This chapter sketches the main features of the landscape of “faith” in Tokugawa-period Japan. This was a time when every person in Japan was legally obliged to register with a Buddhist temple, while simultaneously most people were actively engaged in numerous other faith-related activities, from membership in pilgrimage groups to making donations to roaming troupes of pseudo-religious street performers. The multifarious purveyors of faith-related services competed for custom, and the authorities were obliged to arbitrate in a never-ending stream of lawsuits and conflicts. Temple affiliation was rendered compulsory because faith needed to be policed, so as to ensure that “pernicious creeds” (notably foreign Christianity) would not corrupt the populace. Yet warrior administrators consistently refused to become a party in disputes about doctrinal matters, preferring to grant people a free choice in matters of faith and limit temples’ hold over their parishioners.

Reading Byron's dramas through the conceptual framework of modern play theory helps us appreciate the works of 1820–2 as a unique experimental project. If we focus on Byron’s transgressive playfulness both in terms of genre expectations and the ethos of his original sources (ranging from the Bible and the apocrypha to historical accounts and popular fictional narratives), we may disambiguate some of the more persistent critical quandaries, such as Byron's unsystematic thinking or lack of dramatic rigueur. Rather than aloof carelessness, these dramas clearly attest to Byron’s critical insight into the limits of the authoritative, be it religious or historical, and form a key part of his lifelong exploration of liberty, where the personal is inextricably linked to the political. Play, and playing, for Byron, is one of the key concepts of cultural history.

This chapter provides an overview of gender and sexuality in Byron. It situates the Byronic hero in the context of Regency understandings of masculinity and discusses Byronic sexuality in relation to the larger history of sexuality. In addition, it stresses the ways that Byron at times uses both race and disability to shape his representations of gender and sexuality. The main character of Lara provides an exemplar of the Byronic hero and is explored in terms of his ambiguity and power to draw attention to himself. Sardanapalus provides a contrasting case of a hero whose masculinity and connections to militarism prove to be self-defeating. Manfred and Don Juan reveal Byron’s interest in linking sexuality to mystery and unspeakability. In addition, The Bride of Abydos and Don Juan link sexuality to race in the figure of the African eunuch, whose behaviour is critical in protecting the hero from tyrannical rule.

This chapter examines how Byron draws attention to the material forms in which his works are mediated, beginning with Beppo, which ends because ‘My pen is at the bottom of a page’. It suggests that, in the artistic process of composition, Byron pondered questions that have concerned later critics and theorists from Walter Greg and F. W. Bateson to René Wellek and Nelson Goodman. By attending to the ways in which Byron marked his manuscript page, the chapter suggests that he thought of the literary work as having a distinctive, layered ontology. It situates his implied understanding of the nature of the literary work in relation to that of recent textual scholars such as John Bryant, Peter Shillingsburg, Jack Stillinger, and Paul Eggert. Byron wrote with a keen attention to the materiality of pens, ink, and paper, but he was also well aware that his poems could become mass-produced printed commodities. He was therefore concerned with how remediation changed the effect of a poem, and even its meaning, as effects specific to manuscript did not translate into print. Beppo provides a case in point, as it imagines itself as script, print, and voice by turns, or sometimes all at once.

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.

The chapter looks backwards to Sterne's Tristram Shandy and forwards to Joyce's Ulysses to locate Byron's avant-garde forms of allusion. Byron's deployment of local little narratives against big inhuman systems in Mazeppa, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Don Juan is examined as a mode of political resistance and personal poetic integrity.

