History of english literature

3. The poem “Don Juan”
In English literature, Don Juan (1819–1824), by Lord Byron, is a satirical, epic poem that portrays Don Juan not as a womaniser, but as a man easily seduced by women.[1] As genre literature, Don Juan is an epic poem, written in ottava rima and presented in sixteen cantos. Lord Byron derived the character, but not the story, from the Spanish legend of Don Juan.[2] Upon initial publication in 1819, cantos I and II were criticised as immoral, because the author Byron too freely ridiculed the social subjects, the persons, and the personages of his time.[3] At his death in 1824, Lord Byron had written sixteen of seventeen cantos, whilst canto XVII went unfinished.
Lord Byron was a prolific writer for whom "the composition of his great poem, Don Juan, was coextensive with a major part of his poetical life"; he wrote the first canto in late 1818, and the seventeenth canto in early 1823.[3] Canto I was written in September 1818, and canto II was written in December–January 1818 – 1819. Cantos III and IV were written in winter of 1819–1820 and canto V was written in October–November 1820. Cantos I and II were published on 15 July 1819, and cantos III, IV, and V were published on 8 August 1821.
Byron began to write canto VI in June 1822, and had completed writing canto XVI in March 1823. Given the moralistic notoriety of the satirical, epic poem, John Murray refused to publish the latter cantos of Don Juan, which then were entrusted to John Hunt, who published the cantos over a period of months; cantos VI, VII, and VIII, with a Preface, were published on 15 July 1823; cantos IX, X, and XI were published on 29 August 1823; cantos XII, XIII, and XIV were published on 17 December 1823; and cantos XV and XVI on 26 March 1824.[3]
Structure
The poetical narrative of Don Juan (1819–24) is told in sixteen thousand lines,[4] arranged in seventeen cantos, written in ottava rima (eighth rhyme); each stanza is composed of eight iambic pentameters, with the couplet rhyme scheme of ab ab ab cc. The ottava rima uses the final rhyming couplet as a line of humour, to achieve a rhetorical anticlimax by way of an abrupt transition, from a lofty style of writing to a vulgar style of writing.[5]
In the example passage from Don Juan, canto I, stanza 1, lines 3–6, the Spanish name Juan is rhymed with the English sound for the words true one. Therefore Juan is spoken in English, as /ˈdʒuːən/ JOO-ən, which is the recurring pattern of enunciation used for pronouncing foreign names and words in the orthography of English.[6]
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan
— Don Juan, canto I, stanza 1, lines 3–6.[7]
The Argument
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. On the way, he is shipwrecked on an island in the Aegean Sea, and there meets the daughter of the pirate whose men later sell Don Juan into Turkish slavery. At the slave market of Constantinople, the sultana sees Don Juan up for sale, and orders him bought and then disguised as a girl, in order to sneak him into her chambers. Consequent to arousing the jealousy of the sultana, Don Juan barely escapes alive from the harem. He then soldiers in the Imperial Russian army, rescues a Muslim girl, and attracts the favour of Empress Catherine the Great, who includes him to the royal court. In the course of Russian life, Don Juan falls ill because of the climate, and Catherine returns him to England, as a Russian courtier. In London, the diplomat Don Juan finds a guardian for the Muslim girl. The narrative then relates Don Juan's ensuing adventures with the British aristocracy.[8]