| Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice | |
|---|---|
 First edition title page | |
| Written by | Lord Byron |
| Characters |
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| Date premiered | 25 April 1821 |
| Place premiered | Drury Lane, London |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | The downfall of Marino Faliero |
| Genre | Historical tragedy |
| Setting | Venice |
Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice is a blank verse tragedy in five acts by Lord Byron, published and first performed in 1821.
The play is set in Venice in 1355. Marino Faliero, recently elected Doge of Venice, offends one of the chief officers of state, Michele Steno. Steno retaliates by writing on the Doge's throne an indecent libel on Faliero's wife. For this he is tried by the Council of Forty and convicted, but is only sentenced to a month's imprisonment. Faliero is so outraged by this, as he believes it to be an inadequate punishment for such an affront to the ruling Doge, that he secretly joins in the conspiracy of a group of malcontents to abolish the constitution of Venice, thinking thereby to gain revenge on his enemies. The plot is discovered and Faliero is executed.
Byron was inspired to take on this subject when, on examining the portraits of the Doges in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, he discovered that the portrait of Faliero had been blacked out. [1] The main historical source he drew on was Marino Sanuto's Vite dei Dogi (published posthumously 1733). [2] [3] He completed the play in July 1820, by which time he was living in Ravenna, and published it in April 1821, along with his The Prophecy of Dante. [4] [5] He intended to dedicate it to Goethe, but delays in the post between Italy and England resulted in the play being published without a dedication. [6] The posthumous 1832 edition of Byron's collected works included a later dedication of the play by Byron to his friend Douglas Kinnaird. [7] Marino Faliero was translated into French in 1830 and into Italian in 1838. [1]
Byron intended his play to be read rather than acted, and when he heard that the actor-manager Robert William Elliston intended to stage it he caused his publisher, John Murray, to obtain an injunction to prevent him. Elliston nevertheless performed it, in a version cut almost by half, at Drury Lane four days after the play was published. The reaction from both audiences and critics was lukewarm; perhaps, as Byron thought, because of the play's neoclassical form and lack of sensationalism and love interest. [8] [9] [10]
The subject of Eugène Delacroix' painting The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1825–26), now in the Wallace Collection in London, was suggested by Byron's play. [11] [12] A tragedy by Casimir Delavigne on the same subject is believed to have drawn on Byron, as well as on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Delavigne's play itself inspired Donizetti's opera Marino Faliero . [1] Swinburne was impelled to write his own Marino Faliero by what he considered shortcomings in Byron's play. [13]
Henry De Vere Stacpoole took the name of one of his most famous works, The Blue Lagoon , from this work. The Blue Lagoon, in turn, was adapted into three major motion pictures released in 1923, 1949 and 1980. The first screen adaptation is now lost. The Blue Lagoon, in turn, inspired the title of the 1954 monster horror film Creature from the Black Lagoon .
Francesco Foscari was the 65th Doge of the Republic of Venice from 1423 to 1457. His reign, the longest of all Doges in Venetian history, lasted 34 years, 6 months and 8 days, and coincided with the inception of the Italian Renaissance.
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history. In his Times obituary he was described as "the last genuine example of the English man of letters". Anthony Powell called him "The Last of the Mandarins".
Marino Faliero was the 55th Doge of Venice, appointed on 11 September 1354.
Jean-François Casimir Delavigne was a French poet and dramatist.
The Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, known in Venetian as San Zanipolo, is a church in the Castello sestiere of Venice, Italy.
The Blue Lagoon is a coming-of-age romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, first published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1908. The Blue Lagoon explores themes of love, childhood innocence, and the conflict between civilisation and the natural world. The book immerses the reader in a captivating and haunting setting through Stacpoole's vivid depictions of the island and its untamed splendour.
Events in the year 1826 in Art.
Marino Faliero is a tragedia lirica, or tragic opera, in three acts by Gaetano Donizetti. Giovanni Emanuele Bidera wrote the Italian libretto, with revisions by Agostino Ruffini, after Casimir Delavigne's play. It is inspired by Lord Byron's drama Marino Faliero (1820) and based on the life of Marino Faliero (c.1285-1355), the Venetian Doge.
