<i>Marino Faliero</i> : Veils and Frames

Marino Faliero provoked reviewers to seize upon the contradictions between Byron’s intent to reform the English stage by writing on the model of Greek drama, and his assertion that he had with ‘no view to the stage’ at all. The Preface speaks of his commitment to ‘historical facts’, ‘real facts’, of transferring ‘into our language an historical fact worthy of commendation’. But fact is never transparent in Byron; ‘fact’ provokes interpretation from our own moment in time. History in Byron is history- writing , and Marino Faliero challenges readers to follow the patterns that he dramatically fashions in events from the fourteenth century to his own time. Because editorial apparatus affects this process, the binary of reading and performance is succeeded by concern with the formatting of the chosen text. I compare the first edition with widely separated ‘standard’ editions, those of John Wright, E. H. Coleridge, and Jerome McGann.