Apart from the psychological effect a deformity might have as a spur, his remark suggests that, in contrast to beauty, deformity has an awe-inspiring effect on the viewer. Bodily ‘otherness’ must not necessarily mean weakness, but can be associated with strength, masculinity (in contrast to ‘feminine’ beauty), and heroism. [27] This connection is already suggested in the description of Arnaud in The Three Brothers, which is probably why Byron as a teenager was attracted to the story. [28] In 1805, as a pupil in Harrow, he made a list of famous men, marking all those who had a disability. [29] Byron was evidently fascinated by the combination of bodily deformity, beauty, and fame. Attractive yet flawed bodies like those of Alcibiades or Achilles seem to suggest that beauty and sublimity do not necessarily exclude each other, but can appear in one individual. Consequently, considering the gendered connotations these qualities both have to feminine and masculine traits, the contrast between each adds to their quality of being larger than life. As the Stranger comments, ‘The greatest / Deformity should only barter with / The extremest beauty, if the proverb’s true / Of mortals, that extremes meet’ (I. 1. 284–87). The fragment’s concept of heroism is thus a combination of the sublime and the beautiful, of masculinity and effeminacy, transcending gender boundaries, and a product of hybridity. However, in the Stranger’s ‘shadows’, the contrast between their opposed qualities makes these attributes even more prominent. Byron contests the Burkean notion that the blending of beautiful and sublime qualities in one object or individual weakens the power of both (see Burke, III, 13 and 27). While many of Byron’s characters transcend gendered categories, in the experimental, over-the-top fragment the idea of the ‘hybrid’ hero is taken to grotesque extremes, when the Stranger describes Arnold’s deformities as misplaced animal features:

The Stranger rejects the concept of the superiority of Man over Animal, and of the beautiful over the deformed body, claiming instead that ‘unto spirit / All clay is of equal merit’ (I. 1. 456f). Despite its obvious absurdity, the statement, rejects the derogatory concept of ‘deformity’ as ‘unnatural’ and reflects Byron’s fascination for the idiosyncratic body and his defiance of the notion of purity. [30]

     The Stranger’s comments about the characters he conjures up subvert a tradition which glorifies war as an heroic enterprise and conquerors as heroes and role models. His emphasis is instead on their destructive quality. Thus, in his incantation he summons ‘the shape of each Victor / From Macedon’s boy / To each high Roman’s picture, / Who breathed to destroy’ (I. 1. 177–80; my italics). He stresses that military glory is only achieved through destruction: when Arnold wonders that the disappearing shadow of Julius Caesar, ‘the man who shook the earth’, ‘is gone / And left no footstep’ (I. 1. 203f.), the Stranger also describes Caesar as a destroyer: ‘His substance / Left graves enough, and woes enough, and fame / More than enough to track his memory’ (I. 1. 204–06). In this, the play rejects an idealised image of classical heroism and warfare. In the context of the play’s preoccupation with war and violence, it is also significant that all characters shown to Arnold had a violent death of unnatural causes, except for Demetrius who, however, died a prisoner in a foreign country (Plutarch, Demetrius, LII, LIII). Pickersgill’s Alexander and Hephaistion, who, although young, both died of natural causes are notably absent in The Deformed Transformed (see Plutarch, Alexander, LXXII, LXXVI). Thus, the choice illustrates the point the play makes about the violence inherent in Western culture, and also gives a hint that the Stranger’s offer will ultimately bring Arnold to a violent end.

     In The Three Brothers, Joshua Pickersgill presents a society of cruelty and violence on different levels. The book opens with the description of a village emptied of its young men because of a current military expedition (I, 4–6). The story is filled with military campaigns that give the reader the impression that this is a world permanently and senselessly at war. It is a similar world of chaos and violence that Byron’s Arnold enters after his transformation. As his main wish is to experience life in its fullness, he tells Caesar that he wants to go ‘Where the world / Is thickest, that I may behold it in / Its workings’ (I. 1. 493–95). Caesar’s answer shows that Byron adapts Pickersgill’s dark concept of human culture:

Thus, when Arnold chooses to go to Rome, it is not surprising he finds it at a moment when it is under siege. At this point, relatively late, the story which started out in a remote forest moves into a concrete historical situation: the Sacco di Roma, the conquest and plundering of Rome, which took place on 5 May 1527. [31] Even though Demetrius, ‘Taker of cities’ (I. 1. 259), would have been an equally appropriate choice in the context of the Sacco di Roma, Byron’s hero opts instead for Achilles. So fixed is Arnold on physical beauty as the only means to happiness that he can only be content with the ideal, superhuman beauty of a mythological rather than historical character.

