Episode 201: Lord Byron Still Fucks

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  • Biography of Lord Byron, The Poetry Foundation, 2017: The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, Byron created the immensely popular namesake Byronic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. Born with a lame leg, he was the son of an impoverished Scots heiress and “Mad Jack” Byron, a fortune-hunting widower. The captain squandered his wife’s inheritance, was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France as an exile from English creditors. Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. With the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the “Wicked” Lord Byron Fifth, George became the Sixth Baron Byron. He excelled in oratory, verse, and sports. He also formed passionate attachments with other boy, and; there can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies. Living extravagantly, he began to amass the debts that would bedevil him for years. In March 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords. Though in debt, he gathered resources to allow a tour of the eastern Mediterranean, which reinforced for him the contrast between the glory of ancient Greece and its contemporary disgrace. Between June 1813 and February 1816, Byron completed and had published six extremely popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his travels. His  “Byronic Heroes” descended from Prometheus, Satan, and the sentimental heroes of Rousseau and Goethe. Among their traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, honor, altruism, and pure love. The drawing rooms and salons of Whig society vied for Byron’s presence and lionized him. In 1813 Byron began an affair with his 29-year-old half sister, Augusta. While no legal proof exists, the circumstantial evidence in Byron’s letters strongly suggests an incestuous connection. Throughout his life Byron was a fervent reader of the Bible and a lover of traditional songs and legends. As a champion of freedom, he may have responded instinctively to the oppression suffered by the Jewish people. He married an heiress in 1815 but by 1816 his wife considered him insane and separated, taking their daughter with her. Heavy drinking drove Byron into rages and fits of irrational behavior. 
  • In 1816, Byron sailed for Geneva, where waiting for him were Claire Clairmont (pregnant with his child), Percy Shelley, and Mary Godwin. They passed the time agreeably by boating on Lake Leman and conversing at the Villa; in this environmen,t Mary wrote Frankenstein. In 1819, Byron’s publisher, after some hesitation, cautiously published his “Don Juan.” Typical was the review in Blackwood’s Magazine, which branded Byron as “a cool unconcerned fiend” who derided love, honor, patriotism, and religion in his “filthy and impious poem.” Not all the reviews were negative: Goethe praised Don Juan as “a work of boundless energy.” In October, Byron presented the manuscript of his memoirs, not to be published during his lifetime, containing, among other things, “a detailed account of his marriage and its consequences.” His publisher had the memoirs burned to protect Byron’s reputation. Byron began work on his play “Cain” and challenged accepted religious beliefs in good, evil, death, and immortality, and Robert Southey virulently attacked Byron as the leader of the “Satanic school” of contemporary writers whose works exhibited “a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety.” Shelley proclaimed Cain “apocalyptic— a revelation not before communicated to man.” His was a minority opinion. Resolving that “he who is only a poet has done little for mankind” Byron devoted himself to the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and agreed to loan 4,000 pounds to the Greek fleet. In 1824 he joined the moderate revolutionary leaders on the mainland and was enthusiastically welcomed by shouts, salutes, and salvos, hailed as a “Messiah.” But his constitution deteriorated under the strain and the cold winter rains as well as the frustration of his unrequited love for his handsome 15-year-old page boy. By April he was seriously ill and on the evening of Easter Monday, April 19, 1824, Byron died. In memorial services throughout the country, he was proclaimed a national hero of Greece and his death proved effective in uniting the many Greek factions and eliciting support for their struggle. Byron’s body arrived in England on June 29, and for two days he lay in state in a house in Great George Street. 
