[In the following essay, Robinson probes the Faustian and other sources and thematic implications of the diabolical double in Lord Byron's The Deformed Transformed.]

Byron's The Deformed Transformed is a complex, fragmentary, and uneven drama which has received little critical attention and less praise since its publication in 1824; yet the potential effect of this drama prompted Montague Summers in an unguarded moment to express “infinite regret” that Byron “did not finish the piece, which has a eerie and perhaps unhallowed fascination all its own.”¹ Summers undoubtedly praised this drama because of its unorthodox plot containing a pact with the devil, its perplexing incompleteness, its autobiographical revelations, and its indebtedness to Byron's acknowledged sources: Joshua Pickersgill's unbridled Gothic novel, The Three Brothers (1803); and Goethe's Faust, Part I (1808). But the “fascination” attending The Deformed Transformed is manifestly increased when one realizes that Byron's drama was conceived and written and would have been completed under the indirect influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley, that it is a central document for a literary motif transcending continents and centuries, and that it is in fact the “Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron” publicized by Thomas Medwin and Washington Irving in 1835.

Of the three parts of the incomplete Deformed Transformed, the first scene of Part I is by far the most imaginative and intense, and for this reason Hermann Varnhagen suggested facetiously that the remainder of the drama had been written by someone else.² In this first scene, Arnold, the deformed hero, was rejected by his mother and reminded of his hunchback and lame, cloven foot by his reflection in a fountain. Hated and hating himself, Arnold despaired and attempted suicide, but was deterred by a Mephistophelean “Stranger” who miraculously appeared from the fountain and offered Arnold a new body in order that he could successfully love and be beloved by others. After engaging a compact with the Stranger, who then raised the bodily forms of Julius Caesar, Alcibiades, Socrates, Antony, Demetrius Poliorcetes, and Achilles from antiquity, Arnold chose the form of Achilles and was transformed into the “unshorn boy of Peleus” and and “Beautiful shadow / Of Thetis's boy.”³ But then the Stranger, transforming himself, cleverly assumed Arnold's rejected and deformed “form,” consequently became the “shadow” (I.i.449) or second self of Arnold, and chose to be called Caesar. The protagonist and antagonist in new forms then mounted their coal-black horses and raced to “where the World / Is thickest,” to “where there is War / And Woman in activity” (I.i.494-497).

The remainder of the unfinished drama presents Arnold's and Caesar's exploits with “War” and “Woman.” The second scene of Part I and the three scenes of Part II describe Arnold and Caesar before and during the Siege and Sack of Rome in 1527. As the Bourbon's gallant knight, Arnold successfully led the besieging army over the walls of Rome, engaged Benvenuto Cellini, who had slain the Bourbon as he ascended the wall, and rescued the Roman beauty, Olimpia, from the despoiling troops in St Peter's. Although Olimpia disdained Arnold's bravery and cast herself down from the Pope's altar in the church, Arnold and Caesar revived her and bore her body from the carnage at the conclusion of Part II. Part III of The Deformed Transformed includes only a sixty-seven line choral song which offers virtually no suggestion concerning the future adventures of Arnold, Caesar, and Olimpia. The setting had been changed to a castle in the Apennines, but the plot is advanced no further than the following:

The wars are over,
          The spring is come;
The bride and her lover
          Have sought their home.

(III.i.1-4)

But in 1901 E. H. Coleridge published from Byron's manuscript a second scene for Part III in which Arnold expressed his jealousy and regret that Olimpia could not love him as he loved her. Noting that the new Achilles would become “jealous of himself under his former figure,” Byron was prepared to increase the conflict between Arnold and Caesar, his “former figure.”

Of these three parts briefly summarized above, the first scene of Part I reveals an emotional intensity that rivals Manfred and Cain. This intensity is manifest in Byron's sympathetic portrait of the unloved hunchback, in the Faustian pact between Arnold and Caesar, and in Arnold's glorious transformation, for each of which Byron acknowledged his indebtedness to external influences. But significantly more important for the meaning of The Deformed Transformed is what Byron did not acknowledge: his indebtedness to the doppelgänger tradition for his apparently unique portrayal of the Stranger's assumption of Arnold's deformed body. It is this second transformation that not only intensifies the action of the first scene but also imposes a unity on the drama, in that Caesar inseparably accompanied Arnold as a reflection of his former self, that is, as his metamorphic doppelgänger. That Byron was consciously working within the tradition of the double may be demonstrated, but it is first necessary to consider the sources he acknowledged for his unfinished drama.

Byron once confessed to Lady Blessington that The Deformed Transformed was “suggested” by his own lameness and by the “rage and mortification” he experienced when his mother ridiculed his “personal deformity.”⁴ But if Byron sought to purge these feelings of rage and mortification by empathically portraying Arnold's deformities, he also welcomed other reproaches. Shortly after concluding the fragmentary Deformed Transformed, Byron offered the following comparison between his own lameness and that of his friend, Henry Fox: “but there is this difference, that he appears a halting angel, who has tripped against a star; whilst I am Le Diable Boiteux,—a soubriquet, which I marvel that, amongst their various nominis umbrae, the Orthodox have not hit upon.”⁵ Byron, by portraying the diabolical Stranger's assumption of Arnold's deformed body (with both hunchback and cloven foot), was evidently provoking the Orthodox to compare him with the cynical and deformed devil in Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux.

Byron did not mention his own lameness in the prefixed advertisement to The Deformed Transformed, but he did acknowledge two literary sources for his drama: “This production is founded partly on the story of a novel called ‘The Three Brothers,’ published many years ago [1803], from which M. G. Lewis's ‘Wood Demon’ [sic] was also taken; and partly on the ‘Faust’ of the great Goethe.”⁶The Three Brothers was written by Joshua Pickersgill, an author who in 1804 was unknown by his reviewer, and who in 1826 was mistakenly “supposed to have been the late M. G. Lewis.”⁷ Byron, who may have been introduced to this novel in 1816,⁸ borrowed incidents chiefly from its fourth volume, in which the diabolical villain, Julian, recounted the miseries of his former life as Arnaud. Like Byron's Arnold, Pickersgill's Arnaud was a hunchback (he had been wounded and deformed by the banditti at the age of eight) whose parents had rejected him. Unsuccessful in love, depraved in character, yet proud in spirit (“I! I! I! being the utterance everlastingly on his tongue”⁹), Arnaud despaired. Just as Arnold attempted suicide when he saw his reflected ugliness in the fountain or “Nature's mirror” (I.i.47), so also had Arnaud twice attempted to hurl himself from a precipice after a polished broken blade had mirrored his deformity. Unsuccessful in these attempts, Arnaud conjured up Satan who offered the deformed hero a new body. Because The Three Brothers is not readily accessible, the central transformation scene (also transcribed by Coleridge in Poetry v 473n-474n) is here quoted in full:

The satanic gaze turned on the side of the cavern heat so powerful, that the clay in the interstices was absumed to an ash, and the flinty rock vitrified into glass pervious to the sight of Arnaud, who saw thereon visions admirable and amazing.

There passed in liveliest portraiture, the various men distinguished for that beauty and grace, which Arnaud so much desired, that he was ambitious to purchase them with his soul.

He felt that it was his part to chuse whom he would resemble, yet he remained unresolved, though the spectator of an hundred shades of renown, among which glided by Achilles and Alexander, Alcibiades, and Hephestian: at length appeared the supernatural effigy of a man, whose perfections human artist never could depict or insculp—Demetrius the son of Antigonus. Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within his hand the resemblance of a poinard, its point inverted towards his breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point through his heart, and underwent a painless death.

During this trance, his spirit metemsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of his admiration: like an infant new-born, that exist without consciousness of that existence, incarnate in each desirable perfection, Arnaud awoke a Julian!

(iv 347-348)

The power of this scene was not wasted on Byron, for he adopted the substance of it, even to the similar choice of forms offered by the tempter. Yet the character of the Demon was not developed beyond this point, although he was twice seen as an infernal spirit attending Arnaud (called Julian after the transformation). And there is no suggestion in the four volumes that Arnaud was shadowed by his former self. In fact, Arnaud's rejected and deformed body had been preserved in a grotto in the Forest of the Pines.

