<i>Liberty and Poetic Licence: New Essays on Byron</i> (review)

Abstract

LIBERTY AND POETIC LICENCE: NEW ESSAYS ON BYRON. Edited by Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles E. Robinson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 244. ISBN 0 85323 589 7. £65.00. Collections of essays that begin life as conference papers are a risky business: publish too quickly or indiscriminately and the articles can be shallow or unnecessary; publish too slowly or selectively and they can seem dated or abstruse. Fortunately Bernard Beatty, Tony Howe and Charles Robinson have managed to hit the ideal medium in their collection based on the 2001 International Byron Conference; it is filled with pieces that are fresh, thought-provoking and able to stand on their own merits. 'Byron', as Beatty writes in his sensitive introduction, 'is the poet of liberty'. Yet, as the editor goes on to remind readers, both 'liberty' and 'licence' admit many meanings, and it is with these multivalent definitions that the collection concerns itself. In seventeen essays, Liberty and Poetic Licence examines works from all stages of Byron's career and the editors have designed the collection so that it proceeds chronologically. As a result, readers see the many ways Byron interpreted the concepts of liberty and licence throughout his career and the ways in which his valuations and modes of thought about these concepts altered as he matured. The contributors have chosen, for the most part, to deal with liberty rather than licence and what they offer is, also for the most part, very fine indeed. In the suggestive piece that begins the book, Peter Cochran considers Byron's self-censorship in his first four published collections, suggesting that 'pressures, both social and emotional' made Byron censor his own works, a censorship that perhaps lasted until he left England in 1816. Tom Mole next writes incisively about the politics of visibility in The Bride of Abydos, using Judith Butler to consider the complex matrix of real and subversive freedom in the poem's visualisations: Mole's past writings have proven him an illuminating and sensitive scholar, and this article reconfirms those conclusions. In the third essay, Michael O'Neill, writing on Byron's repeated ability to achieve freedom by immersing himself in destructive elements or experiences in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV, argues for a Byron who relishes complexity and mutability, who finds in hubris a reason to celebrate human determination. Offering richly dense close readings, O'Neill's essay addresses the paradox of sorrow and delight that informs all of Byron's works, throwing new light on its source. In the pair of essays that follow, Peter Graham and Katharine Kernberger discuss Manfred. Graham's fascinating piece uses Isaiah Berlin's political philosophy to consider the ways in which the text contemplates 'freedom from' and 'freedom to', reaching the compelling conclusion that Manfred's freedom, freedom to, situates him as the ultimate free soul, master of his own fate. Kernberger, for her part, examines the play's paradox of death, asserting that the annihilation Manfred seeks is belied by Manfred's persistent representations of an afterlife. Kernberger's essay is less fruitful than Graham's, no doubt because of length constraints: at only twelve pages, it does not have much room for extended analysis. As the collection moves on to the less studied works of Byron's middle period, Gabriele Poole uncovers the rich interweaving of textual and thematic representations of liberty in Mazeppa, while Alan Rawes considers the paradox of both Faliero's and Byron's relationship with aristocratic values in Marino Faliero, a paradox he suggests Byron may have begun to resolve through religion. Rawes's vision of a Byron who is edging into faith is intriguing but, again because of space constraints, leaves the reader wanting more. Andrew Stauffer offers a truly original reading of the influence of the hugely popular eighteenthth-century story of Inkle and Yarico on Byron's later works: the links he elucidates between that story and The Blues, Don Juan and The Island break real new ground. …