My father Mr. Chao-Chun Chou (周朝俊先生) completed an article in Taiwanese Min Nan entitled “George Gordon, Lord Byron: The Destruction of Sennacherib,” shortly before his passing at 90 in 2016.

Father introduces Byron and this poem to the Taiwanese people through this article, which is essentially a Biblical commentary on the passage in 2 Kings 18-19 that Byron’s poem is based upon. Imbedded within this work is father’s translation of this Byron poem in anapestic tetrameter into a Taiwanese Min Nan poem in the Seven Character Ancient Chinese Poetry format (七言古詩). 

Byron’s poetic prowess transforms the Biblical story into a lively drama. The vivid imagery makes father’s commentary engaging to read. Father emphasizes on Bryon’s creative vitality, boundless imaginations, witty expressions, and across the lands eye-witness on-the-spot reporting style that captures the essence of the story about God’s miraculous deliverance of His faithful believers. Father briefly touches on Byron’s unruly personality and scandalous life, and concludes with positive affirmations of Byron’s heroism for the Greek cause.  

The Taiwan Church News (TCN), the first newspaper in Taiwan founded by the British missionary Mr. Thomas Barclay in 1885, published my father’s work in the 1st issue of this year 2025(3801) in the paper form (please see the above photos) and the e-form:  https://tcnn.org.tw/archives/227593.

Father was raised in a big loving family with more than a dozen siblings to grow up with. His asthma not only greatly limited his life experiences, but also cut short a promising English teaching career.  He felt as if he’s running in a never-ending marathon, out of breath at all time, that his life could be snatched away at any given moment. My loving mother, a professionally trained nurse, was a true lifesaver to him whenever a severe attack required a shot to stabilize his condition.

Otherwise, my father, a gentleman scholar, was very much loved, supported, and respected by his big family, his students, and the church community where he served as an elder. It was this enormous blessing from all aspects of his life father received that propelled him to walk steadfastly with the Lord to safely sail through the vicissitudes of life. Father viewed his asthma a blessing like Apostle Paul’s” thorn in the flesh” that kept him humble before the Lord.

When every mortal being’s eventual Assyrian army, the horseman of death, finally arrived to take down the sacred Jerusalem within father, he resolutely kept his faith in God’s deliverance. The angel of the Lord came down and swiftly put everything in a standstill – ascending into eternity, father silently breathed out his last breath on earth. I like to think that wisdom gleamed in this broad stroke Byron poem played a part in father’s peaceful departure.

Nat and Natasha studied music together in secondary school before pursuing degrees in Science and Law, respectively, at Cambridge. Despite this, they continued to combine their creative passions, culminating in 1816. Uniting art and science, as Polidori and the Shelleys did in their own lives and literary works, is a key theme that runs throughout the show. Lord Byron’s connection to the University remains a great inspiration, especially as Nat studies at Trinity College. 

The show explores themes of Romanticism, academic pressure, and creative ambition. Byron battles inner turmoil as he attempts to write a masterpiece – the  pressure of his legacy, his fame, and his humanity weighing heavy on his mind. 

The writings of the Romantics play a central role in 1816 and is adapted both into the script and into various songs throughout the musical. An extract from Byron’s poem ‘To Thomas Moore’ is sung as a toast by Byron and Percy Shelley. Claire Clairmont’s ballad is structured as a letter to Byron and is made up of various snippets from her actual writings. The music itself takes inspiration from multiple places, with more typically Classical sounds in the earlier songs, including a strong Mozart and Beethoven influence for the opening. As the tension rises, more Romantic sounds are used, such as the Rachmaninoff-esque, heavy textures in Frankenstein, and rhythms like those of composers such as Liszt, who himself was greatly influenced by Byron’s poetry.

1816 is being performed at the Theatro Technis, London, on the 6th and 7th August 2025 at 9pm, the Lion & Unicorn Theatre, London, from 30th September- 4th October 2025 at 7.30pm, and the Corpus Playroom, Cambridge, from 15th – 8th October 2025 at 7pm. The link below contains tickets and more information about the show:

https://1816musical.com

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, Percy Bysshe Shelley famously concluded his essay, “A Defence of Poetry”. While most people are chiefly interested in reading the works of a poet, I have always been fascinated with the personalities and likenesses of the poets themselves. My most recent artwork is of the poet Shelley, looking into a microscope. I found it intriguing how a person like Shelley, who was very much interested in natural sciences during his Eton days and authored the reasonable essay “The Necessity of Atheism”, decided to give himself entirely to imagination, to poetry. I believe the likenesses and lives of poets somewhat mirror their poetic ideals and aesthetics. There have been some great portraits of Shelley in the past, such as Joseph Severn’s posthumous portrait of Shelley composing Prometheus Unbound. However, this doesn’t change the issue that there are only a handful of portraits of Percy out there. I think that the great poets deserve more love! That was the goal of my latest digital painting: to add a little droplet into the meagre puddle of existing portraits. An earlier digital painting of mine depicts the french poet Arthur Rimbaud on a boat – this is of course an obvious reference to his most famous poem, “The Drunken Boat”. I think that poem nicely describes Mr. Rimbaud’s hectic life.

My other two digital paintings are heavily inspired by the artwork of the great artist-poet William Blake. Never has there existed a man more fit to paint poetic images. An interesting fact about Blake some people may not know of is that he actually created a poem responding to Lord Byron’s “Cain”. Im sure there are people out there more fit to analyze this poem than me, a humble amateur artist. 

My English teacher must have had a tough time trying to inspire a bunch of adolescents in our comprehensive school but he obviously did something right as he sparked an interest in poetry which I have taken forward into my better-late-than-never music “career”.

As a singer-songwriter I try and connect with people using humour and familiarity, typically writing songs about parochial matters such as losing my phone or putting the bins out. But lately I have broadened my horizons including being asked to write a song for a book-launch. Myy latest single was inspired by Lord Byron and was released this month. Living near Cambridge and playing in the area has given a local dimension to the song and I often pass Trinity College on my way to a gig or busking in the market square.

“Lord of Verse” is out on the usual music “platforms” and is a potted life story of the great man. Although it might be seen as an irreverent rock song (and I certainly focus on the more scandalous aspects of his life) I hope there is a good helping of admiration coming through. Of course I could have written a song with as many verses as Childe Harold but I try and discipline myself to write songs less than 3 minutes long. Part of my punk song-writing philosophy but people can always listen again if they want. When I play the song live or do a radio interview I see it as a chance to inspire people to pick up on his work. It has also delighted me to find people who are Byron fans and “get” it.

I think of Byron’s life as a triumph of success in the face of adversity. His tough early childhood, physical disabilty and family history must have been traumatic and I can only guess at the humiliation he must have faced when he did join the “elite” class. His eccentricity and wild behaviour were probably a reaction to this – also a recurring theme in rock music too (think Johhny Rotten, Morrissey, Boy George etc). Despite or because of this he seems to have broken the mould and become an inspiration to others and this continues to this day. Abandoning the norms of sexual repression his love life was probably despised by those who could not free themselves from their societal straight-jackets. Certainly no surprise that on occasions Mick Jagger modelled himself on Byron during his mid sixties hedonistic heyday. Byron was perhaps the height of enlightenment before the coming of the grey Victorian age.

http://www.vincetootalltaylor.co.uk

Tess had encountered the poem through the years, hearing potential for a simple melody to showcase the words.  It is likely that Byron intended the poem to be sung – it featured up front in his collection ‘Hebrew Melodies’.