     Unlike Pickersgill’s hero, Arnold claims not to have any grand, overreaching aspirations or a lust for power. Although he knows that even in his own body he could ‘be feared, admired, respected, loved’ (I. 1. 359), he is convinced he could not be loved by ‘those next to me, of whom I / Would be beloved’. [32] As he says, he wishes primarily to be loved by those close to him (I. 1. 358–61), to be part of the community and belong with and be accepted by the others. However, his later choice to assume the form of the mythological war hero Achilles (which Byron’s character opts for instead of the body of Demetrius), suggests that he also desires superiority and greatness. [33] His true desire is to be free from the limits of his existence; in this aspiration, Arnold resembles other Byronic overreachers such as Manfred, Cain or Lucifer, from whom he otherwise seems to be different in his wish for private, domestic happiness. Appropriately, like Byron’s Manfred (II. 2. 150–62) and Cain (I. 1. 301–18) and unlike Pickersgill’s character, who deliberately calls for Satan, he refuses a Faustian pact with a supernatural being. He agrees to the Stranger’s unconditional offer of a bodily exchange only when he is assured that he ‘shall have no bond / But [his] own will’ (I. 1. 150f.). Thus, he does not realise that with a change of body he essentially gives up his individuality and agency.

     Despite his bodily transformation, Pickersgill’s Arnaud is not able to free himself from his past and the memories of his rejection, or even from his original body. It does not decompose (IV, 195f.), and when he later seeks a second change of shape, the Devil tells him that he cannot seal a new pact, as the blood in his veins is not his own (IV, 365), so that his new shape is ultimately an illusion. In Arnold’s case, the impossibility of escaping the material reality of the body is even more poignant. As he finds out, he cannot leave his old body behind. [34] The Stranger, assuming the name of Caesar, assumes Arnold’s rejected original form and follows him ‘as his shadow’, thereby showing that his process of transformation and self-reinvention cannot be complete and leads to a split identity.

After his metamorphosis, Arnold exists as a fragmented being, alienated from his past. [35] There are hints that he no longer remembers his former life, having forgotten ‘all things in the new joy / Of this immortal change’ (I. 1. 445f.). Thus, despite of his refusal of a conventional pact, he has lost his individual identity and implicitly his ‘soul’ at the very moment of his transformation.

     Unlike Pickersgill’s protagonist, who changes his name to Julian, Byron’s character decides to stay ‘plain Arnold still’ (I. 1. 543), convinced that he can essentially remain the same person. However, he has to discover that he cannot completely maintain his original self. Quite early on in his career as ‘a conqueror [and] chosen knight’ (I. 2. 4) Arnold longs to be ‘in peace—at peace’ (I. 2. 21); he has no desire to be a war-hero, but as a new Achilles, he is trapped in that role. The Achilles reference is also of particular importance, in that it underlines the fragility of the life of the hero-figure. The presence of an immortal stresses the vulnerability of human life, and Caesar expressively reminds Arnold of his mortality:

There is a certain irony in this passage, for Achilles’ famous invulnerability which he has in various versions of the legend (although not in the Iliad) is always invariably connected with his equally famous heel, his one weakness that causes his early death. One of his key characteristics in the Iliad, as well as in later versions of the story, is that he is ‘short-lived’, doomed to a violent death at an early age (for example, I, 352; I, 416; XVIII, 95). The Iliad repeatedly emphasises both Achilles’ many gifts which make him superior to others and the awareness of his near death, thereby illustrating the destructive force of war and the sadness of the loss of young life. According to legend, Achilles had to choose between a short and glorious life and a long one spent in obscurity (Iliad, IX, 412–16). Both in the Iliad and the Odyssey the Achilles-figure is employed to question the heroic ideal and the view that glory is worthy and desirable reward for an early death. His imminent end is repeatedly mentioned, but the epic closes before his death, which is narrated in the Odyssey, where the shadow of dead Achilles would ‘rather slave on earth for another man— / Some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive— / Than rule down here over all the breathless dead’, thereby implicitly correcting the choice he made in life. [36] In addition, the Iliad questions the glorification of war in another way: Achilles, as its main character and greatest warrior, is not an entirely positive character. The best fighter and the most beautiful and gifted of all Greeks, he can also be a cruel and brutal killer, an over-emotional and vindictive character who does not always act according to the epic’s concept of honour. [37] In The Deformed Transformed, the Achilles connection is thus a hint at Arnold’s probable early and violent death, and also supports the play’s subversive comment on the heroic ideal and the illustration of its brutality. [38]

