ABSTRACT
Animal suffering has been one of Cain's most insistent torments, and Abel's sacrifice of a blood-offering, a horror ‘shaming creation’, is accepted, while Cain's of fruits is rejected. True sovereignty is being replaced not by a just commonwealth but by a ruling clique, as surely in nineteenth-century England as it was in medieval Venice. Traces of the Shakespearian royalism are in the autocratic Doge, a fiery old man loving and loved by the people but intolerant under the insults of the Senate. Byron's dramas sum up a long Shakespearian and post-Shakespearian tradition. Goethe admired Byron's dramas, and in conclusion people glance at his Faust, that life's drama whose composition spans the romantic period. It is probable that full self-realization was more nearly attained by Lord Byron than anyone else of modern times.
