The Works of Lord Byron Volume IV Part 53

line 4: Love, which too soon the soft heart apprehends, Seized him for the fair form, the which was there Torn from me, and even yet the mode offends.

line 8: Remits, seized him for me with joy so strong--

line 12: These were the words then uttered-- Since I had first perceived these souls offended, I bowed my visage and so kept it till-- "What think'st thou?" said the bard, whom I (_sic_) And then commenced--"Alas unto such ill--

line 18: Led these? "and then I turned me to them still And spoke, "Francesca, thy sad destinies Have made me sad and tender even to tears, But tell me, in the season of sweet sighs, By what and how Love overcame your fears, So ye might recognize his dim desires?"

Then she to me, "No greater grief appears Than, when the time of happiness expires, To recollect, and this your teacher knows.

But if to find the first root of our-- Thou seek'st with such a sympathy in woes, I will do even as he who weeps and speaks.

We read one day for pleasure, sitting close, Of Launcelot, where forth his pa.s.sion breaks.

We were alone and we suspected nought, But oft our eyes exchanged, and changed our cheeks.

When we read the desiring smile of her Who to be kissed by such true lover sought, He who from me can be divided ne'er All tremulously kissed my trembling mouth.

Accursed the book and he who wrote it were-- That day no further did we read in sooth."

While the one spirit in this manner spoke The other wept, so that, for very ruth, I felt as if my trembling heart had broke, To see the misery which both enthralls: So that I swooned as dying with the stroke,-- And fell down even as a dead body falls.

Another version of the same.

line 21: Have made me sad even until the tears arise--

line 27: In wretchedness, and that your teacher knows.

line 31: We read one day for pleasure-- Of Launcelot, how pa.s.sion shook his frame.

We were alone all unsuspiciously.

But oft our eyes met and our cheeks the same, Pale and discoloured by that reading were; But one part only wholly overcame; When we read the desiring smile of her Who sought the kiss of such devoted lover; He who from me can be divided ne'er Kissed my mouth, trembling to that kiss all over!

Accursed was that book and he who wrote-- That day we did no further page uncover."

While thus--etc.

line 45: I swooned to death with sympathetic thought--

[Another version.]

line 33: We were alone, and we suspected nought.

But oft our meeting eyes made pale our cheeks, Urged by that reading for our ruin wrought; But one point only wholly overcame: When we read the desiring smile which sought By such true lover to be kissed--the same Who from my side can be divided ne'er Kissed my mouth, trembling o'er all his frame!

Accurst the book, etc., etc.

[Another version.]

line 33: We were alone and--etc.

But one point only 'twas our ruin wrought.

When we read the desiring smile of her Who to be kissed of such true lover sought; He who for me, etc., etc.

MARINO FALIERO,

DOGE OF VENICE;

AN HISTORICAL TRAGEDY,

IN FIVE ACTS.

"_Dux_ inquieti turbidus Adria."

Horace, [_Od._ III. c. iii. line 5]

[_Marino Faliero_ was produced for the first time at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, April 25, 1821. Mr. Cooper played "The Doge;" Mrs. W. West, "Angiolina, wife of the Doge." The piece was repeated on April 30, May 1, 2, 3, 4, and 14, 1821.

A revival was attempted at Drury Lane, May 20, 21, 1842, when Macready appeared as "The Doge," and Helen Faucit as "Angiolina" (see _Life_ and _Remains_ of E. L. Blanchard, 1891, i. 346-348).

An adaptation of Byron's play, by W. Bayle Bernard, was produced at Drury Lane, November 2, 1867. It was played till December 17, 1867.

Phelps took the part of "The Doge," and Mrs. Hermann of "Angiolina." In Germany an adaptation by Arthur Fitger was performed nineteen times by the "Meiningers," circ. 1887 (see _Englische Studien_, 1899, xxvii.

146).]

INTRODUCTION TO _MARINO FALIERO_.

Byron had no sooner finished the first draft of _Manfred_ than he began (February 25, 1817) to lay the foundation of another tragedy. Venice was new to him, and, on visiting the Doge's Palace, the veiled s.p.a.ce intended for the portrait of Marin Falier, and the "Giants' Staircase,"

where, as he believed, "he was once crowned and afterwards decapitated,"

had laid hold of his imagination, while the legend of the _Congiura_, "an old man jealous and conspiring against the state of which he was ...

