Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend. - Review - book reviews

Criticism, Spring, 1999 by Jonathan Gross

Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend by Moyra Haslett. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 310 pp. $78.00.

Moyra Haslett's Byron's Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend draws on speech-act theory and a broad definition of myth to argue that Byron's poem owes more to the historical myth of a legendary seducer than has been previously acknowledged. Ultimately, Haslett's book is an examination of how Byron's contemporaries responded to his poem; of how that response would have been mediated by a thorough knowledge of the Don Juan legend as represented in the various forms that preceded it, such as British pantomime and Mozart's opera; and of how the political implications of Byron's hero--the choice of subject and the narrator's commentary on Don Juan's behavior--can best be read against the nuances of its differences from and similarities to the stage version.

The two terms in Haslett's title might easily be reversed, for her interest is as much in the Don Juan legend as it is in Byron's poem. Influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss, Haslett argues that a myth should be understood in all of its permutations, as "a narrative which can be not only rewritten but also reinterpreted" (8). She uses the word legend, then, because it more adequately describes the full range of meanings a given myth might have. "Levi-Strauss's inclusive definition of a `myth' is especially necessary from a feminist perspective," Haslett argues in her final two chapters, "for its generosity of scope allows feminism's own spokes(wo)men to be heard" (271).

Haslett's first chapter provides a wonderful survey of how the Don Juan legend changed over time, responding to specific political and historical circumstances. Tirso de Molina imbued Don Juan with vitality, charm, and moral ambiguity, Haslett argues, while Villiers, Dorimon, Rosimond, and Shadwell created a "thoroughly villainous" hero (33). In England, Don Giovanni was performed sixty-three times between 1817 and 1819, inspiring a spate of burlesques and pantomimes. Keats reviewed one of the more popular of these, Harlequin's Vision, and the Shelleys, Hogg, Peacock, and Claire Clairmont all attended a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni (1818) that same year, only months before Shelley visited Byron in Italy and the poet began composing Don Juan (61-62). Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon (a woman's response to the Don Juan myth) and Coleridge's "Critique of Bertram" are also adduced as examples of how Don Juan preoccupied English audiences well before Byron chose this eponymous hero as the subject of his poem.

Haslett reviews this material in order to argue that Byron's contemporaries read his poem in terms of the enormously popular stage version (72). "In all, seventeen periodicals invoked the theatrical Don Juan legend in their reviews of Byron's poem between 1819 and 1823, and many more referred consistently to the character of Don Juan as that of a libertine" (80). Yet the fact that reviewers confused Byron's hero with the stage version does not mean that such a confusion is justified. Throughout her study, however, Haslett seems to be insisting on precisely this, the most implausible of her points--that Byron's hero is a libertine seducer who resembles the stage legend. As belabored as the thesis is, I was not convinced by the end of this study, though I am grateful for the excerpts from the theater playbills m the British Library which Haslett uses to make her case.

In her second chapter, Haslett focuses on disproving the image of a Don Juan more seduced than seducing. Like most critics of Byron's poem, W. H. Auden thought the hero of Don Juan comparatively chaste and George Bernard Shaw thought him not nearly blasphemous enough, as in Shadwell's and Moliere's plays (123). Haslett disagrees. "Those critics [like Auden] who underestimate the extent of Don Juan's sexual encounters have ignored the significance of innuendo," she states, and finds "a new tally of at least eleven romantic or flirtatious adventures" (114). The point about innuendo is well-taken, but it is hard to believe that Juan's love affair with Haidee is "tinged with mercenary motives" (94), or that Juan seduces Gulbeyaz (Haslett shifts terms here by calling Juan's seduction an "encounter" [114]). Like Auden, George Bernard Shaw thought that Juan was merely sowing his wild oats. For Haslett, Shaw typically misreads Juan as innocent because he has been seduced by the legend and by the narrator's representations of that legend (123). By tolerating Don Juan's indiscretions, Shaw falls into the trap Byron has set of encouraging his readers to "confound [] liberty with licence" (124).

Haslett's more persuasive third chapter discusses the political implications of a Don Juan. Murray's timid manner of publishing the poem "with copious asterisks and blanks" (148) invited piracy by radical publishers, where the poem ultimately found its widest audience. "Don Juan in quarto and on hot-pressed paper would have been almost innocent," the Quarterly Review noted in 1822, "In a whity-brown duodecimo it was one of the most mischievous publications which have made the press a snare" (151). Yet the rise of middle-class morality, spearheaded by the Evangelical movement, percolated downward to alter working-class attitudes towards sexuality as well: "at the time of Don Juan's writing (1819-24) ," Haslett explains, "sexual libertarianism was becoming untypical of the radical movement as a whole, which increasingly spoke the language of sexual virtue and marriage" (160-61). Well-researched discussions of the aristocratic Don Juan and Anacharsis Clootz as Don Juan close this fine chapter. Haslett shows how Byron's hero was distinctly aristocratic despite his increasingly working-class readership (184).