     Byron’s reviewer in The New European Magazine noticed that Caesar’s role as cynical commentator also recalls Thersites, a minor character in the Iliad, and a more prominent figure in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. [39] The lame and deformed Thersites, in the Iliad ‘the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion’ (II, 216) questions the sense of the campaign, and after several lost battles suggests that the Greeks give up the siege (II, 25–242). His protest is effectively suppressed by Odysseus, who beats him down (II, 265–69), but although Homer has the crowd cheer and agree with Odysseus (II, 270–77), his arguments are not contradicted, and (at least for the modern reader) they leave an uneasy feeling. In Troilus and Cressida, Thersites’ role is of greater importance. [40] Like The Deformed Transformed, Shakespeare’s play presents a very unheroic, brutal war: its Achilles is a very negative character who kills the Trojan prince Hector not in a fight, but while he is taking off his armor (V. 8. 1–22). Thersites mocks and ridicules the Greek warlords very much as Byron’s Caesar mocks Bourbon (e.g. II. 1; II. 3; III. 3; V. 1). At one point, he makes his exit calling the Greek commanders ‘the faction of fools’ (II. 1. 118). Like The Deformed Transformed, Troilus and Cressida is concerned with a criticism and subversion of the heroic ideal and a presentation of the dirt and violence of war.

     As one of the main heroes fighting on the Greek side, Achilles is invariably connected with the Trojan War. In transporting Arnold to a Rome under siege, Caesar therefore to a certain degree makes him re-enact the role of the original Achilles in a rewriting of the Iliad. Arnold has to discover that he cannot completely maintain his original personality and self in a new body. Quite early on in his career, he longs to be ‘in peace—at peace’ (I. 2. 21); he has no desire to be a war-hero, but apparently, in the body of Achilles, he cannot escape from this role. In this context, it is also significant that the city under siege is Rome. According to Roman legend (told, most famously, in Virgil’s Aeneid), Rome was founded by the descendants of Aeneas, the only survivor among the great Trojan heroes. [41] The Romans saw their city as a second Troy, which makes Arnold’s position as Achilles even more poignant.

     While Arnold as an Achilles-figure is the enemy of Rome as a second Troy, Caesar’s name links him to the city. Not only has he chosen the name of the famous dictator, and the title of Roman emperors. Julius Caesar’s family, the Patrician Julii Caesares, claimed direct descent from the Trojan hero Aeneas via his son Julus (Aeneid, I, 321–48). Thus, the Stranger’s decision to call himself Caesar already alludes to a future enmity between him and Arnold. In this context, Caesar’s name even gives a subtle hint that he is in fact the Devil. Aeneas was the son of the goddess Venus (Aeneid, I, 315): the planet Venus, both ‘morning’ and ‘evening star’, is traditionally also identified with Lucifer, the ‘bringer of Light’, or ‘Son of the Morning’, as Arnold addresses him (III. 1. 21). [42] Arnold’s own suggestion that the Stranger, when he announces his intent to change his own shape, might adopt ‘that of Paris’ (I. 1. 367), who killed Achilles, or that of ‘The Poet’s God’ Apollo (I. 1. 368), the most powerful god to fight on the Trojan side, also prepares for their future rivalry. In addition, the allusion to Apollo as the god of poetry also refers to the Stranger as an artist, a product and defender of civilisation in contrast to Achilles as a destructive war hero, and of course, as a ‘creator’ like the poet himself. Throughout the drama, the Stranger/Caesar is linked both to the Devil and the artist. Thus, his claim to ‘ape’ (I. 1. 367) the actions of the ‘Being who made’ (I. 1. 86) the original Achilles alludes to the traditional image of the Devil as ‘God’s ape’, but also to the artist ‘aping’ the author of the original Iliad. Implicitly, the play both rejects and mocks the Romantic idea of the artist as a godlike original creator and instead hints at the iconoclastic, or even derivative nature of all art.

