He won the friendship of her father and brother, who initiated him into the clandestine Carbonari, a revolutionary society seeking Italy’s independence from Austria. His deepening involvement with Italian patriotism may be seen in such poems as The Prophecy of Dante (1821). As he continued with fresh cantos of Don Juan Byron was also writing Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus and The Two Foscari (all 1821), dramas that in various historical settings explore the relationship between the powerful individual and the post-revolutionary state. Byron insisted that their neo-classicism unfitted them for stage representation and was angered when an unauthorized version of Marino Faliero failed at Drury Lane, but all three would be staged. To the same year belongs Cain, a ‘mystery’ drama at once declared beyond copyright for its unorthodoxy and immediately pirated by radicals, and The Vision of Judgment, a devastating rebuttal to poet-laureate Robert Southeys eulogy of the late George III, A Vision of Judgement, in the Preface to which the laureate had alluded to Byron as the head of a ‘Satanic schoo’ of literature.

When Teresa followed her father and brother into exile for their part in an abortive uprising, Byron reluctantly moved with them to Pisa, where Shelley had rented the Casa Lanfranchi for him. He arrived in November 1821, having left his daughter Allegra in a convent near Ravenna, where she died of typhus on 20 April 1822. In early summer Byron went with the Shelleys to Leghorn, where he had leased a villa near their house on the Bay of Lerici.

Shelley and Byron had jointly planned a radical journal, the Liberal, and Byron paid for Shelley’s friend Leigh Hunt to join the collaboration. Hunt had dedicated his poem The Story of Rimini (1816) to Byron, but he was less famous as a poet than as the editor of the Examiner who had been imprisoned in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent. Hunt and his large family arrived in July, and were installed in Byron’s house in Pisa. Despite the drowning of Shelley on 8 July and increasing friction with the Hunts, the periodical went forward. The first number contained The Vision of Judgment, the second Byron’s unfinished heterodox drama, Heaven and Earth (1823), the third his satire, The Blues (1823). At the end of September he moved to Genoa, where Teresa’s family had found asylum; Mary Shelley leased another house nearby for herself and the Hunts.

Byron had begun Don Juan intending ‘to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing’,22 but his purposes had deepened. As he narrated Juan’s career from Spain to Greece and Turkey through the Siege of Ismail and the Empress Catherine’s court to Regency London, he surrounded it with mordant commentary on the Europe of restored sovereigns at the moment of writing. The darling of fame, who had stamped his name on the Byronic hero, had become a demystifier of glory and a critic of English society. Murray had published Cantos III-V of Don Juan in 1821, but, alarmed by Byron’s politics and verbal indecencies, hesitated thereafter; undaunted, Byron transferred his works to Leigh Hunt’s brother John, publisher of the Liberal. The shift from the prestigious Tory to a disreputable radical signaled Byron’s break from the literary system that had nurtured him. Reflecting ruefully that he had formerly been reckoned ‘the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme’ (XI, 55; his inheritance, through his wife, of the Noel estates enabled Byron also to sign himself ‘NB’), Byron’s rupture affirmed his difference and liberated his cultural criticism. John Hunt published all Byron’s later work, including The Age of Bronze (1823), The Island (1823) and Cantos VI-XVI of Don Juan (1823–4), which were ignored by the established reviews but avidly read.

Restive in domesticity with Teresa, Byron agreed to act as the agent of the Greek Committee in London, which had been formed to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence. In July 1823 he left Genoa for Cephalonia. Newstead and Rochdale had been sold; clear of debt and now attentive to his literary income, Byron devoted his forture to the Greek cause. He sent £4,000 to prepare the Greek fleet and then sailed for Missolonghi on 29 December to join Prince Alexander Mavrokordatos.

The venture was no less idealistic than theatrical – Byron landed in scarlet military uniform, to welcoming crowds – and erotically tinged. Byron was accompanied by his page Loukas Chalandritsanos, an unreciprocated last passion and the subject of ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’, published posthumously in the newspapers and influential in shaping the after-images that he had anticipated to Lady Blessington. Philhellenic idealism was soon confronted by the rivalrous and undisciplined Greek patriots, but Byron founded, paid and trained a brigade of Souliot soldiers. The malarial geography of Missolonghi provoked him to ominous puns: ‘if we are not taken off with the sword – we are like to march off with an ague in this mud-basket – and to conclude with a very bad pun – to the ear rather than the eye – better – martially – than marsh-ally’.23 A convulsion, perhaps epileptic, aggravated by tension and hypertension, in February 1824, followed by the usual remedy of bleeding, weakened him; in April he contracted the fever, treated by further bleeding, from which he died on 19 April. Deeply mourned, he became a Greek national hero, and throughout Europe his name became synonymous with Romanticism. In England the stunned reaction of the young Tennyson, who, on hearing the news, sadly wrote on a rock ‘Byron is dead’, spoke for many; as Arnold later recalled, in placing Byron with Wordsworth as the great English poets of the century, he had ‘subjugated’ his readers,24 and his influence was immense and lasting. His body was taken to England and, denied burial in Westminster Abbey, placed in the ancestral vault near Newstead. The refusal attests the transgressive qualities in Byron, qualities that continue to resist even the canonization implied by the placement of a memorial to him in the Abbey in 1969.

NOTES

1. Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A.