‘Where shall I turn me?’: Italy and irony in Beppo and Don Juan

This chapter focuses on Byron’s ‘Italian’ satires, Beppo and Don Juan, as well as the late prose fragment ‘An Italian Carnival’. It begins by highlighting Byron’s parabasic ‘turn’ to Italy in these works in order to argue that the poet’s complex and contradictory self-positioning in Italy, during his years there, underpins the unprecedentedly multiform poetics and world view of these texts. The chapter begins by examining the ambivalences and contradictions in Don Juan’s references to Pulci, Ariosto, Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, showing the extent to which Italy’s literature contributes to, but is also subverted by, Byron’s constructing of his new ‘medley mode’. Turning to Beppo, the chapter considers the ways in which the figure of the cavalier servente offers the poet a crucially performative model for his Italian ‘turn’ and the parabasic nature of his satires. The chapter concludes by examining Byron’s reprise of this mode in ‘An Italian Carnival’ to delineatea final image and assessment of the country.

The politics of the unities: tragedy and the Risorgimento in Byron and Manzoni

This chapter takes an original approach to Byron’s much-discussed engagement with the early Risorgimento by focusing not on biographical aspects, but rather on formal issues. It centres on The Two Foscari in the context of the highly politicised contemporary Italian critical debates about the dramatic unities. In this fashion, it teases out the political implications of Byron’s adherence to the unities by comparing his play to Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola, which programmatically violates them. Focusing specifically on the playwrights’ representations of the fifteenth-century mercenary leader, Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola, the chapter explores these writers’ use or abuse of the unity of time, in particular. In doing so, it throws light on, and contrasts, Manzoni’s Risorgimento agenda on the one hand and Byron’s generally sceptical attitude about leadership and uncertainty about social and political change on the other.

The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy

This chapter concentrates on Byron’s relation to Italy as geography and landscape. It demonstrates that, while reading his poetry confronts us repeatedly with the poet’s digressive, fluid mobilité, studying his relationship to Italy repeatedly confronts us with his capacity for sustained attention to the given. Yet, as this chapter contends, in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, attending to the given is not simply a matter of ‘seizing’ the ‘colouring of the scenes which fleet along’ for Byron. By contrast, his depictions of Italian cityscapes and landscapes are ‘complex, heterogeneous and personal negotiations’ not just with ‘real places’ but also ‘their attendant histories’. In Byron’s poetry about Italy, these negotiations not only cast place as an essential component in the consciousness that observes it, but also make that consciousness ‘an essential element of place’.

From Lord Nelvil to Dugald Dalgetty: Byron’s Scottish identity in Italy

This chapter focuses primarily on Byron’s letters from his Italian years in order to examine the extent to which his Italianisation actually intensified his sense of his own Britishness. The latter category everywhere underpins and complicates his relationship to Italy. As this chapter shows, even as the British poet was ‘rebranding’ himself as almost but never entirely Italian, the Italianised British aristocrat was re-imagining himself as a Scottish mercenary in the midst of Italian revolution. Under the influence of Madame de Staël’s Lord Nelvil (from her 1807 novel Corinne) and Walter Scott’s novels (which Byron avidly read while in Italy), the poet depicted himself in his letters home as an aristocratic Scottish lord leading a band of troops or as serving the Italian cause ‘like Dugald Dalgetty’ in Scott’s A Legend of Montrose. As this chapter demonstrates, Byron never felt himself ‘more Scottish’ than when residing in Ravenna, Venice, Genoa and Pisa.

Introduction: ‘Un paese tutto poetico’ – Byron in Italy, Italy in Byron

The connection between Byron and Italy is one of the most familiar facts about British Romanticism.1 The poet’s many pronouncements about the country (where he lived between 1816 and 1823), its history, culture and people, as well as about his own experiences in Italy and among Italians, are well known and part of his legend. More particularly, Byron’s debauchery in Venice and would-be heroics in Ravenna are often known even to those acquainted with the poet’s biography only in its most simplified versions. In contrast, though the critical panorama has been changing in recent years, serious attention to Byron’s literary engagement with Italy has tended to be discontinuous. Yet he wrote much of his greatest poetry in Italy, and under its influence, poetry that would have a profound bearing not only on the literature but also the wider culture, history and politics of the whole of Europe, and not least Italy itself....

