Political seductions: the show of war in Byron's Sardanapalus - Lord Byron

Criticism, Wntr, 2002 by Daniela Garofalo

Unnoticed by his followers, the king experiences a continuing disconnection that keeps all his self-representations external, distanced, never truly self-coincident. Effeminacy, in the play, is the king's perpetual awareness of this divide between the self and the identities offered to it. Unlike George IV,merely a failure who nonetheless desperately wished to. assume his martial role, a bad actor, who does not even know he is acting, Sardanapalus can skillfully play the soldier but he can never become him. Remaining a perpetual amateur, Sardanapalus acts the part of a soldier but refuses to be professionalized, to become the part he plays. Like the aristocratic dandy who makes a show of his refusal to take any role seriously, the king can move from the harem to the battlefield and back without ever fully becoming either soldier or king. Refusing to conflate his body at war with the nation's power, the aristocrat makes a game of war and flaunts his skill in order to accentuate the carelessness with which he abandons one theater to act in another.

By claiming that Sardanapalus remains fundamentally critical of the martial image he is supposed to embody, I deviate from some of the most important criticism on the play. Susan Wolfson avers that Byron reserves a certain sympathy for the king by suggesting that his effeminacy is not really a symptom of cowardice but rather the sign of a character with a certain flexibility. His effeminacy can encompass both a latent masculinity and a humane kindness because "beneath the surface of Sardanapalus's pleasure-seeking, he leaves signs of `latent energies' (1.1.11) pointed towards a plot of masculine emergence." (26) Although this emergence cannot cover over the "the problem of effeminate character" which "retains its daring and conflicting strains of definition" (894), for Wolfson, the king makes his peace to some degree with the image of manhood he is supposed to embody. Likewise, Jerome Christensen sees Sardanapalus as interpellated by his "Myrrha-ed image of himself" as warrior (280). Playing on the name of the king's Greek slave, Christensen sees Sardanapalus as seduced by "that ideal Sardanapalus who, having become as kingly as his state, would be a self worthy of his own love" (280). My reading stresses instead the king's inability to recognize the mirrored image as his own reflection. He cannot find in the warrior image held forth for him any similitude to a self that is a "nothing," that, as he claims by the end of the play, is characterized by a refusal to become the roles he plays.

The illusion of "masculine emergence," however, does take hold of the Assyrian people. Sardanapalus stumbles upon a theatrical moment in which his playacting is mistaken for the real thing. For a moment, the effeminate king, donning a new costume, is mistaken for a warrior who can embody national strength. However, when Byron's Assyrian spectacle was presented on the British stage in the mid-nineteenth century, the play was edited in such a way that the king could appear to have actually recovered his virility, thus hiding the scandal of his failure fully to assume his role. The masculinization of the nineteenth-century staged Sardanapalus required that no sign of the king's effeminacy remain after he decides to fight in battle. Victorian stage productions in England even edited out the mirror scene altogether. (27) An appalled nineteenth-century theater critic commented on the absurd lengths to which productions of the play went in order to deny the king's effeminacy: "The impression Charles Kean is likely to leave is one of astonishment that any man accustomed to the stage could speak verse so ignorantly, and evade expression so successfully.... Thus, when the sword is placed in his hands, he gives it back, with the remark that it is too heavy, and this remark, instead of expressing effeminacy, he utters as if it were a stolid assertion of a matter of fact! How Byron would have fumed could he have heard his intention thus rendered!" (28)