None of the other Romantics was as loftily dismissive of the business (or 'trade') of publishing as Byron could be. Nonetheless, Byron's literary career was crucially shaped by the practical contingencies of publishing. In turn, his status as literary lion had significant effects on the Regency publishing world - not least in helping to make the name and fortune of what would become one of the great London houses, John Murray of Albemarle Street. Byron's mobility - his protean capacity to be of many minds, strike many poses, hold in suspension apparently contradictory opinions - is nowhere more evident than in his attitudes toward the business side of his 'scribbling labours'. Now he's the nonchalant aristocrat who writes for his own pleasure, now the canny best-selling author who gloats over sales - and mocks his gloating as if to disavow it. Now he disdains the critics' notice, now their disdain provokes his savage indignation. The following pages will take up Byron's relations with the various publishers to whom he entrusted his works (notably the conservative John Murray and the radical John Hunt), his fate at the hands of the pirates who brought out cheap, unauthorized editions of his works, and the connections between details of book production and the evolving nature of Byron's readership. First, however, a few words on how and why a young lord comes to publish at all.

THE PROBLEM OF LOLLARDY

Lollard is a problematic label. A loan from the continent, where it denoted someone of dubious orthodoxy, the word lollardus was used in England from the late fourteenth century to denigrate certain theologians and preachers as heretics. (The word was linked to lolia - weeds - evoking the parable of the tares among the clean grain, Matthew 13:24-30.) The term continued to be applied as a series of episcopal investigations detected lollardi in various dioceses throughout the fifteenth century. Despite the label, there are many problems concerning the origins, coherence, and impact of Lollardy. Because of these problems, it is not possible simply to describe 'Lollard theology'.

From the earliest trials and councils in the process against Lollard heresy, the thought of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (d. 1384) was identified as its ideological source. A debt to Wycliffe was recognized, too, in some Lollard texts. Among modern historians of Lollardy, however, the nature and extent of that debt are the subject of debate. Until relatively recently, historians saw Lollard heresy as a debased version of John Wycliffe’s teachings that was intellectually incoherent and extremely diverse. This view was largely based on study of hostile sources: the chronicles and refutations of opponents, and the records of ecclesiastical councils and trials, for example.

Each of the canonical realist novelists - Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola - takes a pessimistic view of human happiness. Flaubert stands out as the one who shows no belief in a progress narrative. His characters fail repeatedly and decline. Each of his works is a construct of insufficiencies on the level of the plot and in the formation of character; the depicted world, while arguably realist, often seems a slightly lesser version of the real world. His characters' foibles are seldom explored with sympathy: there will be no tragedy here, just a kind of de-dramatised apathy marking time.

A glance at the correspondence might provide us with a way to think about failure in Flaubert’s work and the failure of Flaubert’s work, which are by and large the same thing (and with the caveat that an author is certainly no guarantor of the meaning of his own texts). Flaubert struggles while trying to produce what will become his first masterpiece, Madame Bovary. In a letter to Louise Colet, dated 24 April 1852, he complains about his slow pace, and indicates that he has written only twenty-five pages in the six weeks since he last saw her (Cor. ii 75). His general plan is in place for the novel and he indicates that he will start to write the ball scene on Monday. The process is problematic, for the slowness of the progress is producing a kind of lassitude in him, a sort of self-defeat, as he says that he is ‘annoyed/disappointed at not advancing’ [‘ennuyéde ne pas avancer’]. So it is more than just disappointment, but ennui, a boredom and a Weltschmerz (or world-weariness) that weigh heavily on him. Failure then is always imminent, if even progress can produce this feeling.

When, in his last decade, Poet Laureate Robert Southey collected and edited his Poetical Works, he was willing to include in chronological sequence his sharply political playlet Wat Tyler, written in his republican youth in 1794, twenty years before a Tory conversion earned him his office at court, then published by his enemies in 1817 to embarrass him. But he set A Vision of Judgement, his epic ode on the occasion of George III's death, published April 1821, out of chronology, in the last of his ten volumes. Maybe he meant to give it capstone honours (as Wordsworth liked to use his Great Ode in his volumes). Or maybe he hoped to bury his praises, for the fame of his Vision proved not to be its beatification of King George, but its accidental inspiration for one of the most concise and hilarious satires in English letters, Byron's The Vision of Judgment. Despite the obvious political satire and literary parody, this visionary yoking is less heterogeneous than it might first seem, for Byron's high-spirited mockery contains within it an awareness of his own complicity in self-serving poetic performances. Southey is one of an array of authors, some embraced, some displaced, some disgraced. These involve the poet's pseudonymous visionary 'I'; St Peter; the diabolic chronicler of the monarchy, 'Sathan' (Byron thus distinguishes his adversary from Southey's); the hapless Laureate; and, most critically, the mysterious author-function 'Junius', a shadow that not only shames Southey but falls across Byron as well.

