I. Prologue: “Motto”
Signing off on one of several letters to John Murray between January and April that accompanies the manuscript of Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (1817)—sent from Venice “at different times,” “piecemeal, by the post” (BLJ V:209, 188)—Byron delivers the poem’s epigraph:
And this is your Motto
“There are more things in heaven & earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”—Yours ever,
B
My love and thanks to Mr. G[iffor]d.—(Apr. 9, 1817, BLJ V:209).
The “Motto”—this ostentatiously laconic epigraph from Hamlet—sets a certain tone: (1) for framing the arrival of the Magician, within the play and as a MS to Murray (about which Byron was anxious, having written the week before, “Write to say whether or no my Magician has arrived with all his scenes spells &c,” [BLJ V:204]); (2) for reading the play in all its intense self-reflexivity; and (3) for how Byron deals with literary predecessors, especially Shakespeare, quoted here with a customary kind of droll offhandedness.
Shakespeare’s play famously starts in medias res after the death of Hamlet’s father; so too does Byron’s epigraphed quotation come in the middle of the dialogue between Hamlet and Horatio about the ghost of Hamlet’s father, omitting Horatio’s response to the news that Hamlet has spoken to his father’s ghost, who has revealed his uncle’s dire machinations: “O day and night, but this is wondrous strange” (Shakespeare I.v.891). In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet responds to Horatio’s marking of the “wondrous strange” with “give it welcome” (I.v.893). Hamlet’s comment, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” announces a kind of enlightened disillusionment, as though Horatio is a mere philosopher, without any access to the mysteries of heaven and earth, while Hamlet has access to it all—all the darkness—and is no longer surprised by any of it (I.v. 894-5).
This invocation of Hamlet echoes Byron’s enlightened disillusionment at the revelation that Lady Byron, Annabella Milbanke, has been through his letters: “I am past indignation,” he wrote to Augusta Leigh, as he toured the Alps that were to feature as the setting of Manfred (Sep. 14, 1816, BLJ V:93) and in the Alpine Journal that Byron wrote for Augusta.
The motto’s laconic disillusionment cues the hinterland of “bitterness” that informed Byron’s life and writing after April 1816, when everything became mediated by the memory of “the Separation;” this was particularly pronounced when Byron was writing the first two acts of Manfred in Switzerland in September-October 1816 (BLJ V:104). As he writes to Augusta from the Diodati on September 8, 1816: “As for me I am in good health—& fair—though very unequal—spirits—but for all that—she—or rather—the Separation—has broken my heart—I feel as if an Elephant had trodden on it—I am convinced I shall never get over it—but I try . . . I breathe lead” (BLJ V:91). Writing “she—or rather—the Separation,” as though the thought of Lady Byron might be easier to bear by turning the person (“she”) into the event of the separation, Byron both separates and conflates the two.
The Hamlet epigraph cues philosophy as the domain of the play’s protagonist, the magician Manfred, who in the opening monologue invokes the epigraph’s recessed figure of wonder:
Philosophy and science, and the springsOf wonder, and the wisdom of the world,I have essayed, and in my mind there isA power to make these subject to itself—But they avail not: (I.i.13-7)5
As Manfred laconically recites this list of things that do not avail themselves of his power to subject them—“Philosophy and science,” “the springs of wonder,” and “the wisdom of the world”—the poem thereby also ironically undercuts that very power, gaining its own power through the force of this critique of Manfred, and, through it, Byron’s public self-critique. For, as Jerome McGann has noted, “That Manfred is Byron’s surrogate has never been in doubt” (192). Such gaining through the undercutting of power is also suggested by Byron’s final salutation to Murray, when, having earlier requested that Murray submit the play to William Gifford for his reactions, Byron sends his love and thanks to Gifford (Murray’s chief literary adviser and Byron’s editor), for having judged and found wanting the play’s original third act (which Byron agreed was “d—d bad” [BLJ V:211]). Also registered in Manfred’s opening monologue as “the wisdom of the world” is that strange, capricious prerogative by which audiences are both subject to the celebrity-author’s powers but also free not to be subject to them. In this way, Manfred stages the rituals of celebrity culture and audience reception as objects of exploration.
To link one paratextual space of Manfred (the drama’s epigraph) to another (the letter that sends it), the “Motto” makes a direct address from Byron to Murray, enacting a pre-existing relationship between Byron as Hamlet and Murray as Horatio that Murray initiated in 1814 when he signed off on a letter in which he requested a portrait of Byron—“the Original to whose continued friendship I owe so much”—with the salutation “I am my Lord ‘your poor servant ever’” (Murray 99). As such, the epigraph (“your Motto”) can be read as an indirect reprimand to Murray for having failed to properly appreciate the play, and for being backward in coming forward to “give it welcome” with either praise or constructive critique; Gifford, on the other hand, is conspicuously thanked for doing precisely that. To Murray, his avowedly “poor servant ever,” Byron signs “Yours ever,” while to Gifford he sends his “love and thanks.” This history of Shakespearean role-playing applies a further paratextual twist to Byron’s reference to “your philosophy”: questioning Murray’s self-identification as “your poor servant” and subtly impugning Murray’s loyalty. After Manfred’s publication, Murray’s failure to report on the poem’s public reception became a theme of Byron’s testy correspondence, intensely interested as Byron was in the public’s reaction to a work that so clearly revisited the scandalous events that spurred his departure from England in April 1816.