After circulating an acoustic demo, last September Tess and fellow London based musicians recorded the full band version near Crystal Palace (Perryvale studios, producer/owner Pat Collier), production choices (electric guitar arpeggio, Barrie Cadogan, Harpsichord, Ross Stanley) seeking to evoke imaginings of early 19th Century drawing rooms, with the Romantics rubbing more than shoulders and exchanging radical ideas. With lead vocal changing the subject from ‘she’ to ‘he’ and harmonies in place, the track was completed.

While scoping locations for filming, Tess was lucky to run into local (Treviso) cinematographer, Nicolo Grasso, equally enthusiastic about making the video.  Tess kept an eye open for possible Byrons, approaching a young man in the Venice Biennale, who got cold feet, but mentioned an actor friend who may be interested.  Enter Byron number 1, Francesco, also trained in dance, used to beautiful effect in the video’s outro, after the punk green goggles scenes (said goggles available from all good Venice tourist stalls!).

Tess was arranging for her quick ink sketch of Byron to be printed onto a poster when a second potential Byron walked past.  Tess gave chase, assuring the printers she would be back (she returned – the poster is in the video and thumbnail), and Bamba, Byron number 2, was found.

In 90 degree heat Tess, Nicolo, assistant Alessandra and the two Byrons shot the video over two days, one day for each Byron, Tess’ singing shots squeezed into day 2.  Tess and Nicolo completed the edit a week or so later.

Tess likes to think Byron would have appreciated the song and video, with his love for song and his sense of image, playfulness and humour.  As a figure who had the courage of his convictions, walking the walk, Tess has also admired him through the noise of his personal assignations to his work ethic, prolific writing talent and poetic gift.  A gift which, at its best, moves and reframes, communing on a genuine and relatable level with the reader.  His consistent championing of self-determination, collective action, the arts and culture set an example ever more relevant today.  Onward in beauty he continues to walk, in this video, with a pop spring in his step…

Watch the Video here: He Walks In Beauty.

22nd July 2021

From catfights and arson to high society parties and attempted murder, this event offers an intimate insight into Byron’s Italian love life, told in his own words and introduced by Dr Emily Paterson Morgan. Sopranos Amanda Pitt and Helen Semple bring these romantic liaisons and affairs to life in songs, arias as a female response to Byron’s words. ….

Click here to watch: https://youtu.be/5KblB86QDM0?t=526

Konstantina Tortomani, PhD Candidate, Department of History and Ethnology DUTH

(This blog post is based on a paper given at the 2021 International Byron Conference, which won the Byron Society Student Paper Award).

This paper which constitutes a small part of my PhD thesis, explores the first vampire Gothic novel, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale (1819)[1] as a form of a response regarding the image of Greece in Byron’s early works, and especially in “The Giaour” (1813) and “Fragment of a Novel” (1819). Additionally, it will be attempted to trace the image of Greece and the Greeks in early nineteenth-century British travel literature in order to place both authors’ rhetoric about Greece in perspective. More specifically the general consensus was that the modern Greeks were the ‘unworthy’ and degraded descendants of their glorious ancestors. Additionally, Greece was depicted as a veritable ruin; devastated under oppressive Ottoman rule and ‘buried’ under the superstitious beliefs of the Orthodox clergy: the great civilization of the past was decaying and been replaced by modern barbarism. In this light, it will be shown that Byron’s image of Greece was much closer to the contemporary views of the British travelers; albeit sympathetic to the enslaved Greeks, he presents them in a heavily Orientalized light. On the contrary Polidori’s image of modern Greece seems to be, at least on the surface, diametrically opposite. Nonetheless, in his effort to defend the modern Greeks and condemn Byron’s rhetoric as imperialist, he presents them in an equally limiting way as ‘noble savages’.

1. Live your Myth in Greece: early nineteenth century British travelers and the image of Greece

‘The Greeks are, for the most part, indolent and profligate, vain, obsequious, ostentatious, poor and dirty,’ is how Edward D. Clarke chose to best describe the Greeks in his travelogue, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa which was first published in 1813. Clarke embarked on a four-year tour of Europe, Asia and Africa in 1799, beginning his journey in Scandinavia, which was followed by Russia and Turkey, then Greece and ending in the Holy Land and Egypt.[2]  As the above excerpt reveals, Clarke was not at all impressed by the state of modern Greece or its inhabitants.

As Xanthippi Kotzageorgi points out, during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, wealthy British men endeavored to travel in the Levant in search of both Oriental exoticism and traces of the ancient glory of classical Greece. Kotzageorgi summarizes that British travelers’ opinions on Greece were based on three stereotypes; Greece as an Oriental territory, Greece as the (debased) descendant of the illustrious antiquity – mostly classical Athens – and Greece as a potential colony. She asserts that the impressions of the British travelers on Greece were the product of reinforcing prior perceptions and prejudices rather than authentic and objective observations.[3]

In the context of this paper, I shall be focusing mostly on the second category of stereotypes, that of the portrayal of the modern Greeks as the debased and unworthy descendants of the glorious classical past.

One of the first and the most influential travelogues, providing a sort of basis for the other authors, was that of John Hobhouse, Byron’s companion in his tour of Greece in 1809-10. Hobhouse published his detailed account of the journey in 1817 in two volumes, entitled A Journey through Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia. Hobhouse made a similar comment on the modern Greeks’ affinity for wealth and pageantry, while maintaining that wealth was not revered by the ancient Greeks.^[4] Throughout his narrative, he drew parallels between the ancient and modern Greeks, usually finding the latter lacking. In his view, Greek antiquity signified civilization, while the modern reality represented barbarism; at the same time though, he quoted a French resident who lived in Athens to describe the Athenians: ‘believe me … they are the same canaille as they were in the days of Miltiades’.^[5]

Clarke, whom I mentioned earlier, more or less, presented a similar picture of modern Greece and the Greeks, though he considered some aspects of their culture as survivals from the ancient times. For instance, he believed that their dances contained some ancient features, while superstitions like wearing rings as spells, spitting into bosoms and the use of charms or potions for fertility were, among others, the same as in antiquity. Additionally, while traveling through ancient Orchomenos, in modern-day Livadia, he was surprised to realize that some stones that were considered sacred in ancient times, as recorded by Pausanias, were still preserved and venerated by the modern inhabitants.^[6]

However the rest of the superstitions of the modern Greeks, and especially those that were identified by the British travelers as originating in the Byzantine Empire and Orthodoxy, were extremely criticized and condemned as barbaric. This superstitious nature, alongside the oriental influence of the Turks, was the main justification for the degradation of the modern Greeks according to the travelers. For instance, Hobhouse was adamant in decrying all the Orthodox practices that he encountered and Orthodoxy itself; in one instance he referred to the Orthodox religion as a ‘degrading superstition’ that was not worthy of the term religion.^[7]

Thus, one could point out that, despite the fact that the modern Greeks are described as extremely superstitious, the practices that rescind the habits of the ancient Greeks are viewed with sympathy and benevolence, while those that stem from the Greek Church are considered heathen and barbaric. This is rather contradictory, especially as in the case of charms, where in one instance Clarke rejoiced at encountering the same protective charms as in antiquity, like rings with magical incantations or the rituals around sneezing and childbirth (9) but laughed at the concept of the protective qualities of the icons of the saints and the meticulous prayers of the monks (270). This shows that perhaps the modern Greeks were judged with double standards; anything that connected the modern traditions to the ancient ones, which was approved by the British taste, was acceptable; other influences that had shaped modern Greece were rejected as Asiatic.

The next part of this paper discusses how these preconceptions about modern Greece were reflected in the works of Byron and Polidori.

