[In the following essay, McVeigh examines the Incantation in Manfred's opening scene and suggests there are thematic implications for its incongruity with the rest of the play.]

One of the curiosities of Romantic poetry is a mysterious incantation over the unconscious Manfred in the opening scene of Byron's best-known closet drama, condemning the hero's “guile”:

From thy false tears I did distil
An essence which hath strength to kill;
From thy own heart I then did wring
The black blood in its blackest spring;
From thy own smile I snatch'd the snake,
For there it coil'd as in a brake;
From thy own lip I drew the charm
Which gave all these their chiefest harm;
In proving every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.
By thy cold breast and serpent smile,
By thy unfathom'd gulfs of guile,
By that most seeming virtuous eye,
By thy shut soul's hypocrisy;
By the perfection of thine art
Which pass'd for human thine own heart;
By thy delight in others' pain,
And by thy brotherhood of Cain,
I call upon thee! and compel
Thyself to be thy proper Hell!(1)

In itself the curse seems not untypical of Byron, some of whose satire comes very close in spirit to the ritualistic, magical roots Robert Elliot sees in ancient Greek and Irish verse satire.² But this particular attack may strike us, as it does Leslie Marchand, as “inappropriate in the context of the drama.”³ By repute, Romantic heroes are given to various excesses, but coldness and hypocrisy are scarcely among them, being practically the union card of anti-Romantic villains like Urizen and Shelley's Jupiter. How appropriate is such a solemn indictment against a character whom William Calvert calls “primarily emotional”⁴ and James Twitchell calls Byron's most “romantic” hero?⁵ Stuart Sperry calls the Incantation “in many ways the germ of the completed drama,”⁶ and he is doubtless right. Yet in certain other ways the lines seem not reconcilable with the character of Manfred as it is revealed in the play. Does Manfred smile hypocritically—or at all? Does he seem virtuous, but delight in the pain of others? Is his heart a viper's? As a whole the drama does not suggest so. Perhaps, one might say, the voice is simply mistaken. But some of its accusations are pertinent, so why are the others there at all? Manfred is cold, but not guileful; he has caused evil, but not from malice. The Incantation is neither wholly misleading nor wholly apropos: like a badly tailored suit, the play seems not quite to fit it.

To my knowledge, the thematic implications of this awkwardness have not been explored. Byron apparently wrote the Incantation before the rest of the play. He began Manfred in Switzerland in September, 1816, and completed it in Venice in February, 1817. The Incantation was originally published in December, 1816, in The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems; the exact date of its composition is unknown.⁷ We need not believe Byron had the character of Manfred in mind at all when he wrote it. Some years ago Marchand hazarded a speculation which bears consideration—that as originally published the lines were leveled against Lady Byron and her friends.⁸ The implications of this hypothesis draw one into an interesting conundrum. Critics have consistently seen Manfred as both a hero and an autobiographical projection of the poet; Calvert states forthrightly that “Manfred was at bottom Byron.”⁹ Manfred is superior to other mortals and alienated from them; he is pursued by the unrelenting Furies of a private guilt. Neither an atheist nor a revolutionary, he is yet defiant of powers and structures outside of himself, including the demands of such systems as pantheism, Manicheanism, and Christianity.¹⁰ In all this Manfred bears some similarity to Byron himself. In addition, his destructive and apparently incestuous love for the beautiful Astarte suggests the poet's liaison with Augusta Leigh. In short, Manfred's credentials as an autobiographical hero seem unimpeachable.

So why would Byron direct against Manfred an imprecation charging him with the vices of Annabella Milbanke—the “Princess of Parallelograms,” as the poet took to calling her—and of the “tight little island” which had gossiped him into Switzerland? For if hypocrisy and malice seem foreign to Manfred's character, they were precisely the vices which Byron saw as the peculiar property of his own enemies. His assault on his wife's servant and confidante Mrs. Clermont, for example, published in March of 1816 as “A Sketch,” was so vicious as to stir up public indignation against him. Yet apart from its discomfiting undercurrent of class snobbery, much of the satire in tone and theme resembles the Incantation in Manfred:

          Oh! wretch without a tear—without a thought,
Save joy above the ruin thou hast wrought—
The time shall come, nor long remote, when thou
Shalt feel far more than thou inflictest now;
Feel for thy vile self-loving self in vain,
And turn thee howling in unpitied pain.
May the strong curse of crush'd affections light
Back on thy bosom with reflected blight!
And make thee in thy leprosy of mind
As loathsome to thyself as to mankind!
Till all thy self-thoughts curdle into hate,
Black—as thy will for others would create:
Till thy hard heart be calcined into dust,
And thy soul welter in its hideous crust.(11)

It seems reasonable to suspect with Marchand that the Incantation's vitriol came originally from the same reservoir of hate as this heartfelt curse against Clermont.¹² So Byron's use of the poem in Manfred soon afterwards is suggestive as far as the drama as a whole is concerned. Within the play, I believe, the curse serves to undermine the view of Manfred as “Man Freed,” a projection of the Romantic ego which triumphs in its independence and skepticism, while deepening the ironic dimension of his status as hero. A hero, yes—but he is a cursed hero, doomed for all his independence.

In the drama's opening, Faust-like monologue, Manfred reveals that he suffers from a blight of emotion, a coldness toward good, evil, and life itself:

                                                                                          Good, or evil, life,
Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear,
Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes,
Or lurking love of something on the earth.

(I.i.21-27)

Manfred's imagination is dead; his melodramatic passions are the self-destructive ones of guilt and of love for a dead woman, surface flames flaring up on a spiritual wasteland. He is a “blighted trunk upon a cursed root” (I.ii.68). So the Incantation, when it comes, describes rather than imposes Manfred's curse; its judgment expresses what is potential in Manfred's character:

And on thy head I pour the vial
Which doth devote thee to this trial;
Nor to slumber, nor to die,
Shall be in thy destiny;
Though thy death shall still seem near
To thy wish, but as a fear;
Lo! the spell now works around thee,
And the clankless chain hath bound thee;
O'er thy heart and brain together
Hath the word been pass'd—now wither!

(I.i.252-61)

The unidentified speaker may be the Seventh Spirit who has just appeared in the guise of Astarte and then vanished. In any event, the voice symbolically is Manfred's own.¹³ He is condemned to live desiring yet fearing death, to be his “own soul's sepulchre” (I.ii.27). As he later tells the Witch of the Alps, “I dwell in my despair— / And live—and live forever” (II.ii.148-49). Manfred's inner world is a barren, timeless desert in ironic contrast to the beauty of the Alps around him.

Manfred's curse is personal, not generic in nature; it sets him off from other men, like the mark of Cain. The curse has not blighted Manfred's life alone. He has—again like Cain—destroyed another. The Seventh Spirit describes Manfred's star as

A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe;
Still rolling on with innate force,
Without a sphere, without a course,
A bright deformity on high,
The monster of the upper sky!

(I.i.117-23)

Manfred's torments result from the evil consequences of past actions.¹⁴ The Witch of the Alps knows him “for a man of many thoughts, / And deeds of good or ill, extreme in both” (II.i.35-36). Without desiring evil, Manfred has caused it. To the Abbot he compares his life to the onslaught of the desert wind. The Biblical desert wind, the ruach, is a spirit, generative and life-giving; but Manfred's spirit is destructive:

                                                                                                              Like the wind,
The red-hot breath of the most lone simoom,
Which dwells but in the desert, and sweeps o'er
The barren sands which bear no shrubs to blast,
And revels o'er their wild and arid waves,
And seeketh not, so that it is not sought,
But being met is deadly,—such hath been
The course of my existence; but there came
Things in my path which are no more.

(III.i.126-34)

Manfred's guilt has grown out of his own basilisk nature. “Thou wilt not beam on one,” he tells the setting sun which symbolizes God, “To whom the gifts of life and warmth have been / Of a more fatal nature” (III.ii.27-29).

Manfred's curse is that he is not Everyman; better than other men, he is also worse. On one level, of course, he is Ben Adam, the Child of Clay or Son of Earth—a spirit encased in flesh whose protest differs from that of other mortals only in being more fiery. But Manfred's is a destructive flame, and his curse goes far beyond that of a Phaethon whose aspiration outreaches possibility. His curse is not that he is a man, but that he is Manfred.

