Fazio: A Tragedy

Fazio, A Tragedy is a verse drama by Henry Hart Milman, the English clergyman, historian, and poet who lived from 1791 to 1868 and who eventually became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Milman wrote the play during his early literary career, with the first edition appearing in 1815 when he was twenty four. The play was successfully produced on the London stage and remained in the repertoire of various nineteenth century actresses who valued the substantial female lead role for its dramatic possibilities.

The play is set in Renaissance Florence and centers on a young goldsmith named Fazio and his wife Bianca. Fazio comes into possession of a quantity of gold belonging to a deceased neighbour and uses the money to set himself up in a more prosperous life than his honest trade had previously allowed. The new wealth attracts the attention of the wealthy and beautiful Aldabella, who becomes Fazio’s mistress and whose attentions threaten the marriage. Bianca, driven by jealousy, denounces Fazio to the authorities for the original theft of the gold. The complications that follow lead to the kind of tragic resolution that the form required.

Milman wrote the play in the verse tragedy tradition that dominated serious English drama in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The major Romantic poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley all produced plays in the same tradition, with varying degrees of success on the stage. Milman’s Fazio was actually more successful in production than most of the Romantic verse tragedies, partly because the female lead role gave actresses substantial material to work with and partly because the plot was tightly constructed.

The play remained in the repertoire of major actresses through much of the nineteenth century. Several famous performances by leading actresses of various periods extended its theatrical life well beyond what most verse tragedies of the period managed.

The play runs about a hundred pages in the standard published form and reads in a single sitting. For readers interested in early nineteenth century English verse drama, this is one of the more successful examples of the genre. Milman’s later career as a historian of medieval Christianity and of the Jews has overshadowed his early dramatic work, but Fazio remains worth attention.