Study guide
Manfred
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Overview
- Full title
- Manfred: A Dramatic Poem, with an epigraph from Hamlet ('There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...')
- Author
- George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
- Written
- Begun in Switzerland in the autumn of 1816, soon after Byron's tour of the Bernese Oberland with John Cam Hobhouse in September; finished in a first version in Venice early in 1817; the third act rewritten in Rome in May 1817
- Published
- London: John Murray, June 1817
- Form
- A dramatic poem in three acts written for reading rather than performance: blank-verse soliloquy and dialogue, with songs, incantations and choruses in short rhymed lines
- Length
- Three acts in ten scenes (Act I two scenes, Acts II and III four each); roughly 1,300 lines
- Setting
- The Bernese Alps: a Gothic gallery and tower in Manfred's castle, the cliffs and summit of the Jungfrau, a chamois hunter's cottage, a cataract in a lower valley, and the Hall of Arimanes; the period is unspecified but feudal and Catholic in feeling
- Sources and analogues
- Byron's own Alpine journal of September 1816; Goethe's Faust, Part One (1808), known to Byron through Matthew Gregory Lewis's spoken translation; Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound; Milton's Satan; Gothic drama and romance; classical stories of necromancy from Plutarch, Eunapius and the Bible
- Text in this archive
- E. H. Coleridge's text (1901) via Project Gutenberg, in ten sections, one for each scene. The editor's notes and line numbers are omitted, so references in this guide give act and scene only (for example, II.iv)
Context
Manfred is the first major work Byron wrote in exile. In January 1816, a year after their marriage, Annabella Milbanke left him, taking their infant daughter Ada, and the separation that followed was accompanied by rumours of cruelty, sodomy and, most damagingly, incest with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Byron left England in April 1816 and never returned. He spent the summer near Geneva, at the Villa Diodati, in the company of Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin and Claire Clairmont, and there finished the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Marchand 1957) (MacCarthy 2002).
In September 1816 Byron toured the Bernese Oberland with his friend John Cam Hobhouse and kept a journal of the journey for Augusta. Many details of the drama come directly from it: the Staubbach falls at Lauterbrunnen, whose spray he compared to the tail of the pale horse in the Apocalypse, the avalanches heard on the Wengern Alp, the forests of dead, barkless pines, the shepherds' pipes and cow-bells, and the landslide of the Rossberg (the play's 'Mount Rosenberg'), which had buried the village of Goldau in 1806. Byron later told Murray that the Staubbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, had done more than Faust to make him write Manfred (Marchand 1976).
Byron worked on the drama through the autumn and finished a first version in Venice early in 1817. He described it to Murray as a wild and metaphysical piece, written with no thought of the stage. When the manuscript reached London, he himself judged the third act very bad, and in Rome in May 1817 he rewrote most of it, replacing a worldly and faintly comic Abbot, carried off by demons, with the grave and sympathetic Abbot of St. Maurice. Murray published the poem in June 1817 (McGann 1986) (Chew 1915).
Contemporaries immediately linked Manfred with Goethe's Faust. Byron could not read German; he insisted he had never read Faust, but Matthew Gregory Lewis had translated much of it to him aloud at Diodati in August 1816. Byron also named Aeschylus' Prometheus as a deeper influence on everything he wrote. Goethe reviewed the poem in his journal Über Kunst und Altertum (1820), recognising his own motifs reworked into something new, and speculating, on the strength of gossip, that the guilt behind it lay in a crime committed in Florence (Butler 1956) (Rutherford 1970).
The drama gave the fullest form yet to what readers were already calling the Byronic hero: proud, solitary, haunted by an unnamed crime, superior to the people around him and unwilling to submit to any power. Its central secret, Manfred's love for Astarte, who resembles him in face and voice and is bound to him 'by blood', made the incest rumours impossible for readers to forget. Byron called it a 'dramatic poem' and meant it for the reader's imagination; it nonetheless reached the stage at Covent Garden in 1834, and inspired Schumann's incidental music (1852) and Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony (1885) (Thorslev 1962) (Richardson 1988).
Plot overview
At midnight in his castle in the Alps, Count Manfred, a master of magic, summons seven spirits of the elements and of his own star. He asks for one thing only, forgetfulness of a secret guilt, and they cannot give it, though they offer power and long life. The spirit of his star takes the form of a beautiful woman; Manfred tries to embrace her, she vanishes, and he falls senseless while a voice pronounces a curse that dooms him to live without sleep or death.
Next morning on the cliffs of the Jungfrau, Manfred is about to leap when a Chamois Hunter catches him and leads him down to his cottage. There Manfred sees blood in a cup of wine and hints at a forbidden love; he rejects the hunter's advice of patience and leaves. At a waterfall he summons the Witch of the Alps and tells her his history: a solitary youth, forbidden studies, and one woman, like him in every feature, whom he loved and destroyed. The Witch offers help if he will obey her; he refuses.
On the summit of the Jungfrau the three Destinies and Nemesis gather on their way to the Hall of Arimanes, boasting of the political and natural disasters they cause. In the Hall, Manfred refuses to kneel to Arimanes, and the First Destiny protects him. At his request Nemesis raises the phantom of Astarte. She stays silent while he begs her to forgive him, then speaks his name, tells him that tomorrow will end his earthly ills, and vanishes.
Back in his castle, Manfred feels an unexpected calm. The Abbot of St. Maurice visits to urge penitence and reconciliation with the Church; Manfred courteously refuses any mediator between himself and Heaven. He bids farewell to the setting sun, while his servants talk of his strange habits and of the night Astarte died in the tower. When the Abbot returns, a dark Spirit and its fellow demons rise to claim Manfred's soul. Manfred denies that he ever made a pact with them, drives them away by force of will, and dies in the Abbot's presence.
Part by part
Part 1: Act I, Scene 1: The midnight incantation
Act I, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
In a Gothic gallery at midnight, Manfred sits awake by a failing lamp. In his opening soliloquy he says that he has mastered philosophy, science and magic, has done good and met good, has beaten his enemies, and that none of it has helped since an hour he will not name. Sorrow, he says, is knowledge, and the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.
