Don Juan

Byron's Don Juan is written in ottava rima, a stanza of eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming abababcc. In it, we find a dazzling complexity of style and content, including the seriocomic, the mock epic, and epic satire. The piece is consummately Byronic, although the melancholy of the Byronic hero is less evident than in other works.

Byron said that in it he intended "to be a little quietly facetious about everything," and Don Juan clearly fits that description. It is an encyclopedic, satiric treatment of man, manners, and morals, systematized sophistry, and the wretched affectations of the nineteenth century. He satirizes love, honor, politics, war, youth, law, literary theory, sex, hypocrisy, education, fraud, marriage, books, the Bible, and more.

His concern throughout is appearance versus reality and the fallen state of man.

It is a kind of new retelling of Paradise Lost. Juan is like Adam after he has left the garden, in a world which is no longer a paradise, but full of sham, fraud, and hypocrisy. Because the piece is a composite of the folly of all mankind, Juan's experiences parallel every individual's in some way.

The first 16 cantos were published variously from 1818 to 1824; the fragmentary 17th was published in 1903.

The poem has seven major divisions:

Canto I: Liaison with Donna Julia

Canto II: Storm and Shipwreck
Wrecked in a storm, Juan and several survivors are reduced to cannibalism. Juan alone escapes to a Greek island.

Canto II-IV: The Haideé Idyll
A beautiful Greek girl nurses Juan back to health, while her pirate father, Lambro, is away. They fall in love. Lambro returns, wounds Juan, and sells him into slavery.

Canto IV-VI: The Harem Episode
Juan is purchased by Gulbayez, a love-starved sultana. She disguises him as a female and conceals him in her harem. Because he cannot forget Haideé and she suspects him of loving a harem girl, Dudù, she orders him to be killed. He escapes and makes his way to the Russian lines.

Canto VII-VIII: Siege of Ismail
Juan serves with the Russians against the Turks. He distinguishes himself and saves a little girl, Leila. Wounded slightly, he carries dispatches to St. Petersburg.

Canto IX-X: The Court of Catherine the Great
Juan becomes the latest favorite of the empress, but he grows tired of her attentions. Reluctantly, she sends him, along with Leila, on a diplomatic mission to England.

Canto X to the end: England

As you read, consider the narrator as a puppet master and Juan his puppet. Your anthology's introduction to the poem notes: It is a mistake to look to Don Juan primarily for the story. “The controlling element is not the narrative but the narrator, and his temperament gives the work its unity" (622).