Affiliation:
1. City University of New York
Abstract
The less-than-successful stage premiere of Lord Byron’s tragedy
Marino Faliero
has been blamed on an allegedly mutilated text presented to the audience. A close examination of the cut text, however, shows the theatre had attempted to re-shape the play into a new and stage-worthy work. The theatre’s cuts attempted to streamline the play, advancing more quickly to the main action. Edits also reduced the speeches assigned to minor characters who would not have been played by well-known actors. Most importantly, the cuts reflected the political reality of the time, censoring significant passages that would almost certainly have led the government to deny a license for performance. Ultimately, censorship appears to have been the chief cause of the most devastating cuts to the text.
Publisher
Liverpool University Press
Reference30 articles.
1. ‘Drury-Lane Theatre’ The Times 26 April 1821 p. 3.
2. Letter to John Murray of 11 January 1821 in Leslie A. Marchand (ed.) Byron’s Letters and Journals 12 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1973–82) VIII p. 60. Hereafter BLJ.
3. David O’Shaughnessy of NUI Galway has made images of the text available on this website: https://tobeomitted.tcd.ie/LA2224.html.
4. Thomas L. Ashton ‘The Censorship of Byron’s Marino Faliero’ Huntington Library Quarterly 36.1 (November 1972) pp. 27–44 (p. 28).
5. Here and elsewhere I have given the act scene and line numbers of the quotation followed by the page numbers in the ‘Larpent’ copy of the script submitted to the Examiner of Plays and now archived at the Huntington Library in San Marino California.