SOURCE: Ehrstine, John W. “The Two Foscari: The Silence of Chains.” In The Metaphysics of Byron: A Reading of the Plays, pp. 69-88. The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

[In the following essay, Ehrstine examines the function of Byron's strict adherence to unity of character in The Two Foscari.]

Neither Byron¹ nor his critics have had much to say about The Two Foscari.² This is a serious loss, for, although the play is eccentric and daring in what it attempts, I submit that it is one of Byron's most adroit works technically,³ and that it is perhaps his bitterest and darkest poem. There is hope in it, but it is reached only brutally, at the outer limits of human despair.

There are a number of reasons, both of a technical and a thematic nature, for the intense and nearly motionless focus of this play. For example, if we allow that Byron experiments principally with the unity of time in Marino Faliero, and the unity of place in Sardanapalus, then we will be profited by seeing the unity of character as a central technique in this play.⁴ The central characters undergo change, but only within the strictest terms of their natures. Moreover, this consistency of character fits Byron's still simpler structure here. In Marino Faliero, the Doge's rage, commitment to a plot, and subsequent collapse give that play and its hero three phases; the two sides of the King's nature give Sardanapalus two distinct halves; in The Two Foscari there is but one smooth and inexorable movement, as relentless as Loredano's hatred or the Doge's endurance.⁵ At the close of Act I, Barbarigo say of Loredano, “He's silent in his hate, as Foscari / was in his suffering” (361-2). Both appear to remain utterly static.

Thematically, several progressions become vividly marked out when this play is placed next to the two previous dramas. For example, the spirit of Marino Faliero is succinctly stated in Dante's admonition to Italy at the end of the second canto of The Prophecy:

What is there wanting then to set thee free,
          And show thy beauty in its fullest light?
          To make the Alps impassable; and we,
Her sons, may do this with one deed—Unite.(6)

This is, in some sense, a political application of one principle of Byron metaphysic; facing tyranny, man acts in rebellion in order to regain unity.⁷ Faliero finds suitable men with whom to unite against the tyranny of the nobles. Further, there are clear-cut issues drawing these men together: political blindness, injustice, and decadence. There is less of this corporate enterprise in Sardanapalus, but still the King has at least one worthy ally, Salemenes, not to mention Myrrha. Moreover, political tyranny is only part of the theme; the struggle is more symbolic, having its near-mythic concern with man's inevitable failure to obtain Edenic freedom. At least there remains to Sardanapalus a measure of splendor in his attempt to restore his kingdom and his personal integrity. Neither unity of forces, clarity of issues, nor splendor is at all present in The Two Foscari. In fact, whereas Faliero and Sardanapalus could act, Foscari is utterly trapped. If tyranny drives one to action, then the ultimate political torture, from a Promethean point of view, must be a situation in which action is not possible. By analogy, Byron seems to say here, as Coleridge does in “France: An Ode”, that such a state cannot be saved by political means. Such a state leaves the individual nothing but endurance and suppressed rage; whatever unity may be achieved must obviously be entirely within. Hence the importance of the unity of character: it is all that remains to Foscari.

Another thematic progression in these plays is visible in the heroes. Where Faliero is nominally guilty of rebellion, and Sardanapalus of weakness, Foscari is persecuted for no good reason except that he is Promethean. His and his son's alleged crimes are so vague that one suspects they have none. In consequence, their staunch and noble patriotism appears absurd and abnormal: Jacopo's almost insane love for Venice is matched by the Doge's apparently pointless endurance. That the Doge Foscari is more isolated than his two predecessors is clear enough. More astoundingly, he stands as much alone as Manfred, but with one overwhelming difference: he is still in society, having given all a man may give to the State. He is, therefore, in no way the outlaw of his own dark soul; rather he is the upright leader, labelled an outlaw by the dark minds of his inferiors. Since even at the outset nearly everything of value has been stripped from his life, and his mighty struggle has achieved nothing, it follows that Foscari must do what he does on the blind faith of his vision alone. He turns endurance itself into an action, and hence his “concentered recompense” is utterly enigmatic.

Finally, the thematic importance of the common people suffers a change in these plays. While the commoners are a visible and significant consideration in Marino Faliero, in Sardanapalus the people have been diminished totally into the background. The Two Foscari moves a bit further: they are not really present here at all because the ruling Ten are oblivious of them. The senator, Memmo, says: “Men know as little / Of the state's real acts as of the grave's / Unfathomed mysteries” (I, 184-6). And later, Foscari reminds the Ten that they do not think of the citizenry, only the “populace” (V, 257-61). During the course of these three kindred plays, Byron's sharpened focus comes to rest finally on the nobility alone. The Ten and the Forty are no longer the venomous “hydra” which Faliero called them, but have not become a “mystery”, a thing beyond description by metaphor or image.⁸ As Memmo's comment establishes, even the Senators find the procedures of the high tribunal incomprehensible. When he is later summoned to deliberate with the Ten, Memmo thinks of himself as a novice, ready to see “the mysteries” for the first time (IV, 87-8). “Mystery”, in fact, becomes an important motif: from within, the State's machinations are covert; from without, the people are not visible to the State.

By removing any recognizable guilt from the Foscari, and emphasizing the idea of mystery, Byron makes political tyranny more malignant than in the two previous plays. Not only does it pervert man, it abstracts life, and breeds mystery in which even the strongest are finally trapped. Within the stasis thus produced, the only freedom lies inside, in the silence of the individual mind. It is chiefly through his exceedingly strict adherence to unity of character that Byron establishes the various ways in which each of the dramatis personae is ensnared, and the inner struggle exacted of them.

