Although known primarily for his poetry, Lord Byron (1788-1824) also had a keen interest in the theatre and wrote a number of verse dramas, mostly during his Italian exile. While these plays went largely unnoticed during Byron's lifetime, they have since been recognized by critics for their sublime poetic and dramatic qualities. This collection brings together six of Byron's finest plays: Manfred, Cain, Heaven and Earth, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari.

“Mr. Linney continues to be one of our most perceptive chroniclers of the folkways of rural America, finding humanity and nobility in the most remote of places.” –Mel Gussow, New York Times “Linney’s words do it all, summoning up vistas of scary beauty and passions of elemental force.” –David Richards,Washington Post “His output was dazzling in its variety and exceptional for its depth as well as its breadth of scope. Goering at Nuremberg, Lord Byron’s daughter, the Washington novels of Henry Adams: Life, literature, and history were all his materials, not to be milled down into iconic emptiness, but to be explored for the values they might carry…One of America’s best playwrights.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice Romulus Linney is one of American drama’s best-kept secrets. Uniquely adept at capturing the idiomatic poetry of his native South, he maneuvers with equal grace through the vernacular of New York’s contemporary intelligentsia and the voices of a wide range of historical figures. In Childe Byron, the dying daughter of the notorious Lord Byron conjures a confrontation with the father she never knew. In 2, Linney scrutinizes Hitler’s infamous second-in-command, Hermann Goering, behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials. Tennessee celebrates the indomitability of early Appalachian mountain settlers, while Heathen Valley reveals the same region’s citizens’ subsequent search for faith. In FM, an authentic genius stumbles into the creative writing course of a small Alabama college. Set among SoHo literati, April Snow is a compassionate study of a world-weary screenwriter. Endowed with Linney’s lyric intensity, augmented by his rich sense of humor, the six plays in this volume illuminate a major talent of the American Theatre.

THE STORY: As the play begins, Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, who was Byron's only legitimate daughter, is writing her will. She is thirty-six (the same age at which her father died) and dying of cancer. While she had been estranged from her father

In Byron's Ghosts British and American scholars join together to overturn some of the prevailing assumptions that romance scholars have made about Byron, offering a fresh new reading of his poetry. Informed by recent critical theory focused on spectrality, they look at ghosts in his work, both in the conventional sense—what Mary Shelley once described as the “true, old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost”—and in a postmodern sense, one concerned with a range of phantom effects. Balancing attention on these diverse concepts of the ghost, their essays complicate the popular images of Byron as a materialist, skeptic, and anti-Romantic, revealing crucial new insights about his poetry.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron’s last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.