Byron's 'Deluge': Heaven and Earth

Until George Steiner and a handful of late twentieth-century critics and writers on theatre began to question long-repated assertions about the failure of Byron's late plays as actable scripts, reviews tended to write off his second 'mystery', "Heaven and Earth", as a slighter, if rather less contentious drama than its immediate precursor, "Cain" (also subtitled 'A Mystery'), and as a marginally less absurd production than its late successor, "The Deformed Transformed" (performed in 1970 by the Triple Action Theatre company in the UK under the direction of Steven Rumbelow). "Heaven and Earth" is a more daring work than "Cain" in its free-ranging verse experimentation, and in its proto-extistentialist focus on the dilemme of a sensitive human unable to act out of a convistion that all action is futile.