  • From The Byronic Hero, Princess Weekes, PBS, 2020: Edward Cullen; Han Solo; Lestat–what do all of these characters have in common besides being heartthrobs? They share a common ancestor: the Byronic Hero. Brooding, sensual, violent, a little too single-minded, the Byronic Hero has been a staple in literature dating back to the 19th century. I see you, Cloud Strife, all sad and angsty with your giant sword. According to Professor Peter L. Thorslev, the characteristic Byronic Hero has borrowed characteristics from the gothic villain in his looks, his mysterious past, and his secret sins, and from the Man Of Feelings archetype  in his tender sensibilities and in his undying fidelity. He is a romantic rebel. He chooses his values in open defiance of the codes of society. That’s right, you defy the codes of society by being sad and hot and with your slightly stalker-like tendencies. The Byronic archetype allowed for more complicated male characters to form, and without him we miss out on the development of the anti-hero. Gothic and romantic fiction writers and readers of the 19th and 20th centuries ate this up: Victor Frankenstein, Captain Ahab, The Phantom of the Opera, The Count of Monte Cristo, Mr. Rochester, Megamind–even James Bond is pretty Byronic. Debate me in the comments. They have a mixture of monstrous yet alluring personalities. Frollo from Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starts off as a good man but is gripped by a lust for a woman he cannot have and tips into madness; Heathcliff is such a compelling romantic lead because the text makes it clear that he was forced into becoming a bitter, hateful man by society, but his deep, toxic love for Catherine draws the reader to him. Rochester has a kindly nature and a deep love for Jane but is still capable of locking his wife in the attic. Byron himself had a huge capacity for love, intelligence, and an appreciation for beauty but was chaotic and emotionally aloof. More recently we see more female characters who possess some Byronic qualities, like Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Regina from Once Upon a Time, and Catra from She-Ra. But those characters are punished more by both the audience and the writers. Sometimes, the alluring aspect of female and non-white Byronic characters is seeing them have the freedom to be more complex as  Byronic heroines take on the characteristics of the rebellious, ambitious, narcissistic, individualistic, and ultimately self-destructive Byronic male. All of the tortured romantic bad boys of literature, film, and television have a little bit of Byron in them. So the next time you get deep in your feels for Kylo Ren, cheer for Prince Zuko, or secretly pop on Twilight for the 200th time, maybe pour one out to Lord Byron, to whom we owe all of this angsty goodness to. Or James Dean, either one will do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wNZDIH8d8 
  • • Portraits Of Lord Byron In Order Of Lord Byron-ness, Daniel Lavery, The Toast, 2015: 
  • Lord Byron & His Manservant, 1810: At first glance, you might be tempted to think, “Not very Byron,” because there are other people in the picture, and his alabaster brow isn’t the focal point. This is an error. “You there, boy, fetch into this dinghy and sail into yon exhilarating storm while I stand here and clench my fist over this rock. If you drown in the background it will make for a very exciting painting.” He’s wearing like eighteen ascots and they’re all flowing in a tempest, plenty of Byron here.
  • Portrait of Lord Byron, 1813: SOLID POUTY BYRON. He’s got some secret freaky brocade vest on under his cloak, which is probably full of dildos, his brow situation is ferociously organized, his out-of-frame hand is probably jerking off the devil.
  • Byron’s Dream, 1874: Eight out of ten Byrons. Look at his SEXUAL SNEERING. “What is this woman doing in my portrait? is her hair more luxurious than mine? I hope she falls down this hill and dies so I can be alone with my dog. what is she LOOKING at even? why isn’t it me.”
  • Coloured Print of Lord Byron, Date Unknown: Medium Byron, which is perhaps the least amount of Byron you can get. It’s better to be almost no Byron than just regular Byron, so this is actually zero Byrons. He’s almost smiling?? And like, reading letters, like someone with a job would do? Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE.
  • Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, 1813: ONE BILLION PERCENT would Byron grow a mustache and demand that everyone notice it. He would never come out and say “What do you think of my mustache?” but he would make it clear in a thousand small ways that you were expected to notice and compliment it, and if you withheld that pleasure from him, you would never be invited to dinner again. 
  • The reception of Lord Byron, 1861: “Hello, are you Greece, I am here to run your army? Don’t worry, I’m a poet.”
  • Lord Byron on His Deathbed, 1826: Obviously the lute and the laurel wreath and the funereal sheet draped like a Roman toga are sick touches, but you can’t even see his death erection, which I feel like would have been really important to him, that even in death people were thinking about his dick.
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  • From The Vampyre, John Polidori, 1819: Hitherto, Aubrey had had no opportunity of studying Lord Ruthven’s character, and now he found that his companion was profuse in his liberality;—the idle, the vagabond, and the beggar, received from his hand more than enough to relieve their immediate wants. But Aubrey could not avoid remarking that it was not upon the virtuous that he bestowed his alms;—these were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when an addict came to ask something to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity. All those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery. Aubrey was surprised at the apparent eagerness with which his companion sought for the centres of all fashionable vice; he always gambled with success, except where the known sharper was his antagonist, and then he lost even more than he gained; when he encountered the rash youthful novice, or the luckless father of a numerous family, his eyes sparkled with more fire than that of the cat whilst dallying with the half-dead mouse. In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth in the solitude of a dungeon, whilst many a father sat frantic, amidst the speaking looks of mute hungry children, without a single farthing of his late immense wealth. Yet he took no money from the gambling table but immediately lost, to the ruiner of many, the last gilder he had just snatched from the convulsive grasp of the innocent. Aubrey’s guardians insisted upon his immediately leaving his friend, and urged, that his character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society, and all those females whom he had sought out apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his affair, thrown the mask aside and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze. Aubrey determined upon leaving one, whose character had not yet shown a single bright point on which to rest the eye. He resolved to invent some plausible pretext for abandoning him altogether, purposing, in the mean while, to watch him more closely, and to let no slight circumstances pass by unnoticed. Aubrey determined upon leaving and immediately writing a note, to say, that from that moment he must decline accompanying his Lordship in the remainder of their proposed tour. Ruthven next day merely sent his servant to notify his complete assent to a separation.
