Chapter 7 - Histories and mysteries

Summary

After leaving England, in 1816, Byron became increasingly interested in the study of history, and as a result increasingly sceptical about both Enlightenment beliefs in human progress and Wordsworthian beliefs in human integrity. Childe Harold III illustrated these shifts of emphasis and their interrelation, but in Childe Harold IV Byron responded with particular intensity to the historically multifaceted arena of contemporary Italy – more complex than the ‘sad relic’ of modern Greece – and began to see that just as geography, culture, and religion relativize human affairs, so does the passage of time. His three neoclassical dramas, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari – written between April 1820 and July 1821, and interrupted only by the composition of the fifth canto of Don Juan – are a profound extension of this interest. But in them Byron also pursued historical analogues for his current political concerns (political leadership, revolution, exile, and ‘the state’s safety’; TF I. I. 85). So these dramas present theories of history and politics alongside one another – much as Shakespeare’s Roman plays do.

Byron was fascinated, too, by what we might call the opposite of history, so we also have a more diverse group of works which emerge from a collision between the historical and the timeless – two biblical ‘mysteries’, Cain and Heaven and Earth, and the uncategorizable fantasies, The Vision of Judgment and The Deformed Transformed (all written between July 1821 and the beginning of 1823). In all these late works, however – neoclassic or Romantic, poetic or dramatic, factual or mythic, grave or comic – human action is sceptically reduced in a longer perspective, historical or cosmic, and individuals are portrayed as the victims of either retrospective reinterpretation or divine providence – or, as it may be, simply the luck of the draw.