Since Byron mentioned in his advertisement that Monk Lewis's unpublished drama, “The Wood Daemon” (1807), was also influenced by The Three Brothers, he may have read this drama in its published and revised form, a “Grand Musical Romance” with the title One O'Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon (1811).¹⁰ Lewis acknowledged his indebtedness to Pickersgill's novel in his advertisement to the first edition, and the parallels between the two works are quite obvious. Hardyknute, Lord of Holstein and villain of the drama, was “born deformed” (like Byron's Arnold, but unlike Pickersgill's Arnaud) and engaged “a dreadful compact with the Wood Daemon,” Sangrida, by which he was transformed: “She chained success to my footsteps; she rendered me invulnerable in battle; she endowed me with perpetual youth and health; and she cast over my person a magic charm to dazzle all female eyes, and seduce all female hearts. I was rich, potent, beloved, and wretched! for, oh! to that fatal bond was annexed a penalty.”¹¹ This fatal “penalty” was Monk Lewis's adaptation of Arnaud's desire for a second transformation in The Three Brothers: seeking a new form to elude detection on the first anniversary of his initial transformation, Arnaud promised Satan to kill the first person he saw; similarly, Hardyknute had sacrificed for eight years a young child on the anniversary of his transformation (the “seventh of each revolving August” at one o'clock) in order to maintain his transformed body. In the climax of Lewis's drama, Hardyknute failed to fulfill the bargain the ninth time and forfeited his soul to Sangrida, the Wood Daemon. Yet, like the Demon in The Three Brothers, Sangrida was virtually undeveloped, did not assume Hardyknute's body, and did not influence Byron's characterization of Caesar in The Deformed Transformed.

The final influence Byron acknowledged for his drama was Goethe's Faust, translations of which he read in January 1822, just before he began The Deformed Transformed. Notwithstanding E. H. Coleridge's statements to the contrary, the dating of The Deformed Transformed can be determined, for Byron himself prefixed “Pisa J[anuar]y 1822” to the first page of his manuscript.¹² Although Byron probably did not begin this new drama until after he had completed Werner by January 20 1822, he had written part, if not all, of the first scene “some days after” February 6 1822, by which time he had seen Southey's “pretended reply”¹³ to his earlier attack on Southey in the Appendix to The Two Foscari. The authority for this dating is Thomas Medwin's account of the following dialogue between Byron and Shelley in Pisa:

Some days after these remarks [Byron's reaction to Southey's reply], on calling on him one morning, he produced ‘The Deformed Transformed.’ Handing it to Shelley, as he was in the habit of doing his daily compositions, he said:

“Shelley, I have been writing a Faustish kind of drama: tell me what you think of it.”

After reading it attentively, Shelley returned it.

“Well,” said Lord Byron, “how do you like it?”

“Least,” replied he, “of any thing I ever saw of yours. It is a bad imitation of ‘Faust;’ and besides, there are two entire lines of Southey's in it.”

Lord Byron changed colour immediately, and asked hastily what lines? Shelley repeated,

‘And water shall see thee,
And fear thee, and flee thee.’

“They are in ‘The Curse of Kehama.’”

His Lordship, without making a single observation, instantly threw the poem into the fire. He seemed to feel no chagrin at seeing it consume—at least his countenance betrayed none, and his conversation became more gay and lively than usual. Whether it was hatred of Southey, or respect for Shelley's opinions, which made him commit an act that I considered a sort of suicide, was always doubtful to me.¹⁴

Although Medwin has often been accused of fabrication here, Edward Trelawny confirmed the substance of Medwin's report: “I was in the room—half a sheet of M.S. of The Deformed Transformed was given Shelley to read—which had been written in the night—& that half which was distroyed [sic].”¹⁵ Byron, then, did not destroy the manuscript of The Deformed Transformed, but he evidently did not continue this “Faustish kind of drama” until some months later. Byron was preoccupied in February 1822 with the adverse critical reception of Cain and with Southey's attacks on him; and the Dragoon affair in March, the death of Allegra in April, the writing of Cantos VI and VII of Don Juan from April to June,¹⁶ and Shelley's death in July were more than enough to prevent his continuation of The Deformed Transformed, which he attempted to finish in Genoa even as late as January 1823.¹⁷

Yet it was in Pisa, shortly after he had finished Werner on January 20 1822, that Byron began The Deformed Transformed, and he had access to at least two translations of Faust at this time. Desiring to read Goethe's drama in English, Byron had requested John Murray to send him “designs from Faust. … and a translation of it” on December 4 1821;¹⁸ but because there had been no complete translation by then, Murray sent only Retsch's Series of Twenty-Six Outlines, Illustrative of Goethe's Tragedy of Faust, Engraved from the Originals by Henry Moses, and an Analysis of the Tragedy (London 1820). This volume, which contained a prose translation of Faust (with select scenes only summarized), was received by January 12 1822, and by that time the Pisan circle also possessed a copy of John Anster's alternating translation (in poetry) and summary of Faust which had appeared in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for June 1820.¹⁹ Consequently, Byron's statement to Medwin in Pisa, that his knowledge of Faust was only “from a sorry French translation [by Madame de Staël in De l'Allemagne], from an occasional reading or two into English of parts of it by Monk Lewis when at Diodati, and from the Hartz mountain-scene, that Shelley versified the other day,”²⁰ does not reflect his access to these two translations, unless Byron told Medwin this before Retsch's Outlines arrived in Pisa. If this were the case, then Byron had heard Shelley's translation by January, that is before he began The Deformed Transformed and before Shelley had formally completed his written translation of “several scenes” from Goethe's Faust and Calderon's El Magico Prodigioso for The Liberal in April.²¹

Byron's avowed interest in Faust before and during his writing of the first scene for The Deformed Transformed significantly affected the structure of his drama. The long temptation scene between Arnold and Caesar and their companionship for the remainder of the drama undoubtedly reflect the similar pattern between Faust and Mephistopheles in Goethe's drama, a pattern not present in either The Three Brothers or The Wood Daemon. Goethe himself remarked on Byron's indebtedness to Faust for the characterization of Caesar, at one point egotistically asserting that “Lord Byron's transformed Devil is a continuation [with no originality] of Mephistophiles.” Goethe later tempered this remark, citing Byron's original employment of Caesar, and confessed that Byron's devil was only “suggested by my Mephistophiles.”²² Varnhagen, in his study of The Deformed Transformed, denied any further similarities between Mephistopheles and Caesar (except that “Beide sind skeptische, cynische Spötter”); on the contrary, as F. W. Stokoe has observed, “the Stranger or Caesar has throughout a strain of the cynical humour, almost good-humour, that characterises the Mephisto of Faust I.”²³ Furthermore, as will be demonstrated below, Byron saw Mephistopheles as Faust's symbolic doppelgänger, and he imitated their psychological identity in his characterizations of Caesar and Arnold. But since Mephistopheles did not assume Faust's body, Goethe's drama did not, in itself, provide Byron the idea to use the transformed Caesar as Arnold's physical double.

Having exhausted Byron's acknowledged sources, I do not mean to propose that his conception of the transformed Caesar as Arnold's physical double was his unique creation; quite the contrary. Byron owed a manifest debt to the doppelgänger tradition in literature, extending to such diverse works as Dryden's Amphitryon, Monk Lewis's The Bravo of Venice, and Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux.²⁴ Neither Amphitryon nor The Bravo of Venice employs the devil as double, but both emphasize a schizophrenia that is thematically central to The Deformed Transformed. In Dryden's Amphitryon (as in Plautus's and Moliere's dramas by the same title), Jupiter and Mercury assumed the forms of Amphitryon and his slave, Sosias, in order that Jupiter might easily seduce Amphitryon's wife, Alcmena. Having fulfilled his desires with Alcmena, Jupiter (still impersonating Amphitryon) concluded an ironic argument on the difference between the Husband and the Lover in this fashion:

To please my niceness you must separate
The Lover from his Mortal Foe, the Husband.
Give to the yawning Husband your cold Vertue,
But all your vigorous Warmth, your melting Sighs,
Your amorous Murmurs, be your Lover's part.(25)

Although Alcmena later accused Jupiter of speciousness (“How vainly wou'd the Sophister divide, / And make the Husband and the Lover, two!”), the Husband (Amphitryon) and the Lover (Jupiter) in Dryden's comedy are psychologically and symbolically reflections of one personality.

