ABSTRACT

This essay centers on Byron’s assimilation and deployment, as political thinker and playwright, of the ideas and dramatic techniques of the immensely influential, but now neglected, Vittorio Alfieri. The focus here is on Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. However, the essay also concentrates on P. B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, who absorbed and adapted Alfieri’s political philosophy and dramatic practices in The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Valperga. It recovers Alfieri from long-standing but superficial generalizations that have obscured and simplified the Italian for decades in discussions of British Romanticism. It introduces readers to some key Alfierian texts—a number not readily available in English—as well as some of the leading Italian commentators on these, pinpointing what particularly attracted Byron and the Shelleys to Alfieri—his conceptualization and representation of tyranny and revolution. More broadly, the essay puts its weight behind the recent “international turn” in the study of British Romanticism by pointing to the much wider international networks that can be discovered even in just these three individual British engagements with one continental writer—networks through which we directly encounter British Romanticism’s deep embeddedness in what Diego Saglia has called the “pan-European, transnational” Romanticism(s) of the post-Napoleonic era.

摘要

本文以政治思想家和剧作家拜伦的同化和部署为重点，讨论和影响深远但现已被忽视的维托里奥·阿尔菲耶里（Vittorio Alfieri）的思想和戏剧技巧。这里的重点是Marino Faliero和The Two Foscari。但是，本文还集中于PB Shelley和Mary Shelley，他们吸收并改编了Alfieri的政治哲学和戏剧实践，包括The Cenci，Prometheus Unbound和Valperga。它从长期但肤浅的概括中恢复了Alfieri，这些概括在讨论英国浪漫主义的过程中使意大利人难以理解并简化了几十年。它向读者介绍了一些重要的Alfierian文本（英语中不易找到的数字），以及一些意大利领先的评论家，指出了拜伦和Shelleys尤其吸引Alfieri的原因是他的暴政和革命的概念化和代表性。更广泛地，