In these opening lines of the third Canto of The Corsair (1814), Byron sets the mood for his narrative of the tragic death of Conrad’s faithful wife, Medora, by means of a sunset evocation of Greece, as the radiant sun of antiquity sinks over a land no longer consecrated to the antique spirit. The fact that Byron ‘borrowed’ the bravura sunset passage in its entirety (1–54) from his ‘unpublished (though printed) poem’ (CPW, iii, p. 448), The Curse of Minerva, suggests that he was particularly wedded to the sublimity of sunset as a melancholy symbol of modern Greece. In the latter poem, the same lines introduce another betrayed female, the physically abused and insulted goddess Minerva, who curses Lord Elgin for despoiling her temple, as the shades of evening lengthen over the plundered ruins of the Parthenon. Byron’s recycling of his lines suggests a conscious connection between the values of Conrad’s apolitical love for the ‘housewifely’ Medora and the philhellenic ideology flagged by Minerva.

This chapter covers major late period works, which are in many ways increasingly more twenty-first century rather than eighteenth or nineteenth century: full of contradictions and energy.

This chapter analyses the ways in which Byron’s sense of himself as a writer was gradually, often painfully, informed by the evolving discourse of addiction as it was being medicalised throughout the early nineteenth century and subsequently used to describe a troubling new category of behaviour. For Byron, the act of writing and the emerging sense of his own identity as a poet is formulated not simply through metaphors of addiction, which he himself helped to write into culture, but also through its physical expression. This was much more than a figure of speech – his need to write emerged in painful, bodily manifestations; Byron did not simply write about his writing habit – his habit, in part, wrote him.

This chapter argues that the first two cantos of Childe Harold and the Turkish Tales can be read as a sustained critique and questioning of a teleological history, or a history impelled by the acts of great men and heroes. It suggests that these poems engage with the intellectual crisis precipitated by the Napoleonic wars and a devastated Europe in different ways, representing a broad alienation from the meaningful progress of history both within and beyond European borders. Understanding Byron’s distinctive romanticism as primarily political rather than ontological, the chapter reads this group of poems as being charged with a late-enlightenment scepticism representative of a new freedom of thought in which there are no structural possibilities for history, and through which heroic acts are rendered ever more remote from civilisation’s improvement.

This chapter places Byron's career and writings in the context of Whig ideology during the French Revolution and especially in relation to post-Napoleonic Europe and the disenchantment of Byron's political aspirations by the triumph of reactionary forces.

This chapter explores Byron’s reception through the lens of the Byronic sense of occasion. Focusing on the history of Byron’s contemporary reception, it argues that Byronic reception involves a transformed scene of reading and writing, and a transformed temporality, which is acutely attuned to a sense of occasion, stretching the moment of reception and production across a longue durée. It is a critical commonplace that Byron’s writing is about its own creation and production, but it is also about its reception. The story of Byron’s reception also tells us about the changing practices of Romantic criticism and culture more broadly. The Byron phenomenon taught its contemporaries to think of the poem as a performance, an event, an experience. It is also a kind of entourage. In this transformed scene of reading and writing, the text’s reception – always already anticipated – forms part of the entourage. The chapter examines how Byron’s works contribute to this sustained sense of the text as entourage, event, and public occasion – in furious conversation with its own past, present, and future audiences.

Byron differs from his Romantic contemporaries in his treatment of animals in life and poetry – they are individual beings rather than poetic constructs. If horses are associated with the heroic sublime they are also re-wilded, while dogs are central to his ‘modernisation’ of the artistic attitude to animals in the long nineteenth century.

This chapter has two correlative aims: on the one hand it seeks to complicate the customary conception of Byron as a figure of strength, and on the other hand it challenges the commonplace pejorative understanding of levity as a matter of frivolity, irreverence, or licentiousness, by drawing attention to other, more positive forms of lightness that also play a vital role in Byron’s comic masterpiece. More particularly, by reflecting on Don Juan’s ‘three graces’ (the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, Lady Adeline, and Aurora Raby), the chapter highlights three contrasting models of levity: the carnivalesque, the courtly, and the eschatological. One of the surprising things that emerges from this consideration of the poem’s intermingling of sexual, socio-political, and religious forms of lightness is an underlying posture of epistemological weakness, which both fosters and is fostered by a sceptical openness to possibilities.