He calls on the spirits of the universe by a written charm, then by the name of their chief, and finally by the curse upon his own soul. A star appears and seven spirits answer in song: spirits of the clouds, of Mont Blanc, of the ocean, of earthquake and fire, of the winds, of night, and of the star that rules his destiny, a world turned into a wandering comet. Manfred asks them for forgetfulness. They offer kingdoms, power and length of days, but they cannot give oblivion, since they themselves are immortal and do not forget.
Manfred asks to see them in their own forms. The Seventh Spirit takes the shape of a beautiful woman; Manfred cries out that he might yet be happy and moves to clasp her, but she vanishes and he falls senseless. A voice then pronounces the Incantation, a long rhymed curse that condemns him to be haunted, unable either to sleep or to die, and to be his own hell.
Analysis
The opening soliloquy places Manfred at once beside Faust, who also begins alone at night, having exhausted learning. The difference is significant: Faust wants more experience, Manfred wants less. His first demand of the spirits is 'Forgetfulness', and the whole drama is the story of a man who can command every power except the one that would free him from memory. The line about the Tree of Knowledge borrows Genesis to turn Byron's personal despair into a general law (Butler 1956) (McGann 1968).
The scene is structured as a ritual. Three summonses, each stronger, call up seven lyric voices in contrasting metres, and Byron gives the elemental world a beauty that throws Manfred's barrenness into relief. The spirits' replies also set the terms of the drama's argument: Manfred claims that his mind, the 'Promethean spark', is as bright as theirs, and they answer with cool logic that if this is so, death can do nothing for him. The power to command spirits is real, but it does not reach the inner life (Richardson 1988).
The female figure is the first sign of the hidden story. Manfred chooses no form, yet the most powerful spirit takes the form that means most to him, and his broken sentence, 'And we again will be', implies a lost union. The Incantation that follows was written separately and had already appeared in The Prisoner of Chillon volume of December 1816; many early readers took its accusations of hypocrisy and a 'serpent smile' as Byron's answer to his wife. Within the drama it works as a sentence passed on Manfred that the rest of the action carries out (McGann 1986) (Marchand 1957).
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
The opening soliloquy's maxim: knowledge brings grief rather than life, the drama's answer to the Faustian thirst for learning.
The Mind--the Spirit--the Promethean spark, The lightning of my being, is as bright, Pervading, and far darting as your own, And shall not yield to yours, though cooped in clay!
Manfred's claim that the human mind is equal to the spirits, a Promethean boast tested throughout the play.
Oblivion--self-oblivion!
The single gift Manfred wants, and the one no power can give.
I call upon thee! and compel Thyself to be thy proper Hell!
The climax of the Incantation: Manfred's punishment is to become his own hell, an idea he will turn to defiance in the last scene.
Part 2: Act I, Scene 2: The cliffs of the Jungfrau
Act I, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
Next morning Manfred stands alone on the edge of the Jungfrau's cliffs. The spirits have failed him and he gives up hope of supernatural help. He asks why the earth and mountains are beautiful when he cannot love them, and admits that he has stopped justifying his deeds even to himself. An eagle passes, and the sound of a shepherd's pipe makes him long to be a bodiless harmony.
A Chamois Hunter, following his quarry, sees him and approaches cautiously. Manfred, unaware of him, compares himself to the blasted pines, calls on the avalanches to crush him, and recalls the landslide of Mount Rosenberg, which would have made a fitting tomb. As the mists rise he says farewell to the heavens and prepares to leap. The hunter seizes him, rebukes him for wishing to stain the pure valleys with his blood, and guides him, dizzy and half blind, down the rocks towards his chalet.
Analysis
The scene is the drama's most direct transcription of Byron's Alpine journal: the pines 'barkless, branchless', the avalanches, the herd-bells and the shepherd's reed are all things he recorded in September 1816. Byron turns observation into psychology. The mountains are glorious, but the man who sees them cannot share their glory, and the landscape becomes a measure of his exclusion (Marchand 1976) (MacCarthy 2002).
Manfred's speech on human nature, 'Half dust, half deity', is one of the poem's central statements. Humanity is unfit 'to sink or soar' because its mixed essence turns pride and degradation against each other. The idea recurs in the play's imagery of clay and spirit, and it has been read both as Byron's version of Pascal's or Pope's middle state and as a confession of the Byronic hero's own divided nature (Elledge 1968) (Thorslev 1962).
The attempted suicide is interrupted, and the interruption matters. Manfred feels 'a power upon me which withholds', and the curse of the first scene is now experienced as a fatality to live. The Chamois Hunter, who acts out of plain human decency and talks to him in the practical language of footholds and staffs, is the first of the drama's ordinary people, and his intervention reminds us that Manfred's sublime isolation depends on others he despises (Rutherford 1961).
Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.
Manfred's first address to the Alpine world: beauty without the power to love it.
My own Soul's sepulchre, for I have ceased To justify my deeds unto myself-- The last infirmity of evil.
A sharp self-diagnosis; the phrase echoes Milton's 'last infirmity of noble mind' from Lycidas.
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make A conflict of its elements,
The human condition as Manfred sees it: a mixture that can neither rise nor rest.
Stain not our pure vales with thy guilty blood:
The Chamois Hunter's rebuke, the voice of a simple, pious mountain community.
Part 3: Act II, Scene 1: The Chamois Hunter's cottage
Act II, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
In his cottage the hunter urges Manfred to rest and asks which of the castles of the valley is his. Manfred will not say. Offered wine, he sees blood on the rim of the cup: the blood of his fathers, which ran in his veins and in another's when they were young, had one heart and 'loved each other as we should not love'. That blood was shed and still rises between him and Heaven.
The hunter recommends holy men and patience; Manfred replies that patience is for beasts of burden, not birds of prey. Told he is not yet middle-aged, he answers that actions, not years, are our epochs. He describes the hunter's life of humble virtue, health, sleep and a quiet grave, and says he would not exchange his own lot for it, nor wish his on anyone. Asked whether he has taken revenge on enemies, he says no: his injuries fell on those who loved him, and 'my embrace was fatal'. He pays the hunter in gold, refuses his prayers, and leaves alone.