1. Sad relic versus the noble savage: The image of Greece in The Giaour and in The Vampyre

Dr. John William Polidori (1795-1821) embarked on a journey with Geneva and Italy as its final destinations in April 1816 as Lord Byron’s personal physician. He was chosen to become Byron’s companion on account of his proficiency in languages.^[8]  His relationship with his employer was quite tumultuous; however, this volatile cohabitation ended in the late summer of 1816, when Byron released Polidori of his duties.^[9]

The main event that put Polidori on the path of writing The Vampyre was the literary competition at the Villa Diodati, is a rather famous one in literary history, mostly because another Gothic masterpiece was inspired by them, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.[10] Polidori’s novel, draws extensively from his experiences with Byron during the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati, as attested by the transference of Polidori’s relationship with Byron into the story and the relationship between Aubrey, Polidori’s main narrator and protagonist in the story, with Lord Ruthven, Byron’s alter ego.[11] In fact, many similarities can be observed between the narrative and reality: the initial idolization of Ruthven by Aubrey starts to disintegrate by the gradual unraveling of the former’s character.[12]

However, Byron’s influence in the story is not limited to the creation of the villainous vampire Ruthven. As Polidori admitted himself in his letter to the Morning Chronicle, on the 1^st of May 1819 he was inspired by Byron’s unfinished fragment, written for the competition at the Villa Diodati.^[13] In this tale, there are two main protagonists: an unnamed narrator and Augustus Darvell, a rich and worldly fellow. The two meet at a social gathering and develop a friendship. After a tour of southern Europe, Darvell becomes sick somewhere near Smyrna, which forces the travelers to stop in a Turkish cemetery. Darvell confesses that he is about to die and pleads with the narrator to perform some sort of ritual and swear that, when he returns back home, he would not tell anyone about Darvell’s death.^[14]

Indeed, the similarities between Byron’s fragment and Polidori’s tale are undeniable in the main plot of The Vampyre; a cosmopolitan older man embarks on a grand tour with a young idealist who idolizes him, the former dies in the Ottoman Empire, after extracting an oath of secrecy. What is also undeniable is the Byronic influence in choosing a Greek setting for the novel.

Matthew Gibson discusses what he considers are the reasons behind the placement of the plot in Greece in his book Dracula and the Eastern Question. More specifically, initially, he mentions that research so far has accepted the Greek location as proof of Byron’s influence on Polidori. However, he seems to believe that Polidori portrayed Byron as a vampire figure in order to argue against philhellenism, by expressing the view that the Greeks do not need the help of a person like Byron, who preyed on them instead of saving them.[15]

Another scholar who has attempted to explain the Greek setting of the novel is Ken Gelder in Reading the Vampire. Gelder claims that the tale deals with the reality of Greece in a way which Byron himself did not, since while declaiming its degeneracy, Byron did not attempt to draw realistic portrayals of contemporary Greek society. He deems that Polidori’s tale differs from Byron’s narratives because he couches the myth of the vampire very much in terms of the superstitions of the country folk of Greece. Also, he considers that Polidori places the vampire in contemporary Greece as a reflection of the rise of interest in folklore during the nineteenth century.^[16]

While I agree that Polidori obviously borrows Byron’s imagery, I would argue that he manages to create an alternate view of Greece, perhaps affected by his own Italian heritage and negative view of imperialism.^[17] In the novel both Italy and Greece are represented as Ruthven’s/Byron’s ‘playground’, where his social position allows him to treat the locals according to his whims. Indeed, Polidori’s view of the grand tour in general is rather revealing as far as this matter is concerned:

it was time for him [Aubrey] to perform the tour, which for many generations has been thought necessary to enable the young to take some rapid steps in the career of vice, towards putting themselves upon an equality with the aged … whenever scandalous intrigues are mentioned as the subjects of pleasantry or of praise.[18]

A similar conclusion could be reached based on Ruthven’s perpetual self-indulgence; in every country he visits, he takes advantage of the local population. In Rome, he apparently seduces and then kills an innocent young lady he was involved with, and consequently, ruins the fortune of her family,^[19] and in Athens, he attacks and slaughters an innocent young girl Ianthe.^[20] Not even his homeland manages to escape Ruthven’s malice, as in London, he kills Aubrey’s sister on their wedding night. ^[21] Thus, Polidori culminates the image of Byron and the Byronic hero as a malicious monster that threatens to take advantage of, and then destroy, the population of every place he visits, incapable of seeing beyond the selfish gratification of his vices.

However, I would argue that Polidori’s image of Greece was mostly a reaction against Byron’s depiction of it, rather than an attempt at its realistic portrayal. This can be corroborated by the fact that Polidori had never in fact been to Greece, nor is there any evidence that he was even interested in the subject.

Byron was inspired to write about the East in general, and Greece in particular, after his grand tour of 1809-1811.^[22] The image of abandonment and ruin which correlates to the portrayal of Greece in the majority of early nineteenth-century travel accounts is witnessed in the second canto of the poem (“Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth!”). A similar symbolism is traced in ‘The Giaour’.[23] According to Nigel Leask, the image of Greece is eminent in ‘The Giaour’, and the dead Leila is  symbol for Greece.^[24] Indeed, in the poem Byron presented Greece dead, just like Leila:

Such is the aspect of this shore’

Tis Greece but living Greece no more!

So coldly sweet so deadly fair,

We start for soul is wanting there …(CPW III, 43; Il. 103-107)

As we have seen from the above-mentioned excerpts, for Byron Greece is dead and what remains is a ‘sad relic’. Alexander Grammatikos argues against the supposition that Byron considered modern Greeks as degraded descendants of the ancient Greeks. More specifically, Grammatikos, bases his theory on Byron’s Appendix and Note III in Childe Harold and on the fact that Byron actively defended modern Greek (Romaic) literature against an Edinburgh Review article^[25] that dismissed it. Furthermore, he points out Byron’s undertaking of translating modern Greek literature into English, such as the Greek version of La Marseillaise (Δεύται παίδες των Ελλήνων), in the Appendix of Childe Harold.^[26] Nonetheless, one could not fail to notice that these representatives of the Hellenic Enlightenment movement, such as Korais and Feraios,^[27] belonged to the higher social classes; for the most part they lived in European capitals (for example, Feraios lived in Bucharest and Vienna and Korais in Paris), and they had been educated in European universities. On the contrary the level of the education of the peasants of rural Greece was rather low, if not non-existent.^[28] As a result, one could suggest that the discrepancy in the image of modern Greeks in Byron’s work (the cantos of Childe Harold versus the Appendix and Index III) could be attributed to the aforementioned reasons.

On the other hand, Polidori’s The Vampyre presents a very interesting case study by offering an image of Greece that is diametrically opposite to Byron’s. While Byron had attempted to defend modern Greek scholars, who belonged to the well-educated upper class, Polidori seems to be defending the peasants by presenting an idealized version of their lives. Polidori goes even further by intentionally contrasting his image of the modern Greeks as peaceful and content in their simplicity of life to that of the prevailing picture of them in Byron’s early works, that of the poor and wretched slaves of the Ottomans.

