Manfred

Overview

About sixty pages, a dramatic poem in three acts, written by Lord Byron in 1816 and 1817, in the period immediately following the collapse of his marriage, the public scandal surrounding rumors of an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and his permanent departure from England. Byron composed it during and after a tour through the Bernese Alps, and the mountain setting, glaciers, waterfalls, isolated peaks, is not incidental scenery but an active presence throughout, addressed directly by the play’s protagonist and standing as a kind of sublime, indifferent witness to his private torment.

Manfred was not written for conventional theatrical performance and belongs to the genre sometimes called closet drama, dramatic poetry meant primarily to be read rather than staged, which freed Byron to write scenes of pure interior monologue, spirit summoning and cosmic confrontation without the practical constraints a working nineteenth-century stage would have imposed. The play became one of the most influential single works in establishing what later criticism would call the Byronic hero, an isolated, guilt-ridden, defiantly self-sufficient figure who answers to no external authority, whose direct influence runs through Gothic fiction, later Romantic poetry and well beyond into nineteenth-century fiction generally.

What happens

Summoning the spirits. The play opens with Manfred, a nobleman and magician alone at midnight in his Alpine tower, tormented by a guilt the play never fully specifies, connected somehow to the death of Astarte, a woman he loved, possibly a sister, whom he addresses with a devotion and horror that together suggest, without the play ever stating it directly, that his love for her crossed into something forbidden and that he bears direct responsibility for her death. Unable to find rest, Manfred summons seven spirits of the elements through his mastery of forbidden knowledge, and asks them for a single thing: forgetfulness, oblivion from what he knows and remembers. The spirits, who can offer him power over kingdoms, over the elements themselves, tell him plainly that this alone is not within their power to grant.

Refusing the easy escapes. Manfred, still tormented, climbs to a precipice in the Jungfrau intending to throw himself from it, and is stopped by a chamois hunter who happens upon him, an ordinary man whose simple, uncomprehending decency contrasts sharply with Manfred’s own isolated, cosmic despair. Manfred does not, in the end, throw himself from the cliff, though the play leaves ambiguous exactly why, whether from the hunter’s intervention, from some remaining will to live, or from a refusal to end his suffering on terms other than his own.

Arimanes, and Astarte’s phantom. Manfred descends into the hall of Arimanes, a demon lord ruling over spirits and destiny, and refuses to bow before him, insisting on his own dignity even in the presence of a power that could, presumably, destroy him. At his request, the spirit of Astarte is summoned and appears to him, and in the play’s most emotionally charged scene, Manfred begs her to speak, to tell him whether she forgives him or condemns him. She tells him only that he will die the next day, and vanishes without answering the question that has driven the entire play, leaving Manfred’s guilt permanently unresolved rather than either forgiven or fully explained.

Death on his own terms. In the play’s final act, an abbot arrives at Manfred’s tower and offers him the consolation and absolution of religious repentance, urging him to make peace with heaven before he dies. Manfred refuses, not from defiance of religion as such but from a settled conviction that his suffering and his guilt belong entirely to himself, that the mind which sinned alone must also answer for itself alone, owing nothing to and accepting nothing from any external authority, human or demonic. When demons arrive at the appointed hour to claim him, Manfred sends them away, insisting that his crimes and his punishment are his own, not theirs to collect, and dies in the abbot’s presence, unrepentant, unabsolved, but entirely, deliberately in command of his own end.

How to read it

Read the play as an extended meditation on guilt that refuses to specify its object, and resist the temptation to resolve exactly what Manfred did to Astarte into a single, tidy explanation. The play’s power depends substantially on this deliberate vagueness, which lets Manfred’s torment stand for a more general, unresolvable condition rather than a single confessable crime.

Pay close attention to the confrontation with Arimanes and the appearance of Astarte’s phantom as the play’s emotional and thematic center. Astarte’s refusal to answer Manfred’s central question, whether she forgives him, is the moment the play most clearly declines to offer its protagonist, or its reader, any resolution.

Notice how consistently the play associates freedom with self-sufficiency and isolation. Manfred’s refusal of every offered escape, the chaplain’s absolution, submission to Arimanes, even simple suicide from the cliff, culminates in a death he insists on controlling entirely himself, and the play’s final judgment on this stance, whether it represents genuine dignity or a kind of tragic, isolating pride, is left for the reader to weigh.

Read the Alpine setting as more than backdrop. Manfred addresses the mountains, glaciers and waterfalls directly throughout the play, and their sublime indifference to his suffering, neither punishing nor consoling him, mirrors the play’s larger refusal to supply any external moral verdict on what he has done.

Read this play alongside Goethe’s Faust, which Byron knew and which shares Manfred’s basic situation, a man of forbidden knowledge and power confronting guilt and mortality through supernatural means, and consider what distinguishes Byron’s more compressed, more purely interior treatment from Goethe’s far larger and more elaborately plotted version of similar material.

Questions it raises

• Does the play’s refusal to specify exactly what Manfred did to Astarte strengthen its exploration of guilt, or does the vagueness function as a way of gesturing at scandal, incest specifically, that Byron could not state directly given his own recent public disgrace?
• Is Manfred’s insistence on dying entirely on his own terms, refusing both religious absolution and demonic claim, a genuine achievement of freedom, or a form of pride that the play is more ambivalent about than Manfred himself seems to be?
• What does it mean that Astarte’s phantom answers none of Manfred’s actual questions, telling him only that he will die? Is her silence a withholding of forgiveness, an inability to forgive, or something the play leaves genuinely open?
• How does the chamois hunter’s ordinary decency function within the play? Does his simple humanity offer a real alternative to Manfred’s isolated grandeur, or does the play treat him as incapable of truly understanding what Manfred suffers?
• Is the Byronic hero, isolated, guilty, self-sufficient, answering to no external authority, an admirable figure, a cautionary one, or does the play deliberately refuse to settle which?
• What work does the Alpine setting do beyond atmosphere? Does addressing the sublime, indifferent mountains directly change what kind of confession or complaint Manfred’s speeches actually are?