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The Mad, Bad Theatrical Side of Byron

Sex, decadence, revolution, and, of course, poetry. That in a nutshell is George Gordon, Lord Byron. Or is it?

While his extraordinary success as a rebel-poet seemed matched only by his notoriously scandalous behaviour within 19th century London high society, there is yet another controversial side to Lord Byron. In a recent essay entitled “Historical Bodies in a Mental Theatre: Byron’s ‘Ethics of History’, CBU’s Dr. Nat Leach challenges some of the popular legends associated with that famous Lothario.” This essay was published in one of the leading journals of Romantic scholarship, Studies in Romanticism, and won the Byron Society of America’s prize for its originality

First of all, Leach explodes the stereotype of the solitary Romantic poet recording his own private sensations and replaces it with reality:  Byron was actually a socially and politically engaged writer who wanted to have a serious social and political impact on the world around him. “One of the most important ways of doing this in the 19th century was through theatre.” That said, Leach goes on to point out the fact that audiences at that time consisted of a mixture of upper and lower classes, and plays rather than poems had a better chance of reaching this populace.

Although Byron claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that he did not write for the stage, Leach argues that his theatrical ambitions show the extent to which the 19th century romancer was connected to the popular culture of his time.

Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, Leach contrasts the Byronic rake and libertine with that of an ethical Byron. Noting that the poet was writing at a very politically sensitive time, after the violence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had given England a taste of the horrors that could occur at home if radical factions were not adequately controlled, Leach draws out a parallel to our contemporary post 9/11 cultural anxieties, in particular, how freedom of expression is challenged by an apparent need to police the best interests of the nation.

He then goes on to read the Byron’s plays as coded political attacks that use past events to critique present crises.

Byron took his revolutions seriously. He actually became involved in both the Italian and the Greek struggles for independence, dying in Greece in 1824 at the age of 36 and becoming something of a martyr for the Greek cause. Despite these passionate revolutionary commitments, Leach argues that, in his plays, Byron takes care to avoid being too dogmatic. So instead of prescribing too singular a view of history to his readers, Byron invites them to think about more speculative questions, such as their own place in relation to history and to social order.

Because Byron’s plays focus heavily on talk rather than action, and are narrowly confined to a single setting, they would not be successful in a nineteenth century theatre. Byron knew this, and insisted instead that he wrote for a “mental theatre.” Leach emphasizes the importance both of the physical performance of history and of the cerebral processes required to read and interpret this performance when he analyzes Byron’s “mental theatre.”

To do this, Nat Leach explores the playwright’s “ethics of history,” and claims that Byron not only avoids writing from a narrow perspective but also signals to his audience the impossibility of fully seeing and interpreting a single authoritative version of history. For example, Leach says, when we see a film such as The Other Boleyn Girl, or the TV show The Tudors, we may realize that many of the events depicted are fictional, but we are still given a view of history that passes itself off as being essentially accurate. We may see Henry VIII in a slightly different way than we are used to, but we are implicitly being asked to believe that he was generally “like that.” Byron, by contrast, presents his historical figures in ways that foreground the different perspectives and possibilities within history, but he also makes us aware that each perspective and possibility is one-sided.

Leach cites Lord Byron’s play Marino Faliero as the clincher. It ends not with the title character’s execution, but with a scene in which the citizenry tries to watch the drama from outside the barred gates of the palace. Leach reads this scene as prescriptive:  just like the people outside the gates, the spectators or readers of the play are able to see only a limited perspective of a history that they themselves are a part of.

It is this capacity to comprehend the limitations of historical representation and the way that spectators are thus invited to contemplate their own place in history that Leach identifies as the most distinctive accomplishment of Byron’s plays.

Ultimately, Romantic dramatists such as Byron may be seen as significant precursors to more modern dramatists like Bertolt Brecht (whose treatment of history is quite similar to Byron’s). Leach is currently furthering this angle by researching the work of other lesser known playwrights of the Romantic period, including Joanna Baillie, Thomas Lovell Beddoes and Charles Maturin. He argues that, like Byron, these dramatists, long ignored by literary scholars, embody a significant link between traditional forms of the genre and the experimental innovations of the modern period.

“What’s really exciting about Byron’s theatricals and other plays of the Romantic period,” concludes Dr. Nat Leach, “is that they are absolutely relevant to our 21st century world.”