II. Vengeance is still alive
The Hamlet epigraph is also significant in cueing the genre of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy; it is the conventions of the revenge genre, I argue, that Byron’s dramatic poem engages with its own “springs of wonder.” The word “springs” works here in what we might call an Alpine sense—meaning the places from which water and inspiration flow—but also in the sense of tricks, surprises, contraptions, a form of machine, like Hamlet’s play within a play: the mouse trap. (And Manfred is not a mouse, of course, but a worm—“Thou worm!” [I.i.125],—though his maker had had his heart trodden on by an Elephant.) Where Hamlet traps the conscience of the king, Manfred sets out to catch the conscience of its author. In his discussion of Byron’s revision of the third act in the Life, Thomas Moore deploys “spring” with a similar ambiguity, as he marvels over “the complete success with which, when his mind did make the spring, he at once cleared the whole space by which he before fell short of perfection,” using the figure of making the spring to suggest Byron both making the mental leap and crafting the machine or device (Life IV:15).
Engaging the play’s makings and re-makings of revenge’s “springs of wonder,” my essay considers Manfred as a form of revenge tragedy—the vital if broken heart of a sustained post-separation revenge fantasy that encompasses Byron’s letters and the Alpine Journal. It examines how Manfred allegorizes Byron’s authorial agency as that fraught and intriguing form of social magic, power, and intimate publicity: celebrity. I argue that in its mediation of the marital separation—as public scandal and in the forms of private commemoration—Manfred functions as a kind of celebrity revenge tragedy that seeks to re-set the “springs of wonder” that connect Byron’s authorial practice to his audience and “the wisdom of the world.”
As the Elephant and the breathing of lead (which lined coffins) remind us, Byron had a generous capacity to be refreshed by self-parody, which often took the turn of Gothic pantomime and melodrama. For the Gothic mode cues pantomime, as Byron did explicitly in the April 9 letter to Murray: “As for ‘Manfred’ . . . You must call it ‘a poem,’ for it is no drama (& I do not choose it to be called by so Sothebyish a name)—a ‘poem in dialogue’ or—pantomime if you will” (BLJ V:209). There is melodrama, too, which points the play’s intense self-reflexivity in the direction of emotion. Manfred’s profuse Gothic intertexts are so many “membra” (BLJ V:208)—limbs, arms and legs, quoted, discarded, remade and recycled: Walpole’s Otranto, originator of the genre, and his melodrama The Mysterious Mother; The Monk (by “wonder-working Lewis,” as Byron put it in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l. 265); Goethe’s Faust, that Lewis “translated . . . to me by word of mouth,” when he visited the Diodati in mid-August (BLJ V:206), and from which, as Goethe himself put it, Byron’s play drew the “strangest nourishment” (qtd. in Butler 33).
A less remarked but no less vital, and specifically theatrical, generic intertext for Manfred is the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Mediating between eighteenth-century Gothic and Elizabethan revenge tragedy is Marlowe’s Tragical History of Dr Faustus (1604) about a necromancer who sells his soul to the Devil—which Byron denied having read or seen performed (BLJ V:268, 270). As a generic intertext, Elizabethan revenge tragedy literalizes Manfred’s play with dead bodies and threats of scattered limbs: “Crush the worm! / Tear him in pieces!” (II.iv.49); “what ye take / Shall be ta’en limb from limb” (III.iv.104); “I sent him all three acts piecemeal, by the post” (BLJ V:188). Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1592); Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601, itself a revision of a lost play by Kyd); Othello (1602-4); and the anonymous The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607, attributed to Tourneur and Middleton), all bristle in the intertextual background, as does the genre of Restoration tragedy cued by Byron’s comparison of Manfred with “Nat. Lee’s Bedlam tragedy” (BLJ V:179).
An even more vital intertext for Manfred is The Revenge (1721), by the graveyard poet Edward Young. To some extent a reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello, Young’s Revenge was a primal text for Byron, who performed its central character, the avenging Moor, Zanga, at Harrow Speech Day in 1805. As Paul Elledge memorably notes, “Zanga is a patently juicy role, offering numerous openings for stagy exhibitionism, overstated deviltry, especially to a boy prone to and notorious for mischief-making himself” (129). Not only to a boy, but to that fully-fledged icon of serially elaborated notoriety that Byron would become after the separation and his move into exile: “Consistently [Byron] forced his readers to like and admire against their wills, to like and desire the forbidden, to applaud the transgressive actions he lavished upon them. Zanga fostered that impulse” (Elledge 129). Zanga is an early experiment in the Byronic Satanic hero, the thrillingly ambivalent tragic hero who teeters on the brink of villainy. Thus Byron reworks from Young’s reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello one of the key discoveries of the Elizabethan revenge play: that the revenger is not a villain but a tragic protagonist. Within such a transformed conception of heroism, the figure of Zanga had an enduring significance for Byron; as late as 1821 Zanga crowns a canon of Satanic-tragic heroes, as Byron asks rhetorically: “Who is the hero of ‘Paradise lost’? Why Satan,—and Macbeth, and Richard, & Othello and Pierre, and Lothario, & Zanga?” (BLJ VIII:115).
Young’s Revenge was a live text in Byron’s childhood and throughout the Regency, when Zanga was performed by major actors such as “Master” Betty, John Kemble and Edmund Kean.
