Byron and the Story of Francesca da Rimini

Abstract

Few stories captured and held Byron's imagination as tenaciously as that of Francesca da Rimini. In addition to its association with Dante, who became one of his favorite poets, there was evidently something about the tragedy of love involving a married woman, her husband, and her husband's brother that Byron found especially fascinating. The many amorous triangles in his poetical narratives, as well as the exaltation of romantic love sanctified not by religion but rather by sincere emotion, show that he was temperamentally sympathetic with the basic elements of Francesca's adulterous passion. In his customary way of assimilating whatever he admired, he even identified himself and his halfsister, Augusta Leigh, with Dante's unfortunate lovers of Rimini. After frequent recourse to the story of Francesca, Byron associated himself with it to such an extent that he interwove his own autobiography with it and, I believe, reflected the original tragedy as a strangely configured, though curiously revealing, tragicomedy in the first canto of Don Juan.