Anne Barton

‘A Light to Lesson Ages’: Byron’s Political Plays

In September 1821 Byron sent John Murray the manuscript of a rhapsody in three acts, ‘in my gay metaphysical style’. To Thomas Moore he confided in a letter of 19 September that Cain was to be subtitled A Mystery, ‘according to the former Christian custom, and in honour of what it probably will remain to the reader’. Like most of Byron’s jokes, this one about the impenetrability of Cain was fundamentally serious. Although Manfred, a dramatic poem which approximated to a familiar Gothic mode, developing attitudes already made popular by Childe Harold and the verse tales, was praised and on the whole comprehended in its own time, Byron’s seven other plays — with the significant exception of Werner— proved thorny and baffling from the start. In this same September he confessed to Murray that Gifford’s adverse criticism of The Two Foscari and Sardanapalus had wounded him: ‘to be sure, they are as opposite to the English drama as one thing can be to another; but I have a notion that, if understood, they will in time find favour (though not on the stage) with the reader.’ Byron did not often appeal in this way to ‘the Avenger, Time’ to vindicate literary works which his contemporaries had misprized or misunderstood.