Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing OutJHU Press, 2000 M06 26 - 221 pages The first book-length scholarly examination of the four critically formative years of Byron's public school experience, 1801-1805 How did Byron become "Byron"? In Lord Byron at Harrow School: Speaking Out, Talking Back, Acting Up, Bowing Out, Paul Elledge locates one origin of the poet's personae in the dramatic recitations young Byron performed at Harrow School. This is the first book-length scholarly examination of the four critically formative years of Byron's public school experience, 1801 to 1805, when Harrow enjoyed high subscription and fame under Dr. Joseph Drury, headmaster. Finding its genesis in the boy's intrepid appearance on three Speech Day programs, the book argues that Byron's early performances addressed anxieties, conflicts, rivalries, and ambitions that were instrumental in shaping the poet's character, career, and verse. Elledge carefully examines the historical and biographical contexts to Byron's Harrow performances, showing their relevance to Byron's physical and psychic landscapes at the time—his connections to his mother and half-sister, his headmasters and tutors, his Harrow intimates and rivals, his lameness, his London theatrical spectatorship. Byron's performances in the characters of King Latinus from the Aeneid, Zanga the Moor from Edward Young's The Revenge, and King Lear provide an opportunity to examine his early experiments with self-presentation: as Elledge argues, these performances are "auditions or trials of performative and autotherapeutic strategies, subsequently refined and polished in the mature verse." Throughout, Elledge reads the boy for the sake of reading the poet; he shows how young Byron's introduction to theatricality at Harrow School prepared him to make a confident and spectacular debut on Europe's cultural stage. "His selection of texts for declaiming—the discourse of two kings and a show-stealing, scene-chewing villain—participates in a larger pattern of deliberate self-fashioning that began at least as early as Byron's Harrow years and evolved into the elaborate mode and vogue of self-representation that partially, with his hefty patronage, helped to define the era. To discern his initial experiments with identity formation, to watch his auditions, his inaugural performances of "Byron"—in the provincial run, so to speak, before his London premiere—to track the emergence of these constructs from a confluence of wondrous adolescent energies is to understand anew why and how enduringly certain events and relationships wrote themselves into the text that Byron famously became."—from the Prologue |
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... performance be annually evaluated by " apposers " who tested both masters and boys by putting academic questions to them ; upon proof of the High Master's satisfac- tory execution of responsibility , the celebration of his reappointment ...
... performance of roles . And this remains so even when proof of elocutionary skill — that is , speechmaking — is the institutional raison d'etre for the occasion . Ostensibly it was at Harrow , but Speech Day as theater , show- time , and ...
... of laughter , and receiving at the end enthusiastic applause . Tinne ma [ jor ] had the wind pretty completely taken out of his sails by Wood's brilliant performance ; but , with the exception of. 10 : Lord Byron at Harrow School.
... performance ; but , with the exception of one slight hesi- tation , spoke as if he understood his speech [ the first Phillipic of Demons- thenes ] which , it being in Greek , was no easy undertaking . We hope a good Greek speech will be ...
... performances on the cultural stage where , as Edmund Burke argued , theatricality defined the natural in British ... performance for public delectation seems to me incontestable . Led backward from that commonplace , I am rather con ...