This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

This chapter argues that the interest Middleton shows in the levelling power of mortality in A Game at Chess reveals a consistent attitude towards fame and the eternizing powers of theatre. Rather than transcending the cultural practices and preoccupations of his own time, Middleton’s works in general and A Game at Chess in particular demonstrate an insistent effort to immerse themselves within them. Instead of setting the play apart from the plays for which he is best known, Middleton furnishes A Game at Chess with similar theatrical and thematic interests, many of which bring issues involving memorialization to the surface. While the allegorical surface of the play seems to indulge the eternizing designs of the White House, the more theatrically compelling characters of the Black House, like the moving monuments they resemble, pursue the approbation of the moment over the possibility of a more enduring legacy. Representing the pursuit of fame as a game, A Game at Chess appears designed to gain Middleton the immediate notoriety of the public stage rather than the eternizing admiration of posterity, even at the cost of the future of his career.