Introduction chapter I. Main characteristics of XIX century english literature

Chapter III. Critical literary approach to Lord Byron’s “Cain”.
Cain is a dramatic work by Lord Byron published in 1821. In Cain, Byron dramatizes the story of Cain and Abel from Cain's point of view. Cain is an example of the literary genre known as closet drama.

Summary

The play commences with Cain refusing to participate in his family's prayer of thanksgiving to God. Cain tells his father he has nothing to thank God for because he is fated to die. As Cain explains in an early soliloquy, he regards his mortality as an unjust punishment for Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden, an event detailed in the Book of Genesis. Cain's anxiety over his mortality is heightened by the fact that he does not know what death is. At one point in Act I, he recalls keeping watch at night for the arrival of death, which he imagines to be an anthropomorphic entity. The character who supplies Cain with knowledge of death is Lucifer. In Act II, Lucifer leads Cain on a voyage to the "Abyss of Space" and shows him a catastrophic vision of the Earth's natural history, complete with spirits of extinct life forms like the mammoth. Cain returns to Earth in Act III, depressed by this vision of universal death. At the climax of the play, Cain murders Abel. The play concludes with Cain's banishment.
Literary influences

Perhaps the most important literary influence on Cain was John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, which tells of the creation and fall of mankind. For Byron as for many Romantic poets, the hero of Paradise Lost was Satan, and Cain is modelled in part on Milton's defiant protagonist. Furthermore, Cain's vision of the Earth's natural history in Act II is a parody of Adam's consolatory vision of the history of man (culminating in the coming and sacrifice of Christ) presented by the Archangel Michael in Books XI and XII of Milton's epic. In the preface to Cain, Byron attempts to downplay the influence of poems "upon similar topics", but the way he refers to Paradise Lost suggests its formative influence: "Since I was twenty, I have never read Milton; but I had read him so frequently before, that this may make little difference."[1]

Other influences

As Byron himself notes in the preface to Cain, Cain's vision in Act II was inspired by the theory of catastrophism. In an attempt to explain large gaps in the fossil record, catastrophists posited that the history of the Earth was punctuated with violent upheavals that had destroyed its flora and fauna. Byron read about catastrophism in an 1813 English translation of some early work by French natural historian Georges Cuvier. Other influences include The Divine Legation of Moses by William Warburton and A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke.

Plot

Act I, Scene I

Cain is an angry guy. He's mad at God for planting the Tree of Knowledge. He's mad at his mother Eve for being tempted by the Serpent and taking fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. He's mad at his father Adam for not taking fruit from the Tree of Life. He's even mad at his brother Abel for not being as angry as he is!
The drama opens with Adam, Eve, and their children Cain, Abel, Zillah, and Adah offering God a sacrifice. While everyone else praises God, Cain stays silent. He complains that he won't thank a god who has denied him immortality.
Later in the Act, Cain meets Lucifer. He tells Lucifer that even though the fruit of Knowledge was eaten, he still doesn't know what Death is and fears it.
Act II, Scene I
Lucifer takes Cain into the Abyss of Space, where Cain realizes how small and insignificant he is. Next, the two travel back in time, where Cain sees Earth in its former beauty. Finally, Lucifer brings Cain to the gates of Hades.
Act II, Scene II
Cain is horrified by shadowy Hades, the 'realm of Death.' Lucifer explains that the phantoms flying around are the spirits of beings that God made and destroyed before he made mankind.
All of this disgusts Cain, so much so that he simply wants to die and get it over with. He asks to stay in Hades, but Lucifer tells him he cannot, at least not yet. They return to Earth.
Act III, Scene I
Cain and his sister/wife Adah watch their sleeping son Enoch. Cain says that Enoch smiles because he is still too young and innocent to know that Paradise is lost. He briefly considers killing his son to save him from misery but backtracks when Adah chastises him.
Abel asks Cain to join him at a sacrifice. A column of fire ascends from Abel's alter into heaven, but a whirlwind destroys Cain's alter. Cain is happy to see the fruits scattered off of his alter, but Abel attempts to remake Cain's alter anyway. They argue, and Cain strikes Abel down. Before Abel dies, he asks God to forgive Cain.
Adam and Eve curse Cain and banish him from their home. Adah begs the family to forgive Cain, but they refuse. The Angel of the Lord enters and curses Cain. As punishment, the Earth will never bear fruit when Cain attempts to farm it. He will also be a fugitive, forced to wander the Earth forever.
Adah begs the Angel for mercy, saying that others will want to kill Cain for his crime. The Angel puts a mark on Cain's brow to warn others not to harm him. Cain begs for death instead, but the Angel refuses. Cain and Adah leave together with their son.
Analysis

