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Don Juan (Spanish: [doŋ ˈxwan]), also known as Don Giovanni , is a legendary, fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. The original version of the story of Don Juan appears in the 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina.
Don Juan begins with the birth of the hero, Don Juan, in Seville, Spain. As a sexually precocious adolescent boy, Juan has a love affair with a married friend of his mother. When the woman's husband discovers her affair with the boy, Don Juan is sent to the distant city of Cádiz.
- Lord Byron
- 1819
- Events in History at The Time The Poem Takes Place
- The Poem in Focus
- Events in History at The Time The Poem Was Written
- For More Information
Don Juan—history and legend
While it is unclear whether Don Juan Tenorio—as he was most often called—was a real person, the dashing seducer had been a familiar figure in Spanish and Italian folk legend as early as the seventeenth century. In 1630, Tirso de Molina, a Spanish monk, became the first to dramatize Don Juan’s exploits in his play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra(“The rake of Seville and the stone guest”). In the play, Don Juan engages in a series of romantic intrigues, seducing and abandoning seve...
Don Juan’s interaction with Catherine the Greatrepresents one of the more historical interludes in Byron’s poem. Born in 1729, Sophia Augusta Frederica—of the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst—was betrothed in 1744 to Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, nephew of Empress Elizabeth of Russia and heir presumptive to the Russian throne. In an attempt to please her mother-in-law, Sophia took the name Ekaterina (Catherine) Alekseevna before her marriage in 1745. The royal couple soon became estranged; Peter...
BYRON AND THE SKEPTICAL TRADITION
Various modern critics have noted the influence of such skeptical thinkers as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, and Michel de Montaigne, the French essayist, in Don Juan. Indeed, in the poem’s later cantos, Byron, through the medium of his garrulous narrator, frequently expresses the main philosophical tenet of skepticism: that true knowledge of anything is uncertain. Quoting Montaigne’s motto “Que sÇais-je?” (“What do I know?”), the narrator explores the skeptics’ position “[t]hat all is...
Plot summary
The poem begins with an account of Don Juan’s childhood in Seville, as the only son of rakish Don Jóse and reserved, intellectual Donna Inez. The domestic strife of this ill-matched pair reaches a crisis when Donna Inez attempts to have her husband declared insane. Matters deteriorate until divorce seems inevitable, but then Don Jose unexpectedly dies of a fever. As Juan’s sole guardian, Donna Inez attempts to rear her son in the strictest propriety. At 16, however, the naive Juan falls in lo...
A “hero” for the age
While Byron’s earlier poems, such as The Corsair and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, featured tortured, brooding heroes with dark pasts and darker secrets, Don Juan represents a departure from that tradition in every way. Indeed, Byron has not so much adapted the Don Juan legend as turned it inside-out. The wicked, dashing seducer of Tirso’s play and Mozart’s opera has been replaced by “a stripling of sixteen” who, in the first of his adventures, is led astray by the older Donna Julia (Don Juan,...
BYRON’S RHYMES
In the first canto of Don Juan, Byron sets out his plans for his poem, declaring, “Prose poets like blank verse, I’m fond of rhyme, / Good workmen never quarrel with their tools” (Don Juan, 1.1605-06). Indeed, Byron’s fondness for rhyme and his determination that his stanzas should be seen and heard to rhyme contribute to the comic tone of Don Juan. For example, orthodox pronunciations of Spanish names are deliberately twisted for the sake of preserving Byron’s meter and rhyme scheme—thus, in...
Europe after the Napoleonic Wars
For the better part of 22 years—from 1793 to 1815—England was at war with France, observing with alarm the excesses of the French Revolution and the meteoric rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became emperor of France in 1804. In the decade that followed, England watched in alarm as Napoleon’s seemingly invincible army seized Rome, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. France’s victories on land, however, were countered by England’s might at sea; Admiral Horatio Nelson handed Napoleon a major defeat...
BYRON AND THE “LAKERS”
Byron’s animosity toward the Lake District poets had as much to do with politics as with poetics. As an outspoken liberal of the Whig party, Byron supported such causes as Catholic emancipation and labor reform. He even delivered an eloquent speech in the House of Lords on behalf of Nottingham weavers who were rioting to protest the mechanization of their profession. Byron’s liberalism also made him sympathetic to the principles underlying the French Revolution, even though he deplored the sa...
Reviews
Not surprisingly, in light of Byron’s fall from grace, critical response to Don Juan was hostile. Contemporary reviewers in England refused to judge poem and poet separately; Byron was attacked as much for his lifestyle as for his poetry. An anonymous review in the influential Blackwood’s Magazine stated: “[T]he poet has devoted his powers to the worst of purposes and passions.… The moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key—and if the genius of the author lifts him now and t...
Beatty, Bernard. Byron’s Don Juan. London: Croom Helm, 1985. Christensen, Jerome. Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1993. Coughlan, Robert. Elizabeth and Catherine: Empresses of All the Russias. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974. Eisler, Benita. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool ...
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.
Feb 16, 2021 · Don Juan is written in ottava rima, an Italian eightline stanza form that rhymes abababcc. It was used for both comic and serious work in Italian, and both Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544–95) wrote their great epics in the form.
Don Juan is one of the five great long poems in English, alongside Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), and Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850). But it rarely receives the degree of recognition which that status should imply.
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Jan 22, 2014 · The lavish thousand-page tome Asimov’s Annotated Don Juan (public library) presents Byron’s Don Juan — one of the great epic poems in the English language, launching an audacious and timeless attack on greed, complacency, and hypocrisy — with annotations by beloved writer Isaac Asimov, a man of strong opinions and a large heart, and ...
