Manfred

From the start of Byron’s drama, Manfred is cast as a tortured, brooding figure reminiscent of the folklore legend of Faust, who bargained with the Devil by exchanging his soul for wisdom. Like Faust, Manfred is an intelligent, educated man. However, while Faust sought knowledge, Manfred seeks to forget, and while Faust resists paying for his powers with his soul, Manfred believes that his life, and by extension his soul, must be forfeit to pay for his doomed relationship with Astarte. The mistake or misdeed that Manfred committed in the past is never directly stated in Manfred. However, Manfred makes clear that he feels guilt over some aspect of his relationship with his deceased beloved, Astarte. Moreover, there are several allusions to a possible incestuous relationship between Astarte and Manfred, as illustrated by Manfred’s unwillingness to discuss the details of what happened between them.

Manfred’s brooding, tortured character marks Manfred as an exemplary work of the literary and cultural movement known as Romanticism, which flourished in the 19th century. Romanticism emphasized individual emotions, the imagination, and subjective experience, and often dramatized the experience of individuals as falling short of an ideal existence that has been lost or damaged. Gothic elements such as the supernatural are also present in works of Romanticism, and are prominent in Manfred.

Act I, Scene 1 depicts Manfred summoning dark spirits, who represent powerful forces, but his use of a “strong curse,” and a “tyrant-spell” to invoke them show that Manfred is also a powerful character (33). His request for the spirits to grant him forgiveness exemplifies his readiness to parley with the supernatural. He is frustrated when the spirits cannot fulfill his request, and they end up begging him to let them help him. This suggests Manfred’s own power, and his drive to follow his own dark passions, echoed when he states he wants to “lean no more on Superhuman aid” (44). Additionally, this establishes early in the drama that Manfred is beyond any help—supernatural, religious, or otherwise—and implies that the power to overcome his guilt lies with Manfred alone.

The setting of Manfred emphasizes how Manfred, in his ominous gloom, is separated from the world around him. The scenery of the Alps is beautiful and dramatic, but in true Romantic fashion, Manfred feels separated from this beauty and is unable to find solace in it. Instead of finding joy in the sublime peaks of the Alps, Manfred fantasizes about killing himself among them, “when a leap, / A stir, a motion, even a breath, would bring / My breast upon its rocky bosom’s bed / To rest forever” (44). For the time being, however, Manfred does not act on his impulses, realizing to himself, “I feel the impulse—yet I do not plunge; / I see the peril—yet do not recede” (44). This establishes Manfred’s ambivalence about his guilt; Manfred feels doomed by his past mistakes, yet is reluctant to accept that death is the objective moral consequence for his actions. In this way, Manfred is shown to be out of sync with the natural world because of his fatal error with Astarte, neither able to find solace in nature nor submit to its dangers. The Chamois Hunter, who by contrast represents the purity and beauty of nature, saves him in the dramatic closing of Act I.