Analysis
The cup of wine that turns to blood is the play's first open hint at Manfred's secret, and its wording is carefully double. The 'blood' is family blood, shared by Manfred and the woman he loved; it is also blood that was shed. Byron leaves unclear whether he means death, violence or the sin itself, but the phrase about loving 'as we should not love' made the incest reading available to every reader in 1817 (Marchand 1957) (Eisler 1999).
The exchange with the hunter is a contrast between two kinds of life. Manfred's picture of peasant virtue is affectionate, almost Wordsworthian, and it is also a refusal: he admires what he cannot have and would not take. His contempt for patience and his claim that 'actions are our epochs' express the pride the Abbot will later lament, yet the hunter rightly notices his gentleness to others. The scene keeps both sides in view, and it is one of the moments where critics have found the play more humane than its hero's rhetoric (Rutherford 1961) (Martin 1982).
When we were in our youth, and had one heart, And loved each other as we should not love,
Manfred's most direct allusion to a forbidden love shared with one of his own blood.
Patience--and patience! Hence--that word was made For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey!
The Byronic hero's refusal of Christian patience, in one of the play's most quoted lines.
Think'st thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs:
Time measured by deeds rather than years; Manfred is young in age but old in guilt.
But my embrace was fatal.
The guilt is not violence towards enemies but love that destroyed the beloved.
Part 4: Act II, Scene 2: The Witch of the Alps
Act II, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
In a lower valley, before a cataract arched by a rainbow of spray, Manfred flings water into the air and calls up the Witch of the Alps. He praises her beauty and asks only to look at her. When she presses him, he tells his story: from youth he did not share the aims or sympathies of other men, but loved the mountains, the torrents and the stars; he studied death and forbidden sciences and made his eyes familiar with eternity, like the ancient Magi.
He then speaks of the one woman who was like him in features, hair, eyes and voice, but gentler, with pity, tears and humility that he lacked. He loved her and destroyed her, not with his hand but with his heart, which broke hers. Since then he has sought madness, death and forgetfulness in vain. The Witch says she may help if he will swear obedience to her; he refuses to serve spirits he has commanded, and she vanishes.
Alone, Manfred reflects that we are fools of Time and Terror, loathing life and dreading death. He resolves to call up the dead, citing the Witch of Endor and the Spartan regent Pausanias, who killed the Byzantine maiden he loved and later tried to summon her ghost. If he had never lived, he says, the woman he loves would still be alive. He feels for the first time a cold dread at what he is about to do.
Analysis
This is the play's great confessional scene, and Byron frames it with beauty: the Witch rises under the 'Sunbow' of the Staubbach waterfall described in his journal. Manfred's account of his youth is the clearest portrait of the Byronic hero's formation: estrangement from human aims, communion with wild nature, and a turn to forbidden knowledge. The reference to the raising of Eros and Anteros at Gadara, a story told of the philosopher Iamblichus, places him in a learned tradition of theurgy rather than a pact with the devil (Thorslev 1962) (Chew 1915).
The description of Astarte, though she is not yet named, is central to all readings of the poem. She is Manfred's double, 'like me in lineaments', but 'softened all, and tempered into beauty'. Biographical critics have heard Augusta Leigh in this; psychological critics have seen in it a Romantic fantasy of a feminine counterpart of the self, close to Shelley's idea of the epipsyche, and have noted that the love is narcissistic as well as forbidden (Manning 1978) (Lovelace 1905) (Thorslev 1962).
Manfred's refusal to swear obedience establishes a pattern repeated before Arimanes and the final demons: he will command, but never serve. The closing soliloquy, with its examples of Saul at Endor and Pausanias, also prepares the next act. Pausanias' story is chosen with care: he too killed what he loved, and sought from her shade an answer that came in dubious words. The story comes from Plutarch, and Coleridge's and McGann's editions both annotate Byron's learned allusions here (McGann 1986) (Coleridge 1901).
From my youth upwards My Spirit walked not with the souls of men, Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes;
The beginning of Manfred's autobiography, a classic statement of Romantic estrangement.
Her faults were mine--her virtues were her own-- I loved her, and destroyed her!
The confession at the heart of the play, leaving the manner of her destruction unexplained.
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
Manfred's soliloquy generalises his despair into a statement about all human life.
If I had never lived, that which I love Had still been living;
Guilt as the mere fact of his existence: love itself was the fatal act.
Part 5: Act II, Scene 3: The Destinies on the Jungfrau
Act II, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
On the moonlit summit of the Jungfrau, the First Destiny waits for her sisters on the way to the great festival in the Hall of Arimanes. Voices are heard singing of their work. One has freed a captive usurper and made him a tyrant again, at the cost of a nation's blood. Another has wrecked a ship and saved only a traitor and pirate for further harm. The First Destiny has sent plague upon a sleeping city.
The three Destinies sing together of holding the hearts of men in their hands. Nemesis arrives late: she has been repairing shattered thrones, marrying fools, restoring dynasties, and producing new oracles, because mortals had begun to think for themselves, to weigh kings in the balance and to speak of freedom. They mount their clouds and leave for the Hall.
Analysis
Manfred does not appear in this short scene, which widens the drama's view from private guilt to public catastrophe. The 'Captive Usurper' who escapes his torpor and becomes tyrant again is clearly Napoleon, back from Elba in 1815, and Nemesis' work of 'restoring dynasties' points to the Bourbon Restoration and the settlement of the Congress of Vienna. Byron's satire is double-edged: both the usurper and the restored kings serve the same malign powers (McGann 1968) (Bone 2004).
The scene's lyric metres, with their short lines and heavy rhymes, give the supernatural world a kind of cheerful brutality. The spirits treat plague and shipwreck as work well done. Against this background Manfred's suffering looks less exceptional: the universe the Destinies serve is one of indifference or malice, and the hero's refusal to bow before its ruler acquires a political as well as a metaphysical meaning (Corbett 1988).
The Captive Usurper, Hurled down from the throne, Lay buried in torpor, Forgotten and lone;
An allusion to Napoleon's exile on Elba before his return in 1815.
