expressive mark of punctuation that leads to “I have no choice”—the long dash (reproduced by Byron’s printers and in this paper as a double “em” dash “–”), which has a distinctive place in Manfred and Byron’s writing as a whole. Like the “em” dash, the long or double “em” dash is both a mark of punctuation and (in Byron’s case) a refusal to punctuate. Its ambivalence heightens our awareness of the reader as a co-producer of meaning and as one of the many who are coerced by Manfred’s (and Byron’s) assertions of authority. The long dash, therefore, encapsulates many of puzzles about the interpretive freedom of Byron’s readers, his editors and, indeed, his actors.

In reading Manfred we assume all three of these roles and none of them.

When the British Critic praised Byron for omitting the dashy “eye-traps” in Lara, the phrase “eye-trap” (from the 1750s, according to the OED) was used presumably as a variant of “clap-trap,” the extended pause that set apart moments of high emotion in theatrical performances, designed to attract the attention and applause of the audience.

On the page, Byron’s promiscuous “em” dashing resembles the visual appearance of the Shakespeare plays David Garrick prepared for the Drury Lane Threatre. Garrick used a dash to signal where an actor should pause for effect so that in his published adaptations, as Warren Oakley has shown, “[t]ypography indicates the location of each dramatic caesura, but is silent about the nature of the action filling the expressive pause … prompting the imagination of the reader” (34). The similarly hyperventilated appearance of the page in Byron’s Turkish Tales represents a test for the reader which is taken a stage further by the appearance of a still more elongated dash in the first edition of The Corsair (as shown in figure 3).

The mark after “Waits but my chief” is Davison’s double “em” dash. It is placed here to mark dramatic interruption, and is used for similar arresting effect in the prose fragment attached to Mazeppa, and for coy innuendo in Beppo: “For my part, now, I ne’er could understand / Why naughty women –– but I won’t discuss / A thing which is a scandal to the land” (stanza 68; [“em” dash in CPW IV:150, but restored to double “em” in The Major Works 333]). In the Garland facsimile of the fair copy of Beppo, one can see how Byron’s manuscript dash after “naughty Women” is at least twice the length of the dash after “For my part now,” suggesting that Byron intended a salacious pause in which to conjure and then flamboyantly repress the thought of “naughty Women” and what they do. The relative length of dashes within and between manuscripts is not always as easy to decipher, however, and, as with all his punctuation, Byron relied on his editors to translate manuscript into print.

In the fair copy of Don Juan Canto V (held until recently in the John Murray Archive at 50 Albemarle Street, London), readers can still make out the editorial hand that determined the length of the dashes (see figures 4 and 5).

The pencil of Gifford had the authority to cancel Byron’s own ink dashes and to adjust the pauses and, therefore, the pace of the poem.

Gifford’s dashing almost always has a graphic basis in Byron’s manuscripts (in that there is nearly always a dash in the immediate vicinity), but Gifford’s usual role is to reduce the frequency of the Byronic dash and to turn it into other marks such as a comma or (especially) a colon. Like the poem’s infamous asterisks, the “2 ems” long dash in Don Juan (––) signals the unsayable; but whereas a row of asterisks shows where authorial content has been excised retrospectively by the editor or publisher to avoid obscenity or legal prosecution, the long dash suggests that a speaker nearly said something, but was then stopped or thought better of it: aposiopesis—the mark of knowing self-censorship. The long dash (––) is also a mark of complicity with the reader who is usually able to imagine what would have come next, as in Juan and Julia’s first sexual act: “And then –– God knows what next – I can’t go on; / I’m almost sorry that I e’er begun” (I. 115); or the reference to Donna Inez / Lady Byron: “His lady-mother, mathematical, / A –– never mind” (II.3); or, perhaps something less readily imaginable, “And horrid was the contrast to the view ––” (V.38), a more meditative pause as the narrator of Don Juan contemplates the body of the assassinated military commandant in Ravenna.

