is, along with

, one of Byron’s two Venetian dramas. The former work was composed over a short period of time and published with

and

in December 1821.

shares with

(and with a number of Byron’s early lyric poems) the themes of ancestry, family, and honour. Like Byron’s narrative poem “The Prisoner of Chillon”,

is, on a number of levels, a study of the effects of imprisonment and confinement, while the larger arc of the play’s narrative is its dramatisation of the often secretive and complex political machinery of the fifteenth-century Venetian Republic. In

Byron pushes some of these complexities beyond—or rather, in an even more negative and bleak direction—those…

3266 words

Citation: White, Adam. "The Two Foscari". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 February 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7999, accessed 21 November 2024.]