About the work
Politian is Edgar Allan Poe's only attempt at a stage play: an unfinished blank-verse tragedy he wrote in 1835 while working as an editor for the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. The surviving scenes first appeared anonymously in 1835–36 as "Scenes from an Unpublished Drama" in the Southern Literary Messenger; Poe did not publish the full text of his fragment until 1845, in an appendix to his poetry collection "The Raven and Other Poems." He based the plot on the so-called Kentucky Tragedy of 1825, transposing it from Kentucky to sixteenth-century Rome.
Plot
In Rome, the English Earl Politian falls in love with Lalage, the disgraced ward of Duke di Broglio, who was seduced and then abandoned by the Duke's son Castiglione in favour of a suitable engagement. When Lalage reveals that Castiglione is still alive, Politian swears revenge and challenges him to a duel. The fragment breaks off at night in the Colosseum, where Politian waits for his rival while Lalage recalls her own vow of vengeance — whether the duel takes place is left open by the unfinished manuscript.
Cultural significance
After the muted response to the published scenes, Poe turned away from verse drama for good and concentrated on the short story instead. The complete text, reconstructed from Poe's manuscript, was not published until 1923, by the Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott; the first staging of Poe's own text took place on 19 January 1933, performed by the University of Virginia's Virginia Players.