The key editorial difficulty about retaining Byron’s dashes was summed up by Gifford [writing of The Corsair]: “Lord B. uses dashes for commas – this gives the work a very singular appearance, & in some places, mars the sense” (Nicholson, Letters 70n). Byron, like Shelley, tends to use dashes in place of other punctuation and sometimes, at least in his rough drafts, as vital contact between pen and page as he reaches for the word that will come next.

Byron trusted his editors to supply regular punctuation for him, but unlike the normal “em” dash, one feels that the long double “em” dash never really signifies a comma. Although in some respects it stands alone, the long dash shares the paradoxical and musical nature of Byron’s other dashes and extra-punctuational markings. The long dash is a horizontal (in print) or slanting (in some manuscripts) line that can signal opposing things: a fragmentary, uncertain, but logically continuous progression of thought or a termination, a change of logical direction, a pausa or pivot.

The third thing to bear in mind is that long dashes are shared between most of the characters and are not characteristic of Manfred alone. When Peter Graham perceptively remarks that Manfred’s dashes supply the place of “dark unvoiced thoughts,” this is true in some cases, but not in all of them, and it does not extend to the other characters such as the Chamois Hunter (53). In the draft manuscript, when Manfred attempts to dismiss the Chamois Hunter with “I am not of thine order,” the man retorts: “Thanks to Heaven – / I would not be of thine – for the free fame / Of William Tell; ––” and the long dash here makes the exchange much more like the playful abruptness of dialogue in Don Juan (reminding us of the comic and conversational use of the dash in Sterne’s novels and in eighteenth-century stage comedy) (Levine and McGann 57). The cheeky long dash for the Chamois Hunter was not retained in Byron’s fair copy, nor in Murray’s first edition, but its presence on the first draft might be seen as a residual trace of the experimental serio-comic Manfred which John Wright and Jerome McGann remind us was there from the start.

Many of the long dashes that Gifford allowed into the 1817 edition are performative or gestural, telling us that in the midst of his poem, as in the narration of Don Juan, Byron (and his editor) were aware that the characters needed stage time to do something, or textual time for readers to imagine them doing something. It is significant that the agency that propels these dashes often fails to summon or dismiss or assist the body that is being invoked or cajoled repulsed, so that in the duration of the dash there is often something of a struggle with materiality (or immateriality) that might involve a certain flailing of arms. The questionable authority of speech acts is evident in Manfred’s initial commands to the spirits: “–– Rise! appear!” and “– Rise! appear! ––Appear!” (25), where the long dashes suggest something of an embarrassing pause as Manfred initially fails to make anything rise or appear.

A more solid connection between words and action is evinced when the Hunter hoists Manfred back from the cliffs with, “Away with me –– I will not quit my hold” (25). The long dashes that articulate his instructions as he leads Manfred down the mountain represent the offer of physical assistance (perhaps initially resisted, but eventually accepted) and a shared faltering progress downward. In the next act, the Witch of the Alps dismisses Manfred’s apparent attachment to a mortal, his alleged clinging on to “recreant mortality” with an “ ––Away!” (36) and, at the end of the poem, the Abbot attempts to dismiss the fiend in the third act with “Avaunt! ––”, and an equally vain “I do charge ye in the name ––” (72).

Some of the 1817 long dashes enact Manfred’s dismissal of the Wordsworthian figures, the Chamois Hunter and the Abbot: the Chamois Hunter, speaking of “heavenly patience ––” is impatiently interrupted by Manfred with, “Patience and patience! Hence – that word was made / For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey” (28). The Abbot, remonstrating with Manfred at the start of Act III, is also cut off: “yet so young, / I still would ––” and: “Yet, hear me still ––” (61); the Spirit who comes to claim Manfred in the last act tells him, “thy many crimes / Have made thee ––” but Manfred intercepts the adjective with “What are they to such as thee?” (74). Long dashes in such instances accentuate Byron’s stichomythia, the insistent line breaks that interrupt the flow of the blank verse and enforce a poetics of un-Wordsworthian rupture.

At II.ii.31-2, Manfred summons the Witch of the Alps: “– to call thee thus, / And gaze on thee a moment” (see figure 8).