At this point I would like to draw attention to Ianthe as a symbol for modern Greece, especially, when contrasted to Leila in Byron’s ‘The Giaour’. In fact, I believe that the name Ianthe was used deliberately by Polidori, as Byron begins Childe Harold with a dedication ‘to Ianthe’. Polidori, like Byron, laments the state of Greece at first.[29]Nonetheless, Ianthe, a Greek peasant girl from Athens, steals away his attention, with her innocence and beauty. Furthermore, Polidori seemed to be highly aware of Leila’s description, and is deliberately contrasting Ianthe to her, by using the same symbolisms to describe her, but with staggering differences. When it comes to the description of Leila by Byron, she is depicted as a woman of unparalleled beauty while alive:

Her eye’s dark charm ‘twere vain to tell,

But gaze on that of the Gazelle,

It will assist thy fancy well

As large, as languishingly dark,

But Soul beam’d forth in every spark

That darted from beneath the lid,

Bright as the jewel of Giamschid

Additionally, Leila is described as a ‘Kashmeer butterfly’ and ‘a lovely toy so fiercely sought’.^[30] However, when the story is narrated she is already dead; as a result, she does not have a real presence or voice in the poem:

Which saith, that woman is but dust,

A soulless toy for tyrant’s lust?

Also, Byron compared Leila to a gazelle, and Polidori utilizes the same parallelism, but with an important difference:

As she danced upon the plain, or tripped along the mountain’s side, one would have thought the gazelle a poor type of her beauties, for who would have exchanged her eye, apparently, the eye of animated nature, for that sleepy luxurious look of the animal suited but to the taste of an epicure.^[31]

Furthermore, while Leila was ‘a soulless toy for tyrant’s lust’, Ianthe was beaming with life and spirit as ‘she might have formed the model for a painter wishing to portray on canvass the promised hope of the faithful in Mahomet’s paradise, save that her eyes spoke too much mind for anyone to think she could belong to those who had no souls’.^[32]

In the end, while Leila dies as a victim of her Turkish master, Ianthe falls victim to the vampire, who was none other than Byron’s alter ego, Ruthven. What is more, it is rather interesting that Leila is described as a woman suffering primarily from the consequences of being enslaved to a Turkish master, whereas Ianthe is the victim of a British nobleman. I argue that through this symbolism, Polidori intends to criticize Byron’s attitude towards Greece. This censure could alternatively be an attempt to criticize colonialism too in that manner, by depicting an English nobleman as a villain. However, if in fact Polidori did intend to vilify the British upper classes because of their biased views towards different civilizations, he himself does not manage to avoid falling victim to his own prejudices.

It is rather clear that Ianthe, and her family, match the description of ‘the noble savage’. The noble savage, according to eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is an individual living in a ‘pure state of nature’ – gentle, wise, uncorrupted by the vices of civilization.^[33]According to Ellingson, the European identity was constructed in a tripartite model of contrasting cultures, the ‘European’, the ‘Oriental’ and the ‘Savage’. However, he stresses that the limits between these three distinctions were problematic, since it was not easy to discern ‘where one ended and where the other began’.^[34] Thus, not surprisingly, in Polidori’s narrative the image of the ‘Oriental’ takes up characteristics that match the profile of the ‘noble savage’:

It was innocence, youth and beauty, unaffected by crowded drawing rooms and stifling balls. … she would then describe to him the circling dance, upon the open plain, would paint to him in all the glowing colors of youthful memory, the marriage pomp she remembered viewing in her infancy; and then, turning to subjects that evidently made a greater impression upon her mind would tell him all the supernatural tales of her nurse.^[35]

From the excerpt above, it is rather obvious that Ianthe is described as a ‘noble savage’: she is a pure, innocent person, living in harmony with nature, but on the other hand she is infantile, superstitious and naive. Furthermore, Aubrey not only spots, but also mocks the superstitious character of her family, and therefore her people in general, especially regarding their belief in vampyres.^[36]Also, despite the fact that Aubrey is so in love with Ianthe that he considers marrying her, he still underlines their differences in terms of culture, education and overall her inferiority in contrast to the ‘civilized’ English society; so much so that he finds the idea of marrying her ludicrous.^[37]

What is more, both authors seem to utilize the same gendered stereotypes: the symbol for the Orient is a beautiful woman (Leila and Ianthe), facing a threat by a man (Hassan and Ruthven), who ends up killing her; then, a (western) man, distraught over her death wants to avenge her (the Giaour and Aubrey) by killing or exposing the murderer. This kind of plot brings to mind Gayatri Spivak’s views on the lack of voice on the part of Indian women under the British Empire, as far as the British abolition of widow sacrifice (sati) is concerned. Spivak contends that in this debate between British and Indian men, the party who is the most affected by this custom, the Indian woman, remains unheard. Thus, the postcolonial woman, caught between the dipoles, imperialism and patriarchy, modernization and tradition, is forced to disappear in the margins, unable not only to decide for herself, but even to be heard.^[38]

Similarly, in Leila’s and Ianthe’s cases, the reader never gets to hear them speak for themselves. The only information about them is given to us indirectly, through the view of ‘western’ men. The only difference between ‘The Giaour’ and The Vampyre is that in the former Leila was killed by a ‘brown’ man, while in the latter Ianthe died in the hands of a ‘western’ fiend.

Additionally, the Giaour claimed that he had possessed Leila like Hassan did, thus exhibiting an equally “oppressing” behavior:

Tis true, I could not whine or sigh,

I knew but to obtain or die.

I die – but first I have possest. (1112-14)

However, the one who actually dies as a result of this ‘possession’ is Leila. As a result, the Giaour is either unaware or indifferent to the consequences that Leila would have to face as an outcome of their liaison. In parallel, in The Vampyre Aubrey makes plans about his future with Ianthe, since he seems to be slowly convincing himself that due to the intensity of his feelings he should marry her. Then, he admits that ‘Ianthe was unconscious of his love’, which leads the reader to wonder how Aubrey could possibly contemplate marriage, without knowing if Ianthe would be willing to accept such a proposal, or even returns his affection.^[39]

To conclude, it is my contention that Polidori wrote The Vampyre as a commentary on Byron and his works on Greece. By indirectly contrasting Ianthe to Leila, Polidori attempted to oppose the poet, by showing a different image of Greece that instead of being a ruin, as presented by Byron, is a place full of life. Nonetheless, in his attempt to present Greece in a different way than Byron, he constructed an image just as limiting; while Byron was influenced by ancient Greece in his view of the modern one, Polidori seems to be equally driven by the contemporary British (and European) notions of how wayward, superstitious and simplistic the modern Greeks were. As a result, both images of modern Greece were equally limiting and presented out of their sociopolitical context of Greece.

Nevertheless, this view of The Vampyre as a condemnation of Byron’s uncontrollable debauchery matches partially Ken Gelder’s theory that The Vampyre was written as a social critique over the higher, aristocratic class that Byron was a member of. To be more specific, Gelder suggests that the Byronic vampire is employed as a symbol for the upper-class cosmopolitans who, like a vampire, drain the life out of the places they visit, by victimizing the lower classes wherever they go.^[40] This idea has its merits, since one could perhaps suggest that Polidori, who aspired to be a writer but was forced to work as a doctor, resented Byron’s ability to do whatever he desired without facing any consequences. It could be this defiance of limits that was a characteristic of the aristocratic class in which Byron belonged that played a part in his vilification by Polidori.

Finally, I would conclude that, since Polidori viewed the grand tour as a rite of passage into adulthood through vice, it could be argued that the vampiric characteristics attributed to Byron are an additional commentary of his Orientalist practices: a British aristocrat is exhibiting an ‘oriental’ disease. The same knowledge that was used to designate the low cultural level of a group of people was now being attributed to the British lord that preyed on them and which he continued to spread back in London as well. This suggests that Polidori’s discourse against Byron was primarily based on class politics by vilifying the aristocracy and secondarily as a rhetoric against Byron’s Orientalism of the Greek peasants. However, ultimately, Polidori’s own image of the Greek peasants, that of the ‘noble savage’, ended up being equally Orientalist, and like Leila and Ianthe the Greeks peasants remain unheard.

