Byron completed Manfred in the summer of 1817, just one year before beginning Don Juan, yet the contrast between Byron’s two most remarkable poetic achievements could not be more obvious. Byron, at least, saw it that way, declaring Manfred “too much in my old style,” while Don Juan is in the new “style and manner of Beppo” (BLJ V:185, VII:67). Who could seem more unlike one another than Don Juan and Manfred, and what two story lines could possibly be more dissimilar than theirs as Byron presents them? Loving one woman too much and to the exclusion of all others is ostensibly the fate of Byron’s solitary Alpine brooder; guilt haunts him, and forgetfulness is the one thing he longs for. The hyper-gregarious hero from sunny Spain that Byron adopts for Don Juan is defined by not loving any woman for more than a few fleeting moments; he seems utterly lacking a capacity for guilt, and forgetfulness is the wind beneath his wings. Yet the protagonists of Manfred and Don Juan and their life stories have much in common, as different as they appear to be at first glance. It’s not merely that the poems share a philosophical viewpoint, as one might expect to find in two works by a given author. Peel away a thin layer of their narrative surfaces and deconstruct Byron’s “mock” recasting of the Don Juan source material, and you will find that these two poems share a deep structure: the outline of a common story and central character.
Because Byron’s ironic treatment of the Don Juan source material initially obscures the connection between Don Juan and Manfred, my point of departure is a consideration of Manfred alongside a more straightforward treatment of the Don Juan story well-known in Byron’s day and ever since: namely, Mozart’s incomparable opera Don Giovanni, with a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. Noting resemblances between the opera and Manfred helps illuminate the fact that, despite how different these poems appear to be, Manfred and Don Juan are two variations on the same plot and the same central character. Indeed, regarding these two poems almost as one continuous work helps illuminate important themes latent in both of them.
The culminating scene in Don Giovanni, the Commendatore scene, is one of the most musically thrilling and dramatically powerful scenes in opera. In this scene the Don locks hands with a statue that he has invited to dinner: the statue of the Commendatore whom (in Act I) Don Giovanni killed in a duel after the Commendatore intervened to prevent the Don’s seduction or rape (interpretations vary) of his daughter. The parallels between this scene in the opera and the final scene in Manfred with respect to action, character, imagery, and general atmosphere are immediately obvious. In the opera, the statue repeatedly demands—in a resonant basso profundo and more in anger than sorrow—the Don’s repentance for the dissolute ways of his life; the villain refuses to repent, and he is finally engulfed in the flames of hell, as his servant, Leporello, looks on in terror. In the final scene of Manfred, a larger-than-life, indeed otherworldly, male figure, identified as the Spirit, similarly booms forth his implacable taunts and demands, beckoning Manfred to his final doom, while the Abbot looks on, fearful for Manfred (though not, he claims, for himself).
Thus, both scenes involve three male figures. At the center is the work’s hero (or anti-hero), a charismatic aristocrat, a sexual taboo breaker (if not actual criminal) who remains fearless and unrepentant in his final hour. Next is his antagonist, a supernaturally powerful, older, punishing, or at least challenging, male figure who demands something of the hero: the Commendatore demands the Don’s repentance; the Spirit demands that Manfred go with him. In Manfred, too, there is a plea for the hero’s repentance, which comes from the Abbot in Act III, scene one. The third man present in the scene—Leporello in the opera, the Abbot in Manfred—is an onlooker; lacking the stature both of the hero and of the supernatural figure, he is merely a human being with normal responses, registering, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, the terrors that the audience must feel.
In addition to the male triangle that structures these scenes, they share other features. Both heroes verbally communicate death’s taking hold of them: Don Giovanni cries out, “What strange tremor now assails my spirits!”;
Manfred observes, “I feel my soul / Is ebbing from me” (III.iv.99-100). Death-related coldness is invoked in both scenes: when Don Giovanni takes the Statue’s hand, he shudderingly exclaims, “Che gelo e questo mai!”; the Abbot, taking the hand of Manfred in his dying moment, observes: “Cold—cold—even to the heart” (III.iv.149). Thus, too, a male handclasp occurs in both scenes. Both works culminate in a terrifying glimpse of the afterlife, and both heroes (or are they villains?) expire supernaturally: that is, from no known bodily cause. Also worth considering is the Abbot’s reference to the Spirit as one of Manfred’s “guests” (III.iii.73). While Manfred does not appear to extend an invitation to the Spirit in the way that Don Giovanni famously invites his “stone guest” to dinner, the verbal echo is resonant: the protagonists’ fate is one they themselves invite—one might say desire.
