Gondola In The City Of Venice Essay

Byron uses the image of the gondola as a synecdoche for the city of Venice. No other symbol fully encapsulates the fluidity and restlessness of the city, nor the pervasive intermixing of life and death that characterises Venice so fully. This is particularly true of Beppo, in which the gondola functions as a demonstration of the thin boundaries between the two seemingly antithetical states of life and death in Venice. The connection between the gondola and Venice is established in the opening paratext of the poem: the combination of the subtitle, A Venetian Story, and the Shakespearean epigraph with its emphasis on the gondola as an indicator of Venetian identity, reinforces our sense of the two being interchangeable in Byron’s own narrative. In the poem itself, Byron’s description of the gondola breaks away from the inheritance of Shakespeare’s fictional Venice: Didst ever see a gondola? For fear You should not, I’ll describe it you exactly: ‘Tis a long covered boat that’s common here, Carved at the prow, built lightly but compactly, Rowed by …show more content…
Marino Faliero is ostensibly about stained honour and political corruption, and the gondola therefore depicts a distorted fertility in which death and destruction are uncontrollably reproduced. The gondola exists as a concrete presence throughout Marino Faliero, specifically used to transport Faliero to his induction in the conspiracy; later, Lioni notes the “skimming lights” (IV.i.98) of the gondolas without realising they are being used to transport conspirators towards their designated positions. Here, the gondola is enabling the birth of a revolutionary plot and therefore the attempted liberation and rebirth of