[In the following essay, originally published in The Byron Journal in 1987, Barton assesses the relationship between Don Juan and Haidée and the significance of Lambro's advances toward the couple in Canto II of Don Juan. Barton argues that this incident is the focal point of the poem.]

When Byron's Lambro returns home from his last piratical voyage at the beginning of Canto III of Don Juan he goes ‘ashore without delay, / Having no custom-house nor quarantine / To ask him awkward questions on the way’.¹ It takes Byron, however, a very long time—one thousand, one hundred and eleven lines—to bring Haidée and the father who will destroy her face to face. Lambro is immobilized, strikingly, three times as he covers the short distance from the harbour to his house: once (at line 163) on the summit of the hill overlooking it, where, we are told, ‘he stopp'd’, while the narrator digresses for several stanzas, again (at 330) when he pauses to question the revellers in the garden, and finally (line 482) when he ‘pass'd unseen a private gate / And stood within his hall at eventide’. Lambro will remain standing in that hall, artificially arrested and still, not only for the remainder of Canto III, but for the first 279 lines of its successor.

The narrator of Don Juan is, of course, constantly interrupting and retarding his own story-line. Towards the end of the unconscionable length of poetic time that it takes Lambro to walk a few hundred yards, Byron offers the reader his customary mock-apologies: ‘But let me to my story: I must own / If I have any fault, it is digression’ (III. 96) or ‘I feel this tediousness will never do—/ 'Tis being too epic’ (III. 111). And yet for all the predictability of such excuses, the situation which gives rise to them here is unique. In the first place, Lambro's maddeningly protracted advance in the direction of the unsuspecting Juan and Haidée is, as Byron has made clear from the inception of their love, back in Canto II, that of Nemesis itself. Juan will be Haidée's first and also her last lover. The looming confrontation between father and daughter must destroy her. It will also shatter a paradisal episode, the centre in many ways of the entire epic, in which (for once) man's—and woman's—state has not proved pathetically inadequate to their conceptions.

I have adapted this last phrase from Byron's own account of how Lucifer, in Cain, reduces the hero of the play to that condition of unreasoning despair in which he can murder his brother Abel. It has become something of a commonplace of Byron criticism to see the theme of the Fall, a lost Eden apprehended briefly in childhood or in the raptures of first love, but fundamentally unobtainable, as one of the unifying preoccupations of his poetry. And certainly, there is much that not only feels but is specifically identified as pre-lapsarian about Juan's sojourn on the island. Quite as important, however, as this specifically Christian context is Byron's insistence that what he is describing in the relationship of Juan and Haidée is life lived on the level and with the intensity of great art, effortlessly corresponding to the sculptor's, the poet's, or the novelist's ideal:

This is in others a factitious state,
          An opium dream of too much youth and reading,
But was in them their nature, or their fate:
          No novels e'er had set their young hearts bleeding.

(IV. 19)

Such an achievement, as Byron recognizes ruefully from the start, in itself almost impossible, can only be ephemeral.² Indeed Time, an enemy potentially as destructive as Lambro, is already beginning to threaten it, even before the return of that ‘good old gentleman’, the ‘sea-attorney’, as Haidée and her lover, moving indoors after Lambro's supposed death in Canto III, exchange the naked simplicity of their early embraces in the sea-cave for rich garments, ‘crystal and marble, plate and porcelain’, a profusion of sherbets and sweetmeats, and the dubious company of black eunuchs, dwarfs and dancing girls. None of this luxury has any power to diminish their complete absorption in one another, or corrupt their love. That remains so flawless and unshaken that Time itself, ‘though foe to love’, recoils from the necessity of greying this particular couple's hair, imprinting wrinkles on their brows and muddying their pure blood.

People capable of a passion so rare, Byron maintains,

… were not made in the real world to fill
          A busy character in the dull scene,
But like two beings born from out a rill,
          A nymph and her beloved, all unseen
To pass their lives in fountains and on flowers,
And never know the weight of human hours.