I

Byron manages the characterization of Jacopo Foscari and his wife, Marina, with ease and subtlety.⁹ As son of the Doge, Jacopo has been exiled for suspected crimes which are never made clear. Memmo and another senator discuss the specifics in Act I (293-310). Though held on several counts, Jacopo has confessed only to writing a letter “to Milan's Duke, in the full knowledge / That it would fall into the Senate's hands / And thus he would be re-conveyed to Venice.” After mentioning other crimes which “Circumstance” might lay to Jacopo's charge, Memmo sums up the situation: “There must be more in this strange process than / The apparent crimes of the accused disclose. …” If the assessment of Jacopo's position is accurate (and there is no evidence to the contrary), he is not being punished for any dark felonies, but because he will risk this much simply to return home.

But there is even more mystery here than Memmo can suspect. The Doge himself states the real reason for the unconscionable punishment of his son. “Hear me”, he tells Marina:

                                        They who aim
At Foscari, aim no less at his father;
The sire's destruction would not save the son;
They work by different means to the same end,
And that is—but they have not conquered yet.

(II, 86-90)

The Doge cannot bring himself to utter the cause of his and his son's persecution. This adds to the mystery and blindness of the political hatred which Loredano symbolizes. The Doge's last phrase above merely makes the bitter situation worse: were both the Foscari ordinary men, they would have succumbed. But they are clearly Promethean. The resulting, fundamental irony is that the more they endure, the more Loredano is driven to injustice. The tensions of the situation are admirably realized. They play out dramatically an idea Byron states elsewhere: such heroes have to be able to look down from their pinnacle of superiority on hate and misunderstanding.¹⁰

That Byron defended Jacopo's intense love of country as typically Venetian need not concern us as much as what the characterization of Jacopo accomplishes thematically in the play.¹¹ From our first meeting with him, we can begin to understand what has given his patriotic passion such a turn. The splendid imagery of his first speech indicates that, like so many Byronic heroes, he is at ease with the sea, and the sea—as something greater than man—is regularly symbolic of eternity. Jacopo rhapsodizes to his Guard:

                                                            Oft
In wantonness of spirit, plunging down
Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making
My way to shells, and sea-weed, all unseen
By those above, till they waxed fearful; then
Returning with my grasp full of such tokens
As showed that I had searched the deep: exulting
With a far-dashing stroke, and, drawing deep
The long-suspended breath, again I spurned
The foam which broke around me, and pursued
My track like a sea-bird.—I was a boy then.

(I, 110-21)

Symbolically, his love of the sea matches his love of Venice, the city built on, and wed to, the sea.¹² In the world of Byron's poems, Jacopo's identification with the ocean makes the significance of his outlandish patriotism more meaningful: he loves not only Venice, but timelessness, and man's quest for freedom. In short, his participation in eternity conditions his point of view, moving it beyond that of the fallen world. This is signalled in part by the “sea-bird” image; his love for the depths of the sea allows him flight. Yet included in the symbolic point being made is just the reverse of this synthesis. Stated in its simplest and most comprehensive terms, it is this: Jacopo's love of freedom enslaves him.

His most important scene takes place in the prison cell. His wife visits his dungeon in Act III, and upbraids him for such foolish, transporting love. Why could they not live a more natural life in exile? Like Zarina in Sardanapalus, she offers a hope of salvation that would have sufficed in the Turkish Tales. But Jacopo gives her the Promethean' patriot's answer:

You call this weakness! It is strength,
I say,—the parent of all honest feeling.
He who loves not his country, can love nothing.

(III, 182-4)

As in Marino Faliero, such commitment to country allows one to get beyond himself, to reach a selflessness and inner unity denied those who refuse to deal with the world. In Byron's mind, such a commitment provided the only way corporate freedom was possible; how else are people to fulfill Dante's admonition for unity? And yet, the moment we see the admirability of Jacopo's point of view, we are also aware of a fearful symmetry in the perversion of Venice. It is in so tyrannous a state that its processes are all a “mystery”, and all that is good appear evil. The degree of this reversal is so intense that only the Doge can understand what the struggle really is. Jacopo's genuine nobility then becomes bastardized into perversity. Even the Doge tellingly refers to his weakness as “wommanish”, and the sentiment of the younger Foscari appears absurd somewhat in the manner of Sardanapalus. But this motif is offered more grimly here because tyranny has turned Jacopo's essentially stout patriotism (representing as it does love of Venice, the ocean, and freedom) into apparent sentimental weakness. In reality, it is Loredano and the others of the Ten who are emasculated without knowing it.

Jacopo is finally allowed to return to exile rather than go on the rack again. However, his apparently overstated response—“but 'tis / Exchange of chains for heavier chains” (III, 497-8)—indicates how costly this clemency is. His unselfish love of country, without which he “can love nothing”, is made to appear unmanly, following which he is forced into a genuinely “wommanish” act: exile.

With all this noble endurance, the younger Foscari still has one further step to go to reach full Promethean enlightenment. Although Jacopo says love of country is the foundation for all love, he is called upon to exercise that belief even when the exterior object of his love, Venice herself, is removed. In Act III, Marina advises him that at least in exile they might have life; as for liberty, “The mind should make its own.” She speaks more than she knows here, but it is given in the spirit of the “chainless mind” of the “Sonnet on Chillon”, and echoes all three earlier plays.¹³ By Jacopo's answer, we are given a glimpse of the inner balance to which he must progress: “That has a noble sound; but 'tis a sound, / A music most impressive, but too transient: / The mind is much, but is not all” (III, 85-7). He must then make his mind all, and in his remaining speeches, the spark of the Promethean clearly grows.