Byron had also discovered a different and a more intense double personality, without intervention of god or devil, in Monk Lewis's adapted translation of J. D. D. Zschokke's Abällino, der grosse Bandit, first published as The Bravo of Venice in 1805. The Neapolitan hero, Rosalvo, requiring a disguise, symbiotically projected for himself two distinct personalities: Abellino, the extremely ugly bravo of Venice whose dissembling ultimately freed the Doge from the threat of the banditti; and the extremely handsome Florentine nobleman, Flodoardo, who ultimately won the love of the Doge's daughter, Rosabella. Since Rosalvo was both the ugly Abellino and the handsome Flodoardo, there could be no direct confrontation between his two other selves; rather, as in Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the appearance of one depended on the disappearance of his opposite. This physical antagonism between two personalities manufactured by one self in The Bravo of Venice contrasts with the existence of the second self (Jupiter) who actually confronted his physical counterpart in Amphitryon. And unlike Arnold's extraordinary pact with the devil in The Deformed Transformed, Rosalvo's transformations were self-initiated and were selflessly directed to preserving the Venetians and the Doge from the banditti. Notwithstanding these differences, The Bravo of Venice, which Byron had read, provided and entertaining characterization of dual personality and revealed the potential of subtle variations on the doppelgänger motif.

Although the Venetians had suggested that Abellino, the bravo of Venice, had Satanic origins, Rosalvo finally explained the natural creation of his double personality. Consequently, neither The Bravo of Venice nor Amphitryon offered Byron examples of the devil as doppelgänger. But Byron had also read Le Sage's Le Diable Boiteux, a satirical novel in which the devil, Asmodeus, accompanied and cynically instructed Don Cleophas Leandro Perez Zambullo, a young student, in the vanities of the Spanish people. In one of the episodic scenes, the devil Asmodeus borrowed the form of Don Cleophas in order to save the beautiful Seraphina from a burning house and consequently win her love for Don Cleophas. Byron might have remembered the comic effect of this diabolic transformation when he discovered a similar instance of “doubling” in Goethe's Faust. In a scene translated in both the Retsch volume and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Mephistopheles clothed himself in Faust's gowns and cynically deluded one of Faust's young students. Byron alluded to this scene in Faust as early as December 1821 (see note 21 above), at which time he may have recognized its symbolic value. But by no later than January 1822 Byron would see in Mephistopheles' masquerade an objective correlative for the symbolic identity between the devil and Faust.

Byron's discovery of the devil as doppelgänger in Faust was occasioned by his receipt, by January 12 1822, of Retsch's Series of Outlines which contained, in an anonymous introduction (p 2), the following interpretation of Goethe's drama: “that the easiest clue to the moral part of this didactic action is, to consider Faust and Mephistopheles as one person, represented symbolically, only in a two-fold shape.” Encountering this highly sophisticated interpretation of Faust, Byron was led to recognize the potential of devil as doppelgänger in Goethe's drama and to realize this potential in The Deformed Transformed. Consequently, the companionship of Faust and Mephistopheles in Faust takes on new meaning in relation to Byron's drama, for if Mephistopheles and Faust, though distinct dramatis personae, were symbolically one personality, then the devils Mephistopheles and Caesar merely embodied Faust's and Arnold's moral imperfections (compare, for example, each protagonist's suicide attempt before the devil appeared). Furthermore, Byron made explicit what was but implicit in Faust by having Caesar, through transformation, embody not only Arnold's moral imperfections but also his physical deformities.

That Byron encountered and adopted this interpretation of Faust appearing in the Retsch volume would be highly speculative were it not for Byron and Shelley's discussions of the doppelgänger in January 1822. Shelley, having read at least part of Le Diable Boiteux,²⁶ having understood the symbolic relationship between Frankenstein and his monster in Mary Shelley's novel, having employed Demogorgon to represent a union of Prometheus (head) and Asia (heart) in Prometheus Unbound, and having completed by February 1821 Epipsychidion which, like Alastor, employed the epipsyche as the idealized double of one's self, was no novice in the tradition of the doppelgänger. And by January 1822 Shelley was translating for Byron not only episodes from Goethe's Faust but also scenes from Calderon's El Magico Prodigioso, a drama depicting a relationship between demon and hero similar to that between Mephistopheles and Faust. Furthermore, in January 1822 Shelley was translating (or summarizing) for Byron another Calderon drama, most often entitled “El Embozado,” containing a bizarre plot in which the protagonist was pursued by his “second self.” Since Byron, who had already experimented with the double in Manfred and Cain, intended to adapt the plot of “El Embozado” for his own dramatic purposes, there can be no question that he and Shelley discussed the dramatic possibilities and function of the doppelgänger. Indeed, since Shelley was translating parts of Faust and the two Calderon dramas for Byron, and since he read the Retsch volume the day it arrived, January 12, he probably was the first to recognize the insight of the anonymous editor who claimed that Mephistopheles and Faust were but symbolic representations of one personality.²⁷

Having discovered the symbolic doubling within Faust, Shelley, and consequently Byron, proceeded to compare Goethe's drama with Calderon's El Magico Prodigioso, based on the legend of St Cyprian's pact with the devil in Antioch. After he had finished written translations of scenes from both plays, Shelley cited in April 1822 the “striking similarity” between the plots and suggested that “Cypriano [i.e., El Magico Prodigioso] evidently furnished the germ of Faust.”²⁸ And when Byron discussed Faust with Medwin in January (see note 21 above), he repeated Shelley's earlier and more extensive comparison of the two plays: “You tell me the plot [of Faust] is almost entirely Calderon's. The fête, the scholar, the argument about the Logos, the selling himself to the fiend, and afterwards denying his power; his disguise of the plumed cavalier; the enchanted mirror,—are all from Cyprian. That Magico Prodigioso must be worth reading, and nobody seems to know any thing about it but you and Shelley.”²⁹ The demon or fiend in this drama has been recently interpreted as a “projection, as it were, of processes that go on within Cyprian's mind, imagination, and sensibility”;³⁰ by comparing Calderon's demon to Goethe's Mephistopheles, Byron and Shelley undoubtedly made the same judgment.

The demon of El Magico Prodigioso, like Mephistopheles in Faust and Caesar in The Deformed Transformed, is a Protean figure who frequently transformed himself. Disguised “as a fine Gentleman” searching for Antioch in Act I, the demon initially engaged the pagan Cyprian in a theological debate. Having lost this debate, the demon then manipulated Cyprian's involvement with the fair Justina, and in Act II, after Cyprian offered his soul to Hell's “most detested spirit” in exchange for Justina's love, the demon reappeared in an “unknown form” as a shipwreck victim to claim Cyprian's soul. Preceding the symbolic embrace between Cyprian and his magical tempter, the demon quite clearly explained that he would become Cyprian's shadow or second self: “so firm an amity / 'Twixt thee and me be, that neither Fortune … nor Time … nor / Heaven itself … can ever make / The least division between thee and me,— / Since now I find a refuge in thy favour.”³¹ This symbolic unity between devil and hero was eventually destroyed when Cyprian realized he had been duped by the demon who was powerless in comparison to the Christian God.³² Although Cyprian reclaimed his soul and died a Christian martyr, eternally separated from his inimical second self, the pattern of devil as doppelgänger is quite evident in this drama which has many affinities with Faust.