Anyone who decides to look at the question of Flaubert's attitude to the theatre is likely to have at least two surprises. The first is to do with his childhood. Every reader of a biography of Flaubert is aware that, with his sister and some school friends, he had used his father's billiard-room to put on plays, but it is less well known that this was close to being an obsession. Flaubert wrote plays, he acted in them, he organised performances with costumes, playbills and tickets. Here is how at the age of seventeen he remembered this period of his young life:

Byron's lyric writing needs to be understood in the context of Romantic lyricism in general. This move is particularly important in Byron's case because his writing develops a Romantic 'style' as distinctive and as influential as Wordsworth's, although historical circumstances have obscured this situation. With certain few exceptions, for example, nineteenth-century British poets followed a Wordsworthian line while Europeans were taking their lead from Byron. Not until the legacy of Baudelaire permeated the twentieth century would an access to Byron's lyric procedures open up for poets writing in English.

Romanticism is regularly and usefully characterized in terms lifted from a certain set of adjectives, such as: subjective, impassioned, personal, sincere, spontaneous, reflective, self-conscious. The terms point toward a body of work that, however diverse in other respects, shares the common feature signalled by those various descriptors. Here are several famous Romantic passages, more or less randomly chosen:

If Madame Bovary was brought to trial on account of its perceived indecencies to public and religious morality, particularly on account of the famous, frenetic cab ride around Rouen and the 'sacrilegious' wake at her bedside, the novel's nineteenth-century censors did not detail Emma Bovary's death pangs among their principal objections. Whether considered a 'fitting' punishment for her adulteries or a sacrifice on the altar of Romantic excess or the orders of Patriarchy, her death remains the unquestioned crux of the novel. As the site of its moral, it also highlights Flaubert's implied ethics of art, to show rather than tell. Indeed, Emma's cruelly detailed agony and almost sadistically protracted death have continued to provide grist to Flaubert criticism. Her final death throes have thus stimulated approaches as diverse as sociocritical, psychoanalytic and feminist, and it is this scene too that has fascinated critics who uphold Flaubert the Realist. Frequently cited are the medical accuracy and meticulous ordering of the various stages of death by arsenic poisoning that Emma endures, an attention to medical detail as precise as that of the almost equally famous club-foot operation at the pivotal point in the novel. Conversely, and with equal conviction, critics arguing for the symbolic or mythic import of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will cite the appearance of the blind beggar in her final moments, the significance of Emma's triple coffin, or the decidedly ironic or gnomic ending of this Flaubert novel as indicative of his later novels and short stories. Little critical attention has been paid, however, to the no less problematic and seemingly non-violent deaths that accompany the more visible, violent and hideously graphic ones in Flaubert's works, not least in Madame Bovary.

Of what does a fictional character consist? What choices does Flaubert make in devising his imaginary beings? And how do his styles in character creation compare with those of other authors? Flaubert's two greatest achievements are the creation of richly varied dramatic characters and the depiction of ludicrous grotesques. The inner life of the former transcends simple dichotomies: their psychopathology generates delusional projections that blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality; their vague wishes and abortive projects problematise the relationships between thought and action; their dysfunctionality is florid. The inherent mediocrity of the grotesques, displayed as they blindly conform to, unthinkingly cite, or skilfully manipulate cultural clichés, provides the major vehicle of satire. At times, as with Emma Bovary, these two character types overlap.

Though primarily an opera composer, Verdi also wrote a number of works in other genres. Only one of these, the Messa da Requiem, has assumed a significant place in the repertory. The remaining solo songs, instrumental music, and choral works, more-or-less ignored and virtually forgotten, are infrequently performed and have not been broadly discussed in print. Consequently, this chapter will provide an overview of their history, style, and sources.

Beginning as a young boy in Busseto, Verdi composed a variety of non-operatic works, both sacred and secular. In mid-career he attested to the diversity of his youthful compositional activities:

For generations of readers, the experience of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage has been caught up with a reading of Byron's psychology, for the poem has commonly been seen as the expression of an incompletely repressed alter ego to be read in parallel with Byron's own life and expressed opinions. It therefore finds itself firmly placed within the bounds of an interpretative frame whose constant reference point is the concept of a flawed and melancholic psyche. Within this, approving critics may note the perspicuity of the poem's dark opinions, or the fascination of its psychology, while disapproving critics might censure the indulgence of high Romantic self-expression or dramatisation. These approaches, and their approving or disapproving reflexes are not misreadings. In many ways, they constitute a meta-narrative which is historically continuous, amply echoing the response of Byron's contemporary audience, which enjoyed the poem precisely because it seemingly alluded to the authentic experience of its author. But in general, such a view is likely to eclipse other of the poem's achievements, for it tends to reinforce the Romantic cult of introversion wherein the isolation of the private poet is seen as a necessary condition of a gifted perception. I will argue here for an understanding of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage i and ii as a profoundly public work written in a style designed to appeal to a new audience sympathetic to its coherent and anti-teleological explorations of history, politics and contemporary affairs. It is an ambitious poem which constructs a world-view for the modern - that is to say 'Romantic' - post-revolutionary intellectual, a view which in turn produces the psychology of the Byronic hero as a dramatisation of its effects. Significantly, its perspective is European, discarding orthodox or nationalistic understandings of history and empire, in favour of an all-embracing scepticism, which interrogates ideals of civilisation's progress and nationhood through a series of meditations around posterity's judgements on heroism, fame and achievement.