An early fan of Kean (“a wonder”), Byron wrote in February 1814: “There is a new Actor named Kean come out—he is a wonder—& we are yet wise enough to admire him—he . . . will run Kemble hard—his style is quite new—or rather renewed—being that of Nature” (BLJ IV:67). That style of “Nature” was an emotional style, and Kean was most famous for his powerfully impassioned outsider roles such as Richard III and Shylock, and his capacity for turning villains into compelling tragic heroes. Given that The Revenge was such a formative event for Byron, far more significant in the role of Zanga than either Kean and Kemble was “Master” Betty, the sensational child actor, William Henry West Betty, also known as “the Young Roscius,” who performed Zanga in the 1805-6 season. As a peer of Byron’s at Harrow (and then at Cambridge [Christ’s]), and having played Hamlet five times at Drury Lane during Byron’s 1805 March schooltime (Elledge 108), Master Betty was the object of an “urgent rivalry” conceived by Byron, Elledge intriguingly speculates (121).
In the wake of the separation, and with the memory of a recent 1815 London theatre season in which Kean and Kemble had played Zanga, Byron returns to this “juicy role” and primal ur-text of revenge as he works on Manfred. Another detail helps explain The Revenge’s juiciness: a remark in the preface of the 1792 stage edition that The Revenge is “yet better in the closet than upon the Stage” (Young iii). This recommendation of The Revenge as a “closet drama” would have heightened the play’s appeal for Byron while he was writing Manfred—which he did, avowedly, not for the stage;
Byron’s choice of The Revenge would have fueled—and been fueled by—Byron’s revenge toward the London stage, thickening the extra-textual plots of revenge that Manfred lovingly-hatingly reworks.
In Young’s The Revenge, the central character, Zanga, is a captive Moor, son of a king, Abdalla, who was killed in battle by Alonzo, now Zanga’s master. Unbeknown to Alonzo, Zanga harbours against him an all-consuming passion “To catch the man I hate, and then devour” (27). Having “toil’d, and groan’d for an occasion / Of ample vengeance” (9), Zanga decides upon jealousy as his motive—“Oh, jealousy . . . Thou king of torments” (27), that “Hydra of calamities” (26), “the jealous are the damn’d” (26)—and crafts an appropriately intricate scheme to make Alonzo jealous of his wife, Leonora. With all the rich dramatic irony that attends the genre, Alonzo enlists Zanga in his own plot of revenge against Leonora (“Thou, Zanga, . . . call vengeance, call the furies, call despair” [67]); and, as instructed, Zanga kills Carlos, Leonora’s alleged lover (“Poor mangled shade!”). But then Alonzo’s plan of vengeance goes astray. As Alonzo confides his scheme to meet Leonora in a leafy bower so as to confront her with her crime and kill her, the play delivers up the sweet spot of Zanga’s “maze / Of gloomy thought and intricate design” (27), with a striking (and strikingly Byronic) fantasy of sadistic bisexual perversity in glorious blank verse, when Zanga responds to Alonzo’s plan—sotto voce—with a vengeful curse:
May serpents winding up the trees let fallTheir hissing necks upon them from above,And mingle kisses—such as I should give them. (70)
In this promiscuous tableau of acoustic mingling (of “hissing” with “kisses”) and gender-slithery/gender-neutral pronouning (of Zanga kissing “them”—Alonzo and Leonora), the spicy climax of Zanga’s curse, “And mingle kisses—such as I should give them,” brazenly suggests, of course, the erotic kiss, but also, more indirectly, the fatal kiss of death—the kiss “such as I should [like to] give them,” but can’t, but which serpents can deliver. The serpents are thus in this fantasy scenario the romantic stand-ins that carry out Zanga’s plots of desire and revenge. As it transpires, Alonzo and Leonora do not meet their ends by being fatally hissed and kissed. Instead, when Alonzo is poised to kill her with a dagger, Leonora wakes up, and Alonzo flees. Zanga then tells Leonora of her husband’s jealousy; Leonora and Alonzo meet to try and resolve matters, but then quarrel, at which point Leonora stabs herself. In the final explosive scene, Zanga exultingly discloses himself to Alonso, defiantly confessing: “I hated, I despis’d, and I destroy!” (82), before he “tramples on the body of his prostrate victim” (Hazlitt 228). For William Hazlitt, Kean played this in “an attitude . . . that was not the less dreadful from its being perfectly beautiful” [Hazlitt 228]). This is the scene that Byron played at Harrow.
Heavily based on Shakespeare’s Othello, Young’s Revenge offers a heightened treatment of the revenge plot’s imbrication with sexual jealousy and race, together with an arguably more complex characterization of the figures of the revenger and the Moor.
Zanga is a composite of the vengeful Iago and Othello as Moor to Alonzo’s reworking of Othello as jealous lover. But unlike Iago, Zanga has a conscience (“Oh, the medley / Of right and wrong! The chaos of my brain!” [68-9]). And his revenge is not just personal but cultural, political and religious, responding to centuries of oppression of Muslims by Catholic Spain: “I tread on haughty Spain, and all her kings” (82); “Be propitious, / Oh! Mahomet, on this important hour, / And give at length my famish’d soul revenge” (10). Zanga’s revenge also has a (proleptically Byronic) geopolitical edge: “If cold white mortals censure this great deed, / Warn them, they judge not of superior beings, / Souls made of fire, and children of the sun, / With whom revenge is virtue” (84). Such righteous opposition by “children of the sun” to the “cold white mortals” of England becomes an abiding trope of Byron’s post-exilic world. These “children of the sun” are summoned again in Byron’s “speech of Manfred to the Sun”—one of Manfred’s many echoes of The Revenge (BLJ V:211).
