Trapped in Inversion: George Gordon Byron’s "Cain" as a Mystery Play
Alina Borkowska-Rychlewska
alina.borkowska-rychlewska@amu.edu.plAdam Mickiewicz University (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-7124
Abstract
This article discusses mystery play qualities in Romantic drama, based on the example of George Gordon Byron’s Cain. Although the author himself captioned it as “a mystery,” neither the dramatic structure of the work nor its symbolic layer seems to closely relate to ancient or medieval mystery plays. In Cain, the poet primarily presents the epistemological meaning of the concept of mystery, namely the protagonist’s initiation into the supernatural order of existence. Focusing on an anthropological and teleological analysis of the meanings of Byron’s drama, the author argues that: 1) in Cain, the story of the first fratricide in human history is used as a perverse reference to the biblical, and especially New-Testament understanding of the concept of mystery; 2) the mystery of Cain, entangled at the level of dramatic fiction in various dialectical relationships (the sacred and the profane, truth and illusion, good and evil, thought and action, loneliness and community), soteriological terms; 3) Byron’s work is an intertextual game (played with the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, among others); 4) as “a mystery,” Cain proves to be an excellent vehicle for revealing the meanings of the Romantic dialectic of being and transgressing the boundaries of the human condition.
Keywords:
George Gordon Byron, "Cain", mystery play, Romantic anthropology, Romantic dialectic of being, conditio humanaReferences
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Authors
Alina Borkowska-Rychlewskaalina.borkowska-rychlewska@amu.edu.pl
Adam Mickiewicz University Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-7124
Alina Borkowska-Rychlewska, PhD, professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She works at the Institute of Polish Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University and at the Center for Research on Musical Theater at Adam Mickiewicz University. Her main research interests include opera and opera librettos, historical and contemporary dramatic and musical forms, and 19th-century literature and theater, with a particular focus on the works of Polish and European Romantics.
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