Byron's dictional pattern surrounding this character is well worth observing; besides the sea imagery, Jacopo's speeches are shot through with light images. Here in the dungeon, tyranny has all but wiped out the light. Jacopo says that other than

                                                            the gaoler's torch,
And a strange firefly, which was quickly caught
Last night in yon enormous spider's net,
I ne'er saw aught here like a ray.

(III, 103-6)

The State has very nearly enclosed the light of the mind, and like the spider's net, it suffocates even those who are a spark in places of darkness, or “lamps of night”, to recall a phrase in Sardanapalus. Further, books, “Those lying likenesses of lying men”, are denied him so that even what little enlightenment “annals, history” might have brought him is withheld. Tyranny appears to be able to shut out the light of freedom entirely, both physically and intellectually; the illumination of the past, the sunlight of the present, the “beacon” of the future are all extinguished. What makes the situation so appalling is that Jacopo knows his fate is not singular, only more ironic: “many are in dungeons, / But none like mine, so near their father's palace” (III, 98-9). Against the tyranny of this negative apocalypse, the totally inner assurance of “Prometheus” is all that will save Jacopo from being devoured by the kind of world Byron pictures in “Darkness”. If one is shut out from past and future, he must make the present all time; the same paradox occurs when, in his dream, Sardanapalus is called upon to incorporate past and future into the present. For Jacopo, the solution is reached and indicated through light imagery.

From this point—where ironically the gaoler's torch blinds Jacopo because he is not used to light, and yet blinds his incoming wife because she has come in out of the sun—Jacopo moves toward the moment of his death where he sees some unnamed luminary: “The light! / Is it the light?—I am faint.” The intervening references to light all tally. As Loredano is the symbol of tyranny, Marina rightly says of him: “I have probed his soul / A moment as the Eternal Fire, ere long, / Will reach it always” (III, 212-4). Since tyranny brings perversion, Loredano is identified by perverted light. Moreover, the very cell lies under the level of the ocean, and the metaphorical implication is that in Venice, tyranny is close to quenching the light of freedom for all eternity. Better still, Marina says that Loredano would be “The sole fit inhabitant of such a cell / Which he has peopled often, but ne'er fitly / Till he himself shall brood in it alone” (337-9). With the light of freedom snuffed, the cell would be a remarkably apt image for Loredano's self-made darkness. As they leave the dungeon, he calls for a torch, and Marina sneers, “Yes, light us on, as to a funeral pyre, / With Loredano mourning like an heir” (442-3). Such is the feeble illumination tyranny allows to help man to vision, and even that enlightens him only posthumously, on his way to the grave. With nearly unaccountable perseverance, Jacopo still must hope, and he finds a perfect image for that hope:

                                                  Let there be
A point of time, as beacon to my heart,
With any penalty annexed they please,
But let me still return.

(IV, 102-5)

And since even this bit of light cannot be promised, he is forced to find illumination within himself. To Marina he resolves: “But you are right, / It must be borne.”

With this realization, he is now more imbued with the enlightenment of freedom than ever. He is free to choose to forgive the nobles of Venice, even existence itself. But in this atmosphere, the very statement appears to be puling and weak. He begs his father to forgive

                    My poor mother, for my birth,
And me for having lived, and you yourself
(As I forgive you), for the gift of life, …

(IV, 160-2)

In order to overcome the black perversion of tyranny, he is driven to such unnatural sentiments. He has done nothing wrong, nothing deserving of punishment (1. 165), and yet for his oppressors he says, “I cannot wish them all they have inflicted” (1. 172). Because of his Promethean advancement, Jacopo manages to die without hating life itself. He sinks to death, reaching for his father's hand, and being surprised by the joy of some vision of total light.

As Marina stands helplessly by, observing her husband's death, she sees clearly, but not deeply enough, what has caused it. Although her point of view is limited, she is one of Byron's liveliest female portraits. She fits perfectly into the theme and structure of the play. Since tyranny perverts human life, Marina is robbed of a husband. Hence she must take on some of what ought normally to be a man's role. With energy and clarity she tells the Doge how unnatural it is for a father not to defend a son, and Loredano, as I have pointed out, how inverted his hatred is. When her husband asks, “Why live I”, she reiterates his apparent emasculation: “To man thyself, I trust, with time, to master / Such useless passion.”

Beyond the perversion she observes in these three men, she is appalled at a State which would take her children, allowing them to be hers only to raise, to care for when sick, and to bury when dead (III, 387-95). Moreover, the State allows her to accompany her husband in exile only if she leaves their children behind. While Marina sees the State's inhumanity, Jacopo questions her own:

JAC.:
And canst thou leave them?
MAR.:
Yes—with many a pang!
But—I can leave them, children as they are,
To teach you to be less a child. From this
Learn you to sway your feelings, when exacted
By duties paramount; …

(III, 197-2-1)

Marina's statement would appear courageous, but the irony of tyranny begins to twist her judgment, too, for she is here willing to save her husband at the expense of her children. Thus, such conjugal commitment is both admirable and damning. What results is an awesome dilemma: to go on loving, Marina must be destructive, fragmenting still further the familial unity their marriage has formed. Hence, she in part reverses the ardent human virtues she possesses. She effectually demonstrates her husband's statement that love of country is the basis for all love; lacking it (even though forced to her position), her own ability to love is first undermined, then slowly perverted.