Our hands contain the hearts of men, Our footsteps are their graves;
The Destinies' chorus: fate as a power that owns and kills.
And mortals dared to ponder for themselves, To weigh kings in the balance--and to speak Of Freedom, the forbidden fruit.
Nemesis' account of the Restoration: political thought is the new forbidden knowledge.
Part 6: Act II, Scene 4: The Hall of Arimanes
Act II, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
In his hall, enthroned on a globe of fire, Arimanes receives a hymn of praise from his spirits as prince of earth and air, lord of tempest, pestilence and death. The Destinies and Nemesis report their work. Manfred enters, and the spirits order him to bow down and worship. He refuses: he has knelt only to his own despair, and he tells them to bid Arimanes kneel to the Infinite who made him, and then they will kneel together. The spirits call for him to be torn apart, but the First Destiny claims him as hers and describes him as a man of no common order, whose suffering has been immortal like their own.
Manfred asks Nemesis to call up the dead, and with Arimanes' consent she raises the phantom of Astarte, the first time the name is spoken. Astarte will not answer Nemesis or Arimanes, since she belongs to 'the other powers'. Manfred pleads with her at length to say that she does not hate him, that he bears the punishment for both, and that she will be among the blessed. At last she speaks: she says his name, tells him that tomorrow ends his earthly ills, and says farewell three times. She will not say whether he is forgiven or whether they will meet again. The spirits admire his self-mastery, and Manfred leaves.
Analysis
Arimanes takes his name from Ahriman, the evil principle of Zoroastrian dualism, and the hymn to him is a parody of Christian and biblical praise. Manfred's refusal to kneel is the drama's most theatrical gesture of defiance, but his reasoning is not atheist: he appeals to an 'overruling Infinite' above the prince of the world. This has given critics a long argument about whether the play's universe is Manichaean, Christian or simply open, and whether Manfred's pride is rebellion or a higher piety (Bloom 1961) (McGann 1968).
The raising of Astarte is the emotional summit of the work. Her silence answers him more than words could, and when she speaks, she gives him only his name, a prophecy and a farewell. The scene leaves the central questions unresolved: forgiveness, reunion, and even the nature of her death. Nemesis' remark that Astarte belongs to 'the other powers' places her outside Arimanes' realm, which some readers take as a sign that she is saved and that the love was, in some sense, redeemed (Thorslev 1962) (Manning 1978).
The name Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of love, links Manfred's beloved with Eastern myth and with a goddess condemned in the Bible. Manfred's plea, 'though it were / The deadliest sin to love as we have loved', comes closer than anything else in the play to naming incest. Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, was widely assumed to be the original, and the name Astarte was later given to the 1905 book in which Byron's grandson set out the family's evidence (Lovelace 1905) (MacCarthy 2002).
Bid him bow down to that which is above him, The overruling Infinite--the Maker Who made him not for worship--let him kneel, And we will kneel together.
Manfred's refusal to worship Arimanes appeals to a higher Infinite, not to his own self alone.
That knowledge is not happiness, and science But an exchange of ignorance for that Which is another kind of ignorance.
The First Destiny restates the maxim of the opening soliloquy.
She is silent, And in that silence I am more than answered.
Astarte's silence is itself a judgement, and Manfred takes it as one.
Manfred! To-morrow ends thine earthly ills. Farewell!
Astarte's only message: a prophecy of death that leaves the question of forgiveness open.
Part 7: Act III, Scene 1: Manfred and the Abbot
Act III, Scene 1 (the whole scene)
Summary
An hour before sunset, in a hall of his castle, Manfred has his servant Herman prepare the tower and gives him a key and casket. Alone, he notices an unfamiliar calm, as if he had found the philosophers' 'Kalon', the good and beautiful, though he knows it will not last. The Abbot of St. Maurice is announced.
The Abbot says that rumours of unholy converse with spirits surround Manfred's name, and that his life is in danger from his frightened vassals; he urges him to repent and be reconciled with the Church. Manfred replies that whatever he is rests between Heaven and himself, and he will choose no mortal mediator. No prayer or penance can remove the sense of sin from the mind, which is its own judge. He quotes the dying Nero's words to the soldier who tried to stanch his wound, 'It is too late', and tells the Abbot of the noble ambitions of his youth and his disdain to flatter the mass of men: 'The lion is alone, and so am I.' He leaves courteously. The Abbot reflects that Manfred should have been a noble creature, a chaos of light and darkness, and resolves to try again.
Analysis
This is the scene Byron rewrote in Rome. In the first version the Abbot was worldly and grasping, and the encounter verged on farce. The revised Abbot is dignified and sincere, and the debate becomes serious: Manfred is no longer mocking a hypocrite but refusing an honest offer of grace. The change makes his defiance harder to dismiss and his isolation more tragic (McGann 1986) (Corbett 1988).
Manfred's reply sets out the moral theory of the whole drama. Remorse 'without the fear of Hell' is sufficient to itself and would make a hell of Heaven; no outward rite can reach it. The idea that the guilty mind is its own court and punishment is Byron's reworking of Milton's Satan and, at the same time, a Protestant and even Enlightenment rejection of priestly mediation. Critics disagree whether this is heroic integrity or a pride that makes salvation impossible; the Abbot's final speech allows both views (Bloom 1961) (Thorslev 1962).
The Roman anecdote comes from Suetonius' life of Nero, the sixth Caesar if Julius is counted first. Byron's use of it is typical of the play's mixture of pathos and hauteur: Manfred casts the Abbot, gently, as the officious soldier and himself as the dying emperor with 'some empire' still in his glance. The image of the fallen cataract that 'lies low but mighty still' is his own epitaph for the ambition he abandoned (Rutherford 1961).
There is a calm upon me-- Inexplicable stillness!
The calm that comes over Manfred after Astarte's prophecy, a new experience for him.
I shall not choose a mortal To be my mediator
Manfred's rejection of priestly mediation between himself and Heaven.
The innate tortures of that deep Despair, Which is Remorse without the fear of Hell, But all in all sufficient to itself Would make a hell of Heaven
The play's theory of remorse: the mind punishes itself more surely than any outward power.