Operating as a model for Byron’s fashioning of Nemesis—the goddess of retribution—Young’s Zanga offers a florid homage (and more fabulous snakes) to the figure of Vengeance:
I thought of dying; better things come forward;Vengeance is still alive; from her dark covert,With all her snakes erect upon her crest,She stalks in view, and fires me with her charms. (25)
Young’s Revenge closes with the immortal line: “And each man finds a Zanga in his heart” (87). Byron finds his inner Zanga in the wake of the separation, imaginatively deploying against Lady Byron and the Milbanke family a powerfully personified vengeance that also fuels the early work on Manfred. From Ouchy, on September 17, 1816, Byron writes to Augusta about Lady Byron and the springs of vengeance: ‘Whatever my faults might or may have been—She—was not the person marked out by providence to be their avenger. One day or another her conduct will recoil on her own head; not through me, for my feelings toward her are not those of Vengeance, but—mark—if she does not end miserably tot ou tard. She may think—talk—or act as she will . . .—but woe unto her—the wretchedness she has brought upon the man to whom she has been everything evil . . . will flow back into its fountain. (BLJ V:95).’ Indeed, Lady Byron is imagined here as the springs of vengeance. Avowing that his feelings “are not those of Vengeance,” Byron nevertheless produces a pantomimic revenge fantasy that figures Lady Byron as a fountain of wretchedness—like a fast-motion cartoon of the reversal of fortune whereby Lady Byron’s vengeance is made to “flow back into its fountain” (Lady Byron herself) and “recoil on her own head.” Revenger and victim are inextricably linked; the blame for invoking vengeance is shared. So enmeshed is Byron in this revenge fantasy that he projects onto Lady Byron a desire to be his avenger, even as he repudiates her claim, casting her as his avenger in order precisely to repudiate her: “She—was not the person marked out by providence to be their avenger.” Byron ritualistically invokes an impersonal providence, rhetorically inflating the animus against Lady Byron (who is “everything evil”) and the discord between them. As in any revenge tragedy, “revenge reproduces the injustice it abhors”—enacting what Francis Bacon called revenge’s “wild justice” (Mullaney 147; qtd. in Mullaney, 147).
A couple of weeks later, in an entry in the Alpine Journal, Byron again tries to will himself out of the desire for vengeance: “I am past reproaches—and there is a time for all things—I am past the wish of vengeance” (Sep. 29, 1816, BLJ V:105). But he is not past it. Far from it. The statement is deeply ambiguous: even disclaiming his own wish for vengeance, Byron keeps open the possibility of an impersonal providence whose wish it might be to carry out that wish for vengeance on Byron’s behalf. Sure enough, as Byron writes to Augusta as late as June 3-4, 1817, a couple of weeks before Manfred’s publication in Byron’s homeland while he is abroad in exile, “sooner or later time & Nemesis will give me the ascendant” (BLJ V:232). But far from denying, Byron’s writings are self-reflexively alive to these contradictions.
Such avowals-disavowals stage a dress rehearsal for what John Wilson (“Christopher North”) called in his Blackwood’s review of Manfred the “wild Personifications” of “this extraordinary drama”: Byron has “burst into the world of spirits” and “endeavoured to embody and call up before him their ministering agents, and to employ these wild Personifications, as he formerly employed the feelings and passions of man” (Wilson 290).
Another critic who liked Byron’s “wildness” was John Wilson Croker, who reviewed for the Quarterly, and urged Murray to encourage Byron to continue with the “extravagance.” “Its wildness or, if you will, its extravagance, is to me its first recommendation” (Murray 225), Croker wrote, supporting his case by quoting Voltaire on Hamlet: “amongst the beauties that sparkle in the midst of these terrible extravagances the ghost of Hamlet’s father is one of the most striking pieces of theatre” (May 12, 1817, qtd. in Murray 226). Murray showed Croker’s letter to Byron, which would have confirmed for Byron the strength and fitness of his use of the ghost of Hamlet’s father’s as a structuring absence in the poem.
In the weeks after Manfred was published on June 16, Byron’s inner Zanga is still playing out in Byron’s letters: ‘[I]f I can but live to tear down . . . that . . . Philistine family—I shall not have lived in vain—& if Time & Nemesis but do their usual part—& reverse the present tide of human fortunes—see whether I leave one stone of their hearths upon another—or a fibre of their hearts unscorched by fire. (Jul. 3, 1817, BLJ V:246).’ Having found his inner Zanga, and fired by vengeance’s charms, Byron fashions Nemesis as a pervasive figure in his letters, journals and poetry, from the time of the separation and the composition and publication of Manfred, and for long after.
And what of the play itself? In Manfred, Nemesis arrives with appropriate fanfare and a sense of expectation—“Behold she cometh,” notes the Third Destiny—but also with an edge of drollery. Harried and late (“I was detained repairing shattered thrones”), she nevertheless obliges Manfred by conjuring Astarte, and with a rousing flourish: “Redeem from the worm. Appear!—Appear!—Appear!” (II.iv.95-6). This flourish hosts an intertextual exorcism, as “Appear!—Appear!—Appear!” gothically inverts Hamlet’s words to his father’s ghost: “Rest, rest, perturbèd spirit” (I.5.909). However, much like all the other assembled Spirits and Demons, Nemesis turns out to be somewhat disappointing. Commanding the spirit of Astarte to “speak”—“By the power which hath broken/ The grave which enthrall’d thee”—Astarte refuses and Nemesis is “baffled” (II.iv.106-7, 117). Nemesis’s final words to Manfred are vaguely withholding; when he asks her will he meet her again on the earth, she replies officiously, “That will be seen hereafter” (II.iv.166). This scene with Nemesis and Astarte can also be read as a reworking of Germaine de Staël’s attempt to broker a reconciliation between Lord and Lady Byron, in the early stages of the separation.
