ABSTRACT

The politics of Don Juan are multi-dimensional and confusing. Ghislaine McDayter would have us believe that Byrons later work is redeemed by its attempts to motivate political activism while his romances set out to seduce his feminine audience. In terms of international politics, Don Juan is just as prismatic. Its most famous political statement is the song The Isles of Greece in canto 3, a piece which taken out of context, and with many lines cut, can almost be read as a heroic, Tyrtaean call to arms. Byron had a sketch in his mind for the rest of Don Juan. Three months after finishing canto 5, he wrote to his publisher: The 5th. Byron had much fellow-feeling for the Toms, and for the despised periphery of English society in general being, as he would assert, peripheral himself. Byron, as unscrupulous an absentee landlord as its possible to be, has no leg to stand on when satirizing the English aristocracy.