Lord Byron
In Westminster Abbey, Byron’s friends, wife, and sister ask the Dean to permit a statue and the poet’s burial there. The arrival of the statue prompts memories of Byron’s courtship, his incestuous relationship with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and his exile. Fearing what his memoirs might reveal, they burn the manuscript without reading it. When the Dean learns what they have done, he denies Byron burial in the Abbey. The shades of the poets in Poets’ Corner welcome Byron at the end.