Speculative Tragedy and Spatial Play: Scaling Byron’s Sardanapalus

Even more transgressive, perhaps, are those resources of the past not directly locatable in historical records, not reproducible as present representations, the heritage of past vulnerabilities, fragilities, fractures, and dislocations in power that reveal their effects in the present …

—Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely¹

Tragedy is not a genre that settles easily into our definitions of Romanticism. Romance, lyric, and epic hold sway while the novel and other forms of drama—especially melodrama—have gained currency in recent years. Partly, this is due to the continued influence of George Steiner’s proclamation announcing the death of tragedy.² While few scholars today agree with Steiner that tragedy is an invariant form and, as such, requires specific conditions, there remains some skepticism about how or even if the Romantics produced tragedy. Julie Carlson, Jeffrey N. Cox, Diego Saglia, among others, follow Raymond Williams and his insistence that tragedy “has a complicated yet arguably continuous history.”³ Saglia has counted at least 69 new tragedies published and performed in Britain in the brief period from 1819–23.⁴ Clearly, tragedies were staged and printed, some to great acclaim, but as Cox points out, “Romantic drama redefines the terms of tragedy … and portrays the failure of romanticism’s own central literary mode—the visionary quest romance.”⁵ Arguably, this tension generates doubts—now as it did then—about tragedy’s viability in the period. Reflecting on this, Susan Staves notes that eighteenth-century tragedy produced a “combination of cultural fascination” and anxiety about its “failure.”⁶

Byron’s Sardanapalus, A Tragedy (1821; performed at Drury Lane in 1834) has been the focus of several critical appraisals of Romantic tragedy. Scholars have emphasized repeatedly how the heterogeneity and the unbounded nature of Byron’s cultural archive are at variance with his contention that he “has in one instance attempted to preserve, and in the other to approach the ‘unities’; conceiving that with any very distant departure from them, there may be poetry, but can be no drama.”⁷ Marilyn Butler, for example, has declared, “Interpreters of Sardanapalus have to begin by deciding what genre to put it in.”⁸ She has made a strong case for reading Sardanapalus as a precursor to George Bernard Shaw’s 1904 comedy, John Bull’s Other Island, by comparing it to William Hone’s successful courtroom defense against blasphemy charges in 1817.⁹ I consider Sardanapalus a tragedy for reasons I will discuss, but Butler’s description of it as “an exercise in displacements” and as the first in a sequence of Byron’s “otherworldly dramas”¹⁰ opens the door to understanding and recovering a model Romantic-period tragedy that takes audiences to the discursive peripheries of early modernity in order to dramatize what Siobhan Carroll refers to as “competing constructions of history and space.”¹¹

Like Cain and Heaven and Earth, also published in 1821, Sardanapalus embodies the liminal spaces of crisis and transformation and represents the violent convulsions that mark the period’s revolutionary and conservative narratives. Byron situates his characters in stark relief to the monumental chronicle of human history, the vastness of planetary geography, and the infinite space of the cosmos. He portrays the human condition as a mystery of radical alterity; his characters experience personal and political crises that reorient their worldview and the audience’s conception of history, often by Orientalizing the past and reconfiguring the staid borders between myth, ancient history, and early modernity. In each of these dramas, Byron experiments with temporal and spatial “unity.” He identifies Sardanapalus specifically as a tragedy, and pointedly invokes Aristotle in his Preface to make a point about his adherence to the classical conception of unity. However, in concert with the other dramas published at this time, Sardanapalus also belongs in the generic field of utopian literature. These two forms might appear diametrically opposed, but Sardanapalus reconfigures these elements to produce an alternative form of tragedy, one I refer to as “speculative tragedy.”¹²

Byron’s construction of tragedy in this instance turns on the conception of...