Indeed, herself a fellow celebrity exile, de Staël is a significant protagonist in the biographical events reworked in Manfred, and in the play’s paratextual background and critical reception. Jerome McGann’s marvelous reading of Manfred, which celebrates Byron’s “spoiler’s art” and illuminates how “Byron’s play can only succeed by attacking itself, satirizing and exposing itself to itself,” takes its cues from de Staël’s reading of the deliberate “bad taste” of Goethe’s Faust (McGann 194-5). The legitimator of deliberate bad taste, of bad taste as a strategy, de Staël is also significant as the mediator of Byron’s first encounter with Goethe’s Faust (before Lewis’s oral translation at the Diodati), through what Thomas Medwin referred to as her “sorry French translation” of parts of Goethe’s play in D’Allemagne (1813)—another form of unsuccessful mediation (Medwin 141).
The failed intercession by “our Lady of Coppet” (BLJ V:207) to effect a reconciliation between Lord and Lady Byron occurred just before Byron commenced work on Manfred in September 1816. On August 24, in one of two brief letters to de Staël (of August 24 and 25) in which the separation and Byron’s feelings for Lady Byron are basically the exclusive subject, Byron writes: “The separation may have been my fault—but it was her choice.——I tried all means to prevent—and would do as much & more to end it,—a word would do so—but it does not rest with me to pronounce it.——You asked me if I thought that Lady B[yron] was attached to me—to that I can only answer that I love her . . . I cannot conclude without thanking you once more for your kind disposition towards me on this” (BLJ V:88). Here, Byron articulates a wish to “end” the separation. A letter shortly after that to Augusta, of September 8, suggests that de Staël was helping him to do precisely that: “Me. de Stael has been particularly kind & friendly towards me—& (I hear) fought battles without number in my very indifferent cause” (BLJ V:92). De Staël’s well-meaning failure to broker a reconciliation with Lady Byron is reworked in Manfred through the figuration of de Staël and Annabella as Nemesis and Astarte, respectively. Astarte is, of course, a composite figure who represents both Augusta and Annabella throughout the play; and while she is usually taken to represent Augusta (contemporary readers, such as Annabella’s confidante, Mrs. Villiers, wrote of the resemblance between Astarte and Augusta that “It is too barefaced for her friends to try to deny the allusion” [qtd. in Lovelace 69]), at this moment in the play in the Hall of Arimanes (Act 2, scene 4) she figures Annabella in her capacity as the former lover who might yet be reunited with Byron.
Just as Our Lady of Coppet’s intercession on behalf of Byron and his “indifferent cause” is unsuccessful, so too in the play an explicit reconciliation with and forgiveness from Astarte does not come. Crucially, however, this withholding (from the baffled Nemesis and the silent Astarte) is productive; it is part of the play’s experiment in re-setting the tone, an attempt to move past the wish of vengeance as anger and retribution and toward more mixed forms of the revenge genre, such as revenge farce or “revenge comedy”—apt for a “baffled” Nemesis—and other hybrid forms of intimate commemoration.
III. Uncharnelling
As befits the play’s allegorization of Byron’s poetic practice as a form of “Mysterious agency!,” Manfred is often linked with the magician figures of Faust, Prospero, or the Elizabethan occult philosopher Dr. John Dee (I.i.28). Another vital form of communing with the dead is antiquarianism; and another figure of the practitioner of magic is the antiquarian, such as John Weever, an historian of funeral monuments and church inscriptions who travelled throughout Britain and Europe, collecting and transcribing inscriptions on medieval tombs that were housed in dissolved monasteries. These were published in 1631 in the vast, unfinished survey Antient funeral monuments, republished in 1767 by the Romantic antiquarian, William Tooke.
![Figure 1: Frontispiece to John Weever, Antient funeral monuments within the united monarchie of Great Britaine, Ireland and the Islands adjacent. [1631.] London: Printed by W. Tooke, 1767. Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.](media/image1.png)
Weever’s prefatory “The author to the reader” articulates an urgent sense of antiquarianism as a form of remembering and honoring the dead: ‘Having seen, judicious reader, how carefully, in other kingdoms, the monuments of the dead are preserved, and their inscriptions or epitaphs registered in their church-books; and . . . also knowing withal how barbarously within these his majesty’s dominions, they are (to the shame of our time) broken down, and utterly almost all ruinated, their brazen inscriptions erazed, torn away, and pilfered; by which inhuman, deformidable act, the honourable memory of many virtuous and noble persons deceased, is extinguished, and the true understanding of divers families in these realms (who have descended of these worthy persons aforesaid) is so darkened, as the true course of their inheritance is thereby partly interrupted: grieving at this insufferable injury, offered as well to the living as the dead, out of the respect I bore to venerable antiquity, and the due regard to continue the remembrance of the defunct to true posterity; I determined with myself to collect such memorials of the deceased, as were remaining as yet undefaced; as also to revive the memories of eminent worthy persons entombed or interred, either in parish, or in abbey churches; howsoever some of their sepulchres are at this day no where to be discerned; neither their bones and ashy remains in any place to be gathered. (Weever)’ Here, practices of cultural memory are inextricably linked to burial practices; the dearly departed “sepulchres” that Weever so keenly wishes to discern bear inscribed “memorials” as well as “bones and ashy remains.” The monuments, inscriptions, and epitaphs mark out the place where such remains are to be collected and preserved.