[1] The publication story of this novel is rather interesting in itself, as initially and erroneously so, it was credited as a work written by Lord Byron. J. W. Polidori , ‘The Vampyre’, in John Polidori The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, R. Morrison and C. Baldick (eds), 1997, New York, Oxford University Press, p. vii-viii.

[2] E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa: Part First Russia, Tatary and Turley, vol. 1, London, Printed for T. Cadell and W, Davies, 1810, pp. i-iii.

[3] X. Kotzageorgi, ‘British Travelers in the Early Nineteenth Century on Greece and the Greeks’, in Balkan Studies, vol. 3, no 2, 1992, pp. 209-211.

[4] J. C. Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania and other Provinces of Turkey in Europe and Asia to Constantinople during the Years 1809 and 1810, vol. 1, Philadelphia, Published by M. Carey and Son, 1817, pp. 26-7.

[5] Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, vol. 1, pp. 243, 249.

[6] Clarke, Travels in Various Countries, pp. 9-11, 216.

[7] Hobhouse, A Journey through Albania, vol. 1, p. 130.

[8] A. McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, New York, Pegasus Books LLC, 2014, pp. 15-18.

[9] Polidori , The Vampyre, p. i.

[10] McConnel Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, pp. 145-146; Rossetti, The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, pp. 125-126.

[11] Polidori embarked on the journey to the Continent with Byron, against his father’s wishes, much like Aubrey.^[11] This is confirmed by Rosetti, Polidori’s nephew, in the introduction to his edited diary: ‘Polidori’s father had foreseen, in the Byronic scheme, disappointment as only too likely, and he opposed the project, without success.’^[11]  Despite such warnings, Polidori seemed to be quite taken with his employer, and as he himself aspired to a literary career, he was eager to share his writing, unfortunately, with dismal results. According to Polidori’s diary, when he gave a play of his to Byron, John Hobhouse  and Scrope Davies,  they openly mocked it, which he took quite badly.^[11] This initial episode set the tone for the entire summer; after a series of episodes that even led to a suicide attempt on Polidori’s behalf, Byron decided to fire Polidori the following September.^[11]

[12] Ibid, p. 7.

[13] J. W. Polidori, The Morning Chronicle, 01/05/1819, p. 3, available from the British Newspaper Archive (accessed on 09/11/2018).

[14] G. G. Byron, ‘A Fragment’, in Mazeppa, London, John Murray, 1819.

[15] M. Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the 19^th Century Near East, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 15-16.

[16] Gelder, Reading the Vampire, pp. 35-38.

[17] Polidori considered himself Anglo-Italian and was an ardent supporter of the Italian cause for liberation. McConnel Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre, pp. 21, 35-39.

[18] Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 5.

[19] Ibid, p. 16.

[20] Ibid., pp. 11-12.

[21] Ibid,, p. 23.

[22] P. Stock, The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 19.

[23] ‘The Giaour’ is the first of the Turkish Tales. The plot is set in Ottoman-ruled Morea in the late eighteenth century and the main storyline revolved around the antagonism between the Giaour, a Christian from Venice and Hassan, a Turkish lord. The reason for this rivalry was Leila, a slave of Hassan’s, who developed an affair with the Giaour. Hassan found out about Leila’s adultery and he condemned her to death by the customary manner of being put into a sewn sack and be thrown in the sea. Then, the Giaour avenged her death by ambushing Hassan and killing him in combat. Afterwards the Giaour retired in a monastery, tortured by the memories of his actions. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095851147

[24] N. Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 33.

[25] In the journal in question, the writer of the essay presented a review of Korai’s translation of Strabo’s Geography. In this review he suggests that Modern Greek literature, as a corrupted form of Greek, has no merit of its own, but is better used as a tool in better understanding the ancient, pure, Greek language. (pp. 237-38)

[26] A. Grammatikos, “‘Let Us Look At Them As They Are’: Lord Byron and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and Print Culture”, in European Romantic Review, vol. 27, No 2, 2016, pp. 234, 237, 241.

[27] Byron wrongly attributed the Greek version of La Marseillaise to Rigas Feraios, an important political writer, and prominent scholar of the Hellenic Enlightenment. A. Vakalopoulos, Modern Greek History, Thessaloniki, Ekdoseis Vanias, 2005p. 241).

[28] Vakalopoulos, Modern Greek History, pp. 81, 141, 144.

[29] and soon occupied himself in tracing the faded records of ancient glory upon monuments that apparently, ashamed of chronicling the deeds of freemen only before slaves, had hidden themselves beneath the sheltering soil or many colored lichen. (Polidori. The Vampyre, p. 8.)

[30] P. J. Kitson, Byron and post-colonial criticism: the eastern tales, in Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies, (ed.) Stabler J., New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 118-119.

[31] Polidori, The Vampyre, pp. 8-9.

[32] Ibid., p. 9.

[33] A. Aleiss, ‘Le Bon Sauvage: Dances with Wolves and the Romantic Tradition’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1991, p. 91.

[34] Ibid., pp. 128-129.

[35] Polidori, ‘The Vampyre’, p. 10.

[36] and often, as she told him the tale of the living vampire … his blood would run cold, whilst he attempted to laugh her out of such idle and horrible fantasies; but Ianthe cited to him the names of old men who had at last detected one living among themselves … when they [Ianthe’s parents] all at once begged of him not to return at night … They described it as the resort of vampyres in their nocturnal orgies, and denounced the most heavy evils impending upon him who dared to cross their path. Aubrey made light of their representations, and tried to laugh them out of the idea. Ibid, p. 10.

[37] Ibid, p. 10.

[38] G. C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture London, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 297, 307.

[39] Polidori, The Vampyre, p. 10

[40] Gelder, Reading the Vampire, pp. 29-34

6th April 2022

I had always been mildly interested in her as a scholar but, also, so influenced by Byron’s offhand comment in a letter about Claire as “that odd-headed girl”; and Mary Shelley’s thinly-disguised annoyance with her stepsister’s constant presence in her life with Shelley (often tinged with jealousy).  However, as a writer, I came to be fascinated by her as the “almost famous” member of the quartet.  Ironically, Claire outlived all of them (except Edward Trelawny) by many decades and had her much-later “revenge from the grave” when a fragment of her lost memoir was found by historian, Daisy Hay, in a New York public library in 2010.  Hay included it in her book, The Young Romantics, which is where I first read it, causing one of those epiphanies that changed the course of my life and my fiction-writing career.

I knew Claire had been part of the famous literary “haunted summer” in Geneva during 1816 which produced, most notably, Byron’s “Prometheus” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  And even though Claire wrote a novel, The Idiot (lost over time), and penned superbly witty letters, she never achieved the brilliance or celebrity of the rest of the Byron/Shelley circle.  Mostly, she became known for bearing Byron’s illegitimate daughter, Allegra, and being the “third-wheel” in the various Shelley family households in Italy.  And yet, I had always been struck by her portrait, with its slightly exotic look and half-hidden smile.  Who was she, really?

It turns out, quite a complicated and amazing woman in her own right.

Interestingly, Claire’s memoir fragment gave me a new and very negative perspective on the summer of 1816 as “Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England [Byron and Shelley] . . . become monsters.”  Even worse, she adds their time there was a “perfect hell.”  It was a vehement contradiction of everything I had read about that magical interlude—primarily from the other members of the quartet.  Her alternate view seemed intriguing, to say the least.  At that point, I had to learn more about Claire through her words and her perspective, which proved challenging.  As Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley began passing into legend during the nineteenth-century, Claire became more and more obscure, living out her last days in genteel poverty in Florence, Italy.  She was the one “left behind” in almost every way.