But the most striking thematic and dramatic similarity between the final scenes of the opera and the play is their emphasis on the hero’s defiance in the face of supernatural threats and conventional moral or religious claims. It’s true that, consistent with the original story and audience tastes, the opera affirms Christian beliefs by presenting a horrified and groaning Don Giovanni swallowed by the terrors of hell, followed by the happy moralizing of the finale (“heaven has avenged us all,” etc.). In this respect the opera presents a distinct contrast with Manfred, whose hero finds it “not so difficult to die,” having denied all supernatural powers, infernal or otherwise, external to the human mind (III.iv.151). Yet the brief display of hellfire at the end of the Commendatore scene (often an occasion for hokey stage effects) feels like an afterthought compared to the thrilling power of the scene leading up to that point. Dramatically and musically, the force of the scene derives from the sudden appearance of the Commendatore, his threatening commands, and the defiance of a fearless man who, even in the face of death and the terrors of hell, refuses to repent:
COMMENDATORERepent; change your ways:It is the ultimate moment.DON GIOVANNINo, no, For me there is no repentance;Avaunt! away from me.COMMENDATORERepent, villain.DON GIOVANNINo, you old fool!COMMENDATORERepent!DON GIOVANNINo!COMMENDATOREYes!DON GIOVANNINo!COMMENDATORE AND LEPORELLOYes!DON GIOVANNINo! NO!
The final “No!” is not so much sung as shouted from the very depths of the baritone’s being. The repetition of Manfred’s contemptuous exclamations of rejection is likewise the core of the final scene of Byron’s drama:
SPIRIT. . . Come! ‘tis time.MANFREDI . . . denyThe power which summons me.SPIRIT. . . Come! come!MANFRED. . . Get thee hence!SPIRITMortal! thine hour is come—Away! I say.MANFRED. . . Away! I’ll die as I have lived—alone.[Other Spirits rise up.]SPIRITOnce more I summon him—Away! away!MANFREDI do defy ye . . .. . . I do defy ye . . .. . . I do defy—deny—Spurn back, and scorn ye!. . . Thou never shalt possess me. . . Back, ye baffled fiends! (III.iv.81-140)
That the ending of Don Giovanni—in other words, the classic ending of the Don Juan dramatizations ubiquitous in early nineteenth-century Europe—should bear such striking resemblance to the ending of Manfred might surprise us. After all, in all other respects, as I noted at the outset, the tone and content of Manfred could not seem more unrelated to that of Mozart’s dramma giocosa. Yet since Byron did, as we well know, write a poem utilizing the Don Juan story, observing the classic Don Juan ending in Manfred immediately suggests the possibility of a connection between Byron’s metaphysical drama and his mock epic. The line of connection may be easily discovered by recalling the source for the many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, French, English, and Italian adaptations of the Don Juan tale, El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, the early seventeenth-century play by Tirso de Molina. As its two-part title suggests, Tirso’s drama was very likely an engrafting of two legends: the escapades of a libertine and the story of a statue who comes to dinner and drags the sinner off to hell (Waxman 189). Thus, it’s easy to see how Byron’s Don Juan bears reference to the first part of Tirso’s play, and Manfred to the denouement, which the uncompleted Don Juan does not arrive at (though Candace Tate, in her psychological reading of Don Juan, suggests that Juan’s encounter with the Black Friar, aka the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, at the close of the sixteenth canto, is indeed relatable to Tirso’s and Mozart’s scene of the avenging stone guest [147]). But the material common to Manfred and Don Juan, as highlighted by their connection to the Don Juan story, is found not merely in the way one work corresponds to the first part of the Don’s adventures, the other to his demise, but in fact is found more broadly throughout both works.
To begin with, the heroes of both poems, indeed the poems themselves, represent challenges to authority, religious authority in particular. This is something both works have in common with the Don Juan source material. Tirso’s title identifies Don Juan not as a lover, but as a burlador, a word commonly connoting “seducer,” but, as its etymological relation to burlesque suggests, more literally meaning mocker or trickster. Tirso de Molina was a monk, and his play was intended to ridicule the hypocritical, cheaply purchased repentance that allowed wealthy immoralists to misbehave. Later interpretations have seen in Don Juan’s libertinism and mockery a challenge not merely to a corrupt clergy, but to the taboos themselves, and in some cases to religion itself, when set against human drives and rational understanding. Now, the mocking element is certainly just as strong in Manfred as it is in Don Juan; both works take up cudgels against “cant moral” and “cant religious” (The Works of Lord Byron, V:542). While a comic turn to the satire is overt in Don Juan, the burlesque element of the original version of the third act of Manfred
—as it takes aim at an Abbot who demands, along with Manfred’s repentance, a “gift of all [his] lands / To the Monastery” (CPW IV:468)—reveals a kinship between the spirit of Byron’s somber drama and his “merry” poem (Don Juan IV.39).
