Reading Order
Don Juan Reading Order
Don Juan (1819–1824) by George Gordon, Lord Byron is the most brilliant, entertaining, and formally adventurous long poem in English — an unfinished satirical epic in sixteen cantos (Byron died leaving a seventeenth begun) that takes the legendary libertine Don Juan and instead of making him a villain, makes him a passive, good-natured young man through whose adventures Byron can satirize everything he hated: the English aristocracy, the literary establishment (Southey and Wordsworth are savaged), the hypocrisy of sexual morality, war, commerce, and finally the entire Romantic ideology of noble feeling and heroic striving. The poem's verse form is the ottava rima — an eight-line stanza borrowed from the Italian comic epic tradition (Ariosto, Berni) — and Byron deploys it with a virtuosity and a wit that has never been equalled in English: the rhymes are comic, outrageous, and often deliberately bad; the digressions are as interesting as the narrative; and the relationship between the narrator and the reader is one of the great sustained performances in poetry. The poem is simultaneously a love story (Juan's shipwreck and rescue by Haidée is one of the great romantic idylls in the tradition), a war narrative (the siege of Ismail in Cantos VII–VIII is the most powerful anti-war writing in Romantic poetry), and a sustained comic assault on the pretensions of the age. It is one of the few long poems that can actually be read with pleasure from beginning to end.
Where to start
Don Juan (1819–1824) — the Penguin Classics edition edited by T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W.W. Pratt (1977; revised 2004) is the standard scholarly edition with the best notes on the historical, literary, and personal allusions. The Oxford World's Classics edition edited by T.G. Steffan and E. Steffan is also excellent. Read with the notes — the poem's satirical energy requires knowing who Byron is attacking; without the notes, a third of the jokes are invisible.
Complete Don Juan Book List
- 1Buy
Don Juan (Penguin Classics)
Lord Byron (ed. T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan, W.W. Pratt)·2004·The standard scholarly edition — the Steffan notes are the most thorough identification of Byron's allusions, targets, and sources; essential for getting the full satirical force of the poem. - 2Buy
The Major Works (Oxford World's Classics)
Lord Byron (ed. Jerome McGann)·2008·The best single-volume Byron — includes Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the major tales (Manfred, The Giaour), and the lyrics; McGann's introduction is the most authoritative short account of Byron's career and poetic method. - 3Buy
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Lord Byron·1812·The poem that made Byron famous overnight — the melancholy autobiographical narrator travelling through Napoleonic Europe; read before Don Juan to understand what Byron was reacting against in his own earlier self; the contrast between the two poems shows Byron's comic self-awareness. - 4Buy
Orlando Furioso
Ludovico Ariosto (trans. Barbara Reynolds)·1516·The Italian comic epic that gave Byron his verse form and his comic method — Ariosto's ottava rima and his digressiveness and his wit are the direct models for Don Juan; reading even a few cantos of Ariosto shows where Byron's formal innovation came from. - 5Buy
Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture
Tom Mole·2007·Scholarly study of Byron's celebrity and its relationship to his poetry — Byron invented the modern celebrity author, and Don Juan's narrator-persona is a product of the same self-aware public performance; essential for understanding the poem's cultural position.
Don Juan — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Don Juan by Byron about?
Don Juan (1819–1824) by Lord Byron is an unfinished satirical epic in sixteen cantos following Juan — not the predatory seducer of the legend, but a passive, good-natured young Spaniard who falls in love easily and innocently. His adventures include a seduction by a married woman in Seville, a shipwreck and idyllic love affair with the Greek girl Haidée, the siege of Ismail as a soldier, capture and sale as a slave in Constantinople, and a visit to the English aristocracy. But the poem's real subject is Byron's narrator — endlessly digressive, satirically brilliant, and one of the great comic voices in English poetry.
Is Don Juan by Byron the same as the legendary Don Juan?
Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819–1824) deliberately inverts the legendary character. In the tradition (Tirso de Molina's play, Mozart's Don Giovanni), Don Juan is an active, predatory seducer who pursues women, defies God, and is damned. Byron's Juan is passive and good-natured — women pursue him, he falls in love innocently, and he causes suffering not through predatory ambition but through the ordinary consequences of his attractiveness. Byron uses this inversion to satirize the moralism that condemned the legendary Don Juan: the poem implies that real sexual hypocrisy belongs to the society that moralizes about Juan, not to Juan himself. The poem is Byron's satirical assault on the entire English moral and literary establishment dressed as a comic epic about a legendary libertine.
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