Yet she had a voice.

And it connected with me as an author because I was at a crossroads in my career, recovering from a severe back injury, wanting to pursue my fiction as a full-time writer, and trying to find my own voice.  But I didn’t have a clear sense of how I wanted to do it.  Then, I started to dig for information about Claire and found an old edition of her journals from 1968, as well as the decades-old biography and a two-volume edition of her letters.  I delved into Claire’s checkered life and, gradually, the fragments of her existence came together in my thoughts:  the young, reckless woman who initiated an affair with Byron—the great love and torment of her life; and, the older-but-wiser expatriate, living on her delicately ironic memories in Italy.  Yet she could be vehemently bitter with regard to her daughter, Allegra, whose death she never quite accepted.  So, I decided to tell Claire’s story from those two perspectives, youth and old age, and found my new direction:  a genre-bending historical novel.  It felt right and I dipped my toes into the waters of a new world.

I applied for a grant and had the chance to travel to Geneva and Florence to research the book, which turned out to be only the beginning; it expanded into a trilogy.  Like Claire, I took on new travel adventures that constantly inspired me, from experiencing the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Geneva (and seeing the original manuscript with Percy’s notes), to participating in a writers’ conference in the ancient city of Matera, Italy, to visiting steam caves where Caesar once sat in Bagni di Lucca, near Florence.  My husband even learned Italian so we could manage to chat with local experts in their own language . . . and I finally understood why the Romantics chose to make this country their home; it’s a beautiful landscape full of amazingly generous people.  Through all the travels and research, I had the chance to explore Claire’s story, weaving a bit of mystery around her daughter’s death and pushing myself as a writer every step of the way.  Claire’s Last Secret became the book of my heart, then the sequel followed, A Shadowed Fate.  The trilogy comes to an end this year with the final book, Forever Past, which comes out this spring with Severn House.  I loved every minute of it.

When I first read that fragment of Claire’s memoir in 2015 and decided to write her story, it was a step into the unknown.  I don’t think I could have penned this kind of work as a younger writer because it meant understanding the weight of age and the burden of memory; yet, her story led me to a level of awareness about unheard voices:  they are sometimes the most powerful ones.

They can lead to new horizons, new ways of thinking, and new lives.  It certainly did for me.

It was difficult to let go of Claire at the finish of the trilogy, but all journeys come to an end, something she was only too aware of when wrote of her fear during her final days that her life would be “lost in oblivion.”

I don’t think it will.

28 January 2023

Bernard Beatty is proof that one can read Byron for six decades without once being bored, as he says. For someone who has barely started on his lifelong journey with Byron, it is a special pleasure to hold the outcome of a lifetime of close and careful attention, Bernard’s new book Reading Byron, in my hands. Reading Byron had been highly anticipated not just because Bernard is such a richly decorated Byronist, but also because he has cultivated an appreciation for Byron as a deeply serious thinker as well as a poet speaking with a unique voice. Even today, neither of these can be taken for granted. Though Byron did not subscribe to any articular philosophical position, he harboured a sustained interest in profound metaphysical questions, an aspect that Reading Byron foregrounds against Byron’s (equally important) jovially playful and skeptical side, which we tend to find privileged today. And reading, for Bernard, is also always a species of listening, an attunement to the ways in which Byron speaks to us today. Above all, the book’s message is that Byron is—still—worth opening our eyes and ears to.

Robin, Lord Byron (left) in conversation with Bernard Beatty at the Art Workers Guild

Virginia Woolf supposed Don Juan to have been ‘the most readable poem of its length ever written’; while this is owing in part to the malleable nature of this particular verse, as she observes, Byron’s general readability is further indebted to him speaking a language intimately familiar to many of us. Talking to Gavin Hopps, Bernard stresses that Byron is ‘immersed’ in a ‘conversational idiom’ (p. 224). It is only fitting, then, that the book preview in November (prior to its official launch by Liverpool University Press in January) marked an evening of both reading and conversation.

The event, hosted by the Byron Society at the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury, London, nicely bookended a year of talks on Byron and adjacent figures. For this special occasion, Robin, Lord Byron (President of the Byron Society), sat down with Bernard to discuss the genesis of the book, its aims, and how each age develops its own reading of Byron’s poetry. Alongside important influences he cites, like G. Wilson Knight or Jerome McGann, Bernard has left a mark on the way we read Byron today in numerous books and articles. It was David Woodhouse, the editor of Reading Byron, who, during a long layover at Kyiv airport, suggested that Bernard ought to collect some of these articles in a book. Out of this conversation there evolved a more focussed project, one that seeks to synthesise Byron’s poetry, life, and politics by giving primacy to reading him as a poet, above all (whereas some existing biographies take on the life almost independently of the poetry). This is because Byron’s poetry is more than the marker of a particular stage in his personal development; it is written from experience but, most importantly, it opens up a space of experience for the reader, ‘Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate / Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate’ (Childe Harold IV, 158). Byron enlarges our experience. He gives us what was once commonly understood to be the purpose of poetry, especially long poetry, says Bernard: an aesthetic and cultural form that seeks not just to represent the world in detail but simultaneously show which of our concerns that world impinges on.

Watch Video 1.

A poem such as Don Juan showcases the myriad forms of human experience in its wide-ranging survey of ‘life itself’, but a lot of the aforementioned impingements lead us into more difficult terrain. Byron at his most Byronic is dark and mysterious, a side which was familiar to the Victorians but has been side-lined since, the book argues. To give a flavour of this side of Byron, and indeed, to highlight the books main concern—that Byron ought to be read—the conversation was followed by a rendition of his poetry. Bernard and Christine Kenyon-Jones (King’s College London) lent their voices to different moods and characters across Byron’s oeuvre. There are hues to Byron’s darkness, and the pieces and excerpts ranged across a Byronic insistence on the primacy of the will to the trepidations of unrequited passion; all spoke, however, to a common experience, an experience accessible to everyone but most dramatically manifest in those Byronic heroes who find themselves most trapped in the vice between intensely feeling their own situation and experience, and yet not quite knowing its full scope. In reading Byron, and indeed in Reading Byron, we find the human heart ‘unmasked’, both ‘half-aware and wholly aware’ (p. 54).

Watch Video 2.

The commonality of experience which Bernard highlighted found ample resonance with the audience, to whom the floor was subsequently opened for questions. The resulting ‘conference’, as Kenneth Robbie (Chairman of the Byron Society) quoted Bacon, underlined the book’s main point, namely the fact that Byron’s poetry continues to inspire thoughtful dialogue. There is something reassuring in the publication of a book like Reading Byron, in that the questions raised in its pages and in the responses show very clearly that the conversation about, and with, Byron is ongoing.

Watch Video 3.

All of the videos, alongside more information about the book and its author, are available on a dedicated website, https://www.readingbyronbernardbeatty.com/. The book can be found on the pages of Liverpool University Press and in bookstores.

(Based on a paper given at the 2019 International Student Conference in Messolonghi,  for which Kaiwen received a Byron Society Grant).

