Don Juan: Lord Byron

Don Juan is an 'epic carnival'. It has scope, variety of human experience, common sense,
much matter for laughter, clever and witty observation, ease and fluency; that is why Walter
Scott said the "it has the variety of Shakespeare".
Don Juan was intended as a satire on abuses of the present states of society. It is a quietly
mocking satire on everything, and a serious satire on the hypocrisies of high society, the false
glory associated with war, mans pursuit of fame, the little devices by which people try to
deceive themselves, the human penchant for rationalization, It ridicules things in a unique
tongue-in cheek manner that strikes, without seeming to, everything on its way. In general,
the style, of Don Juan is the easy conversational or epistolary style.
Don Juan begins with a dedication to Robert Southey and William Wordsworthboth
famous poets of the time, whom Byron lampoons here. The narrator distances himself from
these great men by insisting that his own muse is of a lesser nature, and so his verse will
be lesser as well.
The narrative then begins with the birth of Don Juan. The child of Donna Inez and Don Jose
of Seville, Don Juan is sexually precocious, having an affair with his mothers best friend,
Donna Julia. Don Alfonso, Donna Julias husband, discovers the affair and Don Juan is sent
to Cadiz.
En route to Cadiz, Don Juan is shipwrecked, the only survivor of the vessel, and left alone
until he encounters Haidee, daughter of the pirate Lambro. Lambros men find both Haidee
and Don Juan, who is captured and sold into slavery.
The lovely Gulbayaz, member of the Sultans harem, arranges for Don Juans purchase. She
has him disguised as a girl and smuggled into her chambers. Don Juan almost immediately
insults Gulbayaz by bedding one of her courtesans; Gulbayaz threatens to have both
offenders killed, but Don Juan manages to escape.
Don Juan then joins the Russian army in its assault on Ismail; there he proves himself an able
warrior and rescues the Muslim girl Leila. Victorious, the Russian army goes to St.
Petersburg, where Don Juan and his captive are presented to Catherine the Great. Don Juan
so impresses the Czarina that she invites him to join her court.
Don Juan then becomes ill and is sent to England as an ambassador from Russia. There he
finds a governess for the girl Leila. Thus begin a series of shorter adventures among the
British aristocracy.
Analysis
Don Juan is written in groups of eight lines of iambic pentameter that follow an
ABABABCC rhyme scheme, which is known as ottava rima. The dedication, sixteen cantos,
and fragmentary seventeenth canto make up the poem, which Byron insisted was unfinished.
Unfortunately, Byron died shortly after the publication of the last cantos and was therefore
unable to complete the entire mock epic.
As with Childe Harolds Pilgrimage, the protagonist, Don Juan, is often more a plot device
than a character, as the narrator is subsumed into Byron himself. Byron becomes more
central to the poem than the young hero. Don Juan is actually a rather flat characterhe is
young, of a sweet disposition, and simultaneously innocent and promiscuous. Don Juan falls
(often literally) into his amorous adventures, the passive recipient of the erotic attentions of a
succession of aggressive women of power.

Don Juan is a mock epic in that its protagonistwhile often heroic (as in the battle of Ismail
in Canto VIII)is in fact nave and his adventures almost entirely the result of accident. The
tone of the poem is comic, which Byron accentuates with playful rhymes andin particular
incisive homonyms. Byron makes his satire of the classical epics clear in Canto I, where
he notes that Most epic poets plunge in medias res (1.6.41), but then states, This is the
usual method, but not mine (1.7.49) and then proceeds to tell the tale of Don Juan from the
very beginning: his birth.
Always self-conscious of his literary standing, Byron did not neglect to include literary and
cultural criticism in his comedic epic, as he did in Childe Harolds Pilgrimage. His
dedication to Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth seems to be a humble distancing of his
own low efforts from these poets grand accomplishments, but even a cursory reading
demonstrates his incisive critique of their discursive and verbose styles of writing.
The adventures of Don Juan themselves are poetic re-imaginings of Byrons own escapades
and dysfunctional relationships with the women in his life. These make them of interest not
just as poetry but also as windows into Byrons biography from his own point of view. Byron
retells the story of Don Juan with himself as the womanizer. Whether this long poem is a late
masterpiece or self-indulgence or both remains a matter of debate.