... Opinions be changed--or how is truth to be got at? we don't arrive at it by standing on one leg? --George Gordon, Lord Byron to John Murray, May 1817 (1)

Scholars of Byron will not be shocked by the announcement that Manfred (1817) is a skeptical work. A number of writers have made this assertion and considered its ramifications from various angles. They have, for example, argued that the play enacts skeptical beliefs Byron had long held, or, more recently, examined the way that its skepticism reflects simultaneously emergent theories in science and natural history. Curiously, however, few have explored the various manifestations of skepticism in the text itself at any length or reflected on precisely why Byron may have employed it. (2) This is unfortunate, for a close examination of the embrace of radical skepticism in Manfred yields important discoveries about Byron's philosophical goals and epistemological evolution. In Manfred, Byron frames knowledge as a series of choices and as a series of rejections. In so doing, he suggests that what is usually thought of as knowledge is always fundamentally unsound and that actual knowledge is inherently unattainable.

Critics have often been troubled by the epistemological instability of Manfred. The drama's first reviewers argued that its ambiguities undermined morality in a typically Byronic way. Thus, writing in the British Review, William Roberts fulminated against the potential ethical hazards of the play: "Manfred ... confesses himself to have been a man of crime and blood; and yet a certain air of native nobleness, a mysterious grandeur of character, an elevation far above ordinary humanity, all these qualities are made to throw a sort of brilliance around him ... These representations go beyond mere contradictoriness of character; they involve a confusion of principle, and operate very fatally and very diffusively in strengthening prejudices, which are at the bottom of our falsest estimations of men and things." (3) More recent writers have suggested that the play's ambivalences limit its dramatic or philosophical effect, or have argued that they are the pained demonstration of a divided or deeply flawed self (either Manfred's or Byron's). Anne Mellor, for example, asserts that "Manfred has allowed his critical, skeptical intelligence to overwhelm his creative enthusiasm ... has enclosed himself inside a tragic view of the human condition," while Alan Richardson argues that "Byron's analysis of self-consciousness, as presented in Manfred, is sketchy and incomplete, largely because he chose not to separate villain and hero, seducer and seduced." (4)

What such readings fail to notice, however, is that both the play and its writer seem quite untroubled by its confusions. Indeed, although it is always a delicate matter to interpret Byron's comments to others about his works, even allowing for the defense mechanisms (excessive self-mockery or equally excessive contempt) that he habitually employed, his first description of Manfred to Murray seems to relish its ambiguity: "it is in three acts--but of a very wild--metaphysical--and inexplicable kind.--Almost all the persons-but two or three--are Spirits of the earth & air--or the waters--the scene is in the Alps--the hero a kind of magician who is tormented by a species of remorse--the cause of which is left half-unexplained--he wanders about invoking these spirits--which appear to him-- & are of no use--he at last goes to the very abode of the Evil principle in propria persona--to evocate a ghost--which appears-- & gives him an ambiguous & disagreeable answer-- & in the 3d. act he is found by his attendants dying in a tower--where he studied his art." (5) Here is the same backtracking and flip-flopping one finds in the play itself and, despite a flippancy that seems ill suited to the drama's apparent sobriety, the result is by far the most accurate extant precis of Manfred. This is simply because, unlike his critics, Byron does not see the play's epistemological uncertainty as negative. Rather, it amuses him. This is not to argue that Manfred is a lighthearted romp; it is, however, to argue that it is something of a hybrid text, its extravagant bombast and glower begging its own debunking. (6) In fact, Manfred mocks itself and its hero, and in so doing it mocks the possibility of truth. Skepticism in Manfred frees and empowers, and the reader's mind, the mental theater, necessarily plays a signal role in this enterprise. (7)

While it would be unrealistic to imagine Byron's contemporary readers as all possessing the interest and determination of modern literary scholars, evidence from critics such as Jon P. Klancher and Stephen C. Behrendt, as well as from contemporaneous reviews, suggests that the Romantic reading public was more than capable of nuanced, even counterintuitive, readings of Byron's work. The reader of Manfred I assume, then, is not the bovine specimen Phillip Martin (erroneously) imagines in his Byron: A Poet before His Public, "predominantly uninformed ... voluntarily undiscriminating," but rather the "increasingly engaged" one of whom Behrendt writes, "whose sophistication as readers and critics of what they read was ... growing daily." (8) This reader would have been alive to Byron's epistemological manipulations, in full possession of what William St. Clair beautifully describes as "the freedom ... to choose ... which passages to give the most attention to, to skip, to argue, to resist, to read against the grain, to be influenced by irrelevancies ... to be distracted, to slip into dreams, to disagree but to continue reading." (9)

For such a reader, the questions about Manfred begin immediately upon encountering the text, perhaps even before. The first indication that Byron may be playing with the definition of knowledge lies in the ontological confusion that must inform any experience of the play. Remarking with grim mysteriousness on an article in Blackwood's Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in which the writer claimed to reveal "the supposed origin of this dreadful story," Byron wrote to Murray, "the Conjecturer is out-- & knows nothing of the matter--I had a better origin than he can devise or divine for the soul of him." (10) In fact, this enigmatic "better origin" was widely known to be Byron's involvement with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. The play's allusions to and obvious connections with that relationship were recognized not just by those intimately familiar with his personal circumstances--his wife and a select few confidantes--but by the larger reading public: a review in London's The Day and New Times, for example, wrote that Manfred "committed incest! Lord Byron has coloured Manfred into his own personal features." (11) That Byron intended the allusions to be spotted, at least by his friends and perhaps by a wider audience, is clear from the numerous enquiries he made to correspondents seeking to gauge their opinions of the play, not to mention a letter he wrote to Leigh herself, asking if Manfred had created a "pucker" in England. (12) Byron intended Manfred to be the story of Manfred, but he also intended it to be the story of Lord Byron.

Thus, the drama is a form of confession, but not a confession in anything like a standard or straightforward sense. Rather, Byron constructs a text in which a (supposedly) sincere declaration comes in the form of playacting, but by so doing he undermines both confession and playacting. The reader may recognize that some of Manfred is a representation of Byron's actual thoughts and emotions about a specific situation and some is pure invention, but she has no way of knowing which is which. The play contains too much, too obviously, of Byron's actual feelings and thoughts for it to work as an unconsciously confessional piece, but it contains too much of fiction to work as a nakedly confessional one. It does not have Childe Harold I & II's unassailable parallels to its author's life, yet neither, given what readers knew and know about Byron, is it completely divorced from that life. It is thus both fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

This construction results in an intensely confused encounter with the drama. Manfred can only achieve its full resonance if the reader always bears in mind and yokes together both stories, Byron's and the title character's. At the same time, since the two stories are not identical, and since each sheds light upon the other, the reader must keep them separate. She is thus left tussling with two "knowledges," neither of which yields a satisfactory interpretation of the play on its own. The combination of these viewpoints, however (that is, a situation in which one reads Manfred's experiences and thoughts as directly analogous to the life of Lord Byron), also fails to yield such an interpretation.

This continual mental bifurcation is an impossible reading position. The reader simply cannot hold both possible versions of the play in her mind at once. In order to approach and comprehend the text, one coherent version must be accepted from the many possibilities presented. Versions may be exchanged (so that, for example, the Manfred calling up spirits in act I may be accepted as Manfred, there being no analogue in Byron's own life, but the Manfred pleading with Astarte in act III...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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