George Gordon Byron, The Two Foscari

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The Two Foscari

is, along with

Mario Faliero

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

Cain

and

Sardanapalus

in December 1821.

The Two Foscari

shares with

Sardanapalus

(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”,

The Two Foscari

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

The Two Foscari

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 19 March 2024.]

7999 The Two Foscari 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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