Shelley and the Development of Don Juan

Abstract

One of the most exciting encounters in the history of English poetry is that between Percy Shelley and Lord Byron in Venice in the late summer of 1818. For the literary critic, this meeting is more compelling than its famous predecessor, the dark Frankenstein summer of 1816, because both poets were maturing into their great periods and this meeting provided a vital spark. Most directly it produces Shelley's first great poem, Julian and Maddalo, which requires little scholarship to identify as a result of the poets' meeting. Less obvious is the impact on Byron's poetry. He had begun Don Juan earlier that summer, but Shelley, who enthused about the poem, must have encouraged and influenced Byron in a work that would evolve and deepen in the following years. This essay will attempt to cast some light on the processes of that influence. I will propose that Don Juan alters significantly in tone and style in the wake of Shelley's visit and suggest ways in which these changes might be part of a response to Shelley's reappearance on Byron's intellectual map. Byron began drafting the Dedication to Don Juan continuously with Canto I on 3 July 1818. The final page of the draft is dated 6 September and the fair copy was started on 16 September, suggesting that Byron had more or less finished Canto I by then, although we know he was still adding stanzas to the start of the canto as late as 8 December. Shelley arrived in Venice on 22 August and remained in the area until early November. The day after Shelley's arrival the poets rode together on the Lido, the event immortalised in Julian and Maddalo; at this point Byron was probably still drafting Canto I. Canto II was mainly drafted between 13 December and the middle of the following January, in the wake of Shelley's visit. In a letter dated 8 October (but looking back to August) to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley reveals that Byron 'read me the first canto of his Don Juan, a thing in the style of Beppo, but infinitely better'.1 It sounds like this was his first encounter with the poem and also that most - if not all - of the work for Canto I was complete before Shelley arrived.2 Based on this evidence it seems most likely that any Shelleyan influence would have flowed into Canto II. Looking at the poem, this speculation seems plausible: there is a marked difference between key aspects of the first two cantos, especially in the contrast between Juan's first two amorous encounters. The Julia episode is largely continuous with the cynical view of human relationships found in Beppo; the descriptions of Haidee, however, without jettisoning these Byronic fundamentals, are voiced less certainly - the satire merges into more earnest, beautiful and even transcendental imagery, which is not present simply to be undermined. This change in the poem matches Shelley's view of its development. Shelley was uncertain about Beppo and the first parts of Don Juan, which he considered inconsistent with a positive view of 'human dignity', but seems to have seen the end of the second canto - and the appearance of Haidee - as a watershed, after which his praise is unstinting.3 What kind of thinking did Shelley bring with him to Venice? Certainly his mind was full of Plato, having recently completed an excellent translation of the Symposium during his time at Bagni di Lucca, where he stayed prior to linking up with Byron in Venice. As James A. Notopoulos has pointed out, it is likely that 'Shelley's Ficino-like enthusiasm for Plato had a very real influence on Byron'.4 But Shelley's response to Plato was complex and critical as well as enthusiastic; it is everywhere inflected by his wider reading in philosophy. His most striking philosophical utterances bring together a variety of sources, while remaining uniquely Shelleyan. Perhaps most remarkable of all is this from his essay 'On Life', which he probably wrote shortly after the visit to Byron: the existence of distinct individual minds similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is [. …