Manfred

For other uses, see Manfred (disambiguation).
1817 first edition, John Murray, London.
"Scene from Manfred" by Thomas Cole, 1833.

Manfred: A dramatic poem is a closet drama written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Gothic fiction.

Byron commenced this work in late 1816, only a few months after the famed ghost-story sessions which provided the initial impetus for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The supernatural references are made clear throughout the poem.

Manfred was adapted musically by Robert Schumann in 1852, in a composition entitled Manfred: Dramatic Poem with music in Three Parts, and later by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his Manfred Symphony. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it.

Background

Byron wrote this "metaphysical drama", as he called it, after his marriage to Annabella Millbanke failed because of a scandal due to charges of sexual improprieties and an incestuous affair between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Attacked by the press and ostracised by London society, Byron fled England for Switzerland in 1816 and never returned. At the time, he was living at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland.

Because Manfred was written immediately after this, and because it regards a main character tortured by his own sense of guilt for an unmentionable offence, some critics consider it to be autobiographical, or even confessional.[1] The unnamed but forbidden nature of Manfred's relationship to Astarte is believed to represent Byron's relationship with his half-sister Augusta.

Most of Manfred was written on a tour through the Bernese Alps in September 1816. The third act was rewritten in February 1817 since Byron was not happy with its first version.

Plot

Manfred is a Faustian noble living in the Bernese Alps. Internally tortured by some mysterious guilt, which has to do with the death of his most beloved, Astarte, he uses his mastery of language and spell-casting to summon seven spirits, from whom he seeks forgetfulness. The spirits, who rule the various components of the corporeal world, are unable to control past events and thus cannot grant Manfred's plea. For some time, fate prevents him from escaping his guilt through suicide.

At the end, Manfred dies, defying religious temptations of redemption from sin. Throughout the poem he succeeds in challenging all of the authoritative powers he faces, and chooses death over submitting to the powerful spirits. Manfred directs his final words to the Abbot, remarking, "Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die". "The unconquerable individual to the end, Manfred gives his soul to neither heaven nor hell, only to death."[2]

Critique

Published in June 1817, Manfred has as its epigraph the famous phrase of Shakespeare's Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."[3] It shows heavy influence by Goethe's Faust, which Byron most likely read in translation (although he claimed to have never read it).

Manfred has as its theme defiant humanism, represented by the hero’s refusal to bow to supernatural authority.[2] Peter L. Thorslev, Jr. notes that Manfred conceals behind a Gothic exterior the tender heart of the Hero of Sensibility; but as a rebel, like Satan, Cain, and Prometheus, he embodies Romantic self-assertion.[4]

Characters

  • Manfred
  • Astarte
  • Chamois Hunter
  • Abbot of St. Maurice
  • Manuel
  • Herman
  • Witch of the Alps
  • Arimanes
  • Nemesis
  • The Destinies
  • The Seven Spirits

In performance

Manfred was not originally intended for the stage; it was written to be a dramatic poem or, as Byron called it, a "metaphysical" drama.

Manfred has received much more attention on stage for its musical treatments by Tchaikovsky and Schumann than it has on its own dramatic terms. It was later famously played by Samuel Phelps. There are no recorded full stagings in Britain in the twentieth century, but readings are more popular, partly because of the difficulty of staging a play set in the Alps, partly because of the work's nature as a closet drama that was never actually intended for the stage in the first place. The exceptional size of the role of Manfred also makes the play difficult to cast. There was a production on BBC Radio 3 in 1988, however, which starred Ronald Pickup as Manfred.

Scenes

Manfred in literature

The character Manfred was mentioned by Alexandre Dumas, père in his novel The Count of Monte Cristo, where the Count declares: "No, no, I wish to do away with that mysterious reputation that you have given me, my dear viscount; it is tiresome to be always acting Manfred. I wish my life to be free and open."

Indeed, the Count of Monte Cristo is quite similar to Manfred, in that he wants to keep his past a secret, feels superior to social conventions, and is following an agenda that runs counter to the social mores.

On page 61 of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Di Presso seems to refer (perhaps by accident) to Metzger as Manfred.

Manfred's oft-quoted speech from Act II Scene 1 which begins "Think'st thou existence doth depend on time?" is quoted on page 351 of The Masters of Solitude by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky mentions the poem in Notes from Underground when the narrator states, "I received countless millions and immediately gave them away for the benefit of humanity, at the same moment confessing before the crowd all my infamies, which, of course, were not mere infamies, but also contained within them a wealth of 'the lofty and the beautiful' of something Manfred-like" (Dostoyevsky, page 57. Bantam Books 2005)

'In Memory of My Feelings', the poem by Frank O'Hara, includes the line "Manfred climbs to my nape,/ speaks, but I do not hear him,/ I'm too blue."

In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Byron is said to have written Manfred after meeting the magician Jonathan Strange and finding him most disagreeable. It is suggested that he wrote it because he was so disappointed with Strange that he created a magician more to his liking.

Manfred in ballet

In Byron's poem, the hero, a superhuman character, is doomed by fate to destroy those he loves. In vain he undertakes to find Astarte, his ideal spirit who alone has the power to assuage the feeling of guilt with which he is obsessed.

The argument for Manfred, in the choreographic version, lets the imagination run free using this basic theme to which references borrowed from other autographical poems by Byron have been associated. Inspiration has also been taken from the libretto that Tchaikovsky produced from the original work.

The characters and events forming the storyline come from the life of Byron himself. Therefore, we meet the loves and hates of his youth, his tireless quest for wisdom and peace, in friendship, in love, and in patriotic fervour." Programme for Manfred, Palais des Sports, 1979.

Other references to Manfred

In the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Patience Manfred is referenced in Colonel Calverley's patter song "If you want a receipt for that popular mystery" (A Heavy Dragoon) listing one ingredient as "a little of Manfred but not very much of him".

German gothic metal band The Vision Bleak extensively quote from Manfred in their song "A Curse of the Grandest Kind", off their 2010 album Set Sail to Mystery

In her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, when author Susanna Clarke has the magician Strange meet Lord Byron, the two men take an instant dislike to each other. Then in a footnote, (chapter 50, footnote #3) Clarke adds that the meeting may have inspired the poem Manfred, that Byron, "...having met a magician that disappointed him, created one more to his liking."

In Chapter LIV of Dumas' book, The Count of Monte Cristo makes a playful comparison of himself to Manfred in expressing a desire to avoid seeming mysterious.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Manfred, George Gordon (Noel), Lord Byron – Introduction." Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Edna M. Hedblad Russel Whitaker. Vol. 109. Gale Cengage, 2002. eNotes.com. 2006. 25 September 2010
  2. 1 2 "Lord Byron (George Gordon)", Poetry Foundation
  3. ↑ Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 166–167
  4. ↑ Thorslev, Peter L. Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962)
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