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

Criticism, Wntr, 2002 by Daniela Garofalo

However, this representation of a kind king is, for Barrell, something of a ruse: "The language of sentiment masks power with weakness, fear with tenderness, hate with love, but the mask is always transparent, and like the stocking pulled down over the features of the bank robber it makes the face beneath still more frightening than it would be without the disguise" (96). This image of the tender father, then, depends on the very violence it claims to disavow. (22) The representation of Sardanapalus speaks to this problem of disavowed but nonetheless always threatened violence. Anticipating Barrell's account of a king "as a kind of drag queen" (96), Sardanapalus describes himself as "softer clay, impregnated with flowers" (II.i.522). But when his loyal subjects warn the king that his people are displeased with him, the king declares "If [the rebellious people] rouse me, better / They had conjured up stem Nimrod from his ashes, / `The mighty hunter.' I will turn these realms / To one wide desert chase of brutes, who were / But would no more, by their own choice, be human" (I.ii.372-76). Violence remains a potential threat beneath the appearance of feminine softness and the protestations of peace and benevolence. It is this side of his power from which the king seeks to distance himself but that haunts his reign. Whereas England was caught up in a seemingly contradictory representation of power, located in the person of the king, on the one hand, and in the person of the military leader, on the other, Byron's play considers both the hypocrisy involved in this construction of benevolent monarchy and the illusion involved in creating warrior males.

The Performance of Heroism in Sardanapalus

If benevolence is a ruse that covers over the reality of coercive power at a time when the legitimacy of kings is in question, it is also limited in its capacity to bind the people's loyalties to the state. The British people want the "show of war." What the benevolent king hides, the warrior must reveal. While George III denies British imperial power with his homely, fatherly appearance, Nelson and Wellington reveal the nation's manly power. In the Assyrian state, the king himself is called upon to become Wellington. The play unfolds as a pointedly perverse version of George IV's fantasy of a king called upon to become a warrior. The Assyrian public calls the king's bluff and demands to see his latent capacity for violence. Without pretense of kindness, this public admires overt displays of power and understands its leader's martial virility as the barometer of the nation's health.

Salmenes, the king's brother-in-law, repeatedly articulates this ethic of heroism. According to Salmenes, one great difference separates the toil of the king in the harem and his toil on the battlefield. He describes an economy of energy in which the pleasures of the harem expend the same energy as those of the battlefield but without invigorating the reveler. Salmenes asks "Were it less toil/To sway his nations than consume his life? To head an army than to rule a harem?" (I.i.21-23). To sweat "in palling pleasures, dulls his soul, /And saps his goodly strength, in toils which yield not / Health like the chase, nor glory like the war" (I.i.24-26). Salmenes evokes a model of degeneracy in which luxury saps the vigor and health of the warrior. The yield of manly pursuits are health and glory not only for the individual but also for the nation. Without a healthy, manly king, the nation, too, becomes diseased and effeminate. (23)