The first draft uses three separate dashes after “a moment” (Levine and McGann 63) and there is one long dash in the fair copy (above); for the 1817 edition, Gifford again turns the long dash into a single full stop. In the manuscripts, however, Byron seems to indicate that Manfred should dwell on the beauty of the Witch for some time. This impression is strengthened a little later in the fair copy when he says that he desires to “look upon thy beauty – nothing further –” and after seeking refuge in the mysteries of the earth, “I search no further. – – – –” (see figure 8). There were two separate dashes after “no further” in the first draft (Levine and McGann 64), growing to four separate dashes in the fair copy above. In the first edition of 1817, everything is gathered into a terminal full stop (see figure 9).

Even allowing for the fact that Byron often finishes the last line of a manuscript page with multiple dashes as a sort of “PTO” to himself, the manuscripts urge more of a pause than is audible in the grammatically rationalized punctuation of 1817. Gifford’s removal of so many dashes makes Manfred into a cooler, more composed, and more purposeful speaker in the first edition than he is in the manuscripts, where the multiple breaks and pauses in speech suggest a much more jagged melodramatic delivery.

In one of his most discerning asides, Jerome McGann calls the Alpine Journal “[o]ne of the great acts of English prose attention” (to what extent was Byron acting, one wants to ask) (McGann 177). Sights and sounds are recorded with a febrile, raw-nerved concentration for Augusta, linked by dashes that suggest Byron’s headlong plunge into each experience as he attempts to escape consciousness with an accumulation of sense impressions.

The manuscript page of the Alpine journal in figure 13 is a graphic illustration of Byron’s attempt to describe the indescribable: “It is neither mist nor water but a something between both ––.” The dash carries the affective force of the liminal “something,” which is re-transcribed in Byron’s slow realization of the lasting power of a formless form that has almost brought him to speechlessness: “–– wonderful – & indescribable. –– .” In the fair copy of Manfred, one can see the same pausa, the same pivotal seductions of the human mind by its own imaginings. This lagging, internal re-play of beauty suspends the onward rush of dramatic time and inevitability. Its backward-looking, valedictory effect is evident in my final example of a longish dash that was edited out by Gifford see figure 14).

In the fair copy of Act III, scene 2, Manfred’s soliloquy to the sunset ending: “–– He is gone ––” becomes in 1817 “He is gone:” with Gifford’s characteristic colon (Byron rarely uses colons in his manuscripts). If one treats the manuscript as theatrical script, the dashes suggest that Manfred takes time to watch the sun disappear. In a stage performance, a director might arrange a shadow to lengthen into total darkness by the time Manfred reaches “gone.” A musical score might hold the final note, its echo and the silence afterwards. Manfred, we know, “must watch” (I.i.2), and the time he spends in “wanderings / And watchings” is important (III.iii.43-4). As Michael O’Neill pointed out last year when the text was discussed in the Summer of 1816 conference at Sheffield, one of the great paradoxes of Manfred is that its hero keeps saying beauty means nothing to him: “there is no form on earth / Hideous or beautiful to me,” but his speeches are full of exquisitely shaped hymns to natural beauty (I.i.184-5). Byron clearly was ravished by the Alpine scenery of 1816 which recurs throughout his poetry after the summer of 1816.

The dashes around Manfred’s acts of attention partake of what Ian Balfour notes as the “telegraphic notation” of the Alpine Journal (12), or what Susan Wolfson refers to as the “lightning on the page” of dashes in Childe Harold Canto III (765).

Manfred’s tactile attentiveness (almost adhesiveness) to form finds its echo in the very final scene where the Abbot attends the dying Manfred. Manfred expires, of course, on a dash: “Old Man – ’tis not so difficult to die. –” (Levine and McGann 130).

Neither the dashes nor the rest of the line made it into the first edition of 1817; and when the line was restored, the terminal dash was cancelled and became a full stop. As he watches Manfred expire, the Abbot reiterates Manfred’s words on the sinking sun: “He’s gone. – […] he is gone.”

And then, as figure 15 above shows, we have Byron’s lovely signing off: “End of act third – & of this poem. – . –” with a swirl that seems a more emphatic version of the one under the journal entry of September 22, 1816 in figure 13.