The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 5

Byron wrote everything in this fifth volume of his poetry during the last two years of his working life as a poet. The editor, Ernest Hartley Coleridge, gathers it here in the 1901 edition with introductions, variant readings from the manuscripts and full notes.

The volume opens with Sardanapalus, a tragedy about the last king of Assyria, and The Two Foscari, a historical tragedy set in fifteenth-century Venice. Cain and Heaven and Earth, both subtitled "A Mystery", turn to the Book of Genesis. Werner follows a ruined nobleman living under a false name in seventeenth-century Germany and Prague, and a first draft of it is printed too. The Deformed Transformed, the verse satire The Age of Bronze and The Island, a tale in four cantos of Christian and his comrades, close the book.

Coleridge admits in his preface that much of this work had gone unread for two generations, and he sets out Byron's sources and the plays' stage history to bring them back within reach. Students of Romantic drama will find the text and its background side by side.