By the end of January 1822 Byron had thus been introduced to a tradition of doubles which bound Lover (Jupiter) to Husband (Amphitryon), villain (Abellino) to hero (Flodoardo), and most importantly devil (Mephisto and Calderon's demon) to man (Faust and Cyprian). If the anonymous editor of Retsch's Series of Twenty-Six Outlines provided the formal cause (i.e., revealed to Byron the potential of devil as doppelgänger in Faust and El Magico Prodigioso) for The Deformed Transformed, then Percy Bysshe Shelley provided the efficient cause by acquainting Byron in January 1822 with a bizarre doppelgänger in another Calderon drama, which Byron acknowledged as the source for a drama he intended to write. This source, mistakenly entitled either “El Embozado” or “El Encapotado,” was actually Calderon's El Purgatorio de San Patricio.

The evidence for Byron's interest in this Calderon drama was offered by Thomas Medwin to Washington Irving in 1825, in the form of an “unpublished note” which recorded Byron's summary of “El Embozado” or “El Encapotado” together with Byron's expressed design to adapt Calderon's plot of the doppelgänger for his own projected drama. Medwin's alternate titles (neither of which was correct) resulted from his “scanty” record of Byron's conversations in Pisa on this subject. And when Washington Irving transcribed Medwin's “unpublished note” for his own journal of 1825, he accepted not only Medwin's titles (Irving fruitlessly searched Spain in 1826 for a Calderon drama by these titles) but also Medwin's assumption that Byron never began his adaptation of Calderon's plot. Irving retained these misconceptions when he rewrote Medwin's “unpublished note” for publication as “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron” in The Knickerbocker: New York Monthly Magazine.³³ The first misconception, that of the title and identity of the play, has perplexed Byron scholars up to this day, for they are not aware that Horace E. Thorner, in 1934, satisfactorily identified the plot of “El Embozado” as but a scene from Calderon's El Purgatorio de San Patricio, in which Ludovico Enio vainly attempted to kill a mantled figure (“un Hombre Embozado”) who finally revealed himself as Enio's skeletal “second self.”³⁴ The second and more important misconception, that Byron's projected drama was “unwritten,” has been accepted as fact, for no one has recognized that Byron adapted Calderon's bizarre plot in the unfinished Deformed Transformed.

Although Irving's “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron” has been reprinted often since its publication in August 1835, Irving's transcription of Medwin's “unpublished note” in his 1825 journal has never been published. In this “note,” which Medwin “had intended to append to a new edition of his Memoirs”³⁵ and which contains Byron's summary of “El Embozado,” Medwin prefaced his remarks by some important qualifications which were not included in Irving's published version in 1835:

At the time when Lord Byron threatened to make himself as voluminous & prolific an author as Shakespeare, one of the subjects on which he formed a design of exercising his fancies (during a short poetical repose between the burning of the Deformed Transformed and [the completion of] Werner) was the Embozado or Encapotado of Calderon. It is one of the plays that my edition of that past poet (I had nearly said Dramatist) does not contain and which I have in vain endeavoured to procure, to the shame of literature & of his nation, no perfect collection of his work being extant. For the outline of the story Lord Byron was indebted to Shelley, for he did not understand Spanish (the translation of the Ballad ahi de mi alhama [sic]—notwithstanding). My note of the conversation I had with him was so scanty that I did not mention it in my published Journal, but the plot he had in view to develope (I know not how it agrees with the original [)] was nearly as follows.

Three significant items emerge from this introduction and increase Medwin's reliability as Byron's amanuensis in this case. First of all, Medwin specified that Byron was planning this drama on the double in January or February (i.e., between the completion of Werner on January 20 1822 and the burning of The Deformed Transformed manuscript no later than March 1822), when Byron and Shelley discussed the various possibilities of the doppelgänger. Secondly, Medwin's avowed ignorance of the relation between the “plot” and its “original” indicates that he did not hear Shelley's translation or “outline” of El Purgatorio de San Patricio and that he recorded only Byron's summary of the drama. Thirdly, what follows in the remainder of Medwin's “unpublished note” is not merely a summary of the source (El Purgatorio) but a summary of the “plot [Byron] had in view to develope” (hereafter called “El Embozado”):

The hero of the piece is a nobleman (whom I call Alfonzo) just making his debut on the stage of life. His passions from early and unrestrained indulgence are impetuous and ungovernable and he follows their dictates with a wild and thoughtless disregard of consequences. These consequences are obvious enough. Such a moral would be a very common place one but with Calderon [i.e., following Calderon's example] I should take a new and different way of enforcing it and a truly dramatic one it might be made if treated in the genuine spirit of Goethe. Soon after our Spaniards entrance into the world a person in a masque or cloak, that prevents his features or figure from being recognized (for the titles of the play leave us in doubt as to the express nature of the disguise) becomes as it were his shadow—his second self.

This mysterious being Alfonzo is unable to identify with any of his acquaintances; his real name—or country—or place of abode are a mystery—and he is equally at a loss to form even a conjecture as to the peculiar observations and interest of the stranger. This curiosity at first scarcely noticed, or only considered as idle impertinence, daily becomes more irksome. Not only his most-private actions pass under the scrutiny of this officious monitor, but his most secret thoughts are known to him. Speak of him, he stands by his side—think of him—though invisible he feels his presence oppress and weigh upon his spirits like a troubled atmosphere. Waking or asleep he is ever with him or before him—he crosses his path, at every turn he intrudes like the demon in Faust in his solitude—he follows him in the crowded street, in the brilliant saloon, he sees him winding through the assembly & the honied words of seduction that he is addressing to his fair partner in the dance die unfinished on his lips. One voice like the voice of his own soul whispers in his ears and silences the music—Who can he be [?]

Is it the false embodying of his fantasy—a shape his melancholy spirits have engendered out of the atoms of the day? No! It is something more than an apparition that haunts him. Like the Schedoni of The Italian † († vide. romance by Mrs Radcliff) his evil genius counteracts all his projects, thwarts him in all his deep laid schemes of ambition and fame, unwinds through all their intricacies and shapes, the webs of his intrigues, developes the hidden motives of his conduct and betrays that those actions which he wishes to make appear the most disinterested are only based in self.

The Hero of the drama is become abstracted and gloomy. Youth, health, wealth, power all that promised to give life its zest in the outset have lost their charm. The sweetest cup to others is poison to him. Existence becomes a burthen, and to put a [? trouble] to his misery & drive him to a state bordering on frenzy he suspects that the guilty object of his affections has fallen a prey to his tormentor. Alonzo now thirsts only for vengeance but the unknown eludes his pursuit and his emissaries endeavour in vain to discover his retreat; at length he succeeds in tracing him into the house of his mistress & attacking him with all the fury which jealous rage inspires, taxes him with his wrongs and demands satisfaction. His rival scarcely defends himself and the sword of Alonzo at the first thrust pierces the breast of his enemy, who in falling utters “are you satisfied!” his mantle drops off and discovers—his own image the spectre of himself—his self—He dies with horror!

The spectre is an alegorical [sic] being—the personification of conscience or of the passions.³⁶

When Washington Irving rewrote this “unpublished note” by Medwin in “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” he correctly observed that the plot summary was “somewhat vague and immature, and would doubtless have undergone many modifications” in Byron's projected adaptation. But because Joshua Pickersgill's The Three Brothers and Goethe's Faust provided these “modifications,” Irving (as well as Medwin and subsequent Byron scholars) failed to recognize the fundamental similarity between “El Embozado” and Byron's written, not “unwritten,” The Deformed Transformed. The conflict between Alonzo and his “double” and that between Arnold and Caesar are essentially identical, but Byron disguised his indebtedness by altering the character of Alonzo. Influenced by his own lameness and borrowing from Pickersgill's The Three Brothers, Byron created a hunchbacked Arnold whose physical deformities symbolically embodied Alonzo's “impetuous and ungovernable” passions. The consequences of Arnold's deformity, his Faustian pact with Caesar and his transformation into Achilles, were significant structural additions to the frame of “El Embozado,” but Byron did not change the function of the doppelgänger in his adaptation, even though Caesar became the double of Arnold's former self. The “stranger” in Calderon's drama was Alonzo's uneludable “shadow—his second self”; in nearly identical fashion, Byron's “Stranger,” before he took the name of Caesar and became Arnold's “second self,” revealed Arnold's destiny: “In a few moments / I will be as you were, and you shall see / Yourself for ever by you, as your shadow” (I.i.447-449). Just as Calderon's “stranger,” a “personification of conscience or of the passions,” shadowed Alonzo as a reflection of his moral weaknesses, Caesar, who assumed the rejected and hunchbacked body, accompanied Arnold as a reminder of his former physical deformities and of his diabolical transformation.

