Don Juan
A boy from Seville is seduced by a friend of his mother's, shipped abroad in disgrace, wrecked, sold as a slave in Constantinople, sent into the Russian storming of Ismail and delivered to Catherine the Great, before being posted to an English country house. Byron inverts the old legend of the libertine, which the corpus holds only in Molière's version: this Juan is acted upon throughout, and the digressions on cant, poets, marriage, war and Wordsworth take up as much room as the plot. Sixteen cantos and a fragment were done when he died at Missolonghi, and many have thought it the greatest comic poem in English.
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Lineage
- modeled on ↑ Beppo
- ↓ Eugene Onegin
Attributes
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 58% · 13 shared
- 58% · 12 shared
- 57% · 13 shared
- 55% · 13 shared
- 55% · 13 shared
- 55% · 13 shared