After her husband dies, despair further sinks her point of view because even remaining with her children is now turned to an unnatural and hateful deed:

My children! true—they live, and I must live
To bring them up to serve the State, and die
As died their father. Oh! what best of blessings
Were barrenness in Venice!

(IV, 208-11)

Though her character does not vary, Marina develops almost imperceptibly, becoming slightly more corrupted as the play progresses. She is finally forced, because of money, to let the Ten bury Foscari with pomp and circumstance, despite her awareness of the hypocrisy of it (V, 355-61). After all, she must raise her children in this fallen world, and she will have to do so by fallen, material means.

Although she has nobility and courage, her level of awareness is slightly less than her husband's or his father's. This makes her a worthy foil to them. Her energetic vituperation, directed at her husband, the Doge, and most heatedly at Loredano, provides some ventilation for the rage the others must suppress. These outbursts are of immense value to the tense atmosphere of the play.

II

The tension in the atmosphere is largely generated by Loredano, the “Inveterate hater”. As a character, he is realized in a most daring way. While making him a singular human being, Byron draws him as very nearly the abstract of a character.¹⁴ His cold, selfish relentlessness in pursuing “hereditary hate” is brilliantly inhuman and distilled, motivating him finally to ensnare nearly all of the power of the Ten. “They speak your language”, Barbarigo tells him at one point (V, 142-3), “watch your nod, approve / Your plans, and do your work. Are they not yours?” Loredano is moved to such perversion solely by his own quest for vengeance, rather than for justice, or any ideal by which he might otherwise get beyond his own selfishness.

As the figure from whom all the darkness radiates, Loredano appears—with sharp, beautifully managed irony—very like the Doge, who is similarly relentless. Something of this is visible in the opposition between Faliero and Benintende in Act V of Marino Faliero. But here, Byron achieves the ironic mirroring of characters through far more elaborate rhetorical patterns, and sustains it through the whole play. For example, much of what Loredano says forms an exact, but inverted refraction of the Doge's remarks, attitudes, or ideals. Whereas the Prince has never allowed his personal interests to interfere with the State's, Loredano can say to Barbarigo, “now / We have higher business [than the State's] for our own” (IV, 17-8). Or consider Loredano's response when Barbarigo asks if the laws allow the impeachment they intend to inflict on the Doge: “What laws?—‘The Ten’ are laws; and if they were not, / I will be legislator in this business” (IV, 38-9). Similarly, the genuinely high-minded relentlessness of the Doge has its warped opposite in Loredano. Immediately after the Doge has lost his last son, Loredano says:

                                        The feelings
Of private passion may not interrupt
The public benefit; and what the State
Decides to-day must not give way before
Tomorrow for a natural accident.

(IV, 265-9)

If the Prince himself made such a comment, we would accept it as notable toughness. But in Loredano, any of the above passages signifies a chilling, satanic self-absorption. The State, the law, life itself, all exist utterly for his vengeance. He moves through his villainy calmly, with as much self-assurance as Lucifer, and more immediately, with more easily won self-control than the Doge. While Byron deftly paints the portrait of a unique human fiend, he uses this portrait to help characterize Foscari at the same time. Without Loredano as counterpart, the Doge would have no way of being as vivid a personage as he is. This is precisely to the purpose: the Promethean hero is partly satanic in that as rebel he must be willing and able to synthesize good and evil, thus getting beyond either. But this may easily go the wrong direction, and one of such strength is, like Napoleon, constantly, in danger of becoming a “bastard Caesar” after all.¹⁵ In the extreme, that describes Loredano, who is a would-be Promethean.

His rhetoric repays still closer study. The subtlety of his remarks frequently manifests itself as contradiction not just of the Doge, but of what he himself says elsewhere. Always he angles for his immediate end. In one passage above, for example, he says that he will be “legislator in this business”, but he previously had impugned the Doge by saying that the people have only the laws “which he would leave us” (I, 45-6). In like manner, in Act II Loredano is piqued because the old man did not grieve overtly while observing the torture of his son. Yet as Act IV opens, he sneers at the same fact for an entirely different purpose. He allows that the Doge's removal from the throne will not “break his heart”, as Barbarigo insists, because

                                        Age has no heart to break.
He has seen his son's half broken, and, except
A start of feeling in his dungeon, never
Swerved.

(IV, 4-7)

As the play progresses, the contradictions begin to enmesh themselves in thicker rhetorical nets. Sometimes Loredano's individual remarks contain within themselves a reversal of logic. Witness for example the following line of reasoning on the removal of the Doge, uttered in the same scene as the lines immediately above. The Ten should force him to leave now in the midst of his grief:

                                        Sorrow preys upon
Its solitude, and nothing more diverts it
From its sad visions of the other world,
Than calling it back to this.
The busy have not time for tears.

(IV, 251-5)

The complexity of such irony is impressive. First it contradicts the logic of the lines above—“Age has no heart to break”, etc.—which were themselves contradictory of an earlier passage. Secondly, in his intense commitment, the Doge indeed has always been too busy for tears. Finally, there is in this passage a self-contained illogicality: Loredano would rob the Doge of the only concern remaining to him by which he could avoid grief. Loredano's speeches interweave themselves until his own elaborate, selfish rationale literally bedims his vision, and Marina's image of him alone in a cell becomes not only more fitting, but more terrifying. He is already in it. His rhetoric forms the “mind-forg'd manacles” of his entrapment.