Manfred, then, is a projection of Byron's personality toward which the poet evidences a painful ambivalence. Even the hero's Romantic “triumph” at play's end is unlikely to supply one with grounds for envy. Manfred's curse makes his status as hero thoroughly ambiguous. Throughout the drama a light sparkle of Byronic irony hovers around him, threatening to caricature him in his own Romantic tendency toward extremes. Until the end Manfred is in danger of being exposed as the plaything of spirits, manipulated by his destiny even while loudly defying it. In the opening act, for example, the Seventh Spirit responds to his conjuration with disdain:

Thou worm! whom I obey and scorn—
Forced by a power (which is not thine,
And lent thee but to make thee mine)
For this brief moment to descend,
Where these weak spirits round thee bend
And parley with a thing like thee—
What wouldst thou, Child of Clay! with me?

(I.i.125-31)

And almost immediately afterwards he deceives Manfred, appearing suddenly as Astarte, a “mockery” whose vanishing act brings on the hero's swoon. The threat that Manfred will in fact turn out a burlesque rather than a triumph of the Romantic ego persists for some time afterward; the boundary line which separates him from a satiric target like Dryden's fiery Achitophel is often in danger of being obscured in a bright haze of rhetorical excess. At times Manfred's defiance rises perilously close to bombast; he stalks across the stage of the reader's mind like a Hamlet manqué, a histrionic figure like the villains and heroes of early silent films. His gestures—the midnight soliloquy, the swoon, the attempted plunge to a rocky death—are larger than life, the stuff of a Tchaikovsky symphony.

How conscious was Byron's irony here? The fact that Manfred is an autobiographical figure does not necessarily imply that Byron failed to see in him those melodramatic excesses which in the past have made him to unsympathetic readers, as Marchand admits, “almost a burlesque of the self-aggrandizement of the romantic ego.”¹⁵ Byron's own life was hardly free from either extravagance or posturing; but in dealing with his poetry it is hazardous to assume he did not see the dangers involved in “the self-aggrandizement of the romantic ego.” The vision of Manfred's creator is always larger than that of Manfred—sharper, and far more capable of an ironic self-distancing. Certainly Byron often pitied himself as cursed in some measure like Manfred; he experienced much of life and death with deep anguish. Yet he never became so entrapped in his Angst as his Romantic projection does. More than any of his contemporaries Byron was able to view his own ego projections with a certain detachment—in a letter he could refer to Manfred simply as “a kind of magician.”¹⁶ His Romantic eye was at no point without a hint of Augustan jaundice. This ironic tendency suggests less a nihilistic turning on his own vision than an unhappy recognition of its limitations, and his own. An example might lie in his much-quoted description to Thomas Moore of the spiritual tempests in which he was tossed while writing canto III of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in Switzerland: “I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love inextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.” He wrote most of Manfred during this period. Yet even this confession of distress bordering on madness is set in perspective at the end by a typical quip, less often quoted:

I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her—but I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters.¹⁷

The voice strikes us as characteristically Byronic. Yet one can hardly imagine Manfred, poised to leap off the Jungfrau, checking himself with self-mockery. It is a question of cast of mind: as a dramatic creation Manfred embodies only one aspect or dimension (and that not necessarily the most important) of an enormously complex spirit. Byron's Weltschmerz was compulsive, but it never proved so tight a blinder as to prevent the inevitable ironic side glance. If his capacity for self-distancing fascinates biographers, it frustrates those critics prone to Procrustean reductionism. It is easier, perhaps, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a theorist to understand Byron.

