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8 Uses of the Past in the History Plays
Get accessArnold Anthony Schmidt, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Stanislaus, edited a three-volume, 24-play anthology of British Nautical Melodramas (2019). His Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism (2010) received the Elma Dangerfield Prize. Schmidt’s articles on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Byron, Conrad, Garibaldi, Godwin, Scott, Mary Shelley, and Wordsworth have appeared in periodicals such as The Byron Journal, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and The Wordsworth Circle, as well as in collections of essays such as Byron and Italy (2017), Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Cyclones (2017), and Fictions of the Sea (2016).
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Published:22 October 2024
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Abstract
This chapter analyses three of the history plays that Byron wrote during his time in Italy in the context of early modern Venetian history, nineteenth-century British politics, and the Risorgimento, the peninsula’s movement for independence. Analysis of Venice’s legislative politics and the conflict between proponents of its maritime and landed empires enriches readings of Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. Issues of gender identity loom large in Sardanapalus, which, along with the other plays, says much about the Byronic Hero and the poet’s Sisyphean vision of history, in which people act though their deeds come to naught. These three tragedies centre on the failed actions of great men, suggesting the inability of individual agency to affect historical change. On a personal level, however, Byron attempted to affect history by supporting armed insurrection against Austria in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in Greece. Moreover, though he discounted the political influence of his writings, many read Byron’s texts as liberational polemic. A further link connects the poet’s politics with his aesthetics, since these writings often embody Romantic content in Neoclassical form. Analysis shows that by adhering to the so-called Aristotelian Unities, Byron’s hierarchical politics find echoes in the aesthetics of these three tragedies.
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