Familiar caricatures of early nineteenth-century Romantic poets Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats have long thrived in popular culture. The lives of these once merely mortal men have become irresistible legends filled with scandal, tragedy and wonder. Through this myth-making, Byron has become scandal incarnate; ever portrayed as a reckless, ruthless, merciless man, and famously branded by his jilted lover Lady Caroline Lamb as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’. In contrast to Byron’s hedonistic celebrity, his contemporary Percy Shelley has enjoyed a posthumous existence coloured by reverence and adoration; regarded as an unearthly being, and a visionary, too dear for this world. Lastly Keats, who, since his premature death at the age of twenty-five has remained a figure of tragic ingloriousness, a starry-eyed and solitary poet who suffered the woeful neglect of his contemporary audience. The most recent incarnation of this beatific Keats might be found in Jane Campion’s beautiful yet relentlessly wistful Bright Star (2009), which focuses upon the ill-fated love affair between the poet and the young Fanny Brawne. Over the course of two centuries, it seems, fashionable anecdotes concerning each of the poets have translated into hard fact, thus replacing the flesh and bones of real lives with the hard marble of statue and myth.

Whilst Alan Richardson’s Amore: The Romantic Poets certainly upholds and embraces such tempting depictions, it does not merely serve to replicate and perpetuate. Although we are treated to familiar reports of Byron’s many affairs (including the alleged affair with his half-sister), and to a suitably melancholic, pensive reading of Keats’ ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’, the principle pleasure of Richardson’s production lies, however, in its depiction of the poets not as ‘heroes’ or ‘legends’, but as men. Amore moves beyond the detached and static effigies built to great heights over the past two centuries, in an attempt to once more animate the lives of the poets in all their truth and grit. Though this production does not radically reform and reveal hitherto unknown facts and materials about these men, it does provide a revitalizing mix of the well-known with the little-known, quietly challenging the afterlives with which we have become so familiar.

Amore takes the form of a dramatised reading, drawing from a broad range of resources including biographies, letters, poems, newspapers and reviews to present a liberally chronological promenade through the lives of the three poets. Accounts of childhood, family life and schooling were offered in tandem to reveal the very different beginnings which nevertheless brought these men slowly together, as their three separate lives were delicately woven together to create one combined narrative. It might be suggested that, at times, the lives of the men were a little closely drawn, placing stronger emphasis upon friendships and coincidence which wandered dangerously close to further myth-making. Although the lives are told predominantly in the words of the three poets themselves, and brilliantly woven together by the guiding authority of the narrator, there are many other contributions and narratives to be heard. Richardson’s work gives voice to a host of interlocutors: the exasperated interruptions of the Duchess of Devonshire; protestations made by the irrepressible Lady Caroline Lamb; observations candidly expressed by Mary Shelley; letters written by Clare Clairmont, and by Fanny Brawne. This list is by no means exhaustive. It is perhaps one of the most commendable aspects of this production that it offers such a voice to the women who lived alongside, influenced, were loved by and so often suffered mistreatment at the hands the men whose figures loom large in our cultural consciousness. Indeed, the title of the work rather misleadingly implies something of a more frivolous exploration of the romantic encounters of the three men than the production actually offers.

Certainly, these often entertaining adventures do receive plenty of attention, providing much amusement and intrigue; yet, these tales of ardent passions by no means eclipse the darker side of the poets’ amorous encounters, of which there are several rather sinister stories to be told. Shelley’s abhorrent treatment of Harriet Westbrook is related with frank detail, and mostly in her own words. Having met Mary Godwin, Shelley unceremoniously cast his first wife aside to pursue his new love, in a thoughtless hard-heartedness which ended in Harriet’s suicide. So too the temptation to romanticise his second marriage to Mary Shelley was strongly resisted, with claims of his unfaithfulness undermining conceptions of ideal, passionate romance. The story of Byron’s affair with Claremont finds disturbing climax in the death of his daughter Allegra by his decision to place her in a convent at the age of five. The ‘romance’ of Keats is undermined by revelations of his morbid medical obsessions and constant self-diagnoses, making for rather an unattractive lover: a revelation upheld by the details of his somewhat listless and ultimately unfulfilled love affair with Fanny Brawne. Brawne, however, is given an opportunity to redeem herself as a lover, with her most passionate outburst of the whole affair emerging only after Keats’ death, and taking the form of six years mourning.

Nor are the works of the poets offered to universal applause. Particularly pleasing in this regard is the inclusion of a reading of a truly appalling Keats poem, ‘A Party of Lovers’. We are treated to a powerful reading of Shelley’s pamphlet ‘The Necessity of Atheism’; yet we are also subjected to a sample of the critical repercussions resultant from this work. The introduction of Walter Scott upon the scene provides a comic representation of his rivalry with and eventual concession to Byron in the field of poetry; but this also provides an interesting acknowledgement of the brutality of the contemporary literary marketplace. However, the production also affords opportunities to hear wonderful readings of full works, such as the powerful recitation of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, ‘On Death’ by Keats, and Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty’. In an age when reading aloud has become something of an antique memory, it was such a pleasure to hear such works read with such fervour and passion.

Despite its honest revelations and often unexpected details, Amore does not seek truly to unravel our images of the poets. Nor does it offer us anything distinctly new. It is a work which is carefully considerate of the lines between ‘truth’ and ‘myth’ in posthumous biographical representation, and therefore upon the whole refreshingly relies upon the drama of the ‘real’ to emerge principally through the poets’ own words. At the same time it seeks to undermine the posthumous hero-worship to which so many poets and authors are subject after their death. Perhaps it is as a concession to this that the performance draws towards its close with Keats’ prophecy of his own only ever posthumous success as a poet; and to the obituary of Shelley published in the Courier, 1822, a stark reminder of contemporary opinion of the poet: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no’. In Richardson’s production, there are no ‘romantic’ heroes, only men.

Amore was performed at Mayfield Salisbury Church, Edinburgh from August 4th to August 8th 2014.