Cain is a special kind of play called a closet drama. Closet dramas, unlike traditional dramatic scripts, are not meant to be performed on a stage. Instead, they should be read either silently to oneself or aloud in a small seated group of people.

Byron named his play Cain: A Mystery because he wanted it to conform to the language of ancient mystery plays. Mysteries were plays written in medieval Europe that retold stories from the Bible. However, unlike the medieval mystery plays, which were largely reverential to God, Byron's mystery has a decidedly ironic undertone to it.
The character Lucifer openly questions whether God is evil, pointing out that the Maker destroys as much as he creates. In addition, Byron's version of Lucifer demonstrates to Cain how insignificant man really is and how little he really knows or understands about the universe (despite Adam and Eve's having eaten from the Tree of 'Knowledge'.) This recognition that man cannot truly comprehend the full vastness of time and space was a major philosophical undercurrent that ran through numerous writers' texts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Byron battled with this dilemma in many of his compositions.
Before Byron even began to write Cain, he jotted down some lines in his journal and titled them 'Thought for a speech of Lucifer in the Tragedy of Cain.' One of those lines read: 'Were Death an Evil, would I let thee live?' This line never actually made it into the finished version of Cain. Still, it's a great line for us to consider, because it gets to the heart of a key message in Byron's play: eternal life is a far worse punishment than death!

Lands outside paradise. Complaining that his father has been tamed and his mother has forsaken the desire for knowledge that led to her exile from Eden, Cain agrees to go with Lucifer on a tour of the places that will give him the knowledge denied him by God. Lucifer convinces Cain that any place outside paradise is a place of human ignorance. By accompanying him, Lucifer suggests, Cain can satisfy his quest to learn the “mystery of my being.”

Abyss of space
Abyss of space. Lucifer calls infinite space the “phantasm of the world; of which thy world/ Is but the wreck.” The abyss of space represents all places prohibited to man by God but which Lucifer can show to Cain.
Hades
Hades (hay-deez). Underworld that Lucifer shows to Cain to prove God’s hatred of man. In Hades, many “good, great, glorious things” have been taken from the earth, just as Cain and his family will be taken when they die. For Cain, this knowledge of Hades confirms Lucifer’s condemnation of God. Lucifer urges that Cain associate his well-being not with an actual place but rather with “an inner world” composed of his own thoughts.
*Earth
*Earth. Region outside Eden to which Cain returns from Hades. He is enraged that his brother still worships a vengeful God who will continue to punish generations of innocent humans. He tells his sister Adah he has seen worlds closed both to humans and to God’s light. To Cain the earth seems merely a place of dust and toil. Angry that his brother Abel should still want to appease a bloodthirsty God, Cain strikes and kills him. Not only has Cain lost his place in the family, he must travel even farther away from Eden; he is truly a man without a place.
Bibliography

Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 275

Chew, Samuel Claggett. The Dramas of Lord Byron: A Critical Study. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Despite its age, Chew’s study remains the best place to begin any study of Byron and his writing for the theater.
Crane, David. The Kindness of Sisters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. A study of Byron’s reputation after death, exploring bitter and conflicting accounts by the wife he divorced and the sister he seduced.
Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. This famous study includes background material useful for the study of Romantic literature as a whole. Lowes’s treatment of the legend of Cain is still one of the best.
MacCarthy, Fiona. Byron: Life and Legend. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. A biography that re-examines the life of the poet in the light of MacCarthy’s assertion that Byron was bisexual, a victim of early abuse by his nurse.
Marchand, Leslie. Byron: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1957. Byron, one of the most autobiographical of all poets, led a fascinating life. In many instances, his works are largely an idealized version of his own experiences. Marchand’s biography is the standard one and reliably illuminates autobiographical elements in Cain.
Thorslev, Peter L. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Probably the most helpful book that a student confronting Byron for the first time can read. Thorslev describes seven well-known types of heroes in Romantic literature before turning specifically to Byron’s. Depictions of Cain in legend and literature are summarized. Byron’s Cain is usefully compared with John Milton’s Satan and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust.