Weever’s account reminds us of the etymological link between epigraph and epitaph. It was not until the eighteenth century that the practice of attaching epigraphs to the head of a literary work became common. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defines “epigraphe” as “an inscription on a statue” such as a tombstone (Johnson I:309). The forerunner of the modern epigraph was the authorial coat of arms (Genette 144). Hence Byron’s use of the conventional term “motto,” which traditionally referred to the text of the coat of arms that accompanied its “device” or emblem, the visual design.
The coat of arms was a central feature of the design of funeral monuments; and religious monuments became, in turn, museums of armorial bearings—another form of memorial that Weever laments with the destruction of religious monuments.
In an 1819 letter to Murray about “the beautiful Cimetery of Bologna” (BLJ VI:148), Byron imagines his own epitaph. Musing upon epitaphs he had seen at nearby Ferrara, he is particularly struck by the words “Implora pace”: “Can anything be more full of pathos? those few words say all that can be said or sought—the dead have had enough of life—all they wanted was rest—and this they ‘implore’. . . . ‘implora pace’. I hope, whoever may survive me and shall see me put in the foreigners’ burying-Ground at the Lido . . . will see those two words and no more put over me” (BLJ VI:149). With “those two words,” like the earth, “put over me,” Byron marks the epitaph’s function as both symbolic and material. The sheltering words have as much materiality and protective agency as the earth itself. And of course Byron’s peace will only be found in foreign ground: “I am sure my Bones would not rest in an English grave . . . I would not even feed your worms—if I could help it.——So—as Shakespeare says of Mowbray . . . that he after fighting . . . retired himself / To Italy; and there at Venice, gave / His body to that pleasant Country’s Earth” (BLJ VI:149). So Byron returns to Shakespeare, who he opens the letter with—transplanting Shakespeare to Italian soil, as he had transplanted himself—explaining how at Bologna he “found besides the Superb Burial Ground—an original of a Custode who reminded me of the grave-digger in Hamlet” (BLJ VI: 148). As Byron affectionately details, this Shakespearean Custode “had the greatest attachment to . . . his dead people” and a collection of skulls to help remember them and the “joy” they dispensed (BLJ VI: 149, 148). The grave-digger, then, is another kind of custodian (“Custode”), like the antiquarian, who communes with the dead.
When Manfred asks Nemesis to “call up the dead,” and Nemesis replies, “Whom wouldst thou / Uncharnel?” Byron uses a word that had particular significance at the time of the Elizabethan revenge tragedies (I.iv.82). “Uncharnelling” referred to the digging up and disinterring of the bones of the dead from the charnel house of St Paul’s in 1549, an act of desecration and memorial spoliation.
“Uncharnel” has an ambiguous significance, then, meaning to raise from the dead, but also to deprive of proper memory. Hence the revenge tragedy’s remit of calling in honor’s debts in order to avenge such desecration, as Zanga, the righteous Moor, rhetorically asks as he avenges the Christian desecration of his proud Moorish race and Muslim culture: “What is revenge, but courage to call in / Our honour’s debts?” (Young 10). Weever was moved by a similar spirit of avenging desecration, describing his work as being to “preserve” “the monuments of the dead . . . knowing withal how barbarously within these his majesty’s dominions [Charles I], they are (to the shame of our time) broken down, and utterly almost all ruinated, their brazen inscriptions erased” (Weever). The widespread iconoclasm that marked the time of Charles I involved the same impulse that cleared the ossuary of St. Paul’s in 1549, both part of the ongoing cultural trauma that marked the Protestant reformation.
Like Weever, Byron in Manfred conjures diverse forms of commemoration and “monuments of the dead.” In a letter to Murray, topped and tailed with queries about the whereabouts of the MS of Manfred, Byron referred to his marriage as a funeral: “You talk of ‘marriage’—ever since my own funeral, the word makes me giddy—& throws me into a cold sweat—pray don’t repeat it” (Apr. 2, 1817, BLJ V:204). Writing from Ravenna, on New Year’s Eve, 1819, he made the same association, in a letter to Lady Byron herself: “This time five years [ago] . . . I was on my way to our funeral marriage.—I hardly thought then that your bridegroom as an exile would one day address you as a stranger, and that Lady and Lord Byron would become bye words of division” (BLJ VI:260). In its working through and as a commemoration of the “funeral marriage” and the separation, Manfred functions as a kind of funeral monument, as well as a form of revenge tragedy, a genre that explores the process of accounting for the dead (even—especially—when those dead to the heart are still alive). Manfred is a funeral monument, then, that commemorates the death of the marriage, the wreck of the broken heart: it is the “casket”—fittingly, “a small wooden box for cremated ashes”—that Byron fashions for this wreck of the broken heart (III.i.5).