But beyond the poems’ challenges to religion and traditional mores, reading Manfred in its relation to Don Juan illuminates significant embedded themes that they share. Such a reading begins with the observation that the two-part structure of Tirso’s drama, of its various literary and operatic descendants, and of Manfred is noticeably gendered: women define the content of the first part of the narrative, men the second.
The life of taboo-breaking pleasure focuses on women (or a woman); the scene of fear, threat, punishment and/or triumph is a homosocial scene. An Oedipal triangle? The law of the father? A scene of male bonding? However one interprets it, the legendary Don Juan and Manfred, the first part of whose stories centers on heteroerotics, reach their tragic apotheosis in an all-male world. (Here, by the way, is a distinct departure from Faust, which bears certain resemblances to the legend of Don Juan as it does to Manfred, but which culminates in the lure of the Eternal Feminine.)
The contest between men, the agon of son and father, is implicit throughout Don Juan’s escapades with women, not just in the final scene of reckoning. While women are the Don’s obvious target, his misbehavior with them mocks, in the most direct and personal way, the authority of their lovers, husbands, and fathers, the power and laws of men.
Thus, in Don Juan, Juan’s lovemaking first cuckolds an old husband, then undermines a tyrant father, then outwits a sultan, and then takes aim at the English country gentry. Peter Manning, discussing “the ubiquitous and decisive presence of fathers, father figures, and ancestors” in Manfred, observes that “Byron’s pattern of setting Manfred in relief against other male figures culminates in the soliloquy which opens the last scene of the play” (906). In that soliloquy, Manfred recalls standing “within the Coliseum’s wall, / ‘Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome” (III.iv.10-1):
With silent worship of the Great of old,The dead, but sceptered, Sovereigns, who still ruleOur spirits from their urns. (III.iv.39-41)
As Manning explains: “The legendary Caesars, mentioned three times in the first thirty lines of the soliloquy, are the inclusive symbol of the masculine authority to which [Manfred] now bows” (907). But the admiration is tinged with ambivalence, as Manfred derides the power of these revered fathers, noting that “Caesar’s chambers, and the Augustan halls, / Grovel on earth in indistinct decay” (IV.iv.29-30). While a pleasing interpretation of the characters and behavior of Manfred and Juan (as of the legendary Don Juan) is that they represent an attack on the Ancien Régime, we do not forget that these characters are themselves aristocrats and are empowered and admired on account of that.
Even the pure mountain air and “natural music of the mountain reed” recall to Manfred an idyll defined in terms of gender and power: “here the patriarchal days are not / A pastoral fable” (I.ii.49-50). Byron’s own anxiety about fathers may be traceable as far back as his early fragment “When to their airy hall my fathers’ voice” (an anxiety, incidentally, equaled if not surpassed by Mozart’s towards his father, which some critics have regarded as a psychological underpinning of Don Giovanni).
Thus, attempting to undermine powerful male figures and yet wanting to best them at their own game form the Janus-head of these heroes’ deeds and words.
To whatever extent Oedipal antagonism underlies the Don’s famed philandering or Manfred’s fateful fidelity, reading any of the Don Juan literature or Manfred without considering how they thematize anxiety about heterosexual love is scarcely possible. Some critics have suggested, in fact, that the mysterious taboo relationship in Manfred—“the deadliest sin to love as we have loved”—is not incest but homosexuality (II.iv.123).
This is an idea worth pursuing in the present context, even if ultimately one prefers not to translate the poem’s mysteries and destabilizing ambiguities into a fixed code with specific references. Astarte is, after all, an obvious mirroring, Manfred’s feminized version of himself:
She was like me in lineaments—her eyes,Her hair, her features, all, to the very toneEven of her voice, they said were like to mine;But soften’d all, and temper’d into beauty;She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,5The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mindTo comprehend the universe: nor theseAlone, but with them gentler powers than mine,Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;And tenderness—but that I had for her;10Humility—and that I never had. (II.ii.105-15)
Equally significant is the fact that Manfred’s unhappiness and alienation, his sense of difference from other men, date to his youth, in other words predate “that all-nameless hour” that he identifies in Act 1 as the beginning of his suffering and guilt, and which we take to refer to Astarte’s death (see II.ii.50-61).