Lord Byron produced Cain when “a wave of blasphemy prosecutions [had] swept through England” (Schock: 86). As a controversial response to such a crisis, Byron dramatically revised the myth of Cain and shaped the first human murderer as a rebellious hero pursuing knowledge and the truth of life with great revolutionary passion against rigid religious control on free thoughts. After Cain had been published, Walter Scott thought it made Byron “certainly matched Milton on his own ground” (Scott: 256). For the Romanticists, Byron’s Cain was like Milton’s Satan because they both evoke revolutionary passion and share similar features. In Paradise Lost, the villain figure Satan’s image is viewed to be heroic in the first two books of the epic because of Milton’s seemingly glamorous description. Also, because Paradise Lost was written after the English Civil War, considering that Milton was a radical puritan, it was believed that he threw his unfulfilled revolutionary passion into the rebelling figure Satan. Under this circumstance, when being accused of blasphemy and profanity and severely suppressed, Byron used to shelter himself behind his devout predecessor Milton. He said, “If Cain blasphemous, Paradise Lost is blasphemous.” (Byron: 201) Since Milton’s reputation as a biblical poet had been confirmed (Schock: 27), this excuse was more like a satire indicating the authority’s being self-deceived to suppress political reading of anti-Christian works, considering the wide acknowledgement of Milton’s “revolutionary thinking” among the radicals of the time. However, Paradise Lost actually cannot be blasphemous. For those who would like to insist on Satan’s God-like glamorous figure, Milton relentlessly accuses Satan even in the first two books for his rebellion:

… with ambitious aim

Against the throne and monarchy of God

Raised impious war in heaven and battle proud

With vain attempt. (Milton: Ⅰ. 41-44)

The words “ambitious aim” and “vain attempt” just indicates Satan’s doomed failure “With hatefulest disrelish writhed their jaws/ With soot and cinders filled” (Milton: X. 569-570). The failing result emphasises the rebellion is a mistake with vanity, and that the Christian values are glorious and undefeated. Thus, in Paradise Lost, the “right” way for humans is to be tamed for redemption. The essence of Milton’s Satan is to strengthen Christian values and restraints. Nonetheless, the overreading of Milton’s Satan indicates people’s appeal for a change of the rigid conventions in portraying this kind of antichrists. The arguments he arouses provides, maybe not intentionally, a perfect womb for the breakthrough of the anti-Christian figure in Cain.

Pietro Novelli, Cain Killing Abel, The National Library of Scotland

The play starts when Cain refuses to pray with his family led by the parents Adam and Eve to show gratitude to God. Cain does so for he feels that he is destined to die so he does not owe anything to God. The only way of avoiding death seems to be the fruit on the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. However, his parents plucked the fruit from the tree of knowledge and were expelled from the Eden by God for their violation of God’s order. Cain cannot agree to be judged as sinful for his parents’ eating the Forbidden Fruit, because life and knowledge are both good. To him, it is a pity that his parents have had the knowledge but are destined to die, and a shame that they feel so guilty to have knowledge that they indulge themselves in being controlled and tamed for the so-called redemption. Cain’s untamed behaviour arouses his parents’, especially Eve’s anxiety and anger, and their irritation is even amplified by his self-awakening towards a pursuit of knowledge and liberated life. At this time, a spirit Lucifer comes up and claims himself as immortal. He leads Cain to appreciate the Abyss of Space, from which Cain gets a voyage revealing both clear and vague truth of the universe. After he witnesses the grandeur of the world, Cain breaks with the restricted and manipulated life. The action he finally takes is to kill the symbol of blind religious belief, Abel, who is also his younger brother. The play ends with Cain’s self-redemption by endeavouring to defeat the destiny written in blood through positive and active human acts.

***

Cain’s rebellion composes a successful process of humanistic self-awakening, and his awakening is not accomplished suddenly. It germinates in his suspicion of the justice of God, where Cain encounters the contradiction between his own thinking and God’s judgement on his family’s sin and being expelled from the Eden.

Cain. Why not?

The snake spoke truth; it was the tree of Knowledge;

It was the Tree of Life; knowledge is good,

And Life is good; and how can both be evil? (I. I. 35-38)

Here, Cain questions why pursuing Knowledge and Life according to the truth, even though told by the serpent, is evil. It leads to the question that whether it is evil for human beings to be wise and have a longer life even without God’s permission. Before the suspicion is entirely developed, Byron, acutely and ironically, tells what God expects for every man through Eve’s mouth, “Content thee with what is. Had we been so,/ Thou now hadst been contented.” (I. I. 45-46) However, Cain refuses to do so. He starts his awakening to be a rebel against the unreasonable forces in the realm of spirituality over his own rights as a human being. Byron underlines Cain’s unwillingness to be tamed, because a man should not feel satisfied when his own rights are restricted unreasonably.

Then, Lucifer, as “an ironized mouthpiece for free thought” (Schock: 8), appears. To cultivate Cain’s independent thinking against religious control, Byron introduces Lucifer as an attachment, or maybe “a phantasm or drive within Cain himself” (Rajan: 92) which plays a vital role in Cain’s development. With Lucifer, Cain further confirms his pursuit of knowledge and liberated life. The reviewers usually “took Lucifer to be the author’s iconoclastic mouthpiece” (Schock: 78). I agree with Bostetter that “Lucifer’s demonstration… [is] to show that the power of God is both limited and transitory” (Bostetter: 574), which indicates that it is possible to escape from God’s control and that Cain can be more confident in his own insistence. Furthermore, I am further arguing that Lucifer’s demonstration is actually Cain’s own. Lucifer is more like the personification of Cain’s anti-Christian thinking, imagination and self-contradicted thoughts when hesitating in confirming his doubtful self. In this way, there reveals a dramatic and complex connotation of the first murderer. It also indicates human beings are the unity of “good” and “evil”, tameness and rebel, and belief and query. Thus, the awakening of Cain is ultimately the process he uncovers his own pursuit by himself.

Byron’s description of Lucifer’s appearance can indicate Lucifer as part of Cain. The appearance of Lucifer is given in Cain’s soliloquy:

He seems mightier far than them, nor less

Beauteous, and yet not all as beautiful

As he hath been, and might be: Sorrow seems

Half of his immortality. (I. I. 93-96)

Considering Cain here is perplexed in questioning the legitimacy of blind belief in God, the melancholy which Lucifer reveals can come from Cain’s own mind. This projection, leading to a slef-debate, marks that Cain commences thinking about his own life from a more dialectical way. We can expect that Lucifer’s vanishing at the end represents Cain’s combination of his “good” and “evil” thoughts and that he confirms himself in some decision. At present, because Cain is a man who awaits becoming mature, the “immortal” spirit Lucifer shows certain immaturity. He shows his pride through seemingly grand but hollow lines. “Lucifer. Mortal!/ Cain. Spirit, who art thou?/ Lucifer. Master of spirits.” (I. I. 98-100) However, when Cain challenges his strength that “But I will bend to neither”, Lucifer only compromises: “Ne’er the less,/ Thou art my worshipper; not worshipping/ Him makes thee mine the same.” (I. I. 316-320) The weakness blurs Lucifer’s powerful image, but reflects Cain’s floating minds. At the same time, the demonstration of a debate with a powerful immortal just conveys Cain’s undefeated self-esteem, that he believes that he is equal, even to the immortal and maybe to the almighty. Apart from the debate on life, belief or truth, Lucifer brilliantly represents Cain’s imagination of his voyage in the unknown universe:

Cain. Oh thou beautiful

And unimaginable ether! and

Ye multiplying masses of increased

And still-increasing lights! what are ye? what

Is this blue wilderness of interminable

Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen

The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden?