  • From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron, 1818: Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, still great! Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, And long accustomed bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait— Oh, who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb? Spirit of Freedom! Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain, But every carle can lord it o’er thy land; Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain, Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand, From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned. In all save form alone, how changed! and who That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye, Who would but deem their bosom burned anew With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty! And many dream withal the hour is nigh That gives them back their fathers’ heritage: For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh, Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage, Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful page. Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye?  No! True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, But not for you will Freedom’s altars flame. Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe: Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thy years of shame. But ne’er will Freedom seek this fated soil, But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil. Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine And Greece her very altars eyes in vain: Gay were her minstrels once, for free her throng, All felt the common joy they now must feign; Nor oft I’ve seen such sight, nor heard such song, As wooed the eye, and thrilled the Bosphorus along. And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, Land of lost gods and godlike men. Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, Proclaim thee Nature’s varied favourite now; Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface bow, Commingling slowly with heroic earth, Broke by the share of every rustic plough: So perish monuments of mortal birth, So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth.
  • • From Cain: A Mystery, Lord Byron, 1821: I have a Victor––true; but no superior. Homage he has from all––but none from me: I battle it against him, as I battled In highest Heaven––through all Eternity, And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades, And the interminable realms of space, And the infinity of endless ages–All, all, will I dispute! And world by world, And star by star, and universe by universe, Shall tremble in the balance, till the great Conflict shall cease, if ever it shall cease, Which it ne’er shall, till he or I be quenched! And what can quench our immortality, Or mutual and irrevocable hate? He as a conqueror will call the conquered [one] Evil; but what will be the Good he gives? Were I the victor, his works would be deemed The only evil ones. And you, ye new And scarce–born mortals, what have been his gifts To you already, in your little world? But few; and some of those but bitter. Dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face, and tell him that His evil is not good! He is great–– But, in his greatness, is no happier than We in our conflict! Let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne–– Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence; Let him crowd orb on orb: he is alone, Indefinite, Indissoluble Tyrant; Could he but crush himself, ’twere the best boon He ever granted: but let him reign on! Spirits and Men, at least we sympathise–– And, suffering in concert, make our pangs Innumerable, more endurable. The Maker––Call him Which name thou wilt: he makes but to destroy. He, so wretched in his height, So restless in his wretchedness, must still Create, and re–create––perhaps he’ll make One day a Son unto himself––as he Gave you a father––and if he so doth, Mark me! that Son will be a sacrifice! I have nothing in common with him; I dwell apart, but I am great. I tempt none, Save with the truth: was not the Tree a Tree Of Knowledge? and was not the Tree of Life Still fruitful? Did I bid her pluck them not? Did I plant things prohibited within The reach of beings innocent, and curious By their innocence? I would have made ye Gods; and He who thrust ye forth because “ye should not eat the fruits of life, And become gods”–were those his words? Then who was the Demon–He Who would not let ye live, or he who would Have made ye live forever, in the joy And power of Knowledge? 
  • From The Devil’s Drive, Lord Byron, 1813: “And what shall I ride in,” quoth Lucifer then? “If I followed my taste indeed, I should mount in a wagon of wounded men, and smile to see them bleed. But these will be furnished again and again, and at present my purpose is speed; To see of My manor as much as I may, And watch that no souls shall be poached away. I have a state-coach at Carlton House, A chariot in Seymour place; But they’re lent to two friends. Then up to the earth sprung he, And making a jump from Moscow to France, He stepped across the Sea, And rested his hoof on a Turnpike road– No very great way from a Bishop’s abode. The Devil has reached our cliffs so white, And what did he see there, I pray? If his eyes were good, he but saw by night What we see every day. Satan hired a horse and gig With promises of pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at the close of day. The first place he stopped he heard the Psalm that rung from a Methodist Chapel: “‘Tis the best sound I’ve heard,” quoth he, “since my palm Presented Eve with her apple! When Faith is all, tis an excellent sign, That the Works and Workmen both are mine.” The Devil got next to Westminster, And he turned to the room of the Commons; But he heard as he purposed to enter in there, That “the Lords” had received a summons; And he thought, as a fallen aristocrat, He might peep at the Peers, though to hear of them were flat; And he walked up the House so like one of his own, That they say that he stood pretty near the throne. He saw the Lord Liverpool seemingly wise, and Jockey of Norfolk—a man of some size—And he saw the tears in Lord Eldon’s eyes, Because the Catholics would not rise, In spite of his prayers and his prophecies; And he heard—which set Satan himself a staring— A certain Chief Justice say something a-swearing. And the Devil was shocked—and quoth he, “I must go, For I find we have much better manners below. If thus he harangues when he passes my border, I shall hint to friend Moloch to call him to order.”
