Textual analysis- Lord Byron, Manfred (1817) (Lect. 41)
Byron’s Life (1788-1824)
Birth and Background
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron
Born on January 22, 1788, in London; died April 19, 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece.
Noted as one of the most famous English Romantic poets, alongside contemporaries like Percy Shelley and John Keats.
Major works include Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-1818) and Don Juan (1819-1824).
additional notes (PPT)
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was born 22 January 1788 in London and died 19 April 1824 in Missolunghi, Greece. He was among the most famous of the English 'Romantic' poets; his contemporaries included, among others, Percy Shelley and John Keats. His major works comprise Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18) and Don Juan (1819-24). Byron's mother, Catherine Gordon, was a Scottish heiress when she met Byron's father.
Neither her inheritance or the marriage were long-lasting; she raised Byron alone and died in 1811. Her influence over the child Byron was powerful.
Family and Early Life
His mother, Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress, raised Byron alone after his father's departure.
Born with a clubfoot; lived in poverty and inherited his title at age 10.
Developed a strong bond with Newstead Abbey, his ancestral home.
Attended Harrow and Trinity College; published first poems in Hours of Idleness (1806).
additional notes (PPT)
As a child he was known simply as George Noel Gordon. Born with a clubfoot, he was taken by his mother, Catherine Gordon, to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in lodgings on a meager income.
At the age of 10, George inherited the title and estates of his great-uncle, Lord Byron. His mother proudly took him to England. The boy fell in love with the ghostly halls and spacious grounds of Newstead Abbey, and he and his mother lived in its ruins for a while.
Political Engagement and Literary Success
Took his seat in the House of Lords in January 1809, published a satire on critics.
Embarked on a grand tour of Europe, creating early works like Childe Harold.
Became a parliamentary advocate for social reform and was critical of government bills impacting workers, such as the Luddites.
additional notes:
On reaching his majority in January 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, published an anonymous satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to make fun of literary critics (mainly because his poems Hours of Idleness had received severe critical attacks). and embarked with Hobhouse on a grand tour. They sailed on the Lisbon packet, crossed Spain, and proceeded by Gibraltar first to Malta, next to Greece, afterwards they made an inland voyage to Janina and later to Tepelene, both in Albania. At Janina Byron began an autobiographical poem, Childe Harold. In March 1810 he sailed with Hobhouse for Constantinople by way of Smyrna, and, then, visited the site of Troy.
From his journeys in the East Byron came back to London on 14 July 1811, and his mother died on August 1 before he could reach her at Newstead. On 27 February 1812, he made his first speech in the House of Lords, and at the beginning of March, The first Cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage published by John Murray and took the town by storm. He also wrote the Oriental tales: in 1813 there was the publication of The Giaour (June) and The Bride of Abydos (December)
In the House of Lords he became a strong advocate of social reform. In 1811 he was one of the few men in Parliament to defend the actions of the Luddites (the manual workers who opposed the introduction of new working methods and new machines) and the following year spoke against the 'Frame Breaking Bill', by which the government intended to apply the death-penalty to Luddites.
Byron's political views influenced the subject matter of some of his poems. Important examples include 'Song for the Luddites' (1816) and 'The Landlords' Interest' (1823). Byron also attacked his political opponents such as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh in Wellington: 'The Best of the Cut-Throats' (1819) and 'The Intellectual Eunuch Castlereagh' (1818).
Personal Life and Relationships
Had tempestuous relationships, including with Lady Caroline Lamb and incestuous speculations about half-sister Augusta.
Briefly married Annabella Milbanke in 1815; they separated the following year due to scandal and gossip.
Possible links to early computing through daughter Ada Lovelace, who collaborated with Charles Babbage.
additional notes:
In the meantime Byron had several love relationships.
With Lady Caroline Lamb, for instance, Byron had a tempestuous love affair in 1812. She later immortalized the poet in her novel, Glenarvon.
In 1814 he published some more Oriental works: The Corsair (January) and Lara (August)
Another relationship that provoked a lot of gossip, was with Augusta, Byron's half-sister, the daughter of John Byron and his first wife, Lady Amelia D'Arcy, Baroness Conyers. Many biographers believe that the affair with Byron most likely began in the summer of 1813 but it has never been proved.
