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Byron and the Story of Francesca da Rimini

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frederick L. Beaty
Frederick L. Beaty*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1960 , pp. 395 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 Letter of 20 March 1820 (The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero [London, 1898–1901], iv, 419). Hereafter cited as L & J.

2 See letters of 25, 28 September 1812 to Lady Melbourne (Lord Byron's Correspondence, ed. John Murray [New York, 1922], i, 84, 87). Hereafter cited as LBC.

3 Letter of 5 October 1813 (LBC, i, 189).

4 Letter of 9 April 1814 to Moore (L & J, in, 65).

5 Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (Philadelphia, 1828), p. 10. See also Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography (New York, 1957), i, 388–389.

6 Letter of 29 February 1816 to Moore (L & J, in, 267). For Byron's later condemnation see L & J, iv, 237; v, 588.

7 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Roger Ingpen (Westminster, 1903), ii, 26.

8 For a detailed analysis of Byron's life at this time, see Marchand, Byron, i, 426–476.

9 For a plausible account of why this translation has been attributed to Byron see Beatrice Corrigan, “Pellico's Francesca da Rimini: The First English Translation,” Italica, XXXI (December 1954), 215–224. See also John Cam Hobhouse, Lord Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, ed. Lady Dorchester (New York, 1909), ii, 47, 51, 52, 77. Frederick L. Beaty

10 Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London, 1824), p. 28.

11 Ibid., pp. 195–196. The disparaging comments on the Divine Comedy which are attributed to Byron in Medwin's Shelley (London, 1847), ii, 252–254, should not be regarded as his studied judgment, though they do bear out his preference for the narrative, rather than the philosophical or theological, elements of Dante's work.

12 Letter of 20 July 1819 to Lady Byron (Byron: A Self-Portrait, ed. Peter Quennell [London, 1950], n, 463–464). See also his letter of 3 July 1819 to Hobhouse (Self-Porlrait, ii, 468–469).

13 Letters of 20, 23 March. 1820 to Murray (L & J, iv, 419, 422).

14 “Not translated, but betrayed.” See Marchand, Byron, ii, 794–795.

15 See letters of 23 April 1820; 15 March, 4 May, 8 July 1822 to Murray (L & J, v, 17; vi, 40, 60, 94); letter of 24 May 1820 to Moore (L b- J, v, 33).

16 Letter of 17 May 1819 (Ralph Milbanke, Earl of Lovelace, Astarte, ed. Mary, Countess of Lovelace [New York, 1921], p. 82). Frederick L. Beaty

17 When Murray later in 1815 published Hebrew Melodies without the music, Byron's poem entitled “Francisca” wasremoved—probably in anticipation of its use in Parisina.

18 Letter of 20 July 1819 to Lady Byron (Self-Portrait, n, 463–464.

19 See, for example, J. G. Lockhart's “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” No. ii, Blackwood's, No. vin (November 1817), 194–201.

20 That Byron associated a deluding moral restraint with “Platonism” in his own relations with Lady Frances Webster is shown in his comment: “This business is growing serious, and I think Platonism in some peril” (LBC, I, 193; see also LBC, i, 191, 197, 200). For similar ridicule of “Platonism” in Don Juan, see v, 1; xrv, 92.

21 For a study of how Byron's life in Venice, as well as some recollections of the past, became part of the first canto, see T. G. Steffan, “The Token-Web, the Sea-Sodom, and Canto i of Don Juan,” Studies in English, No.xxvi (1947), 108–168.

22 Letter of 25 January 1819 (LBC, n, 101).

23 Letters of 1 July 1813 and April-1 May 1814 (LBC, i, 162, 256–257). Frederick L. Beaty