Manfred

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1817

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Act III

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Manfred’s Tower

As a lord, Manfred is heir to his family’s castle. As his servants Herman and Manuel remark in Act III, Scene 3, Manfred is known to spend significant time in his tower. Manuel notes, “night after night for years / He hath pursued long vigil in this tower” (93). Manuel also admits that “it were impossible / To draw conclusions” about what Manfred does in the tower, though the implication is that the tower is the site where Manfred pursued his quest for knowledge and even dabbled in the dark arts (93). Indeed, Manuel notes that “to be sure there is / One chamber where none enter” (93). This chamber is the site of Manfred’s invocations of spirits, and in the final scene of the drama, his death.

The tower symbolizes how Manfred is isolated and removed from other people. The other characters—Herman and Manuel—can only see Manfred in his tower from afar. In addition, the tower, being an enclosed spaced, consists of literal walls that represent the metaphorical ones he has put between himself and others; the people around him know that Manfred suffers from guilt and is involved in dark ventures, but he does not divulge the exact nature of his secrets. In the final scene of the drama, the Abbot of St. Maurice has to force his way into the “chamber where none enter” (93). Once there, he is witness to Manfred’s conjuring of a demonic spirit and ultimately his death. That mysterious chamber represents how Manfred has situated the darkest, innermost aspects of his mind in an equally secretive space.

The Alps

The Alpine mountains in the heart of Europe provide the setting of Byron’s play, but their majestic beauty provide an especially dramatic backdrop for the tense, high-stakes story of Manfred’s unfortunate end. As is frequently the case in classically Romantic literature, Manfred references the beauty of nature itself, noting details like the graceful flight of an eagle. Manfred recalls how in his youth, he loved being in nature, and that the Alps were particularly meaningful: “My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe / The difficult air of the iced Mountain’s top” (60).

However, at the time of the play’s action, Manfred no longer feels joy within nature. He notes how he has transformed from someone who found solace in the Alps to someone who “dived, / In my lone wanderings, to the caves of death” (60). When Manfred seeks to end his life at the end of Act I, he goes out to the Alps, with the intention of leaping from a cliff. The setting exemplifies both what Manfred has lost and the memory of that loss; the Alps continue to be a site of meaning to him. Thus, the Alps also encapsulate Romanticism’s idea that while humanity can appreciate nature, they cannot hope to share in its innocence, beauty, or purity. Humanity is instead marked by flaws, mistakes, and dark secrets, as Manfred contends.

Ancient Rome

On several occasions, Manfred alludes to ancient Rome as a comparison or metaphor for his own struggles. When speaking with the Abbot of St. Maurice, for example, Manfred refers to an ancient Roman emperor who died by suicide, in connection to his own feelings of doom. Manfred notes that those around the emperor were distraught that they were too late to save him. When the Abbot assures Manfred that he can be saved, Manfred exclaims, “I answer with the Roman / ‘It is too late!’” (104). Later, in Act III, Manfred refers to the ancient Coliseum in Rome, the site of the “Gladiator’s bloody circus” which is now a “noble wreck in ruinous perfection” (116). The marvels of ancient Rome, according to Manfred, are not just about what was achieved in the empire, but in the way that ruins of the civilization have survived, preserving it but in a broken state. “[T]he gaps of centuries,” Manfred notes, have left “that beautiful which still was so” and “that which was not” (117).

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, in Manfred’s mind, symbolizes the way both humanity as a whole has fallen from its noble origins in the state of nature to become fatally flawed, and how Manfred himself has declined from all-powerful to doomed, casting himself as the emperor of his own sphere of influence. This depiction of humanity, and its connection to ruins, is another common idea in Romanticism, and again shows how Manfred is an exemplary text of the literary movement. Manfred turns to the imagery of ancient Rome most powerfully near the end of the drama, when he has reached the peak of his decline and has resigned himself to what he sees as the inevitability of his own end.