Byron married Annabella Milbanke after a short engagement. They married in 1815 and separated just a year later. They had a daughter together. The separation was mainly due to the gossip about Byron's supposed relationship with Augusta.
But Augusta Ada was also the name of Byron's daughter with Annabella Milbanke. She had an unhappy life and died young. She is famous in her own right for working on the 'difference engine' with the mathematician Charles Babbage (a plan for a first automatic computing engines). This gave Tom Stoppard, our contemporary playwright, the idea for his play Arcadia
After the divorce from his wife, to silence the gossip about his numerous love affairs, and Augusta in particular, he left England. After visiting the battlefield of Waterloo, Byron journeyed to Switzerland. At the Villa Diodati, near Geneva, he was on friendly terms with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his entourage, which included William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, who was to become Shelley's wife.
With the Shelley there was also Godwin's stepdaughter by a second marriage, Claire Clairmont, who had begun an affair with Byron before they left England. A boat trip to the head of the lake with Shelley gave Byron material for his Prisoner of Chillon, and he completed a third canto of Childe Harold at Diodati. At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for going back to England, Claire carrying now Byron's illegitimate daughter (born 12 January 1817, and named Alba by Claire, and Allegra by Byron).
Meanwhile Byron had a tour of the Bernese Oberland chain of mountains with Hobhouse that provided the scenery for Manfred, a Faustian poetic drama that reflected Byron's brooding sense of guilt and disappointment for his past life.
Later Years and Death
Byron lived self-exiled in Italy and had affairs, including one with Countess Teresa Guiccioli.
Became involved in the Carbonari, an Italian revolutionary movement.
Died in Greece while supporting the independence movement, catching a chill that proved fatal.
additional notes:
Soon afterwards he came to Italy. In 1818 he wrote Beppo (satire in the ottava rima of Don Juan that is made of 8 lines, 6 of which have alternate rhymes, last two are couplets) published in February. The Shelleys came to Italy too and were with Byron from March to November. Childe Harold canto IV was published in April.
Byron's daughter Allegra came to Venice to live with Byron thanks to Shelley's insistence. She was eventually sent to a convent and died in childhood.
In 1819 Byron began an affair with the married Countess Teresa Guiccioli.
Teresa Guiccioli Gamba was already married to a much older man when she met Byron. They had a passionate affair which settled into domesticity. She was his last great love.
Mazeppa was published in June, Don Juan cantos I and Il in July. Byron moves to Ravenna at the end of the year to be near Teresa.
In 1820 Byron lived for a while in the Guiccioli palace with his daughter Allegra, Teresa and her husband. He became involved in the Carbonari movement, the secret Italian revolutionary organization that were against Austrian rule. Teresa and her husband officially separated in July.
1821 Teresa's family, the Gambas, were banished to Pisa after the defeat of the Carbonari insurrection; Byron moved to Pisa with them.
Marino Faliero was published in April, Don Juan cantos III-V in August, Cain, The Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus in December. they are all plays, and Byron was on a theater commetee before leaving Britain.In 1823 Don Juan cantos VI-XIV was published. Byron sailed for Greece to support the war of Greek Independence from the Turks, arriving at Missolunghi on 30 December.
In 1824 Byron catches a chill in the rain on April 9. He dies at Missolunghi on 19 April. Don Juan cantos XV and XVI were published in March.
Works
Byron’s literary output was enormous, covering various genres including satires, plays, and long poems.
Highlights include Don Juan, a long poem consisting of 17 cantos; it stands as one of the most significant long poems since Milton’s Paradise Lost and critiques contemporary society.
The Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero pervades much of Byron's work.
Scholars have traced the literary history of the Byronic hero from Milton, The Byronic hero presents an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:having great talent
exhibiting great passion
having a distaste for society and social institutions
expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege
disenchanted in love by social constraint or death
rebelling
suffering exile
hiding an unsavory past
arrogance, overconfidence or lack of foresight
ultimately, acting in a self-destructive manner
Presents flawed characters with traits such as great talent, passion, disdain for social norms, rebellion, and self-destructive tendencies.
Byron intended to write numerous cantos for Don Juan, but his death curtailed this ambition.