So the poet was not unaware, I think, of the risk involved in his portrait of Manfred, of cranking out romantic parody rather than romantic drama. One evidence of his caution lies in his depiction of Manfred in an attractive non-romantic social context, to keep his hero's tendency toward solipsism and self-pity in dramatic perspective.¹⁸ We might recall the Chamois Hunter's mild, ironic comment on Manfred's boast that he is of another order—“Thanks to heaven! / I would not be of thine for the free fame / Of William Tell” (II.i.38-40); and the Abbot's sympathy for Manfred's “awful chaos—light and darkness, / And mind and dust, and passions and pure thoughts / Mix'd” (III.i.164-66); and the reminiscences of Herman and Manuel about happier days under Manfred's father (III.iii.1-28). While Byron in no sense wishes to turn his hero into a mockery, he carefully sets off Manfred's Angst against the humane good nature and balance of conventional, limited characters. On this melodramatic stage they are dwarfs overshadowed by the dark pinions of Manfred's ego; but the possibility always remains latent that the world they represent is, though regrettably given to oversimplification, a more genuinely human one than Manfred's own.

The critical problem posed by the Incantation can be understood only in this ironic context. Manfred's role as hero is darkened by his curse; the seeds of his humanity, his imagination and curiosity, are dead. The Incantation serves as his accusation against himself, a proclamation of the curse which has always been his. The inappropriate charges of hypocrisy and malice are remnants of the earlier curse, perhaps written with Lady Byron in mind, not assimilable into the thematic body of the play. Byron never emended the lines to make them fit more snugly into his new drama. The general import of the Incantation—its denunciation of Manfred's coldness and its consignment of him to his “proper Hell”—suffices to establish the curse which was his hero's, and Byron was never so delicate a weaver as to worry about a few loose strands in his tapestries. The power of Manfred as a whole surely depends more on general effect than on tight logic.

This view of Manfred as a haunted, inadequate hero is not entirely compatible with the version of him as Romantic Prometheus, triumphant in his defiance of external frameworks for ordering his life. Still, the difference is largely one of emphasis, because in the end Manfred does conquer his curse and enjoy a certain triumph. He does so by remaining true to himself, however blighted his nature. The hero himself hints at his lonely, ambiguous eminence in his soliloquy on ancient Rome and the Colosseum which broods over it:

But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection,
While Caesar's chambers, and the Augustan halls,
Grovel on earth in indistinct decay.
And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon
All this, and cast a wide and tender light,
Which soften'd down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation, and fill'd up,
As 'twere anew, the gaps of centuries.

(III.iv.27-35)

The scene symbolizes Manfred's own desolate spiritual integrity, himself a “noble wreck in ruinous perfection.” He has kept his distance from the Caesars, neither submitting to nor joining them. His refusal to seek power over others—“I disdain'd to mingle with / A herd, though to be leader” (III.i.121-22)—gives him the right to defy the power of others over him. The moon, like the earlier setting sun, symbolizes the presence of a deistic God superior to all spiritual and human systems, illuminating and lending meaning to a history into which He does not enter directly.

Throughout the drama Manfred overcomes a series of temptations. In each case he is tempted to give allegiance to an ideology—Nature worship, Manicheanism, Christianity—which places redemption outside of his own soul. His climactic defiance is of a “dusk and awful figure” who comes to him “unbidden” (III.iv.61-72). The spirit identifies himself as “the genius of this mortal” (III.iv.81). Manfred's last tempter, like that of Eliot's Becket, comes unexpectedly from his own heart. The menacing figure symbolizes Manfred's curse—or more precisely, the rationalization that the curse exists in any sense outside of himself.¹⁹ In defying his last tempter, Manfred finally takes onto himself full responsibility for his guilt:

                                                                                          Back to thy hell!
Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel;
Thou never shalt possess me, that I know;
What I have done is done; I bear within
A torture which could nothing gain from thine;
The mind which is immortal makes itself
Requital for its good or evil thoughts—
Is its own origin of ill and end—
And its own place and time.

(III.iv.124-32)

Symbolically, Manfred rejects the preternatural mechanisms of the whole drama, escaping finally the grip of the forces which had threatened to turn his defiance to an ironic end. Manfred conquers his curse, paradoxically, only by internalizing and accepting it. The Abbot's ministrations, however well-intended, can have no mediating power in its catharsis—“Old man! / We know ourselves, our mission, and thine order; / Waste not thy holy words on idle uses” (III.iv.94-96). Manfred's death is self-redemptive. Hence Byron's insistence to John Murray that the hero's last words—“Old man! 'Tis not so difficult to die” (III.iv.151)—are central to the whole meaning of the drama.²⁰ To break a curse condemning him to long for yet fear death, Manfred must die; but he can accept death only when he has accepted fully his personal responsibility for the curse. His death is thus the ultimate Pyrrhic victory, an embracing of his “proper Hell.” Whatever his moral status, his courage gives him a heroic stature (not just a melodramatic one) above that of the characters surrounding him. Manfred's triumph is thus not philosophical or ideological, but dramatic and tragic. It is a triumph of character rather than creed—and in this above all the rest, perhaps, Manfred resembles Byron.