Byron's adaptation of the physical doubles in “El Embozado” was also influenced by his awareness of the symbolic doubles in Goethe's Faust. Byron recognized the parallels between the two works and told Medwin that his modification of “El Embozado” would be “in the genuine spirit of Goethe” and that Alonzo's double intruded “like the demon in Faust.” In other words, Arnold and Caesar in The Deformed Transformed were a product of Alonzo and the “stranger” interpreted as Faust and Mephistopheles. This accounts for the difference between Alonzo's ignorance of his pursuing double and Arnold's knowledge of his accompanying double: having altered the structure of his source by introducing the Satanic pact and Arnold's physical transformation, Byron could not retain the unrecognized physical double in “El Embozado”; instead, like Goethe, Byron had the Mephistophelean Caesar accompany Arnold as a symbolic representation of his moral and mortal inadequacies. However, since he assumed Arnold's hunchbacked body, Caesar, like Alonzo's “second self,” was Arnold's physical double. Thus, the doppelgänger in The Deformed Transformed was a unique and imaginative fusion of “El Embozado” and Faust: Byron not only retained the bizarre physical doubling in Calderon's drama; he also made explicit what Goethe but implied in the characterization of Faust and Mephistopheles.

Having fused these two plots, Byron could not recreate the actual suspense of self pursuing self in “El Embozado,” but he did intend to use the climactic scene between Alonzo and his second self in order to resolve the conflict between Arnold and Caesar. Because Byron's indebtedness to this Calderon drama has never been recognized, no reader of The Deformed Transformed has satisfactorily projected the conclusion of this unfinished drama. Mary Shelley, who copied what Byron wrote, acknowledged that she did “not know how he meant to finish it,” but reported that Byron had “the whole conduct of the story … already conceived.”³⁷ In 1826, unaware of the “fragment” to Part III that was not published in Hunt's 1824 edition of The Deformed Transformed, George Clinton mistakenly proposed that Byron would “invent new adventures for his hero” rather than “follow the course of the romance”³⁸ between Olimpia and Arnold. When E. H. Coleridge first published this “fragment,” which contained not only Byron's memorandum on jealousy (“Jealous—Arnold of Caesar. Olympia [sic] at first not liking Caesar—then?—Arnold jealous of himself under his former figure, owing to the power of intellect, etc., etc., etc.”), but also Arnold and Caesar's dialogue on jealousy, he cautiously, but correctly, stated that “Byron intended to make Olimpia bestow her affections, not on the glorious Achilles, but the witty and interesting Hunchback.”³⁹ A further insight into Byron's intentions was offered by Emil Koeppel who interpreted Caesar's statement that the Faustian pact between the two would be signed in blood, but not in Arnold's blood (I.i.147-149), to mean that Arnold would forfeit his soul to Caesar by killing Olimpia in a jealous rage.⁴⁰ But Koeppel was only partially correct here: the text suggests that Arnold would kill Olimpia, but this action would not forfeit his soul but only formalize the bond between tempter and tempted. It is generally overlooked that Arnold had not signed any compact with Caesar in The Deformed Transformed, but Byron did indicate the nature of this “signature” in Caesar's veiled threat to Arnold: “You shall have no bond / But your own will, no contract save your deeds” (I.i.151-152). But this “deed” of contract does not appear in the finished portion of Byron's drama: the transformed Arnold does not join the devil's party by any ignoble action; quite the contrary, as Samuel C. Chew objected, “all that Caesar incites him to do [in the siege of Rome and after] it would occur to any high-minded man to undertake.”⁴¹ Most probably, the “deed” was to be Arnold's shedding of Olimpia's blood. Arnold, through his own wilful act, would assume the spiritual depravity of Caesar just as Caesar had assumed Arnold's physical deformities.

What Coleridge and Koeppel did not know was that Byron's introduction of Arnold's jealousy “of himself under his former figure” was merely an imitation of Alonzo's jealousy of his double, the mantled figure in “El Embozado.” Arnold's destruction of Olimpia would have bound him to Caesar, but it would not have provided Byron the means to resolve the conflict between Arnold and his double. Rather, Byron, who had “already conceived” the climax and who had already “transformed” Calderon's doubles into Arnold and Caesar, intended that Arnold would forfeit his soul by a symbolic “suicide”: just as Alonzo died when he killed his own physical double, Arnold, motivated by a similar jealousy, would have shed “all” of his own blood by killing his diabolical rival and double. Byron's intentions are clear not only from his expressed “design” to imitate Calderon's plot but also from his explicit preparation for this climax in the finished portions of The Deformed Transformed. Koeppel, in his eagerness to project that Olimpia would be killed, overlooked Byron's hint that Arnold's blood would also be shed. When Caesar asked Arnold for “a little of [his] blood” to make the transformation effective, Arnold offered “it all.” Caesar's answer indicates that Arnold's body would later be slain: “Not now. A few drops will suffice for this” (I.i.157). Byron further prepared for Arnold's fate by consciously paralleling the fundamental destructive conflict between Arnold and Caesar to that between other mutually antagonistic doubles: Romulus and Remus; Gore and Glory; Lucifer and Venus; Eros and Anteros; and even Huon and Memnon. The most significant doubles in this series are the twins, Romulus and Remus, and Byron twice referred to Romulus's destruction of Remus: Caesar informed Arnold that he had seen “Romulus … / Slay his own twin”; and the Chorus of Spirits bemoaned Romulus's “Awful … crime” and “inexpiable sin” (I.i.80-81; II.i.38, 76). Metaphorically, the foundation for the “Glory” of Romulus's Rome was the “Gore” of Remus's blood; thus Caesar's description of Arnold's coming “Hand in hand with the mild twins—Gore and Glory” (II.ii.12) and his allusions to Romulus and Remus do more than provide a historical perspective to the Bourbon's pillage of Rome—they actually prepare for Arnold's slaying of his own twin.⁴² Thus the “deed” of forfeiture, Byron's climax for The Deformed Transformed, was to be Arnold's suicide, symbolically represented by his wilful murder of his double, Caesar in the form of Arnold's hunchbacked body.

Once Byron's intended imitation of the climax in “El Embozado” is recognized as the only logical resolution between Arnold and his diabolical double, the function of the doppelgänger in this drama becomes more apparent. Like Manfred and Cain, Byron's only finished “speculative” dramas, The Deformed Transformed dramatized man's self-destruction whereby his immortal aspirations were annihilated by his own mortality. Unlike the heroes in Byron's Oriental tales and unlike Prometheus, Childe Harold, and even the narrator of Don Juan, the protagonist in the “speculative” drama was engaged not in a constructive conflict whereby the self triumphed, sometimes even in death, through its independence and defiance of the “other” (whether man, nature, society, government, religion, or “metaphysics”); rather, with a “chaos of thought and passion, all confused,” this protagonist precipitated a destructive conflict within his own nature in which mortal self destroyed immortal self. Byron's introduction to the plot of “El Embozado” was actually fortuitous, because it provided him the artistic means to give final form to the idea of self-alienation and self-destruction which had been dramatized in Manfred and Cain.