Don Juan: is a poem spanning 17 cantos, one of the most important long poems published in England since Milton's Paradise Lost. Don Juan, Byron's masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels - social, political, literary and ideological.
Written in ottava rima (eight lines of iambic pentameter with an abababcc rhyme scheme), Don Juan consists of a dedication, 16 full cantos (averaging around 100 stanzas) and the introductory fragment of a seventeenth canto. Byron reported that he planned to write many more, boasting that these were but an introduction; his death in Greece at 36 years old marked the end of the poem.
If the nominal hero of the poem is Don Juan, the protagonist figures far less than the narrator himself. Don Juan is an extended riff on other poets, history, patriotism, philosophy, religion, glory in war and social mores.
Don Juan, though beloved and loving, is not a rakish libertine, but a rather sweet young man without much personality. He can be heroic at times, and so worthy of an epic, and yet is often quite passive, especially with the richly-evoked women who dominate the story.
The 'Dedication' of the poem is ironical. Byron dedicates the poem to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey; satirizing Southey and the other Lake Poets for their reactionary politics, pretentions and verse; and insults the Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh.
But while Byron produces comedy out of cannibalism, shipwrecks, religious figures, catastrophes, martial and political heroes, and family relationships (particularly between husband and wife), there are moments of tender compassion and affecting gravity (the death of Haidée in Canto IV is one such moment; the battle of Ismail in Canto
VIII is also deeply involving).
Textual Analysis: Manfred (1817)
Overview
Manfred is a dramatic poem written in 1817, exemplifying the Romantic closet drama style.
Features supernatural themes and was referenced in various musical compositions.
Dramatis Personae
Key characters include Manfred, Chamois Hunter, Abbot of St. Maurice, and spirits like Arimanes, Nemesis, and others.
Setting
Primarily set in the Higher Alps, within Manfred's Gothic castle and the surrounding mountains.
Character Analysis: Manfred
A Faustian noble haunted by guilt over Astarte’s death, seeks oblivion from spirits but fails.
Symbols of hubris and pride throughout the poem's narrative structure.
Themes
Oblivion: Divided into five sequences reflecting Manfred’s struggles between seeking forgetfulness and facing existential crises.
Conflict with Authority: Emphasizes defiance against spiritual and temporal powers, leading to Manfred's tragic end.
Influence and Context
Written shortly after Byron's personal turmoil (e.g., failed marriage, exile).
Influences from Goethe’s Faust and Gothic literature noticeable throughout.
Represents early Romantic Titanism, showcasing passion, rebellion against rationality, and the grandeur of nature.
Textual analysis: Manfred (PPT)
During his brief stay in Switzerland Byron, whose romantic feelings predisposed him to appreciate nature, was attracted by the charm of the wild and majestic mountains, and with his friend Hobhouse did some climbing.
On 23 September 1816, together with his friend, climbed Wengen Alp, where his view could reach the Dent d'argent, Kleine Eiger, the Große Eiger, the Wetterhorn and the highest mountain of the group, the Jungfrau with its glaciers, to arrive at Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland.
It is such an important experience that he describes in his diary, and, later, in a letter to his friend Thomas Moore says: " I wrote a sort of mad Drama, for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description. " [Letter from Venice, March 25, 1817).
However, the Alps are a source of bitter reflections on the character of Manfred, since their beauty contrasts dramatically with his inner torment, but, as an extreme manifestation of a supernatural power, they are also an opportunity for the poet of expressing the greatness of those human being whose titanic authority he compares with the magnificent power of Nature. Those lofty peaks that seem a challenge to the divine power are the mirror in which the character looks and recognizes himself and the image of his hubris.
MANFRED (1816): The Byronic hero is a character from the look that penetrates the soul, with a pale and emaciated face, on which you read the trace of past passions, whose origins are shrouded in mystery and whose heart is haunted by remorse for a secret guilt. He despises all and lives with disappointment among other men, he is transgressive, sometimes cruel, but exerts an irresistible charm. Its predecessors can be identified in Milton's Satan, Goethe's Faust or even in the villain of the gothic novels, or perhaps better still in Gothic dramas, since Byron, in the years 1814-5, had been on the board of the Drury Lane theatre.
