DON JUAN
PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS
GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS
GEORGE GORDON BYRON was born on 22 January 1788 and he inherited the barony in 1798. He went to school in Dulwich, and then in 1801 to Harrow. In 1805 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, later gaining a reputation in London for his startling good looks and extravagant behaviour. His first collection of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807), was not well received, but with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) he became famous overnight and increased this fame with a series of wildly popular ‘Eastern Tales’. In 1815 he married the heiress Annabella Milbanke, but they were separated after a year. Byron shocked society by the rumoured relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, and in 1816 he left England for ever. He eventually settled in Italy, where he lived for some time with Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli. He supported Italian revolutionary movements and in 1823 he left for Greece to fight in its struggle for independence, but he contracted a fever and died at Missolonghi in 1824.
Byron’s contemporary popularity was based first on Childe Harold and the ‘Tales’, and then on Don Juan (1819–24), his most sophisticated and accomplished writing. He was one of the strongest exemplars of the Romantic movement, and the Byronic hero was a prototype widely imitated in European and American literature.
T. G. STEFFAN, a former Professor Emeritus of English in the University of Texas at Austin, died in 1996.
W. W. PRATT, a former Professor Emeritus of English in the University of Texas at Austin, died in 1991.
SUSAN J. WOLFSON received her PhD at University of California, where she met Peter Manning. She taught at Rutgers University between 1978 and 1991, and is now Professor of English at Princeton University. She has published numerous essays on texts and issues in English Romanticism, including several on Byron. She is the author of The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and the Interrogative Mode in Romantic Poetry (1986) and Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in English Romanticism (1996). She is completing Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism.
PETER J. MANNING graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from Yale University. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Southern California and is now Professor and Chair of English at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. A widely recognized authority on Byron, he is the author of Byron and His Fictions (1978) and Reading Romantics (1990), which includes further essays on Byron. He has numerous other publications on various aspects of English Romanticism. His current project is The Late Wordsworth, a culturally situated study of Wordsworth’s career.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
Edited by
T. G. STEFFAN, E. STEFFAN and W. W. PRATT
With an Introduction by
SUSAN J. WOLFSON and PETER J. MANNING
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published in Penguin Education 1973
Reprinted in Penguin Books with revisions and additions by T. G. Steffan 1977
Reprinted with revisions and additions by T. G. Steffan 1982
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1986
Reprinted with revised Further Reading 1996
Reprinted with a new Introduction and
revised Further Reading 2004
6
This edition copyright © T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan and W. W. Pratt, 1973
Revisions and additions copyright © T. G. Steffan, 1977, 1982
Revised Further Reading copyright © Susan J. Wolfson, 1996
Introduction and revised Further Reading copyright © Susan J. Wolfson
and Peter J. Manning, 2004
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold,
hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 9781101490556
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Editors’ note
Table of Dates
Further Reading
Don Juan
Motto to Cantos I–V
Preface to Cantos I and II
Dedication
Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Canto IV
Canto V
Motto to Cantos VI–XVI
Preface to Cantos VI–VIII
Canto VI
Canto VII
Canto VIII
Canto IX
Canto X
Canto XI
Canto XII
Canto XIII
Canto XIV
Canto XV
Canto XVI
Canto XVII
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
Appendix
Acknowledgements
The editors and publishers gratefully acknowledge the permission of the University of Texas Press to draw freely from the four volumes of the 1957 and 1971 Variorum Don Juan in preparing this Penguin edition.
The editors and publishers are also grateful for the permission granted by the following libraries and individuals to quote from the Don Juan manuscripts in their possession: the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New York Public Library, the Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Trustees of the British Museum; the Sterling Library, University of London Library; the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Inc.; the Pierpont Morgan Library; the Miriam Lutcher Stark Library of the University of Texas at Austin; Mr Edwin Thorne; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Library; and John Grey Murray, who not only has several Don Juan manuscripts in his archives, but also holds the legal rights to all of Lord Byron’s papers.
T. G. STEFFAN, E. STEFFAN and W. W. PRATT
Introduction
‘to begin with the beginning’
Byronic, Byronism, Byromania: in his own lifetime Byron entered the lexicon as an adjective, a mode, a phenomenon. The legend-making took shape around the ‘Byronic hero’, of which Byron himself was the celebrity embodiment: ‘Mad – bad – and dangerous to know’, so Lady Caroline Lamb affected to dismiss her first acquaintance with the poet, in March 1812, just before succumbing to a tempestuous affair. The overnight triumph of 1812, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, introduced the ‘hero’, a figure then typecast, with minor variations, across the decade in The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina, Manfred, and two further cantos of Childe Harold (now with the narrating poet, rather than the Childe, as the focus of interest) – all patterned to Lord Byron’s own self-fashioning. The paradox was that this popular, seduct
ive creation was a perfection of titanic, herd-despising alienation – all the more alluring for his mystery, his exotic passions, his secret sins, his self-torturing pride. Tapping an ‘inner Byron’ in readers of every class, sex, culture and nationality, the passionate poetry captivated the imagination of a war-weary world (since 1793). Byron deepened and enhanced his modern hero with a visible lineage from Shakespeare (Richard III, Macbeth, Hamlet, lago, a bit of Othello – all blazing on the Regency stage in the Byronic charisma of actor Edmund Kean 1 ); from Satan in Paradise Lost (alienated, rebellious, sarcastic, theatrical, seductive and, of course, poetic); and from the Satanic school of eighteenth-century rakes, among them, the Don Juans and Don Giovannis of novels, opera, theatre and popular culture.