To reach this extremity of hate, Loredano insists he is avenging the deaths of his father and uncle. More deeply, I suggest that what is at stake is the central, abiding concern with the dynamic of time in Byron's metaphysic. In varying ways, Byron's heroes must accept the past into the present so that they may have a future; or, as in Jacopo's case, the present must contain all time. But Loredano has reversed this process and in effect has invested future and present in the past. He pursues, Barbarigo tells us, “hereditary hate too far” (I, 18), until the past totally controls him. This was true of Manfred, too, in Acts I and II of that play; but Loredano does not realize his blindness, and with pride, he wallows in the past, making no attempt to understand or overcome it. And, once again, we are always aware of how he resembles Foscari. If the spirit of freedom can be bequeathed to the future, as Faliero thinks, then apparently its opposite can, too. The negative is as endlessly creative as the positive, and Byron seems to be toying with the idea of some negative apocalypse. The same possibility also looms as a distant implication in Sardanapalus. But it is stronger here. Barbarigo specifically comments on the vitality of hatred: “You are ingenious, Loredano, in / Your modes of vengeance, nay, poetical, / A very Ovid in the art of hating” (V, 134-6).¹⁶ Here is poetry in reverse, and a potential hero of the “positive Negation” Coleridge came to fear.¹⁷ The spirit of tyranny, then, and that of freedom are in appearance as much alike as Loredano and the Doge, and the struggle of the two men, held out in relief against the backdrop of the State, takes on deeper symbolic clarity than similar conflicts in previous plays.

The final irony is that Loredano thinks he succeeds. But if he does, then by implication Satan or God, negative or positive, could either one finally die into total existence. The either-or aspect of such a suggestion does not chime, generally speaking, with Byron's metaphysic, especially in Cain. It is more likely that Byron turns fiercely and subtly on the dissonance of Loredano's apparent victory. Throughout the play, Loredano has been the only character able to act, and indeed the last word is his: the Doge, he says, has paid “Nature's debt and mine”. But in reality, his actions only belie the hideous, static consistency of his character. He is more trapped than the Doge, for his deeds achieve nothing for him; or rather, they lead him toward self-abstraction instead of the self-awareness of the poet. His acts achieve something for others, however, and that dimension of nuance, together with Loredano's last line, can best be approached through a careful examination of the Doge.

III

Since Jacopo's patriotic crime is really no crime at all, one is pretty well convinced that the Doge has committed none either. He is being persecuted merely because he has Promethean love for Venice, and hence those who are self-concerned beneath him must fasten on him imagined or suspicioned crimes. Although Loredano and Barbarigo both comment on the Doge's bad reign (I, 1-67), we have no proof that it has been so. More likely, his very uprightness constitutes his guilt in others' eyes. In addition, we are given the Doge's own assessment of his success. He speaks of his achievements quite incidentally, to a Senator who comes for his signature, incongruously on a decree which will bring peace to Venice at the very time she is making war against her sovereign:

I found her Queen of Ocean, and I leave her
Lady of Lombardy; it is a comfort
That I have added to her diadem
The gems of Brescia and Ravenna; Crema
And Bergamo no less are hers; her realm
By land has grown by thus much in my reign,
While her sea-sway has not shrunk.

(II, 17-23)

He does not defend himself against calumny, but his silence is not really suspect; “Guilt is loud”, Sardanapalus had cautioned Beleses, and Foscari has no need to be noisy in his own behalf.¹⁸ This is consistent with his whole character. The Doge will accept neither praise for his achievements, nor sympathy for his current dilemma. Because of his self-containment, he has need of neither. He tells Loredano that he has not “worked by plot in Council”, nor indeed by any “secret means”. He has had foes, but he was “openly” the foe in return (II, 230-3). The Doge claims no perfection, but his commitment to Venice places him above the merely rational categories of good and evil, whereas Loredano is beyond distinguishing the two. The Doge's vision allows him to see more than the immediate situation, and this in turn gives him a metaphorical view of the literal and the selfish. The play demands that we place this next to Loredano's outlook. And hatred, Barbarigo tells him with a fine stroke, “has microscopic eyes” (V, 138). The subtlety being underlined is the distinction between the empirical (or fallen) point of view, and the enlightened (or Promethean) overview. With Marina standing by, Foscari tensely tells Loredano:

I have observed with veneration, like
A priest's at the High Altar, even unto
The sacrifice of my own blood and quiet,
Safety, and all save honour, the decrees,
The health, the pride, and welfare of the State.

(II, 255-9)

And these words are to be compared to Loredano's: “We have higher business for our own.” There is also an irony on the Doge's simile of priest and altar if one remembers Memmo's calling himself a novice confronting the mysterious workings of the Ten. Tyranny deals in mystery of the sort Memmo indicates; but using the same metaphor, the Doge adds the word, “sacrifice”. The mystery he describes is the paradox of freedom (or to use his term, personal “honour”) which results from selfless commitment and a metaphorical point of view; honesty, like the State, is more important than self.

And yet, this transcendent “veneration” for the State's laws brings down utmost anguish upon Foscari. Because of the corruption in Venice, his private and public interests come perversely, negatively, together, utterly inhibiting his actions toward either. He must steel his heart; the narrative voice of Childe Harold III calls it “a stern task of soul:—No matter,—it is taught.”¹⁹ With painful irony, Marina constantly upbraids him for not saving his last son, but to do so would compromise his honesty to the State. Why not, then, reform the law?

I found the law; I did not make it. Were I
A subject, still I might find parts and portions
Fit for amendment; but as Prince, I never
Would change, for the sake of my house, the charter
Left by our fathers.

