The Tale of the Two Foscaris from the Chronicles to the Historical Drama: Mary Mitford's "Foscari" and Lord Byron's "The Two Foscari"

According to the documents held in the archives of the Venetian "Council of Ten", the story of Jacopo Foscari was no more than a further instance of the duplicity and corruption typical of medieval Italian politics. Yet, already in late fifteenth century, the Venetian chroniclers began to transform Jacopo into a patriot and a hero who, exiled to Candia for no apparent reason, feigned an alliance with the Duke of Milan in order to be brought back to Venice, even though as a traitor to his own country. The figure of the Venetian Doge forced to condemn his own son to death attracted Romantic historians, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi above all, as well as playwrights. In 1821 Lord Byron was in Ravenna, were he came in contact with, and was strongly attracted by, the "Carboneria" and the Italian "Risorgimento". Here, he wrote his second historical tragedy, "The Two Foscari". In the same year, in England, Mary Russell Mitford drew on the same subject for her own historical drama, "Foscari", which was to be performed in London in 1826. The two plays will be compared with their sources in order to determine to what extent, and for what purpose, the two playwrights re-wrote this well-known Italian tale with clearly divergent results. Finally, the plays will also be analyzed as instances of their authors' theoretical approaches to Romantic historical drama