One question raised earlier, however, remains. If Marchand is correct in speculating that the Incantation was originally aimed at Annabella Milbanke, why would Byron have chosen to redirect it against his Romantic projection? For whatever ironic distance we can see between the poet and his hero, Byron's contemporaries were certain to assume Manfred to be yet another Byronic alter ego—the poet had learned his lesson here with Childe Harold.²¹ So regardless of the Incantation's thematic relevance within the play, in practical terms the lines amounted to a public self-indictment, and a peculiar one. Byron's letters following the marital disaster brim over with self-directed bitterness; his initial reaction, for example, was actually to exonerate his wife rather than to blame her. His oscillation in the matter gradually developed into hatred.²² A calvinistic sense of guilt was an important part of Byron's make-up. Yet surely he never saw himself, as the Incantation suggests, as a prig or a hypocrite? I would like to venture on the matter one speculation (admittedly unprovable) revolving around his love for Augusta Leigh.

The victim whose memory torments Manfred is Astarte. She is not specified to be his sister, but incest is implied, in a rhetorical ellipsis stretching out toward the unspeakable.²³ Poetically, Astarte is a Romantic epipsyche, a female counterpart of Manfred:

She was like me in lineaments; her eyes,
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty:
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears—which I had not;
And tenderness—but that I had for her;
Humility—and that I never had.
Her faults were mine—her virtues were her own—
I loved her, and destroy'd her!

(II.ii.105-17)

The atmosphere of innuendo prevailing in the London Byron had just fled made the immediate connection of Astarte with Augusta inevitable. The fact of Byron's incest is now taken for granted by most scholars. Yet Astarte is not Augusta, any more than Manfred is in any simple sense Byron. Manfred's torture comes not from having loved, but from having destroyed Astarte—“Not with my hand, but heart, which broke her heart; / It gazed on mine, and wither'd” (II.ii.118-19). But Byron never destroyed Augusta, even in a strictly social sense; his hints about their incest would have been unconscionable had he perceived a real threat against her. Still, the Byron-Augusta love and separation clearly lies somewhere in the background of Manfred's orgy of self-recrimination. As much as Augusta herself, I suspect, the figure of Astarte suggests the Augusta aspect of Byron, which the cursed Manfred part has killed. The Incantation may suggest that in some dark moods Byron feared that his ultimate curse was to be left as cold at heart as the Princess of Parallelograms herself. His flight from Augusta seemed a death-blow to the Augusta within him—the pity, smiles, tears, and tenderness which had always been a part of the feminine make-up of his personality. Though thematically the Incantation fits awkwardly into Manfred, biographically its insertion is revealing. The Incantation might symbolize Byron's struggle against the temptation to blame his fate on others: in it Manfred-Byron is revealed as, potentially, a bitter replication of the poet's own enemies.

Coleridge argued that poetry is the great reconciler of opposites. Yet it often seems that Byron must be confronted in a welter of unreconciled opposites. Of all the Romantics he evidences the most doubt about the final validity of his vision. The turning back of doubt on itself can lead to the pragmatic conservatism of a Montaigne or a Dryden. Byron's fierce pride in his independence would surely have forestalled much development in this direction; Hawthorne's vision of him as a Methodist and ultra-Tory is whimsical. Manfred as a whole is not Romantic, or Augustan, or existential; it climaxes in a tragic ambiguity reflecting on different levels all these modes of seeing the world. Byron cannot be cubbyholed; his work owes debts everywhere, but is finally sui generis. In its small way the Incantation in Manfred evidences his struggle to peer into the frightening chasms of his own soul. Courage is the ultimate link between Manfred and his creator. Yet the poet was far more than any of his characters. To move from Manfred to Don Juan is to travel to another region of Byron's heart. The humane voices of its young hero and jaded narrator suggest a resurrection of the feminine, gentle spirit of Astarte—which had, of course, survived its entanglement in the curse of Manfred.

