<i>Byron at the Theatre</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Byron at the Theatre Richard Foulkes Byron at the Theatre. Edited by Peter Cochran. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. Pp. ix +218. ISBN (10) 1 84718 427 8. £34.99. This collection of essays is based on a conference on Byron and the Theatre organised by the Newstead Abbey Byron Society and the Midland Romantic Seminar, and held at Nottingham Trent University on 12 May 2007. The range of contributors and their subjects is very diverse, with the editor responsible for no less than three chapters and co-authoring another, reflecting the fact that three speakers had to 'drop out' of the conference (and evidently the book) at short notice. Happily other speakers made their way to Nottingham from far afield: Cologne, Verona, Krakow, Yekaterinburg, Prague and Moscow, reflecting the strong interest that Byron still commands beyond his native heath. Although not structured chronologically the book virtually provides an account of Byron's [End Page 68] interest and involvement in the theatre from his schooldays to a continuing afterlife in the twenty-first century. Thus David Herbert and Peter Cochran recount the young Byron's recitations not only at the Harrow School Speech Day of 1805, but also in Palladio's Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza over a decade later (9 November 1816), where he gave a reprise of the Chorus from Euripides' The Phoenician Women. In between he had taken part in theatricals at Southwell and made three speeches in the House of Lords, the delivery of which clearly owed something to his youthful acting experience. As the authors say: 'Byron knew himself, then, to be a good actor: but he could never, of course, be a professional one'. Neither, it seems, could he be a professional dramatist, for though he wrote half a dozen or so plays, he did so without any intention of their being performed on the stage of either of the patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane – and this despite the fact that he was involved with the latter, going so far as to write the address for its reopening in 1812. It is all the more remarkable therefore that Byron's plays assumed such a prominent place in the theatrical repertoire from, in the case of Werner, for example, Macready at Drury Lane in January 1830 (lagging two years behind Thomas Barry in New York) to Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in June 1887 (admittedly just one special benefit performance). In between, as the lists of productions in the bibliography show, Byron's plays were performed widely by leading actor-managers (Phelps, Charles Kean and Calvert amongst them) in and beyond Britain. Margaret J. Howell did of course explore several of the most interesting of these productions in Byron Tonight: A Poet's Plays on the Nineteenth Century Stage (1982), and, although Byron at the Theatre complements her work with its useful listings, it does not add significantly to our knowledge about and appreciation of this phenomenon. The appeal was undoubtedly largely scenic, with Byron demanding exotic locations that the increasingly sophisticated technology of the Victorian stage was able to realise, but with Macready at least this did not eclipse his own performance as Werner, which G. H. Lewes considered to be 'one of his greatest parts', in which 'he represented the anguish of a weak mind prostrate, with a pathos almost as remarkable as the heroic agony of Kean's Othello'. The forlorn look and wailing accent when his son retorts upon him his own plea – 'Who taught me there were crimes made venial by the occasion?' – were not to be forgotten. Byron and the Theatre presses on into the twentieth century and beyond with Cochran revisiting productions of Cain by Stanislavski and Grotowski, in little more depth than Margaret J. Howell but with the addition of John Barton's 1995 production: 'very interesting, but […] not Byron'. Shona Allen transports readers to the world of ballet with her account of Nureyev's Manfred in the 1979 Paris and the 1981 Zurich versions and subsequent revisions, but again it is a case of 'not Byron's play, but Nureyev's ballet'. Not that this should be regarded as a criticism, since it...