     Unlike Arnaud, who after his transformation finds himself incapable of affection and love, Arnold falls in love with the Roman girl Olimpia, whom he had rescued from a rape attempt. Despite his deed, as well as status, valour, and physical beauty, however, Olimpia remains indifferent to him (III. 1. 46–54). When he complains about this in the fragment of Part III, Caesar implies that once Arnold has chosen to reject his own body, he has also lost the capacity to be loved for himself:

Though his greatest wish had been to be loved, he has to find out that, in a body other than his own, it is impossible to inspire true affection. Instead of liberating him, his transformation has lead to alienation and loss of self. In the ‘sublime’ shape of Achilles, much like in his original body, he can find admiration, but not the affection he claims to desire. Byron may also be alluding to Burke’s remark that ‘Achilles, in spite of the many qualities of beauty which Homer has bestowed on his outward form, and the many great virtues with which he has adorned his mind, can never make us love him’ (IV, 24), as he is too far removed from ordinary human beings. Thus his beauty and qualities make him sublime and ‘Other’ in the same way as a disabled character (such as Pickersgill’s Arnaud), whereas a loveable character is familiar and small. [43] Burke also argues that the reader is meant to sympathise with the domestic Trojans rather than the Greeks:

     The character of Olimpia herself is also linked to other women from classical mythology. Her readiness to kill herself instead of being raped associates her with the Roman heroine Lucretia, who killed herself after having been raped by Sextus Tarquinius, son of king Tarquinius Superbus (Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, I, 58). In ancient Rome, she was seen as the epitome of female heroism and virtue; according to legend, her fate gave the impulse for the expulsion of the Tarquin kings, and the foundation of the Roman Republic (Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, I, 59–60). [47] Caesar explicitly compares Arnold’s love for her with Achilles’ love for Penthesilea (II. 3. 144–46), queen of the Amazons, who—according to one tradition (although she does not appear in the Iliad)—is first killed by Achilles and then raped by him. [48] When the Stranger first describes Achilles, he mentions his betrothal to the Trojan princess Polyxena, how ‘With sanctioned and with softened love’ he stood ‘before / The altar, gazing on his Trojan bride’ (I. 1. 274f.). Like his mention of Penthesilea, however, the invocation of Achilles’ love for Polyxena points to a tragic, violent ending, for, according to some versions of the legend, Polyxena was sacrificed to the shadow of dead Achilles after the Greeks had conquered Troy. Olimpia’s attempt to kill herself at the altar in St Peter’s may also be an allusion to Polyxena. [49] All these women resemble Olimpia in that they are traditionally represented as being very courageous, but all of them share a tragic fate and are either abducted, raped, or killed. Thus these allusions hint at a tragic outcome of the love story between Olimpia and Arnold, which may have to do with his rivalry with Caesar. At the same time, they also point at a major consequence of war and pillage: violence towards women.

     In Byron’s representation of a chaotic world, the choice of Rome and of the particular event of the Sacco di Roma is highly significant. The political centre of the ancient world and medieval capital of Western Christianity, Rome is in more than one sense the centre of the Western World and European culture. Interestingly, in Caesar’s view the city as a place is re-gendered and changes gender as it develops from political to spiritual capital: it ‘hath been Earth’s lord / Under its Emperors, and—changing sex, / Not sceptre, an hermaphrodite of empire— / Lady of the Old World’ (I. 2. 8–10).