This ‘still exhaustless mine’: de Staël, Goethe and Byron’s Roman lyricism

This chapter addresses Byron’s Italian lyric mode by focusing on Childe Harold IV’s description of the Palatine as an exemplary instance of sustained poetic attentiveness. It places this description alongside the accounts of the Palatine in Goethe’s Italienische Reise and de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie. Comparing these three fundamental texts for the Romantic reinvention of Italy, the chapter draws out their very different ways of responding to Rome. In doing so, it contrasts the fictional and autobiographical works of de Staël and Goethe, which appropriate the ruins of Rome for their own needs and purposes, and Childe Harold IV,which offers an attentive responsiveness to Roman ruins per se. Whereas Goethe seeks an education in Rome, and de Staël finds consolation, Byron, in his poetic exploration of the Palatine, crafts an entirely original lyric mode and persona that are expressive of a heightened attention to the suggestions of Rome. The ‘eternal city’ thus becomes an ‘exhaustless mine’ (CHP, IV, 108, 128) of experiences that hosts of later tourists would then come to explore, relish and revel in.

‘Something sensible to grasp at’: Byron and Italian Catholicism

This chapter documents the evolution of Byron’s personal and poetic relationship with Catholicism from what was presumably his first real encounter with it at Newstead Abbey in 1798 through to the final cantos of Don Juan and the figure of Aurora Raby. Detailing and exploring Byron’s experience of Italian friars, priests, cardinal legates, a pope and, most importantly, Italian Catholic women, the chapter suggests that, in Catholic Italy, spiritually, Byron found ‘something sensible to grasp at’. Ranging across Byron’s poetic career, the chapter sees the poet begin as a John Knox in response to Catholicism but progressively become not only a thinker of theological precision but also a ‘sympathetic outsider’ and, indeed, even an insider to Italian Catholic experience.

Playing with history: Byron’s Italian dramas

This chapter concentrates on Byron’s dramatic representations of Italian history – Marino Faliero, The Two Foscari and The Deformed Transformed. It demonstrates the extent to which ‘play’ – in its performative and sportive, but also competitive and manipulative senses – underpins Byron’s dramatic rendering of Italy in these works. It also highlights how these works combine the carnivalesque and the grotesque to paint a profoundly disturbing picture of Italy’s past. Indeed, Byron’s Italian dramas use Italian history to reflect on the ways in which European historical progress more generally, and the humanising role of art in that progress, repeatedly, endlessly and inevitably descend into sheer violence. As this chapter contends, Byron’s Italian dramas set up a distinctive, coherent and relentless reading of Italian history through particular episodes of it, a reading that places his ideas about the nature of, and the forces ruling, Italian history, but also history more generally, centre-stage.

The literature of Italy in Byron’s poems of 1817–20

This chapter focuses on Byron’s The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante alongside his translations of Filicaja in the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore. It begins by exploring the ways in which Byron ‘exploited both the writings and the figures of Italian writers (especially the exiled Dante and imprisoned Tasso) to construct his own cosmopolitan poetic identity’, reinventing himself as simultaneously – and ambiguously – an English and an Italian poet. In the translation of Pulci, however, Byron stresses his foreignness to both British and Italian poetic traditions, cutting a cosmopolitan figure not through identity but difference. While in his letters – and, of course, many of his poems – Byron is both British and Italian, Italian literature could also offer the poet a way of being neither.

Parisina, Mazeppa and Anglo-Italian displacement

This chapter examines Parisina (written in England but on an Italian topic) and Mazeppa (written in Italy but on a non-Italian topic) as exemplary instances of Byron’s creation of an Anglo-Italian poetics based on displacement in his narrative verse. It considers them separately and together as a useful way of understanding the ‘intricate fabrication of Byron’s Anglo-Italian identity’. It also considers them ‘in dialogue’ and in relation to Italy in order to throw new light on two works that are generally sidelined in the Byron canon. In Parisina, Byron offers an Italian cautionary tale to Regency England,one in which he can ‘poetically release’ things in his own life that he had to publicly suppress in England. In Mazeppa, instead, Byron explores key aspects of his life in Italy in an imagined location that is displaced from Italy rather than to it. As this essay shows, both narrative poems demonstrate, in contradiction to much critical thinking about Byron, the importance of ‘not being on the spot’ to both the poet’s narrative method and his poetic self-fashioning.