Is your course measured for ye? Or do ye

Sweep on in your unbounded revelry

Through and aёrial universe of endless

Expansion—at which my soul aches to think—

Intoxicated with eternity? (II. I. 98-109)

The ether is far away, but imagination brings Cain in the outer space. Cain realises that a man is infinitely small within the sheer scale of the cosmos. Touched by the splendour of the world, he reflects on the current situation. He feels more dissatisfied with being restricted. He asks the “increasing lights” to express his ambition to learn more about the truth—since the world can be that magnificent, he would never be content to accept that a man’s destiny is manipulated and arranged by God, or to bend one’s head to respect and obey the rigid social conventions like a blind sheep.

Before Cain confirms himself, Byron has borrowed from Milton’s description of Satan, but relentlessly sneers at it through Lucifer’s mouth:

When thousand ages

Have rolled o’er your dead ashes, and your seed’s,

The seed of the then world may thus array

Their earliest fault in fable, and attribute

To me a shape I scorn, as I scorn all

That bows to him. (I. I. 233-238)

This taunt comes down in a continuous line with Cain’s original question on good and evil and can be a support in the falseness of blind belief. Also, it uncovers the non-tameness of the “evil”, cause for those who are not willing to bow the “evil” is actually “good”. By the “scorn”, Byron castigates not only the autocratic “He”, but also those who “bow” blindly. Again, through Lucifer’s mouth, Byron says the deviated words that “But we, who see the truth, must speak it” (I. I. 240), claiming that all the humans should be able to acquire truth freely, and they also can and should freely tell it.

Bauer acknowledges that “Lucifer’s method of subverting Cain makes his speeches often appear as externalizations of Cain’s own thoughts”, but he doubts the notion that “Lucifer is but a projection of Cain” mainly because Lucifer seems to know what Cain does not know (Bauer: 81). It is true that Cain says to Lucifer that “I knew not that, yet thought it” (II. I. 268). However, when Cain says he did not have any idea, apparently he is then gaining certain considerations about all these, which just represents the progress Cain has made to learn and pursue what he wants. More importantly, in the voyage, Cain can only get a vague image of the death. The reason can only be that Lucifer is but a projection and cannot present what Cain even cannot imagine. And, when Cain must wish he can get the truth, he still has to admit Lucifer’s words that “matter cannot/ Comprehend spirit wholly” (II. II. 169-70), which signifies Cain’s empirical belief in those knowledge maybr only in imagination. The “cannot” again reveals that Cain subconsciously avoids resorting to God. However, at present he is actually still hesitant in his way to truth because of his fear and perplexity of death. He even comes up with another self-doubt that maybe “my father’s God did well/ When he prohibited the fatal tree” (II. II. 232-33), because he is afraid that the expense of the truth is overwhelmingly frightening. But, he wants the knowledge after all. He cannot help imploring that “let me perish, so I see them” (II. II. 408). But Lucifer replies:

Lucifer. There

The son of her who snatched the apple spake.

But thou wouldst only perish and not see them;

That sight is for the other state. (II. II. 408-11)

This is not to suggest Lucifer becomes the orthodoxy speaker. It is Cain’s last self-critique on his wishful weakness and compromise. Through Lucifer’s mouth, he reminds himself of his mother’s result. He thus realises that God and his offering is never reliable. He should rebel for himself. All these developing and even floating thoughts finally firm his strong individual—completely independent and humanistic individual. He turns all his dissatisfaction and even residuary panic into a fighting spirit to pursue the truth and knowledge. Also, with Lucifer being the projection, in the long process of self-debate, Byron clarifies that a human being should and can think independently with his own ability to judge and make decisions. And, stimulated by a series of thinking, Cain finally makes the decision to take action to get the freedom that he thinks a man should have. Thus, He will and must split from the imposed life and tackle all the obstacles in his way with his liberated mind. He is now going to be an undaunted fighter who will rip the blindness and darkness.

***

Now there seems to be an unavoidable conflict, but Cain still prepares to offer up a sacrifice to God. Through this arrangement, Byron is to assert  that those who are still believing in tameness as a redemption should realise that only rupture and rebel can bring Cain a future with liberty and truth as a human being—God’s cruelty shown in this sacrifice composes the last evidence in this play to show the legitimacy of rebellion against the rigid rules issued by Christianity. After God only accepts Abel’s inhumanely bleeding sacrifice. Byron highlights Cain’s indignation by stressing that the alter is destroyed in the blood of lambs and kids, Cain shouts to Abel that:

Cain. To cast down yon vile flatterer of the clouds,

The smoky harbinger of thy dull prayers—

Thine alter, with its blood of lambs and kids,

Which fed on milk, to be destroyed in blood. (III. I. 290-293)

Undoubtedly Byron indicates the destruction on man, as sheep symbolise God’s believers in biblical expression. Cain is angry because the sacrifice confirms the cruel control on life. The direct cause of the final murder is that Abel, with his devoutness, still tries to pull Cain back in the tameness. Abel here is not Abel himself now, but a typical “vile flatterer” and a representative of “dull prayers”. He becomes an obstacle which embodies the human tameness and depersonalisation to religious control. Cain shouts “thy God loves blood!” (III. I.309) and kills Abel, which is the ultimate break with the rigid restraint and manipulation.

Cain’s rebel is not of violent destruction without “rights of reason” (Bostetter: 575), but a performance of revolutionary sacrifice. In Cain’s remorse for the murder:

Cain. And he who lieth there was childless! I

Have dried the fountain of a gentle race,

Which might have graced his recent marriage couch,

And might have tempered this stern blood of mine,

Uniting with our children Abel’s Offspring!

O Abel! (III. I. 555-561)

Cain does not regret rebelling here, but he regrets the hurt his rebellion brings to a man and a family. Here, through “unite with our children Abel’s offspring”, Byron develops a remarkable way of obtaining the redemptive power. In this way, human beings keep going forward through multiplication to acquire ethical redemption by themselves without being tamed and manipulated by the almighty. Cain’s greatness lies in his rebellion as well as his belief that human beings can defeat the destiny in blood through human actions. Therefore, Cain’s humanistic thinking gets liberated and promoted, and Cain becomes a humanistic liberator in its real sense.

In conclusion, Byron assails the rigid social conventions oppressing and deceiving humanity through Cain and the attachment Lucifer. Cain is still the killer, but not the guilty killer who was imposed into the evil form. Through Cain’s rebel in blood, Byron asserts that the access of human beings to knowledge and liberty can never be obstructed and that blind belief in idols cannot block man’s pursuit of truth. With undaunted courage and unprecedented success in humanistic liberation, Cain’s presence therefore encourages the emancipation from suppression on the human mind. Thus, Cain: A Mystery represents the deepening of humanistic solicitude in literary works, and also appeals to those who are keen to freedom of the liberation of individuality and humanity from any rigid control.

Works Cited

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Bostetter, Edward E. “Byron and the Politics of Paradise.” PMLA, vol. 75, no. 5, 1960, pp. 571–576. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/460667.

Byron, Gorge Gordon. “Cain: A Mystery.” The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge. New York: Charles Scrbner’s Sons, 1901.

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Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Quinones, Ricardo J. “Byron’s Cain and His Antecedents.” The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 87–108. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7ztzr2.8.

Rajan, Tilottama. “‘Something Not Yet Made Good’: Byron’s Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelly’s Falkner.” Byron and the Politics of Freedom and Terror. Ed. Matthew J. A. Green and Piya Pal-Lapinski. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Schock, Peter A. Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelly, and Byron. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Scott, Walt. “Extract from a Letter of December 17, 1821, to John Murray.” George Gordon, Lord Byron (Bloom’s Classic Critical Views). Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.