Manfred Follow Up: Interview with Diego Saglia and Frederick Burwick

This week we talk to delegates from the ‘Manfred: The Text and its Circulation’ panel. Diego Saglia and Frederick Burwick share their thoughts on voice and temporality in Manfred, reflecting on how the written text interacts with staged performance. Saglia discusses the ‘transdimensional interconnectivity’ of the play, suggesting that Manfred’s meaning sits on the border between the written and spoken word. Burwick looks to the 1834 premier performance of Manfred to consider the movement and passing of time in the play. 

Diego Saglia: 1. In your symposium paper on "Voice and Voicing in Manfred," you spoke in detail of the "transdimensional interconnectivity" of Byron’s play. Can you explain what you mean by this term for readers who were unable to watch your talk? How does this term come to bare upon your overall understanding of Manfred?

In my paper I wanted to concentrate on the presence of “voice” in Manfred, developing Jerry McGann’s remark that it “is one of Manfred’s keywords and should be tracked carefully through the poem.” This is visible right from the start of Byron’s “dramatic poem,” in Manfred’s first act of conjuring, when he says: “Now by the voice of him / Who is the first among you…” He wields voice as an instrument of power and control. However, later in the same Act and scene, all this is turned upon its head and against Manfred by the “Voice heard in the Incantation,” which curses him through similarly structured words: “By thy cold breast and serpent smile, / By thy unfathom’d gulfs of guile” and so on. This shift is evidently ironic (as many papers at the symposium reminded us, Manfred is not only tragic and melodramatic but also pervasively humorous, ironic and sarcastic). And this inherent instability is a crucial feature of voice in the text. Indeed, rather than undermining the significance of voice, this instability enables it to function as a connective element – in the case seen above, between self and authority, the human and the superhuman, body and disembodiment.  Voice was a crucial question in Romantic-era theatre – a highly problematic vehicle for performance (Joanna Baillie’s theoretical writings repeatedly highlight its complex status and function). Byron’s text is a hybrid work in which the poetical does not overwhelm the dramatic, as both dimensions interact and coalesce, and the theatre of the period, especially of a Gothic kind, contrasts and intertwines the body and disembodiment (witness the problem of staging spectrality). In Manfred, therefore, voice carries out a function of “transdimensional interconnectivity,” transiting between different spaces and dimensions such as that of Manfred and the spirits, Manfred and the Chamois Hunter, Manfred and Arimanes, and so on. In particular, the voice of Astarte offers a crucial instance of disembodiment, since she is a ghost, but she is the “double” of Manfred, too, so she is actually “bodied” in him. Then, at the end, when the Abbot says, of the dying protagonist, “in thy gasping throat / The accents rattle,” the stress is on the physical nature of Manfred’s voice. Here, voice is once again a fact of the body, and an actor’s body in particular, that of the performer who delivers Manfred’s words in the way indicated by the Abbot. On the basis of these textual and contextual facts, my suggestion is that the meaning of Manfred lies on the cusp between the written and the spoken word – not just the word uttered virtually in the printed text, but also actually uttered by the bodied and disembodied dramatis personae of the Romantic-period stage. 

2. Did you feel like the performance of Manfred supported or challenged some of the ideas and issues that you presented in your paper? Did hearing the voices of Byron's characters come to life alter or enhance your understanding of the play?

First of all, the performance was fascinating to watch because, as with any play, the Manfred I had in mind was not that which the actors or the other members of the audience had collectively constructed through readings and rehearsals. So it was both familiar and (excitingly) unfamiliar. Most importantly, it was a Manfred and, as such, it interpellated the audience, asking us to react to it and think about the version of the text we were seeing and listening to. The result was highly stimulating. I appreciated how the production emphasized the sarcastic, ironic and “knowing” features I admire in the play – that is, those moments when Byron mocks the excesses of the imagination, the deceiving images it conjures up (though, at the end of the performance, the pathos was certainly there and the protagonist’s climactic words were heart-breakingly delivered). And voice played a crucial role in all this. The nuances in the actors’ reinterpretation of Byron’s text relied basically on their use of voice. Their delivery shifted from matter-of-factness and irony (that, to me, conveyed the materiality of the body) to a range of inflections such as whispering, trailing off, staccato, etc, all of which intimated the link and contrast between body and disembodiment. To me, it was also hugely important to hear voices coming from actors positioned in different places on the stage, as voice in Manfred is always related to place and non-places – as with the “voice heard in the Incantation” in Act 1, which is impossible to locate and constitutes one of the most enduringly seductive enigmas in the text. Seeing and, above all, hearing the play was essential to recapture some of the aspects of voicing and uttering that, from my perspective, are a central part of how Manfred’s meanings emerge, work together and are then relayed to us.

Frederick Burwick: 1. As the first speaker on the first panel of the symposium, it was particularly pertinent that your paper on "Illusions of Temporality in Manfred" opened the discussion on Byron’s play. How have the ideas you presented in your paper developed and evolved since hearing the other speakers at the symposium? 

There are inside and outside modes of temporality in Byron’s Manfred. The inside modes involve: Manfred’s vigil, his waiting, watching, and his testing of endurance in his encounters with his own destiny, with the Chamois Hunter, the Witch of the Alps, etc.  The outside modes, as we were reminded by the performance, are defined by the tempo of the dialogue and the succession of scenes. My own paper dealt with the premiere performance in 1834. I adjusted my notions of the concert of theatrical interactions in response to the joint presentation by Jeff Cox and Michael Gamer.  Jane Stabler’s attention to dashes in a typography of pause and tempo prompted awareness of Byron’s own concern with marking the rhythms of reading.  Since the symposium I have further researched the degree to which time was altered and redefined by Sir Henry Bishop’s musical score. My current project is to restore the music and song in order to re-establish the interpretation of temporality imposed in the first performance seventeen years after composition in 1817.