Childe Byron

Childe Byron is a 1977 play by Romulus Linney about the strained relationship between the poet, Lord Byron, and his daughter, Ada Lovelace. Of Linney's more than sixty plays, Childe Byron is one he identified as holding a "deeply personal" connection. In his own words, he approached it through "the pain of a divorced father who can't reach his own daughter." In his narrative poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron wrote of the female infant he left behind when he went into exile: "I see thee not. I hear thee not. But none can be so rapt in thee.” When Linney re-read these words in preparation for the play, he recalled "My daughter Laura, the actress... her mother and I were separated and divorced when she was a baby, so these lines just laid me out."

The play received its first production on March 4, 1977 in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, on the stage of the Virginia Museum Theater (now the Leslie Cheek Theater) in Richmond, Virginia. Commissioned by Keith Fowler, then the artistic director of the theater, with the aid of a Ford Foundation grant, and staged by Fowler as a part of that company's "Festival of Britain," the play received wide attention from local and national press. The original cast was led by Jeremiah Sullivan as Lord Byron and Marjorie Lerstrom as his daughter, with an ensemble of David Addis, Janet Bell, James Kirkland, Pamela Lewis, Rachael Lindhart, and William Stancil. The show's scenery was designed by Sandro LaFerla, and the costumes were by Paige Southard. M. Elizabeth Osborn was the company's dramaturg.

The word "Childe" is an honorific once given to young aristocratic men who had not yet attained knighthood, and its use in the play's title is a reference to Lord Byron's poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The drama begins with Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, writing her will. She is a mathematician and the daughter of the infamous George Gordon, Lord Byron, a man reputed to be "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." She is dying of a painful cancer at age thirty-six, the same age he was when he died. Separated from him while he lived, she now hates his memory. As her own end is near, however, she desires to know more about the man. Her medicines stimulate her imagination, and she envisions him alive again. In incisive, witty dialogue she digs into the truth behind the legends surrounding her father. Six other actors play a diverse range of characters as she observes scenes from Byron's life, including his youthful incestuous relations with his sister, his homosexual adventures, his foolish marriage, and the causes of his disapprobation by British society.

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