(II, 395-9)

Moreover, the Doge has no complaint against the State per se. Indeed, it has done well (II, 400-6). It is republican in nature, and hence good in Byron's terms. But the difficulty is that in the fallen world, a just government must contain both good and evil; it must be the synthesizing agent of paradox. That is what makes it just. Yet with control in the wrong hands, that marriage collapses, and good and evil separate. In that case, division exists, and either everything seems to be evil, or good and evil have the same appearance; either way, opposites cannot be discerned so that they may be contained. In the following passage, for instance, the Doge's subtle diction, and the context, display perfectly the turn-about of republicanism and oligarchical tyranny.

In the present State of Venice,
An individual, be he richest of
Such rank as is permitted, or the meanest,
Without name, is alike nothing, when
The policy, irrevocably tending
To one great end, must be maintained in vigour.

(II, 408-13)

His words are harsh, but they are not those of a tyrant. The Doge is driven to these words by his despair, and the overt statement is simply the underside of an opposite alternative: by paradox, if all were truly nothing, each might see beyond his own fate by seeing it mirrored in others; in that case, each would be “alike something”. At this point, Faliero would favor us with a metaphor for the ideal state, a Greek temple.²⁰ But Foscari faces a more confused and benighted nobility than does Faliero, to whom he alludes at one point (V, 232). Besides being trapped as a father, he can see nothing to do as a leader except adhere to his selfless ideal. Endurance becomes his only course of action.²¹

But this suits Byron's theme and simplified structure, for it is the very spirit of division which the Doge must battle in order to preserve even his own unity, not to mention that of Venice. That spirit is symbolized by Loredano, and the tension between the two characters increases until they represent, as does the King in Sardanapalus, nearly mythic figures, caught up in this confrontation between categorically separated good and evil in an embroiled, tumbling society. In terms of poetic development, Byron has progressed toward greater simplicity in the form he gives to the political speculations of his metaphysic.

It is notable that, as political heroes, both Faliero and Sardanapalus undergo some alteration toward their final Promethean stature. But Foscari is much closer from the start, and my contention has been that the development of his character is consequently more subtle. In his first scene, for example, he says:

I have no repose, that is none which shall cause
The loss of an hour's time unto the State.
Let them meet when they will, I shall be found
Where I should be, and what I have been ever.

(II, 40-3)

This sounds utterly steadfast and positive. Yet these are not facile words. In his first interview with Marina, we learn that he maintains this ideal despite his clear view of lapsed humanity. He breaks his silent anguish momentarily to describe the nature of life to her in the blackest terms to be found in Byron:

                                                                                All is low,
And false, and hollow—clay from first to last
The Prince's urn no less than potter's vessel.
Our fame is in men's breath, our lives upon
Less than their breath; our durance upon days,
Our days on season; our whole being on
Something which is not us!—So, we are slaves,
The greatest as the meanest—nothing rests
Upon our will; the will itself no less
Depends upon a straw than on a storm;
And when we think we lead, we are most led,
And still towards Death, a thing which comes as much
Without our act or choice as birth, so that
Methinks we must have sinned in some old world,
And this is Hell: the best is, that it is not
Eternal.

(II, 241-55)

Sardanapalus had learned that he was isolated in nature, but Foscari has apparently been living with that knowledge. He must steel his heart against his isolation from his family, the State, and nature, so that he will not fall from his solitary integrity. As with Lara, in enduring so much the Doge may well kill his heart, and hence die into the self, rather than unto it. It is to be noticed, however, that the very fact that he continues to endure, while believing life to be as he describes it, is evidence of his will to affirm the struggle for unity, even in its absurdity, and even though that unity is entirely “concentered” within him. If every aspect of life is dependent on “Something which is not us”, then that which is us (i.e., is within) is all man can rely on. And within man, no matter what is outside in the emasculated world, there is the longing to escape selfishness, to get beyond self by achieving freedom and love. Oxymoronically that ideal of getting beyond the self must be achieved totally within the self. The only alternative is the capsized solipsism of Loredano. At least in this play, Byron does not offer any other choice.

In Acts IV and V the Doge is set to his most vicious test. Throughout the play, Marina has scorned him for watching dispassionately his son's “piecemeal” murder. How that figures in her characterization has already been discussed. But what does it achieve for the Doge? At the death of Jacopo in Act IV, Foscari's calm suddenly breaks into visible emotion. At first he laments, “My unhappy Children”, and the remark has an appropriate double meaning: he mourns the deaths of all his own children, but also, in his expanded view, the visionless death-in-life of his Venetian subjects. Still, Marina scalds him with this answer:

                                                                                What!
You feel it then at last—you!—Where is now
The stoic of the State?
DOGE:
(throwing himself down by the body) Here!

Dramatically, it is a startlingly important moment. This is the Doge's only sharp stage movement. The insupportable emotion establishes that, though he has steeled himself against his own heart to maintain his honesty, he does still have a heart; he is still human. It is more than can be said for Loredano, who has a matching moment of uncontrolled emotion: a heartless outburst of wrath at Barbarigo's momentary kindness (V, 156-9).

With exquisite timing, Loredano arrives at this juncture to tell the Doge the Senate has asked for his abdication. The Prince, however, commands himself immediately, as is his habit when duty calls. But now, there is a further reason why he is invulnerable. He tells them:

                    If the tidings which you bring
Are evil, you may say them; nothing further
Can touch me more than him thou look'st on there;
If they be good, say on; you need not fear
That they can comfort me.

(IV, 233-7)

From this point on, the Doge has gone one step further in his Promethean quest, and he becomes the loneliest of Byron's heroes with the exception of Cain. Precisely because he still has a heart, and it has lost all it can lose, that which remains is totally within. It is here that the unity of his characterization is of paramount thematic importance. His “concentered recompense” has been his guerdon all along, and now it is the only reality left to him. In addition, it cannot be touched because, being the product of his metaphorical view, it is wholly the creation of his own imaginative intellect, and it needs no comfort.

