From Byron to Byron: Mazeppa and the Tartars in Nineteenth-Century British Theatre

Abstract

Lord Byron’s Mazeppa (via Henry Milner’s 1831 adaptation) and ‘Monk’ Lewis’s Timour the Tartar (1811) had a decisive, although at times elusive influence on Victorian playwrights such as Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, John Oxenford, Francis Burnand and H. J. Byron, second cousin to the poet. The presence and representation of the Tartars on the nineteenth-century British stage will be explored through an examination of this influence. It will be argued that Lord Byron and ‘Monk’ Lewis worked not only as major turning points in the construction of the Tartars in nineteenth-century Britain but also as links between the ‘high-brow’ world of Romantic poetry and the ‘low-brow’ landscape of Victorian popular entertainment – both enhancing existing racial stereotypes around the Tartars and the East more generally.