IV. Posterity Out of Joint
In commemorating the wreck of the broken heart, Manfred allegorizes how the private event of the author’s broken heart is relentlessly mediated by and as a public celebrity scandal. The “clankless chain” of memory is bound tighter by the echoing publicity of celebrity culture, so that Manfred-Byron is doomed not only to confront these memories, but also to do so before the public eye, for better and worse, for pain and pleasure—doomed but reveling drolly in bringing them into the light (I.i.259). Simultaneously invited and spurned, a key adversary of Byron’s play against which it prosecutes revenge is Byron’s public and the celebrity it bestows. Manfred’s being condemned to eternal life dramatizes Byron’s scandalous celebrity, and a sense of being inescapably before the public eye in a blaze of publicity—obsessively, interminably: “thy spirit shall not sleep.” Hence the “vigil,” a ritualized occasion of remaining awake, in prayer, reflection or keeping watch, of being accountable to a public, during the time one usually spends in private: “There is a power upon me which withholds / And makes it my fatality to live” (I.ii.23-4). A vigil of the heart, Manfred is also a drama of conscience, about coming to terms with the knowledge that knowledge of one’s private acts cannot remain private but will circulate in the “public imagination” (BLJ V:186), especially when these private acts are submitted to the public in the form of a play at the height of Byron’s infamy. As Byron writes to Thomas Moore, “I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in public imagination, more particularly since my moral ** [Clytemnestra?] clove down my fame” (Mar. 10, 1817, BLJ V:186). Byron’s recently coined post-separation code-name for Lady Byron, Clytemnestra, is the classical embodiment of revenge, driven by jealousy on account of her husband’s infidelity and fury at the sacrifice of her daughter.
The social magic of authorial agency reaps ambivalent rewards and pleasures, in those strange solicitations of intimate publicity that animate celebrity culture; celebrity brings company (“My solitude is solitude no more”) and sympathy to “watch my watchings,” but also the sting of a capricious public that does not always avail itself of the choice to subject itself to the celebrity author’s powers, but sometimes chooses instead to repudiate and spurn, conspiring in the cleaving down of fame (II.ii.129-30). Hence the author’s impulse to avenge himself on his public. Revenge is one form of “calling in honour’s debts” to the dead; another form of honoring the dead is posthumous fame, immortal social life. Posthumous fame, that heroic form of fame Weever refers to as “true posterity,” is a way of being “redeemed from the worm;” celebrity is a different kind of fame: contemporary with life, it can disturb the chronological order of life and death, for better and worse. Such temporal disturbance is engaged in Manfred’s address to Astarte:
For hitherto all hateful things conspireTo bind me in existence—in a lifeWhich makes me shrink from immortality—A future like the past. I cannot rest. (II.iv.128-31)
This figure of shrinking from immortality dramatizes the uneasy temporal aspects of celebrity as a form of contemporary fame that pre-empts posthumousness, a form of premature—unnatural—immortality: a kind of posterity out of joint.
But then again, the poem swerves to Manfred’s identification with the immortal, in his famous “mind which is immortal” speech:
What I have done is done; I bear withinA torture which could nothing gain from thine:The mind which is immortal makes itselfRequital for its good or evil thoughts—Is its own origin of ill and end—5And its own place and time . . . (III.iv.127-32)
This is Manfred’s inner Zanga—or the backward anticipation of Zanga’s “Manfredian defiance”—a reworking of Zanga’s shameless rebuke to Alonso preparing the rack for him: “The fix’d and noble mind / Turns all occurrence to its own advantage; / And I’ll make vengeance of calamity” (Elledge 131; Young 85). Both Manfred and Zanga also channel the immortal lines of Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (Paradise Lost I.254-55). This audacious claiming of “its own place and time” enunciates the revenger’s desire to reintroduce a sense of spatio-temporal order. For Nemesis is about introducing a sense of order, putting things in their proper resting place, ceasing the haunting. Temporal disturbance, “time . . . out of joint,” is a key feature of revenge tragedy (Hamlet I.v.915). Revenge and retribution are ways of turning back time. The revenger’s mission is to restore proper order, but the requirement of the genre is that this mission only succeeds with the death of the revenger himself.
While (satanically) redeeming Milton’s lines, Manfred is not so much about redemption as about unfinished business: to redeem from the worm means to attend to unfinished business. Manfred is about the unfinished emotional business that is the desire for revenge, but also about the unfinished textual business of first drafts, recycled work, such as “the Incantation,” written, according to Thomas Moore, “soon after the last fruitless attempt at reconciliation,” and originally published in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems (Dec. 1816) as “a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago” (I.i.192-261; Works III:288; qtd. in CPW IV: 463). Byron, then—much like the antiquary—is finding a place, preserving “The Incantation” by repurposing it as a strange, disembodied, multi-tasking curse upon Lady Byron and Manfred-Byron (recoiling on his own head). Burying the precious text under faint praise and disavowals of interest (“you may put it in the fire if you like—& Gifford don’t like”), Byron both preserves the precious inscription and gives it a kind of ambivalent “uncharnelling,” digging it up, moving it from one poem to another, giving it a new site, a new use, and adding new lines (BLJ V:193).
The famous redrafting of Act III on Gifford’s advice is part of this process and an ongoing saga of the correspondence with Murray. In a spectacular letter written en route from Florence to Rome, Byron tells Murray he must “wait” for Manfred to be finished, and refers to the unfinished manuscript (and the revisions of the third act yet to be completed) at the end of an inspired rant about unfinished funeral monuments:
I also went to the Medici Chapel—fine frippery in great slabs of various expensive stones—to commemorate fifty rotten carcasses—it is unfinished & will remain so. The church of “Santa Croce” contains much illustrious nothing—the tombs of Machiavelli—Michael Angelo—Galileo Galilei and Alfieri—make it the Westminster abbey of Italy.—I did not admire any of these tombs—beyond their contents. That of Alfieri is heavy—and all of them seem to me overloaded—what is necessary but a bust & a name?—and perhaps a date?—the last for the unchronological—of whom I am one.—But all your Allegory & eulogy is infernal—& worse than the long wig of English numskulls upon Roman bodies in the statuary of [the] reign[s] of Charles—William—and Anne. . . .