In Manfred, his first “speculative” drama, Byron created an introspective hero whose “half dust, half deity” (I.ii.40) engendered a conflict between his mortally limiting body and his immortally aspiring mind. Byron externalized this internal conflict by juxtaposing to Manfred “The Lady Astarte, his [physical double and psychological counterpart]” (III.iii.47), as I interpret and complete Manuel's interrupted description of her. Manfred himself described his resemblance to Astarte: “She was like me in lineaments—her eyes— / Her hair—her features—all, to the very tone / Even of her voice … were like to mine” (II.ii.105-107). Yet with “gentler powers,” “humility,” and “virtues,” Astarte possessed a heart which had psychologically complemented Manfred's Faustian pursuit of knowledge. Manfred confessed to the Chamois Hunter that he and Astarte formerly possessed “one heart” (II.i.26), but he told the Abbot that this heart was now “withered, or … broken” (III.i.145). Because Astarte, representing Manfred's heart, had died, the zealous Abbot sensed the futility of appealing to the half-destroyed Manfred: “my humble zeal … May light upon your head—could I say heart— / Could I touch that, with words or prayers, I should / Recall a noble spirit” (III.iv.47, 50-52). Even the Chamois Hunter unwittingly recognized this “noble spirit's” divided nature when he cautioned Manfred: “Thy mind and body are alike unfit / To trust each other” (II.i.2-3); and when he prayed for Manfred: “Heaven give thee rest! / And Penitence restore thee to thyself” (II.i.87-88, my italics). In other words, the “thee” (Manfred's heart or mortality as represented by Astarte) had been severed from the “thyself” (Manfred's mind with its immortal aspirations).

Because Manfred had destroyed his own heart, his gentler self in the person of Astarte, he should have died; yet it was his “fatality to live” (I.ii.24). Protesting too much for “self-oblivion” and “forgetfulness” (I.i.144, 136) of Astarte, whose uneludable “shadow” (I.i.219) reminded him of his divided self, Manfred really quested for self-integration. The Witch of the Alps best understood Manfred's quest for Astarte:

                                   And for this—
A being of the race thou dost despise—
The order, which thine own would rise above,
Mingling with us and ours,—thou dost forego
The gifts of our great knowledge, and shrink'st back
To recreant mortality.

(II.ii.121-126, my italics)

Manfred's head or knowledge could not transcend his heart or mortality. His self-sufficient claim to be “self-condemned” in Act III (i.177) misrepresented the truth: he was his “own destroyer” (III.iv.139) only because he had “loved her, and destroyed her [Astarte, his double]” (II.ii.117).

That Byron was artistically prepared for the development of the doppelgänger in The Deformed Transformed is also manifested by his second “speculative” drama, Cain, whose hero, like Manfred and Arnold, was self-destructive. But this time Byron externalized man's internal conflict by using not just one, but two doubles: Lucifer, the Mephistophelean spirit, represented Cain's Faustian quest for knowledge and immortality; and Adah, Cain's twin sister, represented his emotional need for mortal love. Although Cain could judge the differences between his two companions—he said that Adah “understands not” (I.i.188) and that Lucifer “lov'st nothing” (II.ii.338)—he did not recognize their symbolic functions. Rather, only Adah sensed that Lucifer represented Cain's “own / Dissatisfied and curious thoughts” for immortality (I.i.402-403);⁴³ and only Lucifer judged Adah to represent Cain's enfeebling love for “frail mortality” (II.ii.269). Thus when Lucifer and Adah debated the relative merits of knowledge and love in Act I, Cain did not know that this external debate represented his internal conflict. But finally choosing knowledge over love, Cain separated himself from Adah, his heart, and entered the abyss of space with Lucifer. As Adah informed Lucifer in Act I, “thou … steppest between heart and heart” (I.i.349).

In Act II, Cain attempted to unify his divided nature. Declaring “I must be / Immortal in despite of me” (II.i.90-91, my italics), he requested knowledge not only of his “I,” his “immortal part” (I.i.104), but also of his “me,” his mortal limitation or death. What Cain discovered, in Byron's slightly altered phrase, was the “inadequacy of his [mortal] state to his [immortal] conceptions.”⁴⁴ The incompatibility of Cain's two natures is suggested by his dialogue with Lucifer at the end of Act II:

                              Lucifer. Didst thou not require
Knowledge? And have I not, in what I showed,
Taught thee to know thyself?
                              Cain. Alas! I seem
Nothing.
                              Lucifer. And this should be the human sum
Of knowledge, to know mortal nature's nothingness.

(II.ii.418-422)

Cain, like Manfred, learned that the “Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life”: self-knowledge revealed a disintegrated personality in conflict with itself.

The final act of this drama is but a phenomenal representation of Cain's noumenal experience in Act II. Still alienated from his gentler self—“leave me” (III.i.94), he says to Adah—Cain, according to Byron, “falls into the frame of mind that leads to the Catastrophe”:⁴⁵ he murdered Abel, brought death into the world, and confirmed “mortal nature's nothingness.” Ironically, Cain finally recognized Abel, not Adah or Lucifer, as his double: “'Tis blood—my blood— / My brother's and my own! and shed by me! … I have taken life from my own flesh” (III.i.345-348). There is a tradition whereby Cain and Abel were physical twins, and hence doubles,⁴⁶ but Byron either did not know or develop this circumstance. Nevertheless, Cain's destruction of Abel, who had “sprung from the same womb … drained / The same breast,” and Cain's consequent expulsion “Eastward from Eden” (III.i.535-536, 552), phenomenally represented the destruction of his own immortal aspirations and his self-alienation.

Having already used the double to dramatize the divided self in Manfred and Cain, and having used the devil as doppelgänger in Cain (according to Samuel Chew, the “tempter and tempted are absolutely at one”⁴⁷), Byron in January 1822 adopted the doppelgänger in “El Embozado” to once more portray man's self-alienation. Even before the transformations of Arnold and Caesar, Arnold revealed his double identity by damning his mortal form which limited not his mental conceptions, as in Cain, but his emotional desire for love: “[oh] that the Devil, to whom they liken me, / Would aid his likeness! If I must partake / His form, why not his power” (I.i.40-42, my italics). Like Narcissus, Arnold gazed into the fountain, hoped for the devil's power to complement his form, but was mocked by his “horrid shadow” (I.i.51)—a reminder that his devil's likeness determined the barrenness of his mortality since he could neither be loved nor love himself. Hated by others and hating himself, Arnold despaired and attempted suicide, but was prevented by the stirring of the fountain, the source of his double or reflected image. “Nature's mirror” not only revealed a disintegrated personality but actually separated the opposing principles within Arnold: the diabolical “form” reflected in the fountain was miraculously transformed into the diabolical “power” in the person of the Stranger who emerged from the waters. Thus the Stranger, like Faust's Mephistopheles and Cain's Lucifer, appeared not as an incarnation of the power of abstract evil in the universe; rather, he was an embodiment of Arnold's idealization of power—a double who reflected Arnold's potential for disintegration and self-destruction.

Because the tempter and tempted are symbolic representations of one disintegrated personality, the remainder of The Deformed Transformed is a phenomenal representation of Arnold's internal conflict. Naively idealistic and risking his soul for the love he lacked, Arnold chose to be transformed into the glorious Achilles. Thinking that he had transcended his mortal limitations, the new Achilles believed he had the power to realize his desires: “I love, and I shall be beloved” (I.i.421). That Arnold was only deluding himself and could not transcend his mortality was symbolically represented by the Stranger's transformation into the deformed Arnold. Thus the Mephistophelean Stranger, who had represented Arnold's idealization of power, remained Arnold's double by regressing into the hunchbacked form initially mirrored by the fountain. Power and form were not integrated; they merely changed places. Ever by his side as his shadow, Caesar reminded Arnold of his eternally conflicting double nature, and Arnold discovered that neither esteem in war nor possession of Olimpia, the “Essence of all Beauty” (II.iii.143), could reintegrate the divided self.

Arnold's desire for self-integration through love was, then, limited by his mortality. In Part I, Caesar rose from the fountain as Anteros (the negation of love) to confront Arnold's desire for Eros.⁴⁸ And in the “fragment” to Part III, Caesar (still representing Anteros in the form of Arnold's mortally limiting body) accurately diagnosed the source of Arnold's frustrations:

          you would be loved—what you call loved—
Self-loved—loved for yourself—for neither health,
Nor wealth, nor youth, nor power, nor rank, nor beauty—
For these you may be stript of—but beloved
As an abstraction.