The importance of Act V is that the Ten do try to destroy even this entirety. But in requesting his abdication, they go too far. Since he has twice before asked to step down, has been denied, and has promised not to request it again (V, 39-40), he can refute them with, “I cannot break my oath” (1. 47). Never before has the State demanded outright dishonesty. He had said earlier he gave Venice “all save honour”. He thus forces them to decree his abdication, and the dishonesty is hence theirs. What accrues to him is the destruction of all remaining reality except what is in his mind. In a sense he forces them to make him literally “all-seeing, but unseen”.²² In this way, Loredano's acts are productive, not for himself but for the Doge, and in a less intense way, for Jacopo.

There results a certain ghoulish humor in what remains in the play; or rather, the already established patterns of irony now become wry as their inevitability is worked out. The Ten once more interrupt the Doge's mourning to inform him of their decree. When they proceed to request that he leave the palace, they ingratiate themselves in a number of ways. He may have three days to depart, else his “private fortune” will be confiscated (V, 173-5). But his fortune is already exhausted, having been spent in the exercise of his office (V, 344-5). What is more, he needs no time to decide. He immediately gives them his ring and diadem: “And so / The Adriatic's free to wed another.” With a gentleness ever so slightly barbed, he assures them he will not take the palace with him, nor will he or its walls, both old, tell any tales (V, 210-16). There is no need to leave them with a curse as Faliero did. In fact, Foscari needs words even less than Sardanapalus did. Privately, the quick departure costs him nothing because it has no real meaning; publicly, by readily taking upon himself their insults, he throws on them the terribly visible indecorum of such haste. It makes excellent ironic sense that he will allow no pomp to attend his departure, for materially there is little left of him; he descends as a mere citizen, and with splendidly pointed irony, we have already been told in a number of ways that citizens are all invisible. For Foscari himself, of course, this act has the positive meaning that his integrity has consumed everything. Even his principle statement to them has a dry tincture of mocking politeness to it, forming a perfectly inverted parallel to the rational tone of so many of Loredano's speeches:

If I could have foreseen that my old age
Was prejudicial to the State, the Chief
Of the Republic never would have shown
Himself so far ungrateful, as to place
His own high dignity before his Country;
But this life having been so many years
Not useless to that Country, I would fain
Have consecrated my last moments to her.
But the decree being rendered, I obey.

(178-86)

As the bell of St. Mark's tolls, the Doge weakens at this final insult, and asks for water. He deliberately chooses the glass proffered him by Loredano, and at the obvious level, we are left not knowing whether the Doge is murdered or not. But we should not need to know because in one sense, his literal death is meaningless in the face of his metaphorical death. And, in another sense, the imagery gives us more important knowledge. Upon dying, the Doge joins the light, the spirit of freedom, and it is entirely within his mind: “my brain's on fire!” The terrible irony is that he alone comprehends the consuming fire of freedom to which he has given his life. Sardanapalus' funeral pyre, while more grand, carries with it no more meaning than the same image used so differently here.

Still there is Loredano's last remark, the puzzling reference to “Nature's debt and mine.” As for Loredano's vengeance, it is not even superficially fulfilled. Marina's sons are still alive, as she has unhappily pointed out (III, 270-1), and they will doubtless inherit this feud. Hence Loredano's struggle has not profited him, though he thinks it has: looking grotesquely and foolishly like the recording angel, he writes a credit beside Foscari's debt in his ledger.²³ Here is a clear indication of his rational, arithmetical, fallen point of view.

But what of “Nature's debt”? Certainly the presence of evil may be regarded as the debt man owes to his existence in the state of nature. There is some irony in having a character like Loredano use so orthodox a cliché. A more Byronic implication comes to mind: if nature's debt can ever be paid, it can be so only by absorbing it as Foscari does. It would follow that death is the only ultimate way to pay nature's debt; the metaphor of death would then become literal. In that case, one is fully balanced beyond opposites only in death, which for both the Foscari is a moment of total light. Such an idea illuminates the Doge's earlier comment on Jacopo's demise: while the attending officer exclaims, “He's gone!” the Doge counters immediately, “He's free.”

IV

One further development in this play remains. Whereas Byron's first three plays are tragic in outlook, The Two Foscari is more than tragic, and the additional element is signalled by the repetition of the word, “mystery”. Clearly enough, Byron is more directly concerned with this idea in his next play, Cain, which is subtitled “A Mystery”. It is not that Foscari is less than tragic; he has risked his entire being on the abiding existential questions of life.²⁴ He must play out his dilemma to the end because he is literally not allowed to turn from it. Through this, he learns that, even given man's fall, his isolation in nature, and in society, reunification may be reached and sustained by the individual. But there is an increased ambivalence in what this amounts to. Politically, Foscari is unable to bring society to a crisis, or even to attempt it, as Faliero did. Certainly, too, the rest of the visible world does not remotely understand the full value of Foscari's personal struggle. He alone comprehends it.