Byron could have rested his fame on this stunning literary conquest, yet he turned out to be one of its chief antagonists. This wasn’t a matter of moral judgement (that was work for the disapproving press, its outrage only fuelling the fascination), just of Byron’s boredom with the fatal facility. The harbinger of something new was his decadent Italianate burlesque of 1818, Beppo, a tale featuring a chatty narrator and cast in the ottava rima (an eight-line rhymed stanza) that would become the signature of Byronic satire. The confirmation of this harbinger was the debut in 1819 of Don Juan (also in ottava rima), its title evoking the old hero, only to prove a book you can’t tell by its cover. ‘I want a hero’, begins the epic that would play out in serial publication from 1819 to 1824. It was a recurring public performance, only intermittently about ‘Don Juán’, each instalment more sensational than the last. Its sixteen cantos promised inexhaustible inspiration. Just months into the first, Byron assured his publisher John Murray that he had enough juice for ‘50 cantos’; 2 and just months before he died, he told his doctor in Greece that ‘he meant to write a hundred’ at the very least, ‘that he had not yet really begun the work – that the sixteen cantos already written were only a kind of introduction’. 3 There were fresh instalments to Don Juan even after Byron’s death. A suppressed ‘Dedication’ to Poet Laureate Robert Southey, no less angry in its political invective than hilarious in its mockery, at last had its say in the Poetic Works of 1832 (the year of the first Reform Act). Then, in 1903, the start of a seventeenth canto, left unfinished at Byron’s death and left unpublished for the entire nineteenth century, emerged as the latest excitement, a time capsule that proved still timely.
A NEW SENSATION
From the outset, Don Juan was an unsparing assault on ‘cant’, a contemporary term (less in use now) for complacent, shallow sentiment, tinged with hypocrisy, laying claim to local conversations and the wider languages of cultural fashion, national vaunting, religious and other sermonizing and, not the least, throaty anthems of military ‘glory’. 4 So fearless were Byron’s first two instalments of Don Juan (Cantos I–II in 1819; Cantos III–V in 1821) that these appeared without his or the publisher’s name (anonymity prevented prosecution for blasphemy or libel). Even so, the public ably identified Byron – in no small part because of the transparent coding. Canto I spoofed the headline scandal of 1816: the feeding frenzy of rumour, cant and speculation surrounding the sudden, mysterious ‘Separation’ of Lord and Lady Byron, followed within a few months by Byron’s theatrical farewell to England (for ever, it turned out). If by 1819 Byron was an expatriate, ‘Byron’ was still very much in England. Everyone read Don Juan with electric curiosity. It was dazzlingly, shockingly new, not just for Byron but for British literature, even European literature. While many friends, publisher Murray and several more reviewers were dismayed by the irreverence and ‘immoral’ erotic liberty, one friend, poet Percy Shelley, hailed the originality and significance. With a partisan affection for the satire but also a disinterested admiration of Byron’s genius, he shared with his wife Mary Shelley his enthusiasm for the ‘incredible ease & power’ of the poetry (he had just finished reading Canto V). Here was ‘something wholly new & relative to the age’: ‘every word of it is pregnant with immortality’, he assured the novelist, poet and essayist Thomas Love Peacock, and to Byron himself he cheered:
It is a poem totally of its own species, and my wonder and delight at the grace of the composition no less than the free and grand vigour of the conception of it perpetually increase… This poem carries with it at once the stamp of originality and a defiance of imitation. Nothing has been written like it in English – nor if I may venture prophesy, will there be… You are building up a drama, such as England has not yet seen… 5
No less than the genius, Shelley felt the potential: this method of ‘building up a drama’ was a performance not just reflecting the world but operating as a force within it. The poem’s vigour of conception was animated by the shifts of cultural currents and currency among at least three levels: the late-eighteenth-century era of Juan’s adventures; Byron’s Grand Tour of the continent (1809–11) and his years in England, from the éclat of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812 to the scandals of 1816; and the era of the poem’s writing and publication, 1818–23, also the first years of post-Napoleonic Europe’s restored reactionary monarchies and new repressions. Through a range of voices, allusions, quotations and references, and of perspectives entertained or denounced by the narrator, Don Juan works its exchanges among these levels, as well as between the narrator and the audience he entertains and harangues, teases and frustrates, and for ever intrigues. Byron treats literary conventions satirically, sentimental commonplaces irreverently, and public issues with the conversational fluency of a sceptical intelligence engaged with the ordinary materiality of the world. Along with learned literary references and rivalries, there are coterie allusions, topical jokes, slang, brand names, gossip and riffs on the events of the day. Everything is fair game: kings and soldiers, other writers (past and present), Spanish mores and Spanish maids, shipwrecks, Greek pirates, Turkish harems, Russian armies, British highwaymen, British lords and ladies – and Byron’s own life, from his mother-dominated childhood to his disastrous marriage. With its conspicuous first-person narrator and teasings of authorial self-reference, Don Juan played to its contemporary public as autobiographical verse; and with its serialization, it previewed a new form of fiction to come, the serialized Victorian novel.
