ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the abiding playing qualities of The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron and thereby to rescue Chapman from the critical tyranny of Lamb’s inhibiting label. The imagery also supports the major structural pattern of aggregation and deprivation reflecting the rise and fall of Byron’s fortunes. Images of augmentation are predominant in the Conspiracy, but disease and decay imagery dominates the Tragedy. Byron is falsely inflated, puffed-up, and then slowly eaten away until he “ebbs into air.” The Conspiracy, while dramatically viable in its own right, serves to prepare the audience for the tragic consequences of Byron’s increasing self-delusion and personal disintegration. Though The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron is an organic experiment in the anatomy of human psychology, its real power to compel admiration is generated by the sensitive and profound moral vision of the man who has invested this fascinating play with such force and universal meaning.
