Towards the end of the play, Don Juan flippantly invites the stone statue of the murdered man to dine with him. In one entanglement, Don Juan slays Don Gonzalo, the father of his intended victim.

In the play, Don Juan engages in a series of romantic intrigues, seducing and abandoning several women. In 1630, Tirso de Molina, a Spanish monk, became the first to dramatize Don Juan’s exploits in his play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (“The rake of Seville and the stone guest”). While it is unclear whether Don Juan Tenorio-as he was most often called-was a real person, the dashing seducer had been a familiar figure in Spanish and Italian folk legend as early as the seventeenth century. Events in History at the Time the Poem Takes Place Don Juan-history and legend Although contemporary critics denounced Don Juan as immoral, modern scholars consider it to be Byron’s masterpiece, a comic tour-de-force of formidable scope and range. While living abroad in Switzerland and Italy, Byron continued to write, producing two more cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the dramatic poem Manfred, and the epic satire, Don Juan. A disastrous marriage in 1815, followed by a scandalous separation one year later, tarnished the poet’s reputation and in 1816 Byron left England, never to return. The first two cantos of that poem became an instant success when they appeared in print in 1812 and Byron himself became famous overnight. Soon after his satire’s publication, Byron embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, which provided him with the material for his romance, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Stung, Byron launched a counterattack in his first satirical poem, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809), which was influenced by Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. The new Lord Byron was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge in 1807, he published his first book of poems, Hours of Idleness, which received mildly favorable notices from most literary magazines but one scathing critique from the influential Edinburgh Review.

A satirical poem set in Spain, Greece, Russia, and England during the late eighteenth century published, serially, from 1819 to 1824.Ī handsome young Spaniard embarks on a series of amorous adventures in his native country and abroad.Įvents in History at the Time the Poem Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Poem Was Writtenīorn in 1788, George Gordon became the sixth Baron Byron at age ten, after his great-uncle’s death.

George byron don juan