Manfred

Manfred: A dramatic poem is a closet drama written in 1816–1817 by Lord Byron. It contains supernatural elements, in keeping with the popularity of the ghost story in England at the time. It is a typical example of a Gothic fiction.

Byron commenced this work in late 1816, only a few months after the famed ghost-story sessions which provided the initial impetus for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The supernatural references are made clear throughout the poem.

Manfred was adapted musically by Robert Schumann in 1852, in a composition entitled Manfred: Dramatic Poem with music in Three Parts, and later by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his Manfred Symphony. Friedrich Nietzsche was impressed by the poem's depiction of a super-human being, and wrote some music for it.

Byron wrote this "metaphysical drama", as he called it, after his marriage to Annabella Millbanke failed because of a scandal due to charges of sexual improprieties and an incestuous affair between Byron and his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Attacked by the press and ostracised by London society, Byron fled England for Switzerland in 1816 and never returned. At the time, he was living at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland.

Because Manfred was written immediately after this, and because it regards a main character tortured by his own sense of guilt for an unmentionable offence, some critics consider it to be autobiographical, or even confessional. The unnamed but forbidden nature of Manfred's relationship to Astarte is believed to represent Byron's relationship with his half-sister Augusta.

Most of Manfred was written on a tour through the Bernese Alps in September 1816. The third act was rewritten in February 1817 since Byron was not happy with its first version.

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