Manfred is a Faustian noble living in the Bernese Alps. Internally tortured by some mysterious guilt, which has to do with the death of his most beloved, Astarte (talking about Astarte, he explicitly confesses: "I loved her and destroyed her"). He summons seven spirits, from whom he seeks forgetfulness. (Some speculate that the relationship between him and Astarte is incestuous, and that Astarte's death has been caused because their relationship, but this is not made explicit in the play).
The spirits, who rule the various components of the world, are unable to control past events and thus cannot grant Manfred's plea. For some time, fate prevents him from escaping his guilt through suicide (the hunter's intervention and the abbot's piety). At the end, Manfred dies defying religious temptations of redemption from sin.
The key concept of oblivion is presented in the poem divided into five micro-sequences:
He asks the spirits to grant oblivion but fails.
He wants to commit suicide, thinking thus to achieve its purpose but fails again.
The third attempt is more indirect, because Manfred evokes the Witch of the Alps not only to console himself with its beauty but also to summon the dead, hoping to see his beloved Astarte again and obtain from her forgiveness. This time he does not get what he wants, because his pride prevents him from obeying the spirit (the Witch of the Alps) and from treating her as his equal.
Then Manfred visit the realm of Ahriman, on the top of Jungfrau mountain, where he obtains to see Astarte's spirit from which however he does not get forgiveness, but only the prophecy of his imminent death. Ahriman is the principle of evil, always in conflict with the principle of good, Ormazd, and is surrounded by a train of spirits, some of which, such as Nemesis and the three Destinies (ie the Fates, II, iii) are derived from classical mythology, while the rest is inspired by the doctrine of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra). It is likely that Byron drew the first inspiration for this character from the gothic novel Vathek, where it appears under the name of Ahermann.
The final sequence is that of his death, which includes micro-sequences of the conflict with the abbot and the one with the spirits. He dies, but without succumbing to either of the first persuasion, or the assaults of the second.
Throughout the play, he succeeds in challenging all authoritative powers he comes across, and chooses death over submitting to spirits of higher powers.
Manfred directs his final words to the Abbot, remarking, "Old man! 't is not so difficult to die." Manfred was written shortly after the failure of Byron's marriage to Annabelle Milbanke, who most likely accused him of an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh.
At the time, he had exiled himself permanently from England and was living at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Most of Manfred was written on a tour through the Bernese Alps in September 1816. The third act was rewritten in February 1817 since Byron was not happy with its first version. Manfred shows some influence of Goethe's Faust, which Byron only read or heard in translation.
Manfred can be considered as one of the first model for the Romantic Titanism (together with Goethe's Faust or P. B. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound) for the exuberance of the passion, for his rebellion to the laws of rationality and, as the word suggests, by an aspiration to all that is great in nature and in man.
The first manifestations of this trend in English literature can be traced back even to the Elizabethan era, in fact they can be traced in characters such as Tamerlane or Barabbas or Faust by Marlowe. Great importance in this trend will have the aspiration to a superhuman greatness based on feelings, affections and subjectivism, as in J.J. Rousseau, or we can talk of Titanism in the revolutionary individualism of the Sturm und Drang (1770-1780), that inspired Goethe or Schiller in their youth.
Nietzsche used for the first time the term
Übermensch about the Byronic characters. As evidence of this it will suffice to recall how Manfred clashes with the abbot, with Ahriman and the spirits who come to take his soul, but most of all his speech to the Witch of the Alps (II, 2, 50 ff.), and the description that makes of him the first Spirit of the kingdom of Ahriman (II, 4, 50 ff.), where he openly declares his feelings of superiority over the rest of the world.
Manfred and Music: Manfred is a subject who, between 1834 and 1901, met with wide favor among the musicians. As early as 1834, Henry Rowley Bishop composed a three-act opera on Byron's text, which was performed at Covent Garden in London. In 1847 Louis Brouillon-Lacombe made it a sort of concert for soloists, chorus and orchestra; in 1867 at the city theater in Wiesbaden a large opera was performed in four acts with a libretto by Friedrich Roeber, set to music by Karl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke.
Finally, in 1901, Manfred was released as a great opera in five acts with libretto and music composed by Hans von Bronsart and performed the same year in Weimar. But the most famous examples remain that of Schumann who in 1848-1849 created the music for the drama and that of Ciajovskij who composed his Sinfonia Manfred in 1885.