Chief," promised a subject which the "devil himself" might have dramatized _con amore_.

But other interests and ideas claimed his attention, and for more than three years the project slept. At length he slips into the postscript of a letter to Murray, dated, "Ravenna, April 9, 1820" (_Letters_, 1901, v.

7), an intimation that he had begun "a tragedy on the subject of Marino Faliero, the Doge of Venice." The "Imitation of Dante, the Translation of Pulci, the Danticles," etc., were worked off, and, in prospecting for a new vein, a fresh lode of literary ore, he pa.s.sed, by a natural transition, from Italian literature to Italian history, from the romantic and humorous _epopee_ of Pulci and Berni, to the pseudo-cla.s.sic drama of Alfieri and Monti.

Jealousy, as "Monk" Lewis had advised him (August, 1817), was an "exhausted pa.s.sion" in the drama, and to lay the scene in Venice was to provoke comparison with Shakespeare and Otway; but the man himself, the fiery Doge, pa.s.sionate but not jealous, a n.o.ble turned democrat _pro hac vice_, an old man "greatly" finding "quarrel in a straw," afforded a theme historically time-honoured, and yet unappropriated by tragic art.

There was, too, a living interest in the story. For history was repeating itself, and "politics were savage and uncertain." "Mischief was afoot," and the tradition of a conspiracy which failed might find an historic parallel in a conspiracy which would succeed. There was "that brewing in Italy" which might, perhaps, inspire "a people to redress itself," "and with a cry of, 'Up with the Republic!' 'Down with the n.o.bility!' send the Barbarians of all nations back to their own dens!"

(_Letters_, 1901, v. 10, 12, 19.)

In taking the field as a dramatist, Byron sought to win distinction for himself--in the first place by historical accuracy, and, secondly, by artistic regularity--by a stricter attention to the dramatic "unities."

"History is closely followed," he tells Murray, in a letter dated July 17, 1820; and, again, in the Preface (_vide post_, pp. 332-337), which is an expansion of the letter, he gives a list of the authorities which he had consulted, and claims to have "transferred into our language an historical fact worthy of commemoration." More than once in his letters to Murray he reverts to this profession of accuracy, and encloses some additional note, in which he points out and rectifies an occasional deviation from the historical record. In this respect, at any rate, he could contend on more than equal terms "with established writers," that is, with Shakespeare and Otway, and could present to his countrymen an exacter and, so, more lifelike picture of the Venetian Republic. It is plain, too, that he was bitten with the love of study for its own sake, with a premature pa.s.sion for erudition, and that he sought and found relief from physical and intellectual excitement in the intricacies of research. If his history is at fault, it was not from any lack of diligence on his part, but because the materials at his disposal or within his cognizance were inaccurate and misleading. He makes no mention of the huge collection of Venetian archives which had recently been deposited in the Convent of the Frari, or of Doria's transcript of Sanudo's Diaries, bequeathed in 1816 to the Library of St. Mark; but he quotes as his authorities the _Vitae Duc.u.m Venetorum_, of Marin Sanudo (1466-1535), the _Storia, etc._, of Andrea Navagero (1483-1529), and the _Principj di Storia, etc._, of Vettor Sandi, which belongs to the latter half of the eighteenth century. Byron's chroniclers were ancient, but not ancient enough; and, though they "handed down the story" (see Medwin, _Conversations_, p. 173), they depart in numerous particulars from the facts recorded in contemporary doc.u.ments. Unquestionably the legend, as it appears in Sanudo's perplexing and uncritical narrative (see, for the translation of an original version of the Italian, _Appendix_, pp. 462-467), is more dramatic than the "low beginnings" of the myth, which may be traced to the annalists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but, like other legends, it is insusceptible of proof. Byron's Doge is almost, if not quite, as unhistorical as his Bonivard or his Mazeppa. (See _Nuovo Archivio Veneto_, 1893, vol. v. pt.

i. pp. 95-197; 1897, vol. xiii. pt. i. pp. 5-107; pt. ii. pp. 277-374; _Les Archives de Venise_, par Armand Baschet, 1870; _Storia della Repubblica di Venizia_, Giuseppe Cappelletti, 1849, iv. pp. 262-317.)

