SOURCE: “The Devil as Doppelgänger in The Deformed Transformed: The Sources and Meaning of Byron's Unfinished Drama,” in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol. 74, No. 3, March, 1970, pp. 177-202.

In the following essay, Robinson probes the Faustian and other sources and thematic implications of the diabolical double in Lord Byron's The Deformed Transformed.

Byron's The Deformed Transformed is a complex, fragmentary, and uneven drama which has received little critical attention and less praise since its publication in 1824; yet the potential effect of this drama prompted Montague Summers in an unguarded moment to express “infinite regret” that Byron “did not finish the piece, which has a eerie and perhaps unhallowed fascination all its own.”¹ Summers undoubtedly praised this drama because of its unorthodox plot containing a pact with the devil, its perplexing incompleteness, its autobiographical revelations, and its indebtedness to Byron's acknowledged sources: Joshua Pickersgill's unbridled Gothic...