The course of new poetry never runs smooth, however, and Byron proved the case in spades. The instalments of Don Juan, serial as they were, were also sharply divided by a forced switch in publishers, in 1822, from the cautiously establishment John Murray to the fearlessly radical John Hunt. Murray was already nervous about Cantos I–II in the spring of 1819, just months before scheduled publication, and hoped Byron could see his way to some alterations. But Byron wrote back sharply (6 April), ‘You sha’nt make Canticles of my Cantos,’ refusing (via the implied pun) all cant and insisting on amusement over moralism: ‘The poem will please if it is lively – if it is stupid it will fail – but I will have none of your damned cutting & slashing – If you please you may publish anonymously it will perhaps be better’ (BLJ VI 105). Giving Murray permission to proceed this way, Byron also insisted that he ‘omit the dedication to Southey – I won’t attack the dog so fiercely without putting my name – that is reviewer’s work’ (VI 123). Jabbing at the cant for which Murray’s Quarterly Review was the official press, he declares, ‘I will battle my way against them all – like a Porcupine’, and then shoots off a few quills at the public still addicted to the Byronic Hero, and wanting another fix:
As to the Estimation of the English which you talk of,… I have not written for their pleasure;… I have never flattered their opinions – nor their pride – nor will I. – Neither will I make ‘Ladies books’ ‘al dilettar le femine e la plebe’ – I have written from the fullness of my mind, from passion – from impulse – from many motives – but not for their ‘sweet voices.’ – I know the precise worth of popular applause – for few Scribblers have had more of it – and if I chose to swerve into their paths – I could retain it or resume it – or increase it – but I neither love ye – n
or fear ye – and though I buy with ye – and sell with ye – and talk with ye – I will neither eat with ye – drink with ye – nor pray with ye… (BLJ VI 105–6)
This ranting is peppered with the casual allusiveness that everywhere animates Don Juan. The authorial compact with Coriolanus’ contempt of the sweet-voiced populace expands into an elaborate riff on outsider Shylock’s contempt of those with whom he transacts his living but with whom he knows no, and desires no, intimacy (Merchant of Venice I iii).
By the spring of 1822, Byron’s increasingly controversial publications, not just Don Juan but also Cain (denounced as blasphemy), were making Murray increasingly edgy, ever more eager to ‘slash’. He had shelved other work Byron was eager to have in print, in particular The Vision of Judgment (a satire on the Poet Laureate’s ode on the death and ascension to heaven of George III). In exasperation, Byron gave The Vision of Judgment to Hunt for the first issue of the Liberal, a journal of art and opinion on which he and fellow poets Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt (John’s brother) were collaborating in Italy. Not only was The Vision of Judgment promptly prosecuted for libel, but Murray and his circle were scandalized by Byron’s liberal associations. ‘A man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his talents, a man of his habits’ (raged Murray’s literary adviser John Wilson Croker) ‘can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call Radicals… these jackal followers of his’ (letter, 26 March 1820). 6
Murray kept hoping to redeem Byron, having done wonderfully good business on the second instalment, Don Juan III–V, in 1821; but he was truly dismayed by his preview of Cantos VI–VIII: ‘so outrageously shocking that I would not publish them if you were to give me your Estate – Title and Genius,’ he wrote to Byron in October 1822, begging him, ‘For Heaven’s sake revise them – they… would shock the feeling of every man in the country and do your name everlasting injury.’ 7 By the end of the year, despairing of Byron’s redemption, Murray decided to end the long and profitable association, and Hunt received all the new cantos of Don Juan. Delighted with the award, Hunt got the presses rolling for three instalments in 1823 alone (VI–VIII in July; IX–XI in August; XII–XIV in December), while Byron, feeling not just released but positively liberated from his struggle with Murray, burned off a new prose Preface for VI–VIII (in effect, a new start), reintroducing Don Juan as a poem now much more centrally, and oppositionally, engaged with modern politics and society. ‘[I]t is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard’, he wrote to his friend (and literary agent) Tom Moore in August 1822. He was fashioning the poet into a warrior of the pen: despite ‘fearful odds’, he said, ‘the battle must be fought; and it will be eventually for the good of mankind, whatever it may be for the individual who risks himself’ (BLJ IX 191).
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