Childe Byron.

by Romulus Linney

As the play begins, Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, who was Byron's only legitimate daughter, is writing her will. She is thirty-six (the same age at which her father died) and dying of cancer. While she had been estranged from her father during his lifetime, and had reviled his memory, now, as her own end is drawing near, she is seized with a desire to know more about her profligate father. Stimulated by the drugs she is taking for her illness, she summons him to life and, in sharp, sarcastic exchanges, probes into the truth behind the myth. Aided by a chorus of six other actors who impersonate a variety of characters, the life and art of Byron are unfolded; his tempestuous youth; his incestuous relationship with his sister; his homosexual escapades; the scandal surrounding his brief marriage; and his castigation by the society of his day. In the end the private man, the public figure and the protean poet are reconciled, and the rare dimension of this remarkable figure, who became the symbol of the Romanticism of his time, is made movingly real.

Genres: Plays

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron had a daughter, Ada, who was the world’s first computer programmer. I’ve always been intrigued by this history and will read most anything related to it, especially because it inspired my favorite play of all time, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia . So when I recently learned that Romulus Linney had written a biographical play about Byron and Ada, I had to check it out. (And then in a weird coincidence, I was halfway through reading Childe Byron when I learned that Stoppard had died.)

Linney structures the story as Ada’s hallucination. Dying of cancer at the age of 36, she imagines a conversation/confrontation with the father she never knew: the mad, bad, and dangerous poet who also died at 36. She also hallucinates a Greek chorus of sorts—six actors (three male, three female) who play all of the other important people in Byron’s life.

Note that I said Byron’s life—because the major flaw of Childe Byron, despite its title and its premise, is that it doesn’t do enough with Ada. We learn far more about Byron’s lovers, achievements, and personality than we do about Ada’s. Granted, Byron led a more exciting and eventful life than 99.9% of all humans who have ever lived—but couldn’t Linney have tried to make a case for Ada’s own accomplishments? I don’t think he mentions Charles Babbage’s name even once!

I did like a lot of Linney’s dialogue, though. Ada, describing herself: “A bluestocking. Modern on the outside. Ancient within.” Or this question of Byron’s, a line that wouldn’t be out of place in Arcadia: “But in the future, what will matter mathematics, steam rockets to the moon, and three-hundred-year-old people, if human emotions, like earthquakes, devour them?”

So there’s a lively and entertaining bio-play about Lord Byron in here, but I don’t think the father/daughter framing device works—yet that framing device is what made me want to read the play in the first place. I also wonder about the feasibility of staging some of the more scandalous episodes in Byron’s life. To his credit, Linney doesn’t shy away from the fact that Byron was bisexual and had a taste for teenage boys—but does he envision hiring an actual young teenager to play “Boy” and kiss the adult man playing Byron?

It’s been years since I read it, but IIRC, John Crowley’s Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land is a better and more balanced fictional treatment of Byron and Ada. Also on my list to check out is Ada and the Engine , by the Bay Area’s own Lauren Gunderson.

[Margarita Byron · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting invocation of Byron by his daughter Ada, while on her deathbed, in a seeming attempt to reconcile the Byron legend, the Byron story as given to her by her mother, and Byron the man himself, and his own reality. It was quite the hectic and the emotional read... I will have to take some time to sit down and properly gather my thoughts about it. As a Byronist, I really appreciated the complexity and the artistry with which it was presented.