The lion is alone, and so am I.
The Byronic hero's pride in solitude, stated as a law of nature.
Part 8: Act III, Scene 2: Farewell to the sun
Act III, Scene 2 (the whole scene)
Summary
At sunset Herman tells Manfred that the sun is sinking behind the mountain. Manfred goes to the window and addresses it: idol of early nature and of the giant race born when angels loved the daughters of men, object of the Chaldean shepherds' worship, 'material God' and representative of the Unknown. He says farewell, knowing he will not see it again, and follows it out.
Analysis
The address to the sun is a short, formal hymn in the high style of Childe Harold, and it is Manfred's last act of worship. The figures he chooses are significant: the angels who loved mortal women in Genesis 6 and the 'erring Spirits who can ne'er return' recall his own transgressive love, and the Chaldean shepherds recall the astrologers and Magi among whom he has placed himself. The sun is worshipped not as God but as God's shadow, a 'material God' that stands for the Unknown, and Manfred's reverence is natural rather than ecclesiastical (Chew 1915) (Bloom 1961).
Placed between the debate with the Abbot and the gossip of the servants, the speech shows Manfred at his most serene. His first glance of love and wonder was for the sun, he says, and so is his last. The calm of III.i has turned into a kind of readiness, and the farewell prepares the reader for a death that is chosen rather than suffered.
Thou material God! And representative of the Unknown-- Who chose thee for his shadow!
The sun as the visible sign of an invisible God, a natural religion close to Manfred's own.
I ne'er shall see thee more.
Manfred knows that Astarte's prophecy will be fulfilled.
Part 9: Act III, Scene 3: The servants at the tower
Act III, Scene 3 (the whole scene)
Summary
On a terrace before the tower at twilight, Herman and the old servant Manuel talk about their master. Herman would give much to see the one chamber no one enters. Manuel, who served Manfred's father, Count Sigismund, contrasts the old count, a gay warrior and reveller, with his son, who walks the rocks like a wolf and turns the night into a vigil. He begins to tell of a night like this one, years ago, when Manfred was in the tower with the Lady Astarte, the only thing he seemed to love, 'as he, indeed, by blood was bound to do'. He is interrupted by the arrival of the Abbot, who insists on seeing Manfred. Manuel draws him aside to tell him more.
Analysis
The scene does in prose-like blank verse what the tragedies of the period often did with servants: it gives the audience information from below. Manuel's broken sentence, 'The Lady Astarte, his----', is the nearest the drama comes to naming the relationship, and it is cut off at precisely the word that matters. Readers have filled the gap with 'sister'; the text keeps it as a gap, a rhetorical form of the rumours that surrounded Byron himself (Marchand 1957) (Eisler 1999).
The contrast with Count Sigismund also places Manfred historically: he is the brooding son of a festive feudal order, a figure who has turned inward and left the old social pleasures behind. The servants' homely tone, like the Chamois Hunter's, provides a human scale against which Manfred's isolation is measured (Martin 1982).
Count Sigismund was proud, but gay and free,-- A warrior and a reveller;
The old count as Manfred's opposite: a sociable feudal lord rather than a solitary scholar.
her, whom of all earthly things That lived, the only thing he seemed to love,-- As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do, The Lady Astarte, his----
Manuel's interrupted revelation, the drama's most pointed silence about Astarte's relation to Manfred.
Part 10: Act III, Scene 4: The death of Manfred
Act III, Scene 4 (the whole scene)
Summary
In the tower at night Manfred recalls a moonlit night in his youth among the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome, when the moon softened the ruins until the place became a kind of religion. The Abbot enters to make a second appeal. Manfred warns him that danger is at hand, and a dark, awful figure rises from the earth: the Spirit who calls itself Manfred's genius, come to summon him because his hour has come.
Manfred denies the power that sent it. The Abbot tries to exorcise the spirits, but they tell him his words are useless, for the man is forfeited. Manfred, feeling his soul ebb, defies them: he made no compact with them, his power came from science, penance and strength of mind, and the immortal mind makes its own requital for good and evil. He was his own destroyer and will be his own hereafter. The demons vanish. Manfred, pale and cold, gives the Abbot his hand, says that it is not so difficult to die, and expires. The Abbot wonders, with dread, where his soul has gone.
Analysis
The Colosseum speech is a set piece that looks forward to the fourth canto of Childe Harold, written in the same year after Byron's visit to Rome. Its subject, the moon making ruins beautiful and filling up 'the gaps of centuries', is a fitting prelude to death: the past is given dignity by memory, and Manfred is about to become a ruin himself. The passage also shows the poem's habit of translating Byron's own journeys into his hero's past (McGann 1968) (MacCarthy 2002).
The final confrontation inverts the Faust legend. Faust's damnation follows from a pact; Manfred insists that there was no pact, and that therefore the demons have no claim. His speech on the mind that 'is its own origin of ill and end / And its own place and time' echoes Satan's 'The mind is its own place' in Paradise Lost, but turns it from a fallen angel's boast into a claim of moral autonomy in death. He defeats the demons and dies on his own terms (Bloom 1961) (Butler 1956).
The drama's last words are deliberately unresolved. The Abbot's 'Whither? I dread to think' leaves salvation and damnation open. Byron cared about the dying line: when the first edition left out 'Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die', he protested to Murray that the omission destroyed the effect of the ending. The sentence is quiet rather than defiant, and many readers find in its plainness the real resolution of the play, after the rhetoric of defiance has been spent (Marchand 1976) (McGann 1986).
I learned the language of another world.
The night and the stars as Manfred's first teachers, before magic and spirits.
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection,
The Colosseum by moonlight, an image of grandeur in decay that also fits Manfred.
The Mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts,-- Is its own origin of ill and end-- And its own place and time:
Manfred's answer to the demons, a reworking of Satan's 'The mind is its own place'.
Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.
Manfred's last words, the line Byron insisted must be restored.
