Don Juan

A pail of housemaid’s water comes down the stairs—and Byron’s narrator has found his hero. Don Juan’s first adventure is not a battle, but growing up between a learned, self-proclaimed paragon and her wandering husband.

In Seville, beside the Guadalquivir, Don José and Donna Inez keep up the appearance of a respectable marriage while their quarrels become the city’s entertainment. Byron turns the grand machinery of epic poetry toward this household instead: Inez’s perfect virtues, José’s careless appetites, and their curly-headed son, whose mischief catches even the narrator in its splash. The poem’s wit is as unruly as its young hero, teasing the rules of romance, reputation and good behaviour. What kind of Don Juan will emerge from a home where propriety has a journal—and mischief has a pail?

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