Whereas Childe Harold ii and ii sought the goal of their pilgrimage in the classical world of Greece, at the boundary of civilization and Nature, and Canto iii seeks its elusive goal in Nature beyond civilization, Canto iV concentrates on the high civilization of the Renaissance and of Rome. While obviously to some extent dictated by Byron's own whereabouts, the move also expresses a very significant shift in his world view. In Manfred (pp. 118) we have seen how the individual becomes responsible for the meaning of his or her own life. This is a secular view of meaning, seeing life as a construct of man's own mental activity. This mental activity is represented in and by civilization and culture. Life made meaningful has the form of an artwork - it is a product of civilization and culture. This is the view that dominates Canto iV. The canto opens with the famous image of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice:

Byron's considerable body of dramatic poetry poses special challenges for literary criticism, and studies of Byron have often had little to say about the plays as plays. In part, this neglect reflects a larger failure to bring the verse drama of the Romantic poets comfortably within the standard categories of literary history. All of the canonical Romantics - Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats - wrote at least one verse play, but until the last dozen years or so these have tended to be dismissed as misguided attempts at 'closet drama': plays meant to be read but not performed. The counterimpulse to read at least some works of Romantic verse drama as 'mental theatre' (Byron's term) - innovative and iconoclastic poetic forms rather than stage plays manqués - can work well enough for a 'dramatic poem' like Manfred or an intellectual drama like Cain. It tends, though, to lose sight of the productive tension between the dramatic works of the Romantic poets and the lively and politically fraught theatrical culture of their time. Byron not only produced a larger and more varied canon of verse drama - eight works, if one counts Manfred and the fragmentary Deformed Transformed - than any of the other canonical poets, but he also stands out as the only one with extensive, practical experience of the stage. This overview of Byron's poetic drama, then, opens with a look at his relation to the contemporary theatre.

Set at the court of the Duke of Mantua in the sixteenth century, Rigoletto is the story of a jester whose situation is anything but funny. Ugly, with a hunched back, he is pitilessly derided by the courtiers. In his whole life he has known only one brief period of happiness, when – well before the time of the opera – a woman took pity on him, became his wife, and gave him a daughter. Now a widower, his only solace is that daughter, Gilda, whom he protects obsessively, hoping above all that the Duke (a notorious seducer) will not find her. Unfortunately this is precisely what happens: as the curtain rises, the Duke is preparing to make his move. Gilda is aware of her suitor (although not of his identity) but says nothing to her father. In Act I she enjoys her first few moments together with the Duke before being abducted by a group of courtiers intent on playing a trick on Rigoletto – they think Gilda is his mistress. Momentarily thwarted, the Duke is soon back on top of things: the courtiers can’t wait to tell him about their exploits, and about the woman they are keeping prisoner in the palace. Exit the Duke to an adjoining room, to do what he does best. Rigoletto then arrives to quiz the courtiers, soon realizing that what he fears most is happening at that very moment. When Gilda comes back in to confess that she is no longer the emblem of unworldly purity he thought, he swears revenge on the Duke.

If historians have generally regarded Thomas Cranmer as the most complex character among the churchmen of the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, his theological legacy, particularly when finely tuned, is none too difficult to determine. For, somewhat akin to Beethoven’s masterly Eroica symphony, there is a heroic quality about the life and work of the diligent scholar Henry VIII chose to be archbishop of Canterbury. Modern scholarship may spurn such a judgement, no doubt deeming it 'old hat', simpliste, even partisan and divisive. Nevertheless, there remains an extraordinary dimension to the martyred Tudor primate.

It is tempting to take the parallel further and embrace all four movements of the Eroica. Just as Beethoven opened up a new symphonic scene, Cranmer’s involvement with Henry and Cromwell in their spirited break with Rome over the king’s ‘divorce’ surely provided a dramatic start (allegro con brio) to a Cambridge don’s career at the Tudor court. With the mass as the focal point and purpose of priestly ministry, any second stage of development in the direction of church reform also demanded slow, even dignified (larghetto!) consideration, particularly when the royal creed continued to cleave to Catholicism (papal recognition only excepted). And although it would be inappropriate to liken work on the Book of Common Prayer that followed to the light, playful passage of the scherzo, the Protestant convictions of a young and eager Edward VI at least gave Cranmer new freedom to experiment. As for the finale, what could be more frustrating than the quickening pace (allegro molto) of court faction, of the accession of Mary the Catholic, Roman renewal, and Protestant pastoral vision unfulfilled?