And what is the cause of Astarte’s death? Suicide—presumably over guilt or despair at her incest—is hinted at, and many readers have accepted suicide as the cause of her death and, therefore, of Manfred’s guilt.
But what is Manfred’s—and Manfred’s—explanation of Astarte’s death?
I loved her, and destroy’d her!. . . Not with my hand, but heart—which broke her heart—It gazed on mine, and wither’d. (II.ii.117-9)
These are crucial lines that, as often as one finds them quoted in criticism of the poem, have not been given the attention they warrant.
Their teasing mysteriousness derives from the interplay of positive declaration of agency (“I . . . destroyed her!”), negation of means (“Not with my hand”), metaphoric substitution (“with my . . . heart,” “broke her heart,” “her heart . . . gazed on mine”), and passive causation (“withered”). One thing they do not state clearly, if at all, is that Astarte killed herself. The expression “to break someone’s heart” typically means not the sharing of a mutual love but, rather, the opposite: rejection, lack of mutual feeling. In fact, the lines seem to suggest that something in Manfred’s “heart,” in his inmost being, caused his lover’s heart (i.e., her love, her life) to wither. Perhaps it was this essential, hidden truth of Manfred’s nature—a truth that dare not speak its name—that was fatal to his female lover and caused her to disappear from his life. Certainly, Manfred’s self-accusations heard in the Incantation seem a bit excessive for, even incongruent with, one who merely loved not wisely but too well. What does his “cold breast and serpent smile” (I.i.242), his “shut soul’s hypocrisy” (I.i.245), or his “brotherhood of Cain” (I.i.249) have to do with Manfred’s avowedly passionate and profound love for Astarte? Cain, of course, was the original slayer of a man more favored by the all-powerful, law-giving father. Such anxiety about masculine identity and power, perhaps underlying Manfred’s sense of hypocrisy or sinfulness, was neither caused, nor apparently could be cured, by the love of a good woman.
Of course, we all know what caused the death of Astarte. It was Byron who caused the death of Astarte, in his dream that he called Manfred. If farewells to women are part of the recurrent imagery in the male fantasy known as Don Juan, they are certainly also a recurrent motif in the poetry of Lord Byron. From “Maid of Athens, Ere We Part” to “So, We’ll go No More A-Roving,” Byron’s lyrics repeatedly suggest that pleasure, when it comes to his relationships with women, is ever at its lips bidding adieu.
While Byron is hardly the only poet to have made sweet sorrow of lovers’ farewells, in Byron’s case, not only his poetry but his life was a perpetual illustration of the principle he confided to Hobhouse within three months after beginning his love affair with Teresa Guiccioli: “that a man should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom—of a woman” (BLJ VI:214). Thus, while Manfred self-identifies as the abandoned lover, and readers identify Don Juan as the one who abandons, the outcome for these heroes—one might say the desired outcome— is the same.
Citing several references to Manfred’s preoccupation with male power—with serving and swaying—and to his alternating guilt over inadequacy and pride in triumph, Manning concludes that “it may seem strange to suggest that one current of the action is Manfred’s struggle to earn a place in the world of men” (906). Strange or not, that assessment certainly rings true. About “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Karen Swann observed: “We tend to assume that the knight sincerely wants to capture the lady. . . . Focusing on his loss, we fail to notice what he gains at the end of the poem—accession to an all-male community. Could this community, and not the ideal or even the fatal woman, be the true object of his quest?”(90). Focusing on what Manfred identifies as his life-consuming loss, we may fail to notice that his identity is achieved not as a woman’s lover, but in the fantasy of a triumphant contest with powerful male authority figures. In discussing Romantic triangles, Sonia Hofkosh noted that the “male relation, like the masculine subject, is the primary and prior one; the feminine, empty or derivative,” quoting Mary Jacobus’ explanation that “this triangle characteristically invokes its third (female) term only in the interests of the original rivalry and works finally to get rid of the woman” (Hofkosh 102; Jacobus 119). The tales of both Don Juan and Manfred do indeed “get rid of the woman,” and these heroes achieve their end by enormous self-assertion amidst powerful male figures. We might note in passing that the word “love” or “loved” occurs nineteen times in Manfred while “power” or “powers” occurs thirty-nine times.
Laurence Lipking has quipped that the “true moral of Don Giovanni, as a libertine might see it, seems far from instructive: raping a daughter is permissible, so long as one does not also kill her father” (46). In fact, the heterosexual misbehavior of the legendary Don Juan should be considered in light of the denouement: an anxiety dream about male identity, performance, and the laws and power of men. Although Byron presents different surface treatments of this theme in Manfred and Don Juan, its outline is visible in both works.