  • • From Romantic Satanism, Peter Schock, 2003: By 1820 Byron’s satanic Aura had lost its glamor and was now almost exclusively the channel through which conservative voices expressed criticism. In 1820, Reginald Heber added a new dimension to the attacks on Byron, writing “By a strange predilection for the worser half of Manichianism, one of the mightiest spirits of the age has apparently devoted himself in his genius to the adornment and extension of evil.” This was saying in Elegant terms that Byron was a Satanist, and that was precisely how he interpreted it. Thus prominent writers for the journals and the Tory Ministry applied to Byron the brand of satanic, grouping him with infidels. It should come as no surprise then that a blaspheming Satanic figure looms so large in “Cain.” Unleashing such a character in a religious drama must have seemed especially opportune as a Counter-Strike, the Fulfillment of Byron’s great threat. Shelley probably encouraged Byron to do this when he visited him in August of 1827, leading Byron to heighten the Satanism of the work by shaping Lucifer into the adverse ideal of Christian mythology. Through his drama Byron struck at the tyrants attempting to trample upon free thought, and his target extended Beyond his assailants in the Quarterly Review to all who contributed to the assault on free thought at his time, from Tory ministers who authored repressive legislation to Crown lawyers who prosecuted infidels. The Eclectic Review speculated that Byron wrote Cain to test for himself the limits of the freedom of the press.A peer of the realm, living in England or Italy, had little reason to fear prosecution. Publishers, not writers, were most at stake.He therefore must have assumed that his play would become part of this controversy and that he would be perceived as an aristocratic provocateur in the struggle over the authority of the Bible. Before writing Cain, Byron had worried frequently about the consequences of publishing irreligion. In 1817; Shelley lost the custody of his children over the anti-christian diatribes he wrote in Queen Mab. This chronic anxiety about court judgments meant Byron probably took some care in writing his play, especially in the construction of its superhuman Infidel. Because biblical myth was contested in the blasphemy controversy, because the brand of satanic had been fixed to all transgressive writers, and because publishing blasphemy carried consequences, to write a biblical drama involving satanic myth was to enter into an ideological conflict.
  • From Little Lucifers of the Satanic School, The Satanic Scholar, 2016: Romantic Satanism was not about Devil worship, but rather identification with Satan the magnificent rebel angel out of Milton and adoption of his mythic/poetic revolt against the absolute authority personified in the Almighty as a sociopolitical countermyth. Romantic Satanists were essentially little Lucifers—Miltonic Satans in miniature. When English clergyman Reginald Heber identified in Byron “a strange predilection for the worser half of manicheism,” this, “being interpreted,” reflected Byron himself, “means that I worship the devil…” Heber would go on to explain that “Lord Byron misunderstood us. He supposed that we accused him of ‘worshipping the Devil.’ We certainly had, at the time, no particular reason for apprehending that he worshipped anything.” Byron’s failure—or refusal, rather—to bend the knee in worship of anything, however, was what made Byron so Satanic, and the same goes for Shelley, the militant atheist who imagined himself very much like the heroically unbowed Satan: “Did I now see god seated in gorgeous & tyrannic majesty as described, upon the throne of infinitude – if I bowed before him, what would virtue say?” Just as “narcissists” are simply individuals who bear the likeness of the mythical Narcissus, Byron and Shelley were “Satanists” not because they worshipped the Devil, but because of their likeness to the arch-rebel—an image they often deliberately donned. Satanism was certainly at the heart of Byronism, the cultural phenomenon that saw Byron hurled haphazardly into the limelight. Byron’s dogged sense of sin was mostly the product of the perverted form of Calvinism literally beat into him as a young boy. Being “Majestic though in ruin” was part and parcel of the Byronic persona, however, and so Byron seized for himself the starring role of fallen angel. Like Satan, Byron wished to experience the feeling of being struck with full force by the vengeance of Heaven.