SOURCE: Goldberg, Leonard S. “‘This Gloom … Which Can Avail Thee Nothing’: Cain and Skepticism.” Criticism 41, no. 2 (winter 1999): 207-32.

In the following essay, Goldberg argues that, for Byron, Cain's tragedy “can serve as a locus for testing the legitimacy of his own skepticism.”

From the moment the hero of Cain realizes he is more afraid of Lucifer than of the angels who limit him to “a glimpse of those / Gardens which are my just inheritance,” Byron invites us to read his tragedy as a meditation on legacies, economic and epistemic both.¹ Cain comes to understand what it means to bargain, barter, and haggle, and lives economically in a sense that his parents, condemned to lives at hard labor, never come to do. His desire for more of everything—more life, more liberty, more land, more knowledge—points in this direction, for his primal conviction is that the world can...