Foreword

ON 15 JULY, 1819, London publisher John Murray issued 1500 copies of Cantos I and II of Lord Byron’s new poem Don Juan anonymously: he feared it might harm his Author’s brilliant reputation and his own. Don Juan spurned the censorship and self-censorship of late Regency literature. Here was a major poet writing light-heartedly, with great energy and wit about "what everyone knows" of sex, fame, war, religion and liberty but few — no establishment figure, certainly, in 1819 — would discuss. Except Lord Byron.

The first edition was a roaring success (and quickly pirated). Murray continued, anxiously to attempt to `curate’ the manuscripts of the following Cantos and, on 8 August 1821, published Cantos III-V. But Byron, exasperated with Murray’s `corrections’ and misprints, used the Hunt brothers’ radical press for all subsequent Cantos.

This annotated edition collects those first five Cantos. A second volume is planned for Cantos VI to X, which brings Juan on his “grand tour” to England… and, perhaps, a third.

How Should you read Don Juan? “Just jump right in"’ is a good strategy. The verse of Don Juan is infallibly metric and canters on stanza-after-stanza with clever rhymes, hilarious imagery and brutal disregard for propriety, pomp and political correctness.

In every respect, Don Juan is a performance of, and by, Byron. Try reading out loud – even muttering to yourself – you’ll quickly find yourself acting the part. It’s a multi-layered a performance: self-conscious and contrived for comic effect so we can never be quite sure when Byron is play-acting and when (if ever) he is not. Still, he manages to make us feel we’re having just as much fun as he is.

Byron probably did not have a clear idea of the whole poem when it was first published. Don Juan was issued as a sort of serial. Still, it’s not the random journey that he liked to claim (especially to his anxious publisher, John Murray). The trail of Juan’s travels — from his youth in Seville, through his Aegean love affair to his captivity in Contantinople, bravery at the siege of Ismail, prominence in St Petersburg and mission to the English court — is an adventure calculated by Byron to propel his satire and and provide the variety of scenery and manners that — in a jokey kind of way — justifies the "epic" label that Byron ironically claims.

Then Bryon wanders off the trail of his narrative a dozen times or more in every Canto. His diversions are almost as long as the narrative and are in some ways the best part of the poem. So… don’t be afraid of wandering. Wandering in your reading is good: I hope my brief tables of contents at the head of each Canto will help. They are a sort of guide to the "good bits" and you should absolutely take advantage of them. Remember, however, the tables by no means capture all of the good bits. So be sure to “read between the lines” (of the tables) too..

As for the notes in the margin… They are, strictly, unnecessary: Byron’s great poem remains “the most readable poem of its length ever written” (Virginia Wolf) and “by far the greatest comic poem in English” (Germaine Greer). My notes and the illustrations are meant only to refresh the jokes, jibes, historical and literary references of Don Juan for readers 200 years later.

I owe a great debt to Peter Cochran’s extensive commentary (PC in the text); to the notes in the Steffan/Penguin edition, and; to the footnotes that Dr Isaac Asimov (IA in the text) provides in his beautiful edition of Don Juan, illustrated by Milton Glaser (Doubleday, 1973).

All the other stuff and remaining errors are mine. I’d be grateful to any reader who would let me know of such faults using the contact details at petergallagher.net.

This PDF edition of Don Juan has been prepared for reading on-screen using any of the popular & free PDF readers. The file will display on a phone screen, but it may be hard to read.

The notes accompanying this edition of Cantos I & II of Don Juan are covered by a Creative Commons “Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)” license. So long as you give credit to Peter Gallagher at petergallagher.net, you may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. You may also adapt and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. To preserve these versions they have also been uploaded to archive.org

The Cantos

Canto I

Don Juan is born in Seville to the unwary, philandering, Don José and his ’learnéd’ wife, Donna Inez. José dies when Juan is young leaving Inez to raise him according to strict principles that leave Juan with no knowledge of anything practical, much less biological. Donna Julia, 23 years old and married to the much older Don Alfonso (a former beau of Inez), falls for the handsome, 16-year old Juan. Although she resists the temptation at first, Julia seduces Juan. Don Alfonso, suspecting that his wife may be having an affair, bursts into their bedroom one night, followed by a lawyer and witnesses. Julia and her servant hide Juan under the covers of the bed just in time. Farcical scenes ensue. Finally, Juan is discovered. After a brief struggle with Alfonso, he easily prevails and flees into the night. To dampen scandal, Inez sends Juan off on a sea-voyage ’to improve his morals’, while Julia withdraws to a nunnery.

Canto II

The ship on which Juan leaves Spain is wrecked by a storm in the Gulf of Lion. The crew, Juan, and his entourage take to a boat. As hunger and thirst take their toll on the marooned sailors, they resolve to kill one of their number and eat him. The lot falls to Juan’s tutor. Only Juan refuses to join in the ghastly feast. Madness and despair grip the survivors. One by one, even in sight of land, they perish or drown. Juan, alone, manages to swim ashore on an Ionian island where he faints, exhausted on the beach. Haidée, the beautiful daughter of the pirate-slaver Lambro, master of the island, discovers Juan. She hides him in a cave and nurses him back to health, teaching him, meanwhile to speak Greek. One night, on the moonlit strand, they consummate their love.

Canto III

Juan and Haidée live in unclouded happiness on the island; their love absolute and seemingly eternal. The lovers feast, celebrate, and entertain the island’s inhabitants in Lambro’s palace, Juan clothed in eastern splendour, Haidée reigning as queen in her absent father’s stead. At the height of the festivities, a wandering poet sings of Greece’s fallen glory — a celebrated lyric lament for a nation enslaved. Then, abruptly, the idyll is shattered. Lambro, reported dead, returns from his piratical voyages to find his island home transformed into a scene of revelry and his daughter openly living with a stranger. He is a cold, controlled man; his fury, though volcanic, is suppressed beneath a mask of calm. He surveys the scene, recognises the situation, and withdraws to plan. The canto closes on an ominous note of suspended threat as the lovers, oblivious, sleep in each other’s arms.

Canto IV

Lambro strikes. His armed retainers fall upon Juan; a violent struggle ensues in which Juan fights desperately but is outnumbered, wounded, and put in irons. Haidée throws herself upon her father with a ferocity that astonishes even him, but she is restrained by force. Juan, bleeding and bound, is carried aboard one of Lambro’s vessels, destined for the slave markets of the East. Haidée, bereft, slips into a profound delirium — she neither eats nor speaks, locked in a waking dream haunted by visions of Juan. She wastes away and dies, a casualty of love and of her father’s pitiless will, her unborn child dying with her. Juan, meanwhile, shackled and grieving, is carried eastward on the slave ship — along with an Italian Opera troupe, betrayed by their Impressario — toward Constantinople and a new chapter of misadventure.

Canto V

Juan and his fellow captive Johnson, an English soldier-adventurer, are transported as slaves to Constantinople and put up for sale in the market. Juan is sold to Baba, a corpulent black eunuch acting on behalf of Gulbeyaz — the imperious, beautiful fourth wife of the Sultan — who has been captivated by Juan’s looks. Baba dresses Juan in female clothing to smuggle him past the palace guards and into the seraglio. The seductive Gulbeyaz expects her new slave to yield easily to her desires but Juan, still raw with grief for Haidée, instead bursts into tears and refuses — a defiance that first enrages, then disarms, the Sultana. Still, she is on the verge of ordering his death when the Sultan himself arrives to inspect his harem and notices the new "female" slave with disconcerting interest, leaving Juan’s disguise and his life in equal peril.