Don Juan (Byron) - Sources

Sources

Byron's epic poem has a host of literary precedents. For example, John Hookham Frere's mock-heroic Arthurian tale Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work had suggested Beppo, and, at the same time, had prompted and provoked a sympathetic study of Frere's Italian models, Francesco Berni and Luigi Pulci; and, again, the success of Beppo, and, still more, a sense of inspiration and the conviction that he had found the path to excellence, suggested another essay of the ottava rima, a humorous poem "à la Beppo" on a larger and more important scale. If Byron possessed more than a superficial knowledge of the legendary "Don Juan," he was irresponsive and unimpressed. He speaks (letter to John Murray), of "the Spanish tradition;" but there is nothing to show that he had read or heard of Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convidado de Piedra (The Deceiver of Seville and the Stone Guest), 1626, which dramatized the "ower true tale" of the actual Don Juan Tenorio; or that he was acquainted with any of the Italian (e.g. the Convitato di Pietra of Giacinto Andrea Cicognini or French adaptations of the legend (e.g. Le Festin de Pierre, ou le fils criminel, a tragicomedy of Abbé De Villiers, 1659; and Molière's Dom Juan, ou Le Festin de Pierre, 1665). He had seen Carlo Antonio Delpini's pantomime, which was based on Thomas Shadwell's Libertine, and he may have witnessed, at Milan or Venice, a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni; but in taking Don Juan for his "hero," he took the name only, and disregarded the "terrible figure" "of the Titan of embodied evil, the likeness of sin made flesh", "as something to his purpose nothing"! But many readers have also detected echoes of eighteenth-century comic novels in Don Juan, pinpointing the poem's rambling, desultory style, flamboyant and distractible narrator, and heavily ironic tone—qualities that Byron may have gleaned from novels like Fielding's Tom Jones, as well as the writings of Tobias Smollett. Likewise, Don Juan belongs to the tradition of the picaresque, a genre of fiction (originating in Spain) that followed the adventures of roguish young men of low birth who made their way in a corrupt society via their cunning and courage. (Fielding's and Smollett's novels also belong to this genre.) Finally, Byron was probably inspired by Cervantes's Don Quixote and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, two works which he greatly admired and borrowed from liberally.