Sardanapalus - A Tragedy

By Lord George Gordon Byron

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jul 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781473376519

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SARDANAPALUS:

A TRAGEDY.

by

Lord Byron

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without

the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Lord Byron

PREFACE

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

ACT I.

ACT II.

ACT III.

ACT IV.

ACT V.

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron was born in London, England in 1788. His mother was abandoned by her husband when Byron was two years old, and she took her son to Aberdeen, where they lived in considerable poverty for some years. Byron had a club foot, and was taunted in school, turning to writing at a young age to cope with this bullying. In 1798, aged just ten, he inherited the estates of his great uncle, Lord Byron, and moved with his mother first to the ruinous Newstead Abbey, then to nearby Nottingham. He started his education a year later, eventually enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Byron published his first poetic work, Fugitive Pieces (1806), at the age of just eighteen. Three years later, he began his Grand Tour of Europe (at that time a traditional trip undertaken by mainly upper-class young men of means) in the company of John Cam Hobhouse. Byron visited most of the Mediterranean, as well as Constantinople and what was then believed to be the site of the ancient city of Troy. He returned to England in 1811, publishing his exotic travelogue Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage a year later. The work was an instant success, the first edition selling out in three days.

Over the next few years, Byron continued to publish a number of verse narratives, including The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and The Prisoner of Chillon. In 1816, he separated from his wife of just one year, with the cause supposedly relating to her revelation to her nursery governess that Byron had practised sodomy on her. In the same year, aged 28, he left England, never to return.

Byron visited Switzerland, staying at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where he composed the third canto of Childe Harold, and where Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont visited him during the summer.  Later that year, he moved to Venice, where he began a now-notorious lifestyle of debauchery with numerous local women. In the summer of 1818, he completed the first section of what would become his magnum opus, Don Juan. His publishers in England insisted it would never get printed, but he persisted. In 1819, Byron married again, this time to an Italian Countess, and became involved in the Italian struggle against Austrian rule.

In 1821, Byron published the poetic dramas Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain. He also completed Don Juan – his most famous work, and now considered one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In 1823, Byron – a lifelong supporter of national liberation, and opponent of colonialism – was contracted by the London Greek Committee to aid the Greeks with their War of Independence from the Turks. Arriving in Cephalonia, an island off the mainland of Greece, he spent £4000 (about £200,000 in modern terms) of his own funds to enable part of the Greek fleet to relieve the town of Missolonghi, before becoming commander of a planned attack on the Turkish held fort at Lepanto.  However, Byron died in April of that year (1826), following a series of fevers and fits. He was just 36 years old.

During his lifetime, Byron was celebrated for his excesses – huge debts, constant travel, numerous love affairs, opium use, and self-imposed exile. The ‘Byronic hero’ – an idealistic but flawed character in possession of both passionate talent and a self-destructive nature – is now a fixture of Western literature. Byron is now regarded as one of the greatest British poets; in Greece, he remains a national hero.

TO

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GOETHE

a stranger presumes to offer the homage of a literary vassal to his liege lord, the first of existing writers, who has created the literature of his own country, and illustrated that of europe. The unworthy production

which the author ventures to inscribe to him is entitled

SARDANAPALUS.

PREFACE

In publishing the following Tragedies I have only to repeat, that they were not composed with the most remote view to the stage. On the attempt made by the managers in a former instance, the public opinion has been already expressed. With regard to my own private feelings, as it seems that they are to stand for nothing, I shall say nothing.

For the historical foundation of the following compositions the reader is referred to the Notes.

The Author has in one instance attempted to preserve, and in the other to approach, the unities; conceiving that with any very distant departure from them, there may be poetry, but can be no drama. He is aware of the unpopularity of this notion in present English literature; but it is not a system of his own, being merely an opinion, which, not very long ago, was the law of literature throughout the world, and is still so in the more civilised parts of it. But nous avons changé tout cela, and are reaping the advantages of the change. The writer is far from conceiving that any thing he can adduce by personal precept or example can at all approach his regular, or even irregular predecessors: he is merely giving a reason why he preferred the more regular formation of a structure, however feeble, to an entire abandonment of all rules whatsoever. Where he has failed, the failure is in the architect,—and not in the art.

In this tragedy it has been my intention to follow the account of Diodorus Siculus; reducing it, however, to such dramatic regularity as I best could, and trying to approach the unities. I therefore suppose the rebellion to explode and succeed in one day by a sudden conspiracy, instead of the long war of the history.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

MEN.

Sardanapalus, king of Nineveh and Assyria, etc.

Arbaces, the Mede who aspired to the Throne.

Beleses, a Chaldean and Soothsayer.

Salemenes, the King’s Brother-in-Law.

Altada, an Assyrian Officer of the Palace.

Pania.

Zames.

Sfero.

Balea.

WOMEN.

Zarina, the Queen.

Myrrha, an Ionian female Slave, and the Favourite Mistress of Sardanapalus.

Women composing the Harem of Sardanapalus, Guards, Attendants, Chaldean Priests, Medes, etc., etc.

Scene.—A Hall in the Royal Palace of Nineveh.

SARDANAPALUS.

ACT I.

Scene I.—A Hall in the Palace.

Salemenes (solus). He hath wronged his queen, but still he is her lord;

He hath wronged my sister—still he is my brother;

He hath wronged his people—still he is their sovereign—

And I must be his friend as well as subject:

He must not perish thus. I will not see

The blood of Nimrod and Semiramis

Sink in the earth, and thirteen hundred years

Of Empire ending like a shepherd’s tale;

He must be roused. In his effeminate heart

There is a careless courage which Corruption

Has not all quenched, and latent energies,

Repressed by circumstance, but not destroyed—

Steeped, but not drowned, in deep voluptuousness.

If born a peasant, he had been a man

To have reached an empire: to an empire born,

He will bequeath none; nothing but a name,

Which his sons will not prize in heritage:—

Yet—not all lost—even yet—he may redeem

His sloth and shame, by only being that

Which he should be, as easily as the thing

He