I have done nothing at Manfred’s third act—you must wait—I’ll have at it—in a week or two—or so.—(Apr. 26, 1817, BLJ V:218)
Here, as the particular figure of Charles returns us to Weever, the whole passage suggests an unwitting iconoclastic parody of Weever’s moving tribute to lost funeral monuments. In contrast to the absent monuments so lovingly elegized by Weever—“broken down, utterly almost all ruinated,” “at this day nowhere to be discerned”—Byron exuberantly details an infernal surfeit of “overloaded” monuments, of “fine frippery in great slabs of various expensive stones—to commemorate fifty rotten carcasses.” This caustic recital has a leveling effect, neutralizing sectarian religious sentiment by making the “fine frippery” and “illustrious nothing” of Italian Catholicism as equally preposterous as “the long wig of English numskulls upon Roman bodies in the statuary of the reigns of Charles—William—and Anne”—grotesque English hybrids mimicked in turn by the grotesque hybridity of Santa Croce as the “Westminster abbey of Italy.”
Byron’s identification with “the unchronological” emphasizes the importance of chronology: “the unchronological” are prone to forget dates, so they need to be reminded. Byron explains: “The context will show you the sense” (BLJ V:218). The context for both topics (Florentine funeral monuments and Manfred) is provided by that historical drama of religious conflict and its legacies of cultural trauma, brilliantly satirized—but commemorated too—in Byron’s rendition of these ecumenically bizarre funeral monuments. This broader historical context connects to another, more personal context—Byron’s desire for Nemesis to do its work. The context of revenge as a form of commemoration informs “the unchronological” as an ominous figure of the terrible power of memory, suggesting how memory can play havoc with a proper sense of place and time. Byron as “the unchronological” emphasizes the need for a date, intoning—like any committed revenge hero—that repeated formula of “Time & Nemesis” (BLJ V:246). The revenger is the unchronological, poised in that limbo of “sooner or later.”
The texts, intertexts and paratexts of Manfred calibrate so much unfinished business. The revenger’s unfinished emotional business links with the unfinished business of commemoration (“a bust & a name?—and perhaps a date?”) and the business of unfinished manuscripts; just as the play’s mechanisms of self-reflexivity facilitate reflection on different forms of fame, so too, in the letter to Murray that sends the epigraph for Manfred, does Byron engage these different forms of fame, joking about his own posthumousness: ‘You tell me to “take care of myself—” faith and I will —I won't be posthumous yet if I can help it—notwithstanding—only think—what a “Life & adventures”—while I am in full scandal—would be worth—together with the “membra” of my writing-desk—the sixteen beginnings of poems never to be finished—(Apr. 9, 1817, BLJ V:208)’ Not that anyone’s counting. But Byron assesses the current state of his celebrity and its commercial value, in a canny evaluation of the relationship between posthumous fame and celebrity. His swaggering suggestion that Murray consider how much an account of his life would be worth “—while I am in full scandal—” links celebrity to commodity culture, making himself over as a commodity, while distinguishing between posthumous fame and contemporary scandalous celebrity and their differential economic returns.
But even this playful celebration of Byron’s posthumousness and celebrity soon recurs to a blackly comic revenge fantasy—the seemingly interminable revenge fantasy that Byron unspools across Manfred, the Alpine Journal and the letters: ‘Do you think I would not have shot myself last year—had I not luckily recollected that Mrs. Clermont [Lady Byron’s maid and confidante, former governess and nurse] & Lady Noel [Lady Byron’s mother] & all the old women in England would have been delighted . . . ? Be assured—that I would live for two reasons—or more—there are one or two people whom I have to put out of the world—& as many into it—before I can “depart in peace” if I do so before—I have not fulfilled my mission. (BLJ V:208)’ What is that “mission”? It is to put “one or two people” into the world, to populate and “repeople” the world with new creations (as Byron’s narrator is soon to put it in Childe Harold IV). It is that often painful business of submitting himself and his vigil of the heart “in full scandal” to the public and contending with its reception, as Byron writes in that letter to Moore: “I suppose now I shall never be able to shake off my sables in public imagination. (BLJ V:186). And if never able to shake off the sables, nor for that matter was Byron ever able to shake off the public imagination. “However,” Byron adds, “nor that, nor more than that, has yet extinguished my spirit, which always rises with the rebound” (BLJ V:186). Besides, Byron without his sables was arguably less compelling to the public imagination, as Francis Jeffrey suggests of Byron’s far more conventional history play, Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy (1821): “Lord Byron, without his bitters and his sweets, his softness and horrors, is only a very bold and clever writer—withal somewhat clumsy and verbose” (Jeffrey 271). Manfred might be conceived of, nevertheless, as Byron’s process of attempting to shake off the sables—an exorcism of vengeance and its Gothic forms—in order to rise with the rebound, with “his bitters and his sweets,” in the commanding (if ambivalent) mixing of generic registers and tones that he made his own.
Manfred, A Dramatic Poem is a poem in search of a certain tonality, for memory, for commemoration. It re-sets the springs of wonder in search of a new set of tones and forms not only of revenge but of self-critique and commemoration, of the good and the bad, a new mix of comic and tragic forms that might—if not elude or “shake off”—at least disarm or re-mediate the wondrous strange rituals of intimate publicity to which Byron’s life and work were forevermore subject. Like Byron’s spirit, the old Gothic revenge forms also “rebound”: never fully exorcised, there’s bloom on their cheeks. Uncharnelled, “redeemed from the worm,” they “rebound” to enthrall. Hence our commemoration of Manfred’s “strange hectic” from which we draw the “strangest nourishment” (II.iv.100).