Ordelafo Faliero de Doni was the 34th Doge of Venice.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron was an English poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Michele Steno was a Venetian statesman who served as the 63rd Doge of Venice from December 1, 1400, until his death. He is remembered as the ruler crucial for establishing the Domini di Terraferma, in the aftermath of the War of Padua.
This article presents a detailed timeline of the history of the Republic of Venice from its legendary foundation to its collapse under the efforts of Napoleon.
Filippo Calendario was an architect, a designer of the 14th century Doge's Palace, Venice. He was executed for treason.
The Two Foscari: An Historical Tragedy (1821) is a verse play in five acts by Lord Byron. The plot, set in Venice in the mid-15th century, is loosely based on the true story of the downfall of doge Francesco Foscari and his son Jacopo. Byron's play formed the basis of Verdi's opera I due Foscari.
Sardanapalus (1821) is a historical tragedy in blank verse by Lord Byron, set in ancient Nineveh and recounting the fall of the Assyrian monarchy and its supposed last king. It draws its story mainly from the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus and from William Mitford's History of Greece. Byron wrote the play during his stay in Ravenna, and dedicated it to Goethe. It has had an extensive influence on European culture, inspiring a painting by Delacroix and musical works by Berlioz, Liszt and Ravel, among others.
The Faliero coup was a failed 1355 coup designed to overthrow Venice's established republican government. Strains between the Venetian commoners and the nobility, originally stemming from the catastrophic failure of the nobility in the Battle of Porto-Longo against Venice's long-time rival, Genoa, are largely considered to be the main cause for the coup. However, traditional stories also point to the marriage of Doge Marino Faliero as a possible cause for the coup. Faliero, an 81 year old man, had recently taken a young bride, who was rumored to be engaged in multiple affairs, including with Michele Steno, a Venetian statesman and future Doge. The consistent rumors and apparent intense arrogance of the established Venetian elite seems to have gotten to Faliero in this explanation for a coup. A more reasonable one, however, is that Faliero wished to transform Venice into a dictatorship, mirroring those of Genoa and other northern Italian city-states. This view is, however, disputed by some historians, who cite Faliero's apparent regret at his trial, and, his lack of mentioning his belief that a dictatorship would better suit Venice's interests, a valid argument. These two actions are much more consistent with a man regretting a passionate crime, than one who had executed a calculated plan, some argue. The coup was poorly organized and abortive.
The letters of Lord Byron, of which about 3,000 are known, range in date from 1798, when Byron was 10 years old, to 9 April 1824, a few days before he died. They have long received extraordinary critical praise for their wit, spontaneity and sincerity. Many rate Byron as the greatest letter-writer in English literature, and consider his letters comparable or superior to his poems as literary achievements. They have also been called "one of the three great informal autobiographies in English", alongside the diaries of Samuel Pepys and James Boswell. Their literary value is reflected in the huge prices collectors will pay for them; in 2009 a sequence of 15 letters to his friend Francis Hodgson was sold at auction for almost £280,000.
Byron's Memoirs, written between 1818 and 1821 but never published and destroyed soon after his death, recounted at full-length his life, loves and opinions. He gave the manuscript to the poet Thomas Moore, who in turn sold it to John Murray with the intention that it should eventually be published. On Lord Byron's death in 1824, Moore, Murray, John Cam Hobhouse, and other friends who were concerned for his reputation gathered together and burned the original manuscript and the only known copy of it, in what has been called the greatest literary crime in history.
The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero is an oil painting on canvas of 1826 by the French Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix, inspired by the 1821 play Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice by Lord Byron, which in turn was based upon events in the life of the Venetian Doge Marino Faliero (1274–1355). Today the work is part of the Wallace Collection in London; as of 2021 it is listed as "not on display".
Pietro Badoer was a Venetian patrician who served as duke of Crete in 1358–1360. His career was derailed by his closeness to the disgraced Doge Marino Faliero and he was banished twice, the second time for poisoning his wife.
venice a fragile city.
