Note 402 — Scene I.—An Apartment in the Ducal Palace.

[Byron admits (vide ante, p. 340) that the character of the "Dogaressa" is more or less his own creation. It may be remarked that in Casimir Delavigne's version of the story, the Duchess (Elena) cherishes a secret and criminal attachment for Bertuccio Faliero, and that in Mr. Swinburne's tragedy, while innocent in act, she is smitten with remorse for a passion which overmasters her loyalty to her husband. Byron's Angiolina is "faultily faultless, ... splendidly null."

In a letter to Murray, dated January 4, 1821 (Letters, 1901, v. 218), he says, "As I think that love is not the principal passion for tragedy, you will not find me a popular writer. Unless it is Love, furious, criminal, and hapless [as in The Mysterious Mother, or in Alfieri's Mirra, or Shelley's Cenci], it ought not to make a tragic subject. When it is melting and maudlin, it does, but it ought not to do; it is then for the gallery and second-price boxes." It is probable that he owed these sentiments to the theory and practice of Vittorio Alfieri. "It is extraordinary," writes M. de Fallette Barrol (Monthly Magazine, April, 1805, reprinted in Preface to Tragedie di Alfieri, A. Montucci, Edinburgh, 1805, i. xvi. sq.), "that a man whose soul possessed an uncommon share of ardour and sensibility, and had experienced all the violence of the passions, should scarcely have condescended to introduce love into his tragedies; or, when he does, that he should only employ it with a kind of reserve and severity.... He probably regarded it as a hackneyed agent; for in ... Myrrha it appears in such a strange character, that all the art of the writer is not capable of divesting it of an air at once ludicrous and disgusting."

But apart from the example of Alfieri, there was another motive at work—a determination to prove to the world that he was the master of his own temperament, and that, if he chose, he could cast away frivolity and cynicism, and clothe himself with austerity "as with a garment." He had been taken to task for "treating well-nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices" (Blackwood's Edin. Mag., August, 1819), and here was an "answer to his accusers!"]