From Manfred on, Byron wrote a series of works in dramatic form, though he often insisted that they were not intended for production. He claimed at some length (for example in the Prefaces to Marino Faliero and Sardanapalus) that these dramas were modelled on Aristotle's principles, observing the unities of time, action and place, and eschewing the Shakespearean tradition of the English stage. This was part of his general attack on Romantic self-indulgence, and his stout defence of the poetry of Pope and the eighteenth century. It should be noted though that the underlying rationale of this defence is not very eighteenthcentury- like. It depends on the premise that the individual is the ultimate meaning-giver in life, and therefore needs the support of civilized (but artificial – in the linguist 's sense ‘conventional’) decorum in order not to fall into solipsistic chaos. The earlier period started from the opposite presumption – that civilized decorum was an absolute mirror of universal truth and the very opposite of human hubris. Byron's insistence on ‘art’ over ‘nature’ is closer to the twentieth century than it is to the eighteenth.

The only one of these plays to have substantial repeated success on stage was Werner, which became something of a box office hit in the nineteenth century, in an acting version edited by the actor and impresario William Macready. But most of the plays had a significant cultural impact, even if not on the stage. Manfred, most obviously, as well as entering into the canon of literary texts and the history of ideas, produced orchestral works by Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Sardanapalus is the subject of a painting by Delacroix, as is Marino Faliero. Cain became a cause célèbre over its supposed blasphemy, and is revived from time to time in small-scale productions to the present day. All of this is in stark contrast to the dramas of Byron's poetic contemporaries – Coleridge's for example – whose theatre works have sunk far deeper than Southey in his lake. But this may have more to do with Byron's fame, than with the intrinsic merits of the plays. However, though they never rise to the level of Don Juan, Werner and Cain in particular do have some metrical interest, and most share with their progenitor, Manfred, a clear thematic structure, almost like a laboratory experiment, which can reveal a lot about Byron's thinking.