I had a dream which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air . . .
- ‘Darkness’ (1816)
Though he never appears on stage, Byron plays a very significant role in ARCADIA. One of the most important of the Romantic poets, he speaks with a voice which is sceptical, ironic yet still capable of intense passions and political enthusiasms. Born in 1788, Byron inherited an 18th century Enlightenment belief in rationality, in the capacity of the human mind to understand the design of the universe. By 1809, when Arcadia begins, Byron (then 21) had published only two volumes of poetry, Poems on Various Occasions and Hours of Idleness (1807), which had been scathingly reviewed: “If this was one of his lordship’s school exercises at Harrow, and he escaped whipping, they have there either an undue respect for lords’ bottoms, or they do not deserve the reputation they have acquired”. Byron challenged the reviewer, Mr Twiddie, to a duel; Twiddie wisely was ‘not at home’. Byron then decided to get his revenge on all reviewers and most living British poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey (whom he hated) in his next satirical poem “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”, published March 1809. Ezra Chater in Arcadia is suitably insulted when he learns that Byron wants to include him in the proposed second edition of this work.
Byron sailed from Falmouth in June 1809 on the first leg of his planned ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, which extended as far as Albania and Greece. Hindered by the large mortgages on his estates and his considerable personal debts, Byron repeatedly demanded that his lawyer John Hanson pay for this trip by leasing or selling Newstead Abbey, the family home. As he wrote to Hanson on April 16 1809, “If the consequences of my leaving England were ten times as ruinous as you describe, I have no alternative, there are circumstances which render it absolutely indispensible, and quit the country I must immediately.” When Bernard Nightingale tries to make such evidence fit his thesis on Byron’s activities at Sidley Park on April 10 1809, might there be a grain of truth in it?
Byron’s greatest fame as a poet came with the publication of works such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) which introduced the notion of the Byronic hero, and Don Juan (1819 - 24) an ironic and brilliant satire on human folly in love. Byron’s own life was played out on the ‘couch of Eros’. An extremely attractive man, he had a remarkable number of sexual exploits and affairs, most famously perhaps with Lady Caroline Lamb, who is alluded to in Arcadia, both as Byron’s mistress and as the subject of Hannah Jarvis’s book Caro.
Byron is thus the perfect poet to stand behind Tom Stoppard’s brilliant meditation on how we can and cannot know the past, on how chaos both creates and undercuts our intellectual systems, on how erotic desire pushes us on, we know not where.
“There’s no such thing as certainty, that’s plain . . ./ So little do we know what we’re about in / This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.” (Don Juan)
[Adapted from an essay on Byron by Prof. Anne K. Mellor] Back to Arcadia main page
