Volume 49, Number 20 · December 19, 2002
Byron: The Poetry of It All
By Anne Barton
The Kindness of Sisters: Annabella Milbanke and the Destruction of the Byrons
by David Crane
Knopf, 290 pp., $26.95
Byron: Life and Legend
by Fiona MacCarthy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 674 pp., $35.00
Although Delia Bacon is said surreptitiously one night to have approached the vault beneath Stratford's Holy Trinity Church armed with a crowbar and shovel before losing her nerve, no one has yet succeeded in disinterring William Shakespeare. Byron, who had wanted to be buried without fuss in Greece, where he died in 1824, and who lacked Shakespeare's foresight in composing an epitaph cursing anyone who disturbed his grave, has been less fortunate. On June 15, 1938, a small, oddly assorted group of people broke open the Byron family vault in the church at Hucknall Torkard, near Nottingham, for reasons that ranged from a spurious need to establish the existence of a medieval crypt to the voyeuristic and fanciful. (The then Lord Byron had visions of hidden treasure, while the vicar, Canon Barber, claimed improbably to have been told many times that the remains of the sixth Lord Byron were no longer there, but had been mysteriously spirited away, and it was necessary to ascertain the truth.) After opening the last of the three coffins in which the embalmed body had been placed, they were able to look upon the well-preserved corpse of Shelley's 'pilgrim of eternity,' lying defenseless in his shroud, and to take excited notes, one churchwarden being particularly struck by what seemed to him the 'abnormal' size of the dead poet's 'sexual organ.' After saying a brief prayer, they restored the status quo.
Review, 3638 words
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