At the close of the Preface, by way of an afterthought, Byron announces his determination to escape "the reproach of the English theatrical compositions" "by preserving a nearer approach to unity," by subst.i.tuting the regularity of French and Italian models for the barbarities of the Elizabethan dramatists and their successors. Goethe (_Conversations_, 1874, p. 114) is said to have "laughed to think that Byron, who, in practical life, could never adapt himself, and never even asked about a law, finally subjected himself to the stupidest of laws--that of the _three unities_." It was, perhaps, in part with this object in view, to make his readers smile, to provoke their astonishment, that he affected a severity foreign to his genius and at variance with his record. It was an agreeable thought that he could so easily pa.s.s from one extreme to another, from _Manfred_ to _Marino Faliero_, and, at the same time, indulge "in a little sally of gratuitous sauciness" (_Quarterly Review_, July, 1822, vol. xxvii, p.

480) at the expense of his own countrymen. But there were other influences at work. He had been powerfully impressed by the energy and directness of Alfieri's work, and he was eager to emulate the gravity and simplicity, if not the terseness and conciseness, of his style and language. The drama was a new world to conquer, and so far as "his own literature" was concerned it appeared that success might be attainable by "a severer approach to the rules" (Letter to Murray, February 16, 1821)--that by taking Alfieri as his model he might step into the first rank of English dramatists.

Goethe thought that Byron failed "to understand the purpose" of the "three unities," that he regarded the law as an end in itself, and did not perceive that if a play was comprehensible the unities might be neglected and disregarded. It is possible that his "blind obedience to the law" may have been dictated by the fervour of a convert; but it is equally possible that he looked beyond the law or its fulfilment to an ulterior object, the discomfiture of the romantic school, with its contempt for regularity, its pa.s.sionate appeal from art to nature. If he was minded to raise a "Grecian temple of the purest architecture"

(_Letters_, 1901, v. Appendix III. p. 559), it was not without some thought and hope of shaming, by force of contrast, the "mosque," the "grotesque edifice" of barbarian contemporaries and rivals. Byron was "ever a fighter," and his claim to regularity, to a closer preservation of the "unities," was of the nature of a challenge.

_Marino Faliero_ was dedicated to "Baron Goethe," but the letter which should have contained the dedication was delayed in transit. Goethe never saw the dedication till it was placed in his hands by John Murray the Third, in 1831, but he read the play, and after Byron's death bore testimony to its peculiar characteristics and essential worth. "Lord Byron, notwithstanding his predominant personality, has sometimes had the power of renouncing himself altogether, as may be seen in some of his dramatic pieces, particularly in his _Marino Faliero_. In this piece one quite forgets that Lord Byron, or even an Englishman, wrote it. We live entirely in Venice, and entirely in the time in which the action takes place. The personages speak quite from themselves and their own condition, without having any of the subjective feelings, thoughts, and opinions of the poet" (_Conversations_, 1874, p. 453).

Byron spent three months over the composition of _Marino Faliero_. The tragedy was completed July 17 (_Letters_, 1901, v. 52), and the copying (_vide post_, p. 461, note 2) a month later (August 16, 17, 1820). The final draft of "all the acts corrected" was despatched to England some days before October 6, 1820.

Early in January, 1821 (see Letters to Murray, January 11, 20, 1821, _Letters_, 1901, v. 221-228), an announcement reached Byron that his play was to be brought out at Drury Lane Theatre, by Elliston. Against this he protested by every means in his power, and finally, on Wednesday, April 25, four days after the publication of the first edition (April 21, 1821), an injunction was obtained from Lord Chancellor Eldon, prohibiting a performance announced for that evening.

Elliston pursued the Chancellor to the steps of his own house, and at the last moment persuaded him to allow the play to be acted on that night only. Legal proceeedings were taken, but, in the end, the injunction was withdrawn, with the consent of Byron's solicitors, and the play was represented again on April 30, and on five nights in the following May. As Byron had foreseen, _Marino Faliero_ was coldly received by the playgoing public, and proved a loss to the "speculating buffoons," who had not realized that it was "unfit for their Fair or their booth" (Letter to Murray, January 20, 1821, _Letters_, 1901, v.

228, and p. 226, note 2. See, too, _Memoirs of Robert W. Elliston_, 1845, pp. 268-271).