The ambivalence also pervades in the haunting conflict between good and evil. What is the meaning of it, and what difference does it make whether man wins or loses in it? Byron is, I think, still affirming man's tragic struggle for unity. But in all three historical plays, an increasing awareness of mystery lying beyond tragedy finds acknowledgement. And yet, it is an enlightened mystery in which some comfort is found, as opposed to the political mystery which tyranny deals in and multiplies. No longer does one receive so much as a voice out of the whirlwind to validate his endeavor. The individual alone must create the value he perceives from tragic vision, or even proceed to live tragically on blind faith alone. If he can do this, in the face of blank absurdity, he may still, Byron seems to say, balance good and evil by being himself the synthesis. Hence it is not merely Tennyson's “Believing where we cannot prove”, but a more active process.²⁵ As suggested in an earlier chapter, tragic vision for Byron seems to be thought of, and imaged, in psychological terms in Manfred. These same terms not only abide in the historical plays, despite the radically different technique, but intensify as one reads through them chronologically. Because of what it suggests along these lines, The Two Foscari is a remarkably modern poem. As with Cain, Byron seems in this play to have come astonishingly close to absurdist drama.²⁶

The artistry of it may best be measured by its quietness, engendered largely by the unity of characterization in Foscari and Loredano. In an admirably risky fashion, Byron sets the two combatants—both relentless and nearly mute—in relief against the more verbal characters like Jacopo, Marina, and Barbarigo, and against the state generally. He achieves striking effects by this arrangement. While the basic struggle remains extremely quiet, and the five acts are each unbroken by scene changes, the play yet quickens with poetic intensity. The very quietness itself points up the hushed grimness of the encounter. If Sardanapalus' palace becomes a microcosm of social man, then the two chief characters here become even more radically distilled symbols of man in society.

By reducing the involvement of the structure of the play, Byron gains a certain kind of dramatic quality which has an ancient tradition; the horribly tense struggle between good and evil assumes a liturgical solemnity and inevitability. It is in this manner that the mystery of it is fortified. But more than that: by his structure, Byron sets the central human issue before us with such unrelieved simplicity that we are not allowed to hide behind the complexity of argument. Finally, Byron can underline the ambiguous balance of good and evil by the uncomplicated movement of this play. In Cain, he advances further in this technical direction; there, one finds more of the uncluttered plotting, and a still simpler, plainer versification and language. The characters are, as one could anticipate, even more mythic, and more totally isolated because there is no society with which to identify.

Notes

1. Even the early biographer, John Galt, Life of Lord Byron (London, 1830), p. 260, says he never knew or heard when this play was written. Byron's first mention of it in the letters is to Moore, June, 1821; LJ, [Byron's Works. Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland Prothero (London, 1898-1901)] V, 310.

2. [Samuel Chew's discussion [in The Dramas of Lord Byron (Gottingen, 1915)], pp. 99-102, is the least helpful section of his study; [Leslie A.] Marchand, [Byron's Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1968)], pp. 101-2, is also unimpressed with this play (it “has even fewer virtues” than Marino Faliero); even [G. Wilson] Knight nowhere offers much commentary [see “The Two Eternities” in The Burning Oracle (London, 1939) and Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (London, 1952)]. By far the best criticism is that of [Jerome] McGann [The Fiery Dust (Chicago, 1968), pp. 215-27 passim, and [M. G.] Cooke The Blind Man Traces the Circle (Princeton, 1969), pp. 181-213 passim.

3. The adroitness is still more remarkable when one realizes that Byron conceived and executed the play in less than a month; P, [Byron's Works. Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge (London, 1904-5)] V, 115. (Subsequent line numbers refer to Coleridge's text; P, V, 121-96.)

4. In the Preface, P, V, 8, he claims only to “approach” the unities in this play. My contention is that the more obvious unities—of time and place—are only approached, perhaps because that of character is for the moment Byron's concern.

5. Knight, The Burning Oracle, p. 286, does point to the play's extreme tensions.

6. II, 140-43; P, IV, 260.

7. Compare LJ, V, 189, 451.

8. Chew, p. 100, hints at something of this.

9. Ibid., p. 101; Chew is misled in saying this character's love of Venice renders him unconvincing, and he has misled nearly everyone since; for example, McGann, p. 220.

10. Childe Harold III, xlv, and IV, cxxxv; P, II, 243, 429.

11. P, V, 119.

12. Byron took pleasure in the association of Venice with the sea: compare for example the “Ode to Venice”, I (P, IV, 193-4), Childe Harold IV i-ii (P, II, 327-8), and LJ, IV, 337.

13. Manfred III, 4, 129-36; Marino Faliero IV, 2, 276-8; Sardanapalus V, 1, 223-8.

14. Compare McGann's analysis, p. 222.

15. Childe Harold IV, xc; P, II, 397.

16. Other passages suggest this possibility: for example, II, 332-65; IV, 334-7.

17. “Limbo”, The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), p. 431.

18. Sardanapalus II, 1, 300.

19. III, cxi; P, II, 285.

20. Faliero's image of a Greek temple (III, 2, 168-75) implies Byron's idea of a republic, as does Sardanapalus' awareness that his subjects, because of his attitude, have “gorged themselves up to equality”. See also LJ, V, 462.

21. The strongest critical commentary on the Doge is that of Cooke, pp. 181-213 passim, who sees him as a new development in Byron's heroes and the embodiment of “counter-heroic humanism”. His great virtue is that he refuses to act, and therefore contains at least his own guilt.

22. Childe Harold IV, cxxxviii; P, II, 430.

23. McGann, p. 218, points to the recurrence of the image of a balance, fortifying the irony of any concept of justice in the play, as Loredano does in another way here.

24. Richard Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New Haven, 1959), p. 7.

25. In Memoriam, Prologue, 1. 4: Tennyson: Poems and Plays, ed. Thomas Warren (Oxford, 1968), p. 230.

26. See Leonard Michaels, “Byron's Cain”, PMLA, LXXXIV (Jan., 1969), 71-9 passim, who reads Cain as an absurdist drama.