(lines 61-65)

But the power and the form of one personality were not united by the ideal of self-love. As Cain discovered from Lucifer (I.i.420-431), knowledge destroyed love. Similarly, Arnold's ideal of self-love was an illusion and would be destroyed by his final knowledge of his divided self: “owing to the power of intellect,” Arnold was to become “jealous of himself under his former figure” (Byron's memorandum to this “fragment”). The disintegrating reality of jealousy rather than the integrating ideal of love was to seal Arnold's fate. Caesar warned Arnold that he would become jealous of his mortal self, and he metaphorically explained the nature of this jealousy: “Now Love in you is as the Sun—a thing / Beyond you—and your Jealousy's of Earth— / A cloud of your own raising” (lines 80-82). Thus Arnold would have attributed his inability “to be [Olimpia's] heart as she is [his]” (line 101) to the presence of Caesar, confirmed his mortality by being jealous of his own hunchbacked form, and consequently increased his self-alienation. As in Othello (which Byron and Shelley talked of “getting up” in February 1822⁴⁹), Arnold, motivated by jealousy, was destined to yield up love to tyrannous hate, to destroy Olimpia (an object of his love), to recognize his self-delusions, and finally to destroy himself. But since the doppelgänger modified this tragic action, Arnold, finally recognizing the source of his self-delusions, would destroy that which he wanted to love—himself, mortally represented in the form of Caesar. Thus the suicide which the self-alienated Arnold had prevented by self-hypnosis in the fountain was to be symbolically reenacted at the end of the drama by his murder of Caesar: ironically, Arnold's final triumph over his mortally limiting body would have confirmed his mortality; he would have destroyed himself.

Having demonstrated the subtleties of The Deformed Transformed, I propose that it contains something more significant than what G. Wilson Knight calls “Byron's ‘Richard’ complex.”⁵⁰ Whether Byron could have artistically completed this representation of the destructive conflict within man is doubtful, not only because the disproportionately detailed account of the Siege of Rome violates the drama's integrity, but also because its bitter portrayal of “mortal nature's nothingness” demanded a total cynicism that is not readily compatible with the increasing mellowness of the last few cantos of Don Juan. Yet if Byron had completed The Deformed Transformed, it would have been a major document in the Byron canon and among other literary treatments of the doppelgänger. As it is, Byron's development of Arnold and his summary of “El Embozado” as reported by Medwin and Irving influenced such diverse works as Irving's abortive “El Embozado” (1825), Mary Shelley's short story, “Transformation” (1831), Hawthorne's “Howe's Masquerade” (1838), Poe's “William Wilson” (1839), Irving's “Don Juan: A Spectral Research” (1841), and even Yeats's A Vision (1925).⁵¹ A historically ironic footnote to these treatments of the doppelgänger is that three “critics,” without knowing it, prophesied the existence of The Deformed Transformed and its offspring: the anonymous reviewer of Pickersgill's novel observed that The Three Brothers would “furnish more than one topick [sic] for dramatic ingenuity”; Shelley, that “Cypriano evidently furnished the germ of Faust, as Faust may furnish the germ of other poems”; and Irving, that “the foregoing sketch of the plot [of “El Embozado”] may hereafter suggest a rich theme to a poet or dramatist of the Byron school.”⁵² Irving's statement is doubly ironic, since he anachronistically failed to recognize that Byron, the creator of this “school,” had himself adapted this “rich theme” in The Deformed Transformed.⁵³

Notes

1. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (London [1938]) 276.

2. Über Byrons dramatisches Bruchstück “Der umgestaltete Missgestaltete” (Erlangen 1905) 18.

3. I.i.268, 381-382. The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry ed Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London 1901) v 487, 491. All subsequent quotations from Byron's poetry will be taken from this edition (hereafter cited as Poetry) and will be followed by line numbers in the text.

4. Lady Blessington's Conversations of Lord Byron ed Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton 1969) 80-81.

5. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals ed Rowland E. Prothero (London 1901) vi 178-179. Hereafter cited as L&J.

6. Poetry v 473-474.

7. The Gentleman's Magazine 74 (1804) 1047; George Clinton Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Lord Byron (London 1826) 666. For evidence of Joshua Pickersgill's authorship, see N&Q [Notes and Queries] 169 (1935) 262, 299, 339, 378.

8. In 1816 at Diodati, Monk Lewis, in translating viva voce Goethe's Faust for Byron, may have referred to the Satanic pact in Pickersgill's novel, which formed the basis of his 1807 drama, “The Wood Daemon.” It is also possible that Mary Shelley drew Byron's attention to the novel, for she read it in December 1817. See Mary Shelley's Journal ed Frederick L. Jones (Norman, Okla 1947) 88.

9. The Three Brothers: A Romance (London 1803) iv 273-274. Arnaud narrates the events of his life in Chapter XI (iv 224-351).

10. For a consideration of this play's complex history, see Summers The Gothic Quest 274-276. For a summary of the unpublished “Wood Daemon,” see “First Visit to the Theatre in London” Poems by Hartley Coleridge ed Derwent Coleridge (London 1851) i cxcix-cciii (Appendix C). Coleridge interestingly called Hardyknute, “the Deformed Transformed.”

11. These and other quotations from One O'Clock! or, The Knight and the Wood Daemon are taken from Act III of the Oxberry edition (London 1824).

12. Although E. H. Coleridge recorded (Poetry v 469) that the “date of the original MS. of The Deformed Transformed is ‘Pisa, 1822,’” Professor Truman Guy Steffan has informed me that a MS in his possession bears the more specific date. Coleridge mistakenly conjectured that the drama was begun and finished between April 20 and July 8 1822.

13. Letter to Kinnaird, February 6 1822 (L&J vi 10).

14. Medwin's Conversations of Lord Byron ed Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (Princeton 1966) 153-154. The terminal date for this dialogue is March 11 1822, the day Medwin left Pisa for Rome (see 242, 245n). But the chronological sequence (haphazard as it may appear) of the Conversations suggests that this dialogue took place in February.

15. As quoted by Lovell Medwin's Conversations 155n. Most recently, John Buxton, in Byron and Shelley: The History of a Friendship (New York 1968) 197-198, gratuitously dismissed Medwin's account without examining Trelawny's supporting statement. Consequently, Buxton's statement that “Byron did not begin The Deformed Transformed until some weeks after Medwin left Pisa,” repeats E. H. Coleridge's mistaken dating of this drama.

16. To further substantiate Truman Guy Steffan's well-reasoned “conjecture that Byron began to write Canto VI about the middle of April and finished it and Canto VII at least by the end of June” (Byron's Don Juan: The Making of a Masterpiece [Austin 1957] i 384n-385n), see Shelley's reference to the completion of these two cantos on June 29 1822 (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed Frederick L. Jones [Oxford 1964] ii 442; hereafter cited as PBSL).

17. Byron had Mary Shelley copy at least the first scene of The Deformed Transformed by November 1822, at which time she quizzed Byron about the transformed Caesar: “I have copied your MSS. The ‘Eternal Scoffer’ seems a favourite of yours. The Critics, as they used to make you a Childe Harold, Giaour, & Lara all in one, will now make a compound of Satan & Caesar to [? serve as (MS torn)] your prototype.” (The Letters of Mary W. Shelley ed Frederick L. Jones [Norman, Okla 1944] i 202). But Byron had apparently not finished Part II of the drama by that time, for he sent Mary Shelley a “few scenes more” for transcription on January 25 1823 (L&J vi 165). For Mary Shelley' continued praise of this drama, see Letters i 213.

18. L&J v 488.

19. vii (1820) 253-258. For Shelley's criticisms of both translations, see PBSL ii 376.

20. Medwin's Conversations 141-142, and note 335.

21. Shelley began his translations of these two works some months before April. In December 1821, Byron and Shelley had already discussed the scene in which “Goethe's Mephistopheles [masquerading in Faust's gowns] calls the Serpent who tempted Eve ‘my Aunt the renowned Snake’” (PBSL ii 368n-369n). And on January 14 1822, the day Trelawny arrived in Pisa, Shelley had been orally translating El Magico Prodigioso: see Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (London 1887) 14. Consequently, it is quite possible that “the other day” in Byron's reference to Shelley's translation from Faust was in January 1822.

22. Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, trans John Oxenford, rev ed (London 1909) 108, 174. Conversations for January 18 1825 and November 8 1826.