Characters
Manfred and his household
- Manfred
- A Count of noble lineage living in a castle in the Bernese Alps, a scholar and magician who commands spirits. He is tormented by guilt over the death of Astarte and seeks only forgetfulness. Proud, solitary, contemptuous of ordinary aims yet gentle with ordinary people, he refuses to bow to Arimanes, to the Church or to the demons who come for him, and dies on his own terms. He is the fullest dramatic embodiment of the Byronic hero.
- Astarte
- The woman Manfred loved and 'destroyed', named only in II.iv. She resembled him in features and voice but was gentler, and she is bound to him by blood. She appears as a phantom raised by Nemesis, says almost nothing, and prophesies his death. Her name is that of the Phoenician goddess of love; readers since 1817 have connected her with Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh.
- Herman
- Manfred's young servant, curious about the forbidden chamber in the tower and eager to hear stories of the past.
- Manuel
- An old servant who served Manfred's father, Count Sigismund. He compares father and son and begins to tell of the night Astarte died, but is interrupted.
Mortals
- The Chamois Hunter
- A mountain hunter who saves Manfred from suicide on the Jungfrau and shelters him in his cottage. Pious, practical and kind, he represents the humble virtues Manfred admires but cannot share.
- The Abbot of St. Maurice
- A sincere churchman who comes to urge Manfred to penitence and stays with him at his death. In the first version of Act III he was a worldly and comic figure; Byron's revision made him dignified and sympathetic.
Spirits
- The Seven Spirits
- Spirits of the clouds, of Mont Blanc, of the ocean, of the earth's fires, of the winds, of night, and of Manfred's star, summoned in I.i. They can offer power but not forgetfulness. The Seventh, the spirit of his ill-fated star, takes Astarte's form.
- The Witch of the Alps
- A beautiful spirit of the mountain waters, raised beneath the rainbow of a cataract in II.ii. Manfred tells her his history; she offers help on condition of obedience, which he refuses.
- Arimanes
- The prince of earth and air, enthroned on a globe of fire, named after Ahriman, the evil principle of Zoroastrian belief. Manfred refuses to kneel to him, but he allows the raising of Astarte.
- The Three Destinies
- Agents of Arimanes who boast of restoring a tyrant, wrecking ships and spreading plague. The First Destiny claims Manfred as hers and defends him from the other spirits.
- Nemesis
- The spirit of retribution, busy restoring dynasties and suppressing thoughts of freedom. She raises the phantom of Astarte at Manfred's request.
- The Spirit (Manfred's genius)
- A dark, scarred figure who rises in the last scene to claim Manfred's soul, with other demons. Manfred denies its authority and drives it away.
Themes
Knowledge and sorrow
Manfred begins where Faust begins, having mastered human learning, but he draws the opposite conclusion: 'Sorrow is Knowledge', and the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. The First Destiny repeats the lesson in the Hall of Arimanes. Knowledge in the play brings power over spirits but no happiness and no remedy for memory (Butler 1956).
The drama also suggests that Manfred's guilt is tied to his knowledge. Astarte shared his 'quest of hidden knowledge', and their love belongs to the same forbidden territory as his sciences. Byron thus links intellectual and erotic transgression, a combination that made the work a model for later Romantic and Victorian dramas of the over-reaching mind (McGann 1968).
Guilt, remorse and the self-judging mind
Manfred's crime is never fully explained, but its consequences are explored in detail. He cannot forget, cannot die and cannot be forgiven by any outward power. In III.i he describes remorse without the fear of hell as a torment sufficient to itself, and in III.iv he claims that the immortal mind makes its own requital for its thoughts.
This conception of guilt as wholly internal is the play's most original and most debated idea. It refuses both the Church's sacramental pardon and the devil's claim, leaving the self as sole judge. It can be read as heroic integrity, as tragic pride, or as Byron's secular psychology of conscience (Bloom 1961) (Thorslev 1962).
Solitude and the Byronic self
From youth Manfred has walked apart from other men, finding joy only in wilderness and study. He will not mingle with 'a herd', even to lead it. Yet the play surrounds him with ordinary, decent people, the Chamois Hunter, the servants and the Abbot, whose care for him complicates the hero's self-image.
The solitary, guilty, superior hero had already appeared in Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales; Manfred gives him metaphysical scope and a dramatic form. Critics have traced the figure to Milton's Satan, the Gothic villain and the Man of Feeling, and have asked how far Byron identifies with him and how far he observes him (Thorslev 1962) (Martin 1982).
Nature and the sublime
The Alpine setting is not decoration. Mountains, glaciers, avalanches and waterfalls embody a grandeur that Manfred both resembles and cannot share: 'Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye.' Nature is sublime, but it does not heal him, and in this the play quietly resists the Wordsworthian faith in nature's restorative power that Shelley is said to have pressed on Byron at Geneva.
The natural world is also peopled with spirits, so that the landscape becomes a theatre of powers. The Witch of the Alps rises under the rainbow of a waterfall, and the Destinies hold their revels on the Jungfrau's summit. Byron turns the observed scenery of his journal into a mythology of the elements (Marchand 1976) (Richardson 1988).
Defiance and authority
Manfred refuses every claim on his obedience: the Witch's, Arimanes', the Abbot's and the demons'. He is willing to kneel only to the 'overruling Infinite' and only together with Arimanes. His final victory over the demons rests on his claim that he never made a compact with them.
The political allusions of II.iii, with Napoleon's return and the restoration of dynasties, connect this metaphysical defiance with the politics of post-Napoleonic Europe. The spirits serve power, and Nemesis suppresses the freedom of mortals to 'weigh kings in the balance'. Manfred's refusal to bow thus has a liberal edge (McGann 1968) (Bone 2004).
Motifs
Summoning and incantation
The play is built from a series of summonses: the seven spirits, the Witch of the Alps, the phantom of Astarte, and finally the demons who summon Manfred himself. Each answers less fully than the last, until the summoner becomes the summoned. The lyric incantations, in short rhymed lines, give these scenes a ritual sound distinct from Manfred's blank verse.
Clay and spirit
Manfred is repeatedly called 'Child of Clay' or 'Son of Earth' by the spirits, and he describes humanity as 'Half dust, half deity'. The opposition of clay and the 'Promethean spark' runs through the drama and defines its idea of the divided human condition.
