Manfred Follow-up: Jonathan Gross

In this interview, Jonathan Gross responds to seeing a staged reading of Manfred performed by the Red Bull Theater company, reflecting on how it changed his views regarding Byron’s drama. The interview concludes with Gross’ take on the “incest scandal” so often associated with the play. 

How did seeing the staged reading of Manfred enrich your understanding and enjoyment of the written text? Did it bring to life any elements of the written text that you were not expecting? 

The staged reading of Manfred showed me that the play could be performed; that there are dramatic moments between Manfred and the Witch of the Alps; that much of the play hinges on a series of philosophical confrontations about the nature of guilt; that some of these are more interesting than others; and that there is a distasteful aspect to Manfred that I did not see when I read and taught the play. The actor brought this out fully. 

Many of the key moments of Manfred are set in extreme locations such as the Alps, a cataract, the summit of a mountain etc., all of which are central to the atmosphere and meanings of the play. How did the staged reading overcome the challenges of scale that Byron creates in Manfred? Do you think the performance reproduced a sense of scope and the sublime? 

I don't think locations such as the Alps or the Jungfrau, or a cataract are necessary at all; Manfred is a play, not a movie; the picturesque and sublime are evoked through language and the reader's imagination; I liked the focus on Byron's language; when Manfred says “how beautiful is all this visible world,” we can use our imagination, our memory of Nature, to fill in the blank. 

Certain scenes and lines from the written text were cut for the purposes of the staged reading. If you were directing Manfred, what elements of Byron’s play would you bring to the fore? What would you cut from the play entirely? And why?

I didn't mind the cuts; going off script, however, without the use of three-ring binders, would have been a plus; not wearing flannel or mod NYC street clothes might also have been wise; some attention to costume would help; do spirits wear specs?; a smirking, and by turns fey, Kurt Cobain Manfred doesn't work for me. Nevertheless, I did like the director of the play and found his comments, and the actors' comments, perceptive. Obviously it was done on a shoe-string budget. A pleasure to hear them respond to their view of the play's meaning, untouched by academic discourse. I wish Red Bull Theatre the best; I appreciate the work they put into the production and their commitment to Byron's poetry. 

It’s hard to ignore the resemblance between Manfred and Astarte in the play, and the incestuous relationship between Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh. How did this relationship come across in the play—was the director able to make more of this relationship without the constraints of the written page?

Actually I think Astarte resembles Anne Isabella Milbanke. He loved her and destroyed her; and she returned the favor. As Timothy Webb said of “Julian and Maddalo,” it is mistake to reduce a great work of art to autobiography. Manfred suggests many relationships and impulses— Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Goethe's Faust—without being reduced to a relationship with his half-sister that remains ambiguous. As Thomas Moore noted in his biography of his friend, Byron consistently exaggerated the gothic nature of his activities at Newstead Abbey (Moore: 1:150), among other things.