23. Varnhagen Über Byrons dramatisches Bruchstück 21; Stokoe German Influence in the English Romantic Period: 1788-1818 (New York 1963) 167. For further discussion of similarities between Faust and The Deformed Transformed, see also Samuel C. Chew, Jr The Dramas of Lord Byron (New York 1964) 145-148.

24. Byron's references to Amphitryon and The Bravo of Venice (Medwin's Conversations 178, 191) and to Le Diable Boiteux (L&J vi 178-179) demonstrate his knowledge of these works. Byron was evidently unaware of the doppelgänger in such continental works as Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl and Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir, both of which were first published in English translation in 1824, the year of publication not only for The Deformed Transformed but also for James Hogg's portrayal of the devil as doppelgänger in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

25. Act II, scene ii, as quoted from Dryden: The Dramatic Works ed Montague Summers (London 1932) vi 173-174. See also Act IV, scene i (vi 194) for Jupiter's further distinction between Husband and Lover.

26. Mary Shelley's Journal (entry for March 23 1815) 42.

27. Shelley's letter to John Gisborne (PBSL ii 376) demonstrates his reading of the Retsch volume which Murray sent to Byron. Although Byron's extant letters do not refer to his receipt or reading of this volume, his request for it, his interest in Faust and Goethe at the time, and his conversations with Shelley indicate that he would have read or at least discussed the volume when it arrived.

28. Letter to John Gisborne (PBSL ii 407).

29. Medwin's Conversations 142, 143n.

30. A. A. Parker “The Devil in the Drama of Calderon” Critical Essays on the Theatre of Calderon ed Bruce W. Wardropper (New York 1965) 19-20. For a similar interpretation of the devil as doppelgänger in El Magico Prodigioso, see Everett W. Hesse Calderon de la Barca (New York 1967) 92.

31. These quotations are from Shelley's translation of El Magico Prodigioso in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York 1965) iv 299-320. For a complete translation of this drama, see The Wonder-Working Magician in Calderon's Dramas trans Denis Florence Mac-Carthy (London 1873).

32. After failing to pervert Justina, the demon intended to impersonate and defame her through his actions (“I will assume a feignèd form, and thus / Make thee a victim of my baffled rage”). But it was the Christian God who sent a phantom-figure of Justina in skeletal form to intimidate Cyprian and effect his conversion. Note then the tradition of the angelic as well as the diabolical doppelgänger.

33. 6 (August 1835) 142-144. Irving's article for the Knickerbocker has been reprinted at least four times: see The New York Mirror 13 (October 17 1835) 122; The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for 1836 ed Miss Leslie (Philadelphia, nd) 166-171; Thomas Ollive Mabbott “An Unwritten Drama” The Americana Collector (November 1925) 64-66; and His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron ed Ernest J. Lovell, Jr (New York 1954) 279-281.

34. “Hawthorne, Poe, and a Literary Ghost” The New England Quarterly 7 (1934) 146-154. Although Thorner did not specifically acknowledge his source for the identification of “El Embozado,” he was indebted to Denis Florence Mac-Carthy who, by 1873, had recognized that “the ‘Embozado’ which Captain Medwin and others supposed to be the name of one of Calderon's dramas, and which, as might be expected, Washington Irving vainly looked for in Spain, was the ‘Hombre embozado,’ the ‘Muffled Figure’ of Calderon's Purgatorio de San Patricio” (Calderon's Dramas 353). The failure to recognize that Byron's summary had its source in Calderon's Purgatorio has caused critics to question Medwin's reliability. Even Ernest J. Lovell asked: “Did Medwin make up this narrative of man's dual nature, the seed of it Byron's relation to him of a waking nightmare or vision Shelley had at San Terenzo in 1822?” (Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley [Austin 1962] 149). Rather than discrediting Medwin's story, Shelley's nightmare in which he, like Ludovico Enio, encountered his mantled “second self” suggests that Calderon's Purgatorio had been a topic of conversation in 1822. For reports of this nightmare, see Medwin The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London 1847) ii 299-301; Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources ed Lady Shelley, 3rd ed (London 1875) 191-192; and Trelawny's note as quoted by Harry B. Smith “Books and Autograph Letters of Shelley” Scribner's Magazine 72 (1922) 74. Shelley had read Purgatorio by July 1819 (see PBSL ii 105) and had praised it in a note to The Cenci (see Complete Works ii 72n).

35. Washington Irving's letter of March 1825 to his brother, Peter, as quoted in Pierre M. Irving The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York 1864) iv 71.

36. Quoted from Washington Irving's “Note book containing extracts of poetry and prose; hint for a tale or farce; and miscellany [1824-26]” with the permission of the Manuscript Division, The New York Public Library. In subsequent references to this plot summary, the hero will be called Alonzo. Irving (or Medwin) called the hero both “Alfonzo” and “Alonzo.”

37. From Mary Shelley's inscription on the fly leaf of her copy of The Deformed Transformed, as quoted in Poetry v 474n.

38. Memoirs of Byron 672.

39. Poetry v 531, 533n.

40. Lord Byron (Berlin 1903) 192.

41. The Dramas of Lord Byron 148.

42. For the reference to Lucifer and Venus, see II.iii. 189, and for the possible allusion to Eros and Anteros, see Poetry v 480n. That Arnold as Achilles would slay Caesar is also indicated by the names given the two pages at the end of the first scene. Although they are not twins and are not mentioned again in the drama, Huon (with the “golden horn” and the “bright / And blooming aspect”) and Memnon (the “darker” one “who smiles not”) reflect the antagonistic countenances of the transformed Arnold and Caesar. Byron, who was introduced to Huon of Bordeaux (a medieval hero who had obtained what Arnold desired: success in “War” and with “Woman”) in William Sotheby's translation of Wieland's Oberon, probably did not know that Huon's original adventures involved a confrontation with the devil, Lucifer (see D. D. R. Owen “The Principal Source of Huon of Bordeaux” French Stuides 7 [1953] 129-139); but Byron certainly recognized that the Ethiopian, Memnon, a son of Eos and brother of Phosphor or “Lucifer,” was slain by Achilles in the Trojan war. Thus this allusion to Memnon (an oblique reflection of the diabolical Caesar with the “swart face”) who had been slain by Achilles prepares for the destruction of Caesar (and consequently Arnold) by the new Achilles, Arnold himself.

43. Even Lucifer hinted at his symbolic function when he described the snake in Eden not as a demon but as a snake who “but woke one [demon] / In those he spake to with his forky tongue” (I.i.229-230).

44. Letter to John Murray, November 3 1821 (L&J v 470).

45. L&J v 470, my italics. Byron was most probably aware of the irony in this statement: “the frame of mind,” with its analogue in Blake's “mind-forg'd manacles,” draws attention to the head's destruction of the heart.

46. See Otto Rank “The Double as Immortal Self” Beyond Psychology (New York 1958) 90.

47. The Dramas of Lord Byron 131.

48. This distinction between Anteros and Eros is based on Byron's allusion to the paired opposites in the stage directions following I.i.82. See E. H. Coleridge's accompanying note, Poetry v 480n.

49. See Mary Shelley's Journal 167n.

50. Byron and Shakespeare (New York 1966) 155.

51. For Irving's notes on his proposed “El Embozado,” see The Journals of Washington Irving ed William P. Trent and George S. Hellman (Boston 1919) ii 171-174; for the influence of “El Embozado” on “Howe's Masquerade” and “William Wilson,” see Thorner “Hawthorne, Poe, and a Literary Ghost”; for its influence on “Don Juan: A Spectral Research,” see Lovell Captain Medwin 149 and Stanley T. Williams The Life of Washington Irving (New York 1935) i 466-467; and for Yeats's use of The Deformed Transformed see Giorgio Melchiori The Whole Mystery of Art (London 1960) 277-279.

52. The Gentlemen's Magazine 74 (1804) 1047; PBSL ii 407; “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron” The Knickerbocker 6 (1835) 144.

53. This study was begun with the assistance of the University of Delaware Faculty Research Fund.