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Manfred's Remorse and Dramatic Tradition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Byron wrote of Manfred that he is “… a kind of magician, who is tormented by a species of remorse, the cause of which is left half unexplained.” It will perhaps be agreed that after much scholarship the cause remains in fact somewhat more than half unexplained, unless all is referred to Byron's anguish over the relationship with Augusta Leigh.
With characteristic impatience the poet repudiated the guesses of his contemporaries as to the sources of Manfred, which, he said, he wrote “for the sake of introducing the Alpine scenery in description.” To Wilson's suggestion in the Edinburgh Magazine that “the origin of this dreadful story” might be found in Marlowe's Faustus, Byron replied that “the conjecturer is out, and knows nothing of the matter.” When Goethe, reviewing the play, stated that “this singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself,” Byron retorted that he had never read Faust, “for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it, viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it.” Earlier he had written, “An American who came the other day from Germany told Mr. Hobhouse that Manfred was taken from Goethe's Faust. The devil may take both the Faustuses, German and English,—I have taken neither.” He was receptive only to Jeffrey's suggestion of an Aeschylean influence. Prometheus, he confessed, “has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or anything that I have written.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1947
References
1 To John Murray, February 15, 1817.
2 To Thomas Moore, March 25, 1817.
3 To John Murray, July 9, 1817. When he wrote the letter, Byron did not know just what “source” had been suggested, but stated that he had “a better origin than he (Wilson) can devise or divine, for the soul of him.”
4 Moore's Life of Byron, p. 448.
5 To John Murray, June 7, 1820.
6 To John Murray, October 23, 1817.
7 Edinburgh Review, xxviii (August 1817), 430-431.
8 To John Murray, October 12, 1817.
9 The Dramas of Lord Byron (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915), pp. 74-75.
10 Byron: Romantic Paradox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 140.
11 Ibid., 141-143.
12 Mr. Chew, op. cit., p. 64, pointed towards the need for just this emphasis more than thirty years ago: “Manfred is in the line of descent from The Castle of Otranto. More direct is its descent from Walpole's other essay in Gothicism.” It is the second sentence (referring to The Mysterious Mother) that should have been the real cue for studies in this matter. Actually, scholars have continued to place their emphasis on the tradition as represented in prose fiction. I have attempted to describe the tradition in drama in Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, a volume to be published by The University of California Press.
13 Not all of these plays are readily accessible. Many have not been printed. My studies in this field have centered in the licenser's copies of manuscripts which make up the Larpent Collection of the Henry E. Huntington Library. These manuscripts have been handily catalogued by Dougald MacMillan, San Marino, California, 1939.
14 Still the most useful of these books, in my opinion, is Eino Railo's The Haunted Castle (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1927). See especially Chap, vi, pp. 218-239.
15 Classical convention was strong when the early Gothic dramatists wrote, and to keep the unity of time it was necessary to plunge in medias res. Further, the frequent adaptations of Gothic novels meant much summarizing and reference to past events. From whatever necessity it arose, the technique which involved the secret “past event” accorded well with Gothic purposes of mystery and mystification.
16 Critics were unanimous in praise, and Walpole was delighted.
17 A few of these were Banditti (C.G. 1781), by John O'Keefe; The Mysterious Husband (C.G. 1783), by Cumberland; Lord Russel (Hay. 1784), by William Hayley; The Carmelite (D.L. 1784), by Cumberland; The Enchanted Castle (C.G. 1786), by Miles Peter Andrews; and Vimonda (Hay. 1787), by Andrew McDonald. With the last named—a superb example of the Gothic in dramatic form—the genre came fully into its own.
18 The Regent was acted at Drury Lane, March, 1788.
19 Life of Kemble, i, 338.
20 John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, vi, 332.
21 In Adelgitha, for instance, Lewis's heroine finally turns on her oppressor and kills him. She and her family are stricken with remorse (her husband faints when he learns of the deed), and in the preface to the printed edition the author makes an elaborate plea that no one mistake Adelgitha for a heroine. Lewis adopted the policy of publishing his plays before they were acted, so that if any additions were made in the acted version he would be able to prove his own innocence.
22 Byron, I scarcely need say, would have denied that his protagonist's display of remorse was partly a matter of gratifying the censor and the actor.
23 This play is quoted from the MS in the Larpent Collection. It was published as The Confession in Sotheby's Tragedies (London, 1814).
24 Adelmorn was acted at Drury Lane in 1801; The Castle of Monlval in 1799; De Monfort in 1800. It is interesting to note that four playwrights transformed villain to hero at almost the same time.
25 British Review, viii (1816), 64.
26 Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin (London: Constable, 1923), p. 120.
27 The manuscript reached Byron through Maturin's benefactor, Sir Walter Scott.