     In the early sixteenth century, when the story takes place, Rome had long lost its political power and its spiritual leadership of Christianity was threatened and questioned by the Protestant Reformation (which features in The Deformed Transformed in the person of the Lutheran soldiers who call the Pope the ‘Anti-Christ’; II. 3. 5), so that the city in The Deformed Transformed symbolises both power and its fragility. Several times, the play emphasises that Rome itself had been the aggressor, an expansive empire similar to the Holy Roman Empire by which it is now attacked. Although, as Arnold points out, the present Romans cannot be held responsible for the deeds of their ancestors, the Holy Roman Empire, once itself conquered and subdued by Rome, now sees itself as Rome’s heir. Both are located in a world and a culture in which violence breeds violence. In this context, the intertextual reference to the Trojan War is equally important: the ancient Romans saw themselves as the descendants of the Trojans. The allusion to Troy supports the notion that a victim will in time become an aggressor. It shows present conflicts as rooted in a distant, mythological past. In addition, in the Iliad’s version, the story of the Trojan War was the oldest literary text in Western culture known in Byron’s time. Although legendary, in ancient Greece and Rome it was largely seen as historical. By alluding to the first great war in European cultural memory in a play which subverts the heroic ideal, Byron implicitly criticises and challenges a literary and historiographic tradition which glorifies and idealises classical heroism and which celebrates the wars of the past and the present.

*     *     *     *     *

In its unfinished state, The Deformed Transformed is a genuinely sceptical work. Clearly, in the play love and freedom are not achieved by the rejection of one’s own physical reality and individuality, but Byron does not argue either that ‘mental beauty’ has precedence over or transcends the physical state (which might have been the case if Olimpia had indeed fallen in love with Caesar in Arnold’s body). In fact, in a finished version the play might have easily lost some of its complexity. As it is, the fragment explores the relationship between body and soul without giving any definitive answers. Keeping Caesar’s identity ambiguous, it also maintains an interesting tension between the presentation of a chaotic, amoral universe and a world conforming to Christian theology. It is therefore an interesting and tempting thought that the fragmentary state of The Deformed Transformed may have been deliberate. Although in a short preface he wrote that ‘the rest may appear, perhaps, hereafter’, [50] he wrote to his publisher John Hunt ‘I doubt I will go on with it’. [51] Byron’s decision to publish this ‘odd sort of drama’ as a fragment suggests that he might have intended it as an experiment, a dramatic counterpart to Don Juan, which was composed at the same time and shares its digressive structure. Contemporary reviewers already pointed out the similarities and supposed that his eventual decision whether to continue it or not depended on the audience’s reaction that it elicited. [52]

     Byron, who claimed to ‘deny nothing, but doubt everything’, had a lifelong suspicion of truths represented as definitive and orthodox. [53] The fragmentary state of The Deformed Transformed gives him the opportunity to use a Devil-figure and make a point about human cruelty in a chaotic world, without assuming any clear-cut theological position. His scepticism and awareness of the impossibility of any absolute truths is also connected to an awareness of the fragmentary character of every state and statement. From the beginning of his literary career, he experimented with fragmentary writing,and he commented in one of his journals that his own ‘mind [was] a fragment’. [54] The play also reflects the situation of the protagonist. It recalls the structure of the Iliad itself, which concludes before the imminent death of its main character Achilles. On a deeper level, Arnold himself is a fragmented being, who, through the transformation and the bond with the Stranger, gives up his body and his real self. Henceforth, he is divided in parts, his body severed from his soul and mind, and all of them disconnected from his past, so that he exists only in the present, split from his history.

     As the Stranger and Byron’s play argue, love and a fulfilling existence are not achieved through a narcissistic pursuit of perfection and a rejection of the imperfect. Rather, a reinvention of the self should acknowledge and integrate individual idiosyncrasies. As I have argued in this paper, The Three Brothers is relevant for Byron’s use of intertextual classical allusions in The Deformed Transformed, for his concept of heroism and the genesis of the Byronic Hero, as well as for his defiance of the Burkean concept of an opposition between the Sublime and the Beautiful. It is this combination of contrasts, this fluidity and paradox that constitute the fascination of the Byronic Hero and the Byronic idea of a complex, fulfilling life. In its present state, The Deformed Transformed is a highly sophisticated work, with a complex use of intertextuality. The classical allusions function on different levels, to characterise Arnold and Caesar and their relationship, to put in question the possibility of individual freedom and the nature of heroism, and to subvert the ‘classical’ Western heroic ideal and heroic historiography. The Deformed Transformed deserves to be recognised as one of Byron’s important investigations of the human condition.