Notes

1. I.i.232-51. All quotations from Byron's poetry are taken from The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, Oxford Standard Authors edn. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966).

2. See Robert Elliott, The Power of Satire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1960).

3. Leslie Marchand, Byron's Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 77.

4. William Calvert, Byron: Romantic Paradox (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 174.

5. James Twitchell, “The Supernatural Structure of Byron's Manfred,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 15 (Autumn 1975): 601.

6. Stuart Sperry, “Byron and the Meaning of Manfred,” Criticism 16 (Summer 1974): 190.

7. In a footnote Byron explained ambiguously that “The following Poem was a Chorus in an unpublished Witch Drama, which was begun some years ago.” The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 7 vols. (London: John Murray, 1898-1904), 4:92n. Marchand believes that Byron wrote the poem originally during the summer of 1816, but notes that it “seems to embody some of the bitterness which he felt on hearing in October of his wife's cold replies through intermediaries to Mme. de Staël's attempts to effect a reconciliation.” (Byron's Poetry, p. 77n). See also Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 2:656-57n.

8. Byron's Poetry, pp. 77-78.

9. Byron: Romantic Paradox, p. 143.

10. These symbolic temptations are proffered by the Witch of the Alps, Arimanes, and the Abbot. See Sperry, p. 196.

11. Poetical Works, p. 88, lines 79-92.

12. Byron blamed Clermont for turning his wife against him. In a letter to Lady Byron dated 10 April 1816, he loaded yet more opprobrium on the poor woman: “The curse of my Soul light upon her & hers forever!—may my Spirit be deep upon her in her life—& in her death—may her thirst be unquenchable—& her wretchedness irrevocable—may she see herself only & eternally—may the fulfilment of her wishes become the destruction of her hopes—may she dwell in the darkness of her own heart & shudder—now & for existence.—Her last food will be the bread of her enemies.—I have said it.—” Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), 5:63-64. With spells like this the ancient Irish bards were reported to have killed rats.

13. The Seventh Spirit rules the star of Manfred's destiny (I.i.110-11). Twitchell's article discusses the Neoplatonic and Zoroastrian background of the play's spirits.

14. In “Lord Byron's Manfred: A Study of Alienation from Within,” University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (Fall 1970): 19-20, K. McCormick Luke sees Manfred's pangs of guilt as self-imposed and groundless. Much of the play implies objective grounds for the guilt, however; and the Witch's comment in II.ii.35-36 seems explicit.

15. Byron's Poetry, p. 84.

16. Byron's Letters and Journals, 5: 170.

17. Byron's Letters and Journals, 5: 165.

18. Those who doubt the importance of this context to the play's balance should re-read the bathetic original third act, in which the Abbot is mocked and carried away by demons. Murray criticized this ending, and Byron re-wrote the act in Rome in May, 1817, making the Abbot “a good man.”

19. Sperry sees the spirit as symbolizing the Byronic hero. Clearly, Manfred represents one aspect of Byron. But may we see him as representing Byron as writer? The hypothesis makes sense biographically, but in the context of the play seems forced.

20. Byron's Letters and Journals, 5: 257.

21. By the time he got to canto IV of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he could write, “With regard to the conduct of the last canto, there will be found less of the pilgrim than in any of the preceding, and that little slightly, if at all, separated from the author speaking in his own person. The fact is, that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive” (Poetical Works, p. 226).

22. By June of 1817 he could refer to Lady Byron as “that infernal fiend—whose destruction I shall yet see” (Byron's Letters and Journals, 5: 243).

23. Manuel speaks of “her, whom of all earthly things / That lived, the only thing he seem'd to love,— / As he, indeed, by blood was bound to do, / The lady Astarte, his—Hush! who comes here?” And the Abbot enters, to leave the flames of our curiosity unquenched (III.iii.44-47).