Ruben del Mazo Villanueva 3 January 2013 CAIN by GEORGE GORDON BYRON (LORD BYRON) In this paper we are going to analyze the work Cain by the British poet Lord Byron, published in 1821, in which we can appreciate an outstanding influence of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The story of Cain and Abel appears in the book of Genesis in the Bible, and the reader must understand that this myth is placed within the Christian doctrine. On the one hand, through this kind of fable the exile of man from Garden of Eden is explained.

Because of the mortal sin Eve committed when eating the apple, humanity was cursed and expelled from Paradise.

On the other hand, it also explains why human beings suffer during their lifes and finally die. Death is something extremely complicated for humans to understand, and even more difficult to accept. In the Christian doctrine the opposite places of hell and heaven are used to keep people under control and make them follow some rules or dogmas: if they obey they will succeed and go to a beautiful place called heaven but on the contrary if they don’t they will be punished and sent to hell, were they will be unhappy for the rest of their lifes.

If we look closely to this work, we can perceive that heaven is the same as Garden of Eden (living with God and worship Him) and exile and living in pain wandering on earth wold be a representation of hell. Lord Byron’s Cain is considered as a critique to the Christian doctrine, a way to show his own skepticism and an attack to the theocentric conception of universe as appearing in the Bible.
His work has been accused of being plainly heretic and blasphemous but otherwise it can be interpreted as a reflection of how dificult is to understand and distinguish the bloody and wrathful God from the merciful and loving one. Lord Byron’s Cain is greatly influenced by Romanticism and its way of thinking; its spirit. The author tries to understand the world in all its complexity (which is a hard task to take) and throwing questions about issues like death, punishment, pain, suffering, and obviously justice, or in this case, injustice.
Unlike his “beloved” brother Abel, who is a tame conformist person and always agrees with what he has and what he knows, Cain is represented as a curious man who needs to learn more and more about life. He wants to get his questions answered but as we will see, he never get his expectations fulfilled and doubt lies in wait. Lord Byron and Cain may have some resemlances in common if we note that both of them are curious about some questions of life and as we see in Byron’s quote: “I deny nothing, but doubt everything”.
He refuses to accept the existence of God as Cain refused to blindly obey whatever the Lord says. His character, Cain, does not agree with God’s plans because He created man as an imperfect being, but when this creation makes a mistake it is punished but actually it is not its fault due to the fact that if God is almighty (and can do whatever he wants to) this misbehaviour is what He wants, so if He get angry or disappointed when it happens then the whole situations seems to be contradictory for a rational being as Lord Byron, or in this case Cain.
Another famous quote pronounced by Lord Byron is: “there’s naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion”. In this affirmation he makes clear that (as rum) religion is an ideal method to putt all your problems out, to keep them away from you. Religion is seen as a way to avoid making questions about life, pretending you already have every single answer when you really do not, and that is part of his critic view.
Moving on with the story of Cain, Lucifer appears in scene bringing doubt and jealousy with him. With his offer of knowledge he confuses Cain and it is guilty for some of his actions. In a fragment of the work, the Fallen Angel mentions another beings who lived on earth before man did, and this was heretic and blasphemous at that time because it was against what the Bible says, God created everything on Earth and never said a word about other creatures before, and that was heretic (see Genesis 1. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” /Genesis 1. 10 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”). With the words of Lucifer who tells Cain to trust his own mind,we can observe a Romantic influence so different from what religion is about: do what I, in the name of a superior being, I’m telling you (“Make sure you are doing what Gods wants you to do… then do it with all your strenght”, George Washington).