Summary
Summary of Don Juan
Key ideas
Key idea 1
Juan overturns the familiar legend
Byron takes the Spanish legend of a seducer and turns it upside down. His Juan is a good-natured young man pursued by women and carried along by events, rather than a hunter directing every encounter. That change gives the poem its comic starting point.
Behind Juan stands a restless narrator who jokes, complains and wanders away from the action. His targets include hypocrisy, war and poets who flatter the powerful. The adventures matter, but so does the voice questioning the values behind them.
Key idea 2
Respectability conceals desire and excuses
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Key idea 3
Hunger exposes the limits of virtue
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Key idea 4
Kindness makes an island refuge
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Key idea 5
Power cannot command real love
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Key idea 6
Kindness matters more than military glory
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Key idea 7
Polite society hides its own vices
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Key idea 8
The wandering voice holds everything together
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Key idea 9
Distrust grand words and value kindness
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Read the rest freeWho it’s for
For readers who love wit, travel and satire, with love affairs, shipwrecks and adventures at royal courts. Byron’s comic poem also welcomes anyone who enjoys a narrator who mocks hypocrisy, war and fashionable society.
What this book is
Don Juan is a long comic poem by Lord Byron, written between 1818 and 1823 and left unfinished when he died in 1824 in Greece. It runs to sixteen full cantos and part of a seventeenth. Byron took the old Spanish legend of Don Juan, the seducer who ends in hell, and turned it upside down. His Juan is not a hunter of women. He is a good-natured young man to whom things keep happening, and women keep pursuing him.
Byron wrote it while living in Italy, far from the English society that had turned against him after the scandal of his failed marriage. The poem is his answer. It laughs at hypocrisy, at war, at poets who flatter the powerful, and at his own earlier fame. The narrator, who sounds a great deal like Byron himself, wanders off the plot whenever he likes, to joke, to complain, to praise a glass of wine, or to attack a politician.
In about fifteen minutes you will follow Juan from his strict childhood in Seville through love, shipwreck, a pirate island, a Turkish harem, a bloody siege and the courts of Russia and England. You will also see how the poem works and why readers still enjoy its voice. We begin where Byron does, with a boy and his mother.
In this summary
- 1A boy raised by a learned motherFree
- 2A first love with a married woman
- 3Shipwreck, hunger and hard choices
- 4An island idyll with Haidee
- 5A slave market and a sultan's palace
- 6War at Ismail, seen without glamour
- 7From Catherine's court to English drawing rooms
- 8What the poem is really about
- 9How the poem is told
Key point 1 of 9
A boy raised by a learned mother
The poem opens in Seville, where Juan is born to Don Jose and Donna Inez. The narrator says at once that he wants a hero, and that every year brings a new one, so he will choose the old Juan, a name everyone knows from the stage and the legend. He then sets his hero in a house at war with itself.
Don Jose is a careless man who has affairs and spends more than he has. Donna Inez is proud of her learning and her virtue. She knows mathematics, Latin and a good deal of morals, and she watches her husband for faults. Byron makes sly fun of her, and most readers see in her a comic portrait of his own wife, though he denied it.
Their marriage breaks down in a long and petty quarrel. Don Jose dies, and Inez is left to bring up their only son. She decides that Juan will be educated with the greatest care. His tutors teach him the classics, but she picks out the passages, and the improper lines are gathered together in an appendix at the back, where they are easy to find.
The narrator enjoys the joke. A boy forbidden to hear about love is the boy most likely to fall into it. Juan is gentle, handsome and curious, and his mother's careful scheme to keep him pure is the very thing that leaves him unready for the world.
This opening sets the tone for the whole poem. The story moves quickly, the narrator interrupts it often, and every serious subject, such as marriage, learning and virtue, is treated with a smile that has an edge. We are told early that the real subject is how people behave, not how they say they behave.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Check yourself
How does Byron change the traditional figure of Don Juan?
Right. “He is a good-natured young man to whom things keep happening, and women keep pursuing him.”Not quite. “He is a good-natured young man to whom things keep happening, and women keep pursuing him.”
Which action gives Juan's role at Ismail its moral importance?
Right. “In the chaos of the storming he rescues a small girl, Leila, from soldiers who are about to kill her.”Not quite. “In the chaos of the storming he rescues a small girl, Leila, from soldiers who are about to kill her.”
What fault connects the poem's targets of satire?
Right. “Byron claims that most of the sins people condemn are small, and that the worst sin is pretending to be better than you are.”Not quite. “Byron claims that most of the sins people condemn are small, and that the worst sin is pretending to be better than you are.”
Questions about Don Juan
What is Don Juan by Byron about?
It follows a young Spaniard, Juan, through love affairs, a shipwreck, a Turkish harem, a war and the courts of Russia and England, while a witty narrator mocks hypocrisy, war and society.
Is Byron's Don Juan the same as the legend of the seducer?
Byron uses the old Spanish legend but reverses it. His Juan is not a cold seducer who is punished. He is an innocent and good-natured young man, pursued by women and swept along by events.
Why is Don Juan unfinished?
Byron began it in 1818 and kept adding cantos for years. He died in 1824 in Greece with sixteen cantos and part of a seventeenth written, and he never settled on a final plan.
Is Don Juan hard to read?
The language is plain and conversational. The humour, the story and the rhythm carry the reader along from one adventure to the next.
What is ottava rima in Don Juan?
It is an Italian stanza form of eight lines, rhymed in a set pattern, with the last two lines rhyming together. Byron uses the final pair for jokes and sharp turns.
