‘Our Mix’d Essence’: Manfred’s Ecological Turn

Staging Manfred’s strict dualist epistemology allows Byron to think against the grain of Western philosophy’s ontology of Man v Nature. Rather than celebrating a Promethean transcendence, the play works toward affirmation of humanity’s ‘mix’d essence’; a relational ontology of man-nature interdependence that underpins Byron’s view of human society as the evolved product of specific natural environments, a theory of cultural ecology that informs most of his writing.