The Penguin text differs in many respects from other editions – in spelling, italics, capitalization and punctuation. The spelling recommended by recent dictionaries has usually been accepted. Occasionally an archaic spelling (burthen, sate) is retained because it affects pronunciation in a rhyming position. Byron used both sat and sate, rhymed sat with chat, that and also twice with what (to our ears this last one is an oblique or impure rhyme). He treated the Latin verb sat in the same way, twice rhyming it with that and what. He rhymed sate with gate and state. Since sate often appears in non-rhyming positions and in passages where he used other words with a similar vowel sound, this spelling has been kept for the assonance he intended. His spelling of proper names, even when it differs from recent custom, has usually been followed.
In 1820, it was proper to print words considered vulgar or profane with dashes (d–n, w–s, b–s). The manuscripts and first editions are inconsistent here, partly because of Byron’s teasing mischief. Twentieth-century editions have maintained this convention, but on the following pages, Byron’s damns (the manuscripts had many that he himself censored), whores and bitches have been spelled out.
Though Don Juan is replete with an ingenious variety of contractions, one obsolete and misleading usage rarely appeared on Byron’s manuscripts, but was introduced by editors or publishers: the apostrophe in the past tense and past participle of numerous verbs (sharpen’d, soil’d, watch’d) in the first five cantos published by John Murray. 3 When John Hunt became the publisher, these superfluous apostrophes vanished almost entirely from Cantos VI–XII, but recurred frequently from the middle of Canto XIII to the end of Canto XV and then disappeared again in Canto XVI. This variation was possibly due to whim or carelessness or to a change of copy editors. Since the apostrophe does not affect the modern (or Byron’s) pronunciation of these verbs, the present text prints the ed that Byron wrote on the manuscripts.
However, for the past tense and past participle of verbs ending in s and p, Byron sometimes, but not always, liked the t ending: blest, carest (for caressed), confest, dipt, drest, exprest, kist, nurst, stript, supt, tost (for tossed). Since it seemed sensible to maintain this manuscript spelling in rhyme words, it has been kept also in other places where he may have preferred the t sound to d.
Although for certain verbs grammarians (e.g. Lindley Murray) preferred the past tense that is also current today (began, rang, sang, sank, sprang), Byron used a form that was common in his time: begun, rung, sung, sunk, sprung. These appeared as rhymes and also in other positions.
On his manuscripts Byron capitalized hundreds of abstractions and other nouns that he thought important, but caprice ruled and rushed his quill. The first and later editions printed many of these oddities. In the Penguin text, capitalization, as determined by current custom, is reserved for proper names, titles, the deity, personification, and for other ‘standard’ occasions. One exception has been Nature, where Byron referred to the rural outdoors in general, or where he had in mind a universal, eternal body of law or principle, or that which was a right or just form or norm in human life, as opposed to freakishness and distortion. But where such eighteenth-century concepts are not involved and where he means human character or individual temperament or a personal proclivity, nature is lower cased.
Byron was as strongly addicted to italics as he was to capitals, and most of these have been copied by editors. The present text has retained those that were his means of calling attention to puns or to metrical stress that does not coincide with an oral accent – to words that without italics might not be given the rhythmic beat he desired. Italics are also used for ‘a foreign slipslop now and then’ (XIII 47, 6) – words and quotations, which on the manuscripts were set off with quotation marks and/or italicized. But words that were alien in 1820 may not be so in 1970. Byron regarded ennui as a welcome import, but still an emigrant (XIII 101, 5–8) and treated début in the same manner. Both were later anglicized. The chief problem now is that dictionaries of our own generation are not in agreement about the contemporary status of many words. Purée and consommé have been accepted in the United States though not in England, according to the Oxford Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary (10th edn, 1967) which has usually been followed in the present text. This dictionary does not italicize entremets and syncope, but both the shorter and the longer OED do so.
Byron neither knew nor cared much about punctuation and asked others to ‘point’ his verse. He scattered thousands of dashes across his pages, often two or three per line: to get a full stop, to divide syntactical segments, and to indicate caesuras and rhetorical pauses. Except for the question and exclamation marks, other manuscript punctuation was sparse, haphazard, and often coupled with the dash. Editors not only have kept too many of Byron’s dashes but also have felt obliged to substitute some mark for almost every dash they discarded, and even to add punctuation where Byron had none, of which very little was necessary for clarity. For a century and a half, the punctuation of Don Juan has remained chaotic as successive printers and editors continued to revise it, changing colons to semi-colons and vice versa. It is often so eccentric as to be a distraction, and so excessive as to disrupt the flow of Byron’s talking verse. Moreover, since colons and semi-colons were more fashionable than periods, the change of Byron’s dashes to other partial stops lengthened many of his sentences with a loose chain of remotely coordinate clauses, that gave the structure an easy appearance of complexity it does not really have. In the present text, punctuation has been reduced and simplified in an attempt to sustain the fluent, colloquial movement that prevails in most of Don Juan. Even in the declamatory outbursts and the oratorical parallels, punctuation has been as restrained as possible. But Byron’s rhetorical habits, his emotional and stylistic fluctuation, as well as his conviction about the inconsistency of all things, render futile and absurd any attempt at absolute consistency. Hence, one of Byron’s mannerisms has usually been observed – a dash or lesser stop in the final line of the octave, or at the end of line 7, to enforce a long pause before a concluding contrast, surprise or irony. Another more complex indulgence, the many asides and discursive interruptions, for which Byron used either dashes or parentheses, no one would want to try to simplify, other than to diminish double or triple punctuation.
Byron’s contractions are associated with his metrics and with two prevailing cadences: a decasyllabic line with a stressed ending or an eleven-syllable line with an unstressed ending. He used or avoided contraction to contrive either one of these two endings. Like Haidée’s poet, ‘his verses rarely wanted their due feet’. Only through haste did he allow an eleven-syllable line to end with a stress. Where such a verse remains on a manuscript and in all editions and where no elision will shrink it to a pentameter, but where contraction of a verb (I’m, I’ve, she’s, he’d, they’re, and others) will yield one of his rhythmic patterns, it would be consistent with Byron’s customary phrasing to use the contraction in the Penguin text. There are few such situations in the first four cantos. Beginning with the fifth they become more numerous. Had Byron made his own fair copies of Cantos VI–XVI, he might have marked the natural and necessary contractions. The present text, nevertheless, retains the uncontracted verbs, but several notes suggest that they be read as Byron pronounced them – with a contraction that will give one of his two common cadences. (See the notes to Canto V 4, 6, and Canto XII 28, 4.)
Although elision is abundant in Don Juan, Byron rarely signalled it with an apostrophe, nor does the present text ever do so. The reader should, however, be alert to the opportunities for elision, that are vital to Byron’s colloquial style and to his rhythmic pace. Once in the publication of an early poem, he issued a firm directive: ‘Always print “een” “even”. I utterly abhor “een” – if it must be contracted, be it “ev’n”.’ 4 Many deceptive dissyllables are to be read as monosyllables, though not invariably: fall’n, giv’n, heav’n, ris’n, pow’r, dow’r, dev’l. Just as common is elision (again unmarked) that co
mpresses an apparent trisyllable to a dissyllable, that is sometimes ungainly: blund’ring, diff’ring, flutt’ring, glitt’ring, ling’ring, rend’ring, flatt’rer, slack’ning, threat’ning, ev’ry, myst’ry, corp’ral, gen’ral, temp’rate, mod’rate. Elision also occurs where an apostrophe would be inept or misleading: natural, mutual, championed, glorious, virtuous, all of which are usually dissyllabic.
The rare malapropisms and the sort of maladroit abuse or semantic lapse that Byron and Thomas Moore derided in the speeches of Castlereagh, and the somewhat more frequent anacoluthons and solecisms (real or apparent) – these are so integral to the verse of Don Juan that it would be presumptuous and impossible to tamper with them. Moreover, what may now seem ungrammatical may have been a colloquialism in Byron’s day: ‘You was not last year at the fair of Lugo’ (IV 88, 7). Sometimes a singular noun or pronoun by implication may be understood as a collective plural: ‘each Cossack/Who were immortal, could one tell their story’ (VII 14, 3–4). Or a verb may be drawn into the plural by an intervening noun as well as by the implied sense: ‘neither of their intellects are vast’ (IV 2, 4). Readers who may be jolted by ‘has sank’ (III 89, 5), and by ‘some sung psalms’ (for sonics too, II 34, 3), and by the case of the pronoun in III, Lyric 16, 2: ‘Where nothing, save the waves and I’, will concede that these are beyond our jurisdiction and that the process of modernizing must observe its respectful, logical and essential limits.
In four or five stanzas among the two thousand, when the 1833 and later editions provide a precedent, a singular verb has been made plural (contrary to the manuscript and the first edition). In these few sentences, the change did no violence to metrics, meaning or euphony. A few verbs, if pluralized, would have seemed artificial and ludicrous to Byron, as well as to us, however theoretically correct the change might be; for instance, in XV 40, 3–5 and XVI 60, 7, where several singular subjects follow a singular verb. All verbal departures from the manuscripts and the first editions have been recorded in the notes.
1973 T. G. STEFFAN, E. STEFFAN, and W. W. PRATT
REPRINTS 1977, 1982
The text of Byron’s poem remains identical to that of the 1973 Penguin edition with the following exceptions: in Canto I 194, 7–8; I 195, 1; and 197, 6; and in Canto II 20 certain verbal changes were required.
The Notes have been altered within restricted limits to include those which were sent to the publisher too late to appear in the first edition, and new ones assembled since 1973. We hope this section has been improved by condensing a few entries and by expanding several dozen others, some only by a few words or a sentence, others by a paragraph. The content of these additions adheres to the purposes and principles explained in the introduction to the Notes of the 1973 edition (p. 559).
We call attention to the Appendix beginning on p. 756 where in 1977 and 1982 we placed Notes that could not be inserted without considerable repagination.
We are gratefully indebted to all readers and scholars who have called our attention to misprints and other lapses and who have provided us with essential information.
November 1976 T. G. STEFFAN
May 1977
May 1982
NOTES
1. See Introduction, p. viii. For this edition the Editors’ Note has been abridged from their original introduction.
2. Letters to Murray, 25 March, 23 April 1818, LJ IV 217–18, 231 (see p. 561 for abbreviations). Letter from Murray to Byron, 16 June 1818, in Samuel Smiles (ed.), A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1891), I 393–4.
3. For an exposition of the principles followed by Murray’s staff, see T. G. Steffan, Lord Byron’s Cain (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 145–7.
4. LJ II 278.
Table of Dates
1778 Captain John (Mad Jack) Byron (b. 1756), poor but extravagant, elopes with rich Lady Carmarthen (Baroness Conyers) and later marries her (1779).
1783 Augusta Byron, the poet’s half-sister, born.
1784 Captain John Byron’s wife dies.
1785 He marries Catherine Gordon of Gight for her money and soon impoverishes her.
1788 George Gordon Byron, the poet, born 22 January with a deformed foot; his lameness a lifelong harassment.
1789 Taken to Aberdeen, Scotland, by his mother.
1791 Death of his father, Captain Byron.
1792 Attends day school in Aberdeen. Childhood here not unhappy in spite of their need for money and his mother’s alternating tantrums and affectionate effusions. For the next few years he is influenced by the Calvinism of his nurses, Agnes Gray and her sister May Gray, who also encourage his thorough reading of the Bible. Becomes heir to the title.
1796 His precocious, idealized devotion to eight-year-old Mary Duff begins.
1797 Pious May Gray begins his sexual experience.
1798 Death of his great-uncle, Lord William Byron, ‘the wicked Lord’. Byron inherits the title and Newstead Abbey, heavily encumbered by debts. Mrs Byron, her son and May Gray move to Newstead (August).
1799 Byron stays in Nottingham, attended by May Gray, while he is tormented by excruciating, but unavailing, treatments of his club foot. Goes to the Hansons in London with May Gray (July). Hanson sends her back to Newstead and urges her dismissal; puts Byron into Dr Glennie’s school at Dulwich. Continued painful foot treatments.
1800 Passion for his cousin Margaret Parker inspires his ‘first dash into poetry’. Restless at Glennie’s school. Friction with his mother.
1801 At Harrow until 1805. Falls in love with Mary Chaworth.
1804 Mrs Byron living at Southwell; Byron’s friendship with Elizabeth Pigot. Begins writing poetry. His mother beset by financial problems.
1805 Mary Chaworth rejects him and marries John Musters. Augusta comes to Harrow for Speech Day. Byron enters Trinity College, Cambridge, in October.
1806 Fugitive Pieces, his first book of poems, privately printed, immediately suppressed and destroyed.
1807 Poems on Various Occasions (January); Hours of Idleness (June); in Southwell nine months. Returns to Cambridge (June).
1808 Edinburgh Review violently attacks Hours of Idleness (February); lives at Newstead. Receives MA degree at Cambridge (4 July); leaves University heavily in debt.
1809 Attains majority; takes seat in House of Lords, ignored by his guardian, Lord Carlisle. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers appears (March). Sails with Hobhouse to Lisbon (2 July). Journeys to Seville, Cadiz and Gibraltar; sails to Malta (August); to Albania, where he visits Ali Pasha (September); to Missolonghi (November); to Athens (December). Canto I of Childe Harold completed (30 December).
1810 Leaves Athens for Smyrna (March). Completes Canto II of Childe Harold (March); to Constantinople (April–July); returns to Athens and remains ten months.
1811 Sails for England (May); reaches London (July). Death of Mrs Byron (1 August), the drowning of Matthews, and the previous loss of young friends all depress him. Byron lives at Newstead. Corresponds with Augusta. Writes Thyrza poems.
1812 Speeches in the House of Lords. Childe Harold I and II published by John Murray (March). Byron becomes famous. Friendship with Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers, John Murray, Lady Melbourne and others. Affairs with Caroline Lamb and Lady Oxford. Meets Annabella Milbanke; proposes and is refused.
1813 Byron much in London society. Affair with Augusta (June); confides in Lady Melbourne. The Giaour published (June); The Bride of Abydos (November).
1814 Byron’s daughter, Medora Leigh, born to Augusta (April). The Corsair and Lara published (February, August). Byron and Augusta at Newstead (early September). Engaged to Annabella Milbanke (15 September).
1815 Married at Seaham (2 January). Settled in a London house on Piccadilly Terrace (late March). Hebrew Melodies published. Meets Sir Walter Scott. Becomes a member of Drury Lane Management Committee. Visits from Augusta, April to June, November to March 1816. More financial difficulties. Daughter, Augus
ta Ada, born 10 December. Lady Byron alienated.
1816 Lady Byron leaves London for her father’s house, Kirkby Mallory (15 January). Siege of Corinth and Parisina published. Deed of Separation drawn up (March) and signed in April. Byron snubbed by London society. Financial difficulties become acute. Claire Clairmont begins her liaison with him (April). Prepares to leave for the Continent. Public auction of his library (23 April). Accompanied by Fletcher (his servant) and Dr Polidori, Byron leaves England for ever (25 April). Travels through Belgium; visits field of Waterloo; up the Rhine, reaches Geneva (25 May). Rents Villa Diodati; Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont living near by. Tour of Lake Geneva with Shelley (June). Writes Childe Harold III and The Prisoner of Chillon, which are taken to London by Shelley (near end of August). Travels in Alps with Hobhouse for a few weeks. Writes two Acts of Manfred. Leaves for Milan (5 October); moves on to Venice (10 November); lives with the Segati; affair with Marianna Segati. Starts going to the conversazioni of the Countess Albrizzi. Childe Harold III and The Prisoner of Chillon published (November). Casual affairs with many lower-class women.
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