Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice. An Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. With Notes. The Prophecy of Dante, A Poem.
London: John Murray, 1821.
Price: $750.00
About the item
First edition, first issue (Doge’s speech at p. 151 is only 5-1/2 lines). xxi, 261, [262, imprint], [2, ads, recto blank] 4 ads. 1 vols. 8vo. Later boards, untrimmed. Wise, "Byron" II, pp. 29-30.
Item #352119
Written in Ravenna the year before another of Lord Byron's plays based on the lives of past doges, The Two Foscari, and published in the same year, Marino Faliero was set in Venice in 1355. Byron was inspired to take on this subject when, on examining the portraits of the doges in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, he discovered that the portrait of Faliero had been blacked out. He drew from Marino Sanuto's Lives of the Doges (1733) as source material.
Byron intended to dedicate this play to a fellow lover of Italian travel, Goethe, but delays resulted in the play being published without a dedication.