Blood
Blood in the play is both lineage and violence: the blood Manfred sees on the brim of the hunter's cup is the blood of his fathers, shared with Astarte, and blood that was shed. Manuel's phrase 'by blood was bound' returns to the same double sense.
Kneeling and refusal
The spirits of Arimanes' hall demand that Manfred kneel; the Abbot asks him to submit to the Church; the Witch asks him to swear obedience. His repeated refusal is the drama's characteristic gesture, balanced only by his admission that he has knelt, in private, to his own despair.
Symbols
Manfred's star
The Seventh Spirit describes the star that rules Manfred's destiny: once a fair world, it became a wandering comet, 'A bright deformity on high'. It is an image of Manfred himself, a brilliant being turned destructive, and of the fated quality of his ruin.
The Alps and the Jungfrau
The mountains stand for a sublime grandeur and purity that Manfred mirrors in pride but not in peace. The Jungfrau, whose name means 'maiden', is both the place of his attempted suicide and the meeting ground of the Destinies.
The sun
In III.ii the setting sun is a 'material God' and the shadow of the Unknown. Its setting marks the end of Manfred's life, and its worship by the Chaldean shepherds links it with the ancient wisdom he has sought.
The tower
Manfred's tower, with its forbidden chamber, is the site of his studies, of Astarte's death and of his own. It stands for the closed, solitary mind that the servants and the Abbot try in vain to enter.
Critical debates
How Faustian is Manfred?
Early reviewers saw Manfred as an imitation of Goethe's Faust, and the parallels are clear: the opening soliloquy of a scholar who has exhausted learning, the summoning of spirits, a lost woman and a final struggle for the hero's soul. Byron, who knew Faust only from Lewis's spoken translation, denied direct borrowing and pointed instead to Aeschylus' Prometheus. Goethe's own review acknowledged both debt and transformation (Butler 1956) (Rutherford 1970).
Modern critics usually stress the differences. Manfred seeks forgetfulness rather than experience, makes no pact and is not damned or saved in any clear sense. McGann and others read the drama less as an answer to Goethe than as a stage in Byron's own development, and Chew's early study collected the wider range of Gothic and classical sources (McGann 1968) (Chew 1915).
Astarte: biography or symbol?
From the beginning readers connected Astarte with Augusta Leigh. Harriet Beecher Stowe made Lady Byron's accusations public in 1869, and Byron's grandson, the Earl of Lovelace, set out the family's case in Astarte (1905), whose title comes from the play. Most modern biographers accept that Byron and Augusta had an incestuous relationship, though some of the evidence remains indirect (Stowe 1869) (Lovelace 1905) (Marchand 1957) (MacCarthy 2002).
Other critics warn against reading the drama as confession. Thorslev places Astarte within a Romantic tradition of the beloved as the self's double, and Manning's psychoanalytic study reads her as part of a pattern in Byron's fictions of a lost, forbidden and idealised female figure. On these readings, the incest is a symbol of narcissistic self-enclosure as much as an allusion to a real relationship (Thorslev 1962) (Manning 1978).
The two third acts
Byron's first Act III featured a worldly Abbot who was mocked and carried off by demons, and Byron himself condemned it once he saw it from a distance. The revised act, written in Rome, gives the Abbot dignity and Manfred a more serious refusal of grace. McGann's Oxford edition records the original version, so the two can be compared (McGann 1986).
Critics have asked whether the revision improved the play or merely made it respectable. Some find the second version more tragic, since Manfred now rejects a real offer; others regret the loss of the first act's satirical energy, which looks forward to Don Juan. The debate bears on the larger question of how seriously Byron meant the drama's metaphysics (Rutherford 1961) (Martin 1982).
Hero or self-dramatist?
Manfred has been read as the purest form of the Byronic hero, a figure of tragic grandeur whose refusal to submit is the drama's moral centre. Thorslev's typology traces him to the Gothic villain, the Faust figure, Prometheus and Milton's Satan, and shows how Byron combined them (Thorslev 1962).
A more sceptical line of criticism sees self-dramatisation in Manfred's rhetoric and suggests that the play both indulges and examines it. Rutherford and Martin, in different ways, question the coherence of the hero's claims, and Martin relates the figure to Byron's management of his public image. The ordinary characters, who see the hero's pride and his kindness, give the text itself a vantage point outside him (Rutherford 1961) (Martin 1982).
A theatre of the mind
Byron insisted that Manfred was not written for the stage, and his experience on the management committee of Drury Lane in 1815–16 left him wary of the theatre. The drama's spirits, mountains and phantoms are hard to stage, and its action is largely internal (Chew 1915).
Richardson's study of Romantic poetic drama treats such works not as failed plays but as a 'mental theater', in which the dramatic form explores consciousness, and he reads Manfred's soliloquies and spirit-scenes as projections of a divided mind. Corbett, by contrast, places Manfred within Byron's later engagement with tragic form and stresses its dramatic qualities (Richardson 1988) (Corbett 1988).
Satan, Prometheus and the ending
Manfred's final claim that the mind is 'its own place and time' clearly echoes Milton's Satan. Critics differ on what follows from the echo: Bloom reads the play within a Romantic Prometheanism that turns Satan's boast into a claim of human autonomy, while others see in Manfred a fallen figure whose freedom from the demons does not amount to salvation (Bloom 1961).
The ending is also ambiguous in tone. The defiance of the demons is followed by a quiet line, 'Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die', and the Abbot's uncertain 'Whither?'. Elledge's analysis of Byron's metaphors and McGann's account of the poem's development both point to an ending that resolves the hero's struggle without resolving the theological question (Elledge 1968) (McGann 1968).
Politics in a metaphysical drama
The songs of the Destinies in II.iii allude to Napoleon's return from Elba and to the restoration of dynasties after 1815. Readers have asked whether these passages are incidental satire or a key to the play's meaning, in which the supernatural powers stand for the reactionary order of post-Napoleonic Europe (McGann 1968).