(IV. 15)

Juan and Haidée, unlike other humans, for whom passion scarcely outlives the moment of possession, can love like classical demi-gods. But physically they remain subject to decay. That being so, the best gift that could be offered them, the narrator insists at the beginning of Canto IV, is early death. Yet, like Time itself, he seems oddly reluctant to initiate the work of destruction. Of course, Byron keeps Lambro waiting in the wings for so long, a momentarily arrested doom, partly to generate suspense. But it is suspense of a special kind, singularly lacking elsewhere in the poem. And when the catastrophe finally comes, when Haidée collapses into madness and then death, while Juan, without ever knowing what has become of her, enters a bondage that is metaphoric as well as literal—enslaved henceforward to the world and time—it proves remarkably all-embracing. The island itself becomes mysteriously ‘all desolate and bare / Its dwellings down, its tenants past away’ (IV. 72), overtaken, as it seems, by a fate even bleaker than that of the castle in Keats's ‘Eve of St. Agnes’ after the lovers flee away into the storm. The story of Haidée and Lambro is still known, and told or sung, on other islands. But where they actually lived, for reasons which Byron refuses to divulge, even their graves are lost.

An Edenic vision disappears with Haidée, never to return in the poem, except fleetingly in Canto VIII, as Byron wistfully contemplates the life of Daniel Boone in the backwoods of America—itself, significantly, a legend of the past—or in the parody offered by London suburbia, with its ‘“Rows” most modestly called “Paradise”, / Which Eve might quit without much sacrifice’ (XI. 21). Eden, however, is not the only paradigm shattered in Canto IV. I said earlier that on the island, for a little while, Byron allows Juan and Haidée to do something which he was always trying (and failing) to accomplish in his own existence: to live with the intensity, the total commitment of great art, to realize myth. That is true in specific terms, as well as general. Jerome McGann has pointed to the way Byron draws upon Homer's Odyssey in the Haidée section: in particular upon the Nausicaa episode and (in Lambro's homecoming) upon Odysseus's return to a riotous house which no longer recognizes him as its master.³ In both cases, what in Homer had turned out happily leads to disaster. An ‘honest gentleman at his return’, as Byron observes, ‘may not have the good fortune of Ulysses’ (III. 23). He is likely to find his Penelope unchaste, ‘and that his Argus bites him by—the breeches’. This, effectively, is what happens to Lambro. Even so, Haidée learns, unlike Nausicaa, that introducing her father to the handsome castaway she has discovered is the way to destroy the stranger's fortunes, not to mend them.

I want to add to McGann's Homeric paradigm another equally important: Shakespeare's The Tempest. It is clear that this play was explicitly in Byron's mind at stanza 134 of Canto II. Just after Haidée tears herself away reluctantly from the sleeping stranger, Byron initially toyed with a final couplet about dreams which leave ‘No “baseless fabric”, but “a wreck behind”’: a phrase adapted from Prospero's famous valediction ‘Our revels now are ended’. He cancelled the line in the end—as he not infrequently did with Shakespearean quotations which might seem to undermine his consciously constructed and essentially mischievous dissent from contemporary Bardolatry—but its shadowy presence clarifies something which might otherwise have been harder to isolate: the way Prospero, Ferdinand and Miranda, another island trio of irascible father, shipwrecked lover and disobedient daughter, hover behind Byron's Lambro, Juan and Haidée.

As with the echoes from Homer, this second fictional paradigm poignantly helps to define what might have been against what, in Byron's more pessimistic handling of the situation, actually is. A man even more embittered and disabused than Prospero, Lambro's affections are wholly bound up with this one child who shares his essentially solitary existence. She constitutes his last remaining human tie. But the anger which Prospero merely feigns against Ferdinand, ‘lest too light winning make the prize light’, the contempt for his ‘silly’ sword, and imposition of fetters and forced labour—features which in The Tempest are steps on the way to a happy ending—become, in Byron, the agents of catastrophe. Shakespeare's story re-told goes wrong before our eyes, as life multiplies its rebellions against the patterns of art.

Just how much emotion Byron had invested in the Haidée episode becomes clear in the fourteen extraordinary stanzas of Canto IV describing her progress from coma to frenzy to death. The narrator observes his heroine's dissolution rather as Byron had in the last minutes of that criminal whose execution he witnessed at Rome in 1817: with an opera glass in hand to pick up detail, because ‘one should