Cain (play)
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Cain is a dramatic work written by Byron in 1821. It was published in 1822 along with two other dramatic works, The Two Foscari and Sardanapulus. In Cain, Byron attempts to dramatize the story of Cain and Abel from Cain's point of view. Cain is an example of the literary genre known as closet drama. It was never intended to be performed.
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[edit] Characters
Adam
Eve
Cain, their eldest son
Abel, their second son
Adah, Cain's sister and wife
Zillah, Abel's sister and wife
Lucifer
Angel of the Lord
[edit] 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 with a catastrophic vision of the earth's natural history, complete with spirits of extinct life forms like the mammoth. Depressed by this vision of universal death, Cain returns to Earth in Act III with a nihilistic conception of life. Byron depicts the murder of Abel at the climax of the play as Cain's attempt to wreak vengeance on an indiscriminately destructive God by destroying one of God's favorite creatures.
[edit] Literary Influences
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. The character of Cain is clearly modelled on Milton's defiant protagonist. However, the relationship between Cain and Paradise Lost is more complicated than this. For instance, 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, given by the archangel Michael in Books XI and XII of Milton's epic. (Byron does claim, however, in the opening to this work, that the influence of 'Paradise Lost' was only minimal, since he had not read it for many years.)
[edit] 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.