Read politically, Manfred's refusal to kneel to Arimanes becomes the gesture of a liberal aristocrat in exile, and the drama joins Childe Harold III and IV in Byron's response to the Restoration. The Cambridge Companion's essays offer a range of views on how Byron's politics and his metaphysics relate (Bone 2004).
Key passages
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
The opening soliloquy's maxim. Manfred has mastered every science, and his reward is grief. By alluding to the two trees of Eden, Byron sets his hero's private despair within the oldest story of forbidden knowledge and announces the theme the First Destiny will repeat in II.iv.
Oblivion--self-oblivion!
When the spirits offer power and kingdoms, Manfred asks only for forgetfulness of himself. The request defines the drama: it is not a quest for more life or knowledge, as in Faust, but for release from memory, which no power in the play can give.
Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mixed essence make A conflict of its elements,
On the cliffs of the Jungfrau Manfred describes the human condition as an unstable mixture of clay and spirit. The idea explains both his ambition and his misery, and it recurs in the spirits' insistent naming of him as a 'Child of Clay'.
Patience--and patience! Hence--that word was made For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey!
The Chamois Hunter's advice of patience provokes Manfred's contempt. The line shows the pride that sets him apart from ordinary virtue, and the image of the bird of prey links him with the eagle he admired in I.ii.
Her faults were mine--her virtues were her own-- I loved her, and destroyed her!
The core of Manfred's confession to the Witch of the Alps. Astarte is his double, sharing his faults but not his hardness. The verb 'destroyed' is left unexplained, and Manfred immediately adds that he did it with his heart, not his hand.
We are the fools of Time and Terror: Days Steal on us, and steal from us; yet we live, Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.
Left alone after refusing the Witch, Manfred generalises his despair. The pun on 'steal' and the balanced final line give the passage the sound of a moral sentence, and it prepares his decision to call up the dead.
Bid him bow down to that which is above him, The overruling Infinite--the Maker Who made him not for worship--let him kneel, And we will kneel together.
Manfred's refusal to kneel to Arimanes is not a denial of all higher power. He appeals to an Infinite above the prince of the world, so that his defiance becomes a kind of higher reverence, a point critics have used to argue about the play's theology.
The innate tortures of that deep Despair, Which is Remorse without the fear of Hell, But all in all sufficient to itself Would make a hell of Heaven
Answering the Abbot, Manfred argues that no prayer or penance can reach a mind that judges itself. Remorse needs no hell to be infernal. The passage is the clearest statement of the drama's internal theory of guilt.
The Mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts,-- Is its own origin of ill and end-- And its own place and time:
Manfred's last argument against the demons echoes Satan's claim in Paradise Lost that the mind is its own place. Manfred uses it to deny the demons any right over him: the mind punishes and rewards itself, and owes nothing to their compact.
Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.
Manfred's last words, spoken to the Abbot after the demons have vanished. After so much defiance, the line is quiet and almost gentle. Byron protested when it was left out of the first edition, since without it the ending lost its calm.
Questions for study
Why does Manfred ask the spirits for forgetfulness rather than knowledge or power, and what does this tell us about the difference between Manfred and Faust?
Compare the opening soliloquy with the offers of the spirits in I.i and with the Faustian quest for experience.
How does Byron use the Alpine landscape to express Manfred's state of mind?
Look at I.ii and II.ii, and consider the details Byron took from his Alpine journal of 1816.
What is the dramatic function of the Chamois Hunter and the servants?
Think about how ordinary people see Manfred, and whether the play endorses his contempt for them.
How explicit is the drama about the nature of Manfred's relationship with Astarte? Why might Byron have chosen indirection?
Consider II.i, II.ii, II.iv and Manuel's interrupted sentence in III.iii, as well as the rumours of 1816.
Is Astarte's silence in II.iv a judgement, a mercy, or neither?
Consider what she says and what she refuses to say, and Nemesis' remark that she belongs to 'the other powers'.
Why does Manfred refuse to kneel to Arimanes, and what does his reasoning reveal about his beliefs?
Look at his appeal to the 'overruling Infinite' and compare it with his refusal of the Abbot's mediation.
What does the political allegory of II.iii add to a drama otherwise concerned with private guilt?
Think about Napoleon, the Restoration and Nemesis' fear of mortals who 'weigh kings in the balance'.
How does the revised third act change our view of Manfred? What might have been lost with the first version?
Compare the sincere Abbot of St. Maurice with what is known of the comic Abbot of the original act.
In what sense, if any, does Manfred win his final struggle with the demons?
Consider his claim that he made no compact, the echo of Milton's Satan, and the Abbot's last words.
Byron called Manfred a dramatic poem and said it was unsuitable for the stage. What features of the text support this, and what would a performance gain or lose?
Think about the spirits, the scenery, the soliloquies and the idea of a 'mental theater'.
Further reading
- Bloom, Harold. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.
- Bone, Drummond, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Byron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
- Butler, E. M. Byron and Goethe: Analysis of a Passion. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1956.
- Chew, Samuel C. The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1915.
- Coleridge, Ernest Hartley, ed. The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry. Vol. 4. London: John Murray, 1901.
- Corbett, Martyn. Byron and Tragedy. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.
- Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
- Elledge, W. Paul. Byron and the Dynamics of Metaphor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
- Lovelace, Ralph Milbanke, Earl of. Astarte: A Fragment of Truth Concerning George Gordon Byron, Sixth Lord Byron. London: Chiswick Press, 1905.
- MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. London: John Murray, 2002.
- Manning, Peter J. Byron and His Fictions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978.
- Marchand, Leslie A. Byron: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.
- Marchand, Leslie A., ed. 'So Late into the Night': Byron's Letters and Journals, Vol. 5, 1816–1817. London: John Murray, 1976.
- Martin, Philip W. Byron: A Poet before His Public. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
- McGann, Jerome J. Fiery Dust: Byron's Poetic Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
- McGann, Jerome J., ed. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Vol. 4. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
- Richardson, Alan. A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
- Rutherford, Andrew. Byron: A Critical Study. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1961.
- Rutherford, Andrew, ed. Byron: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 'The True Story of Lady Byron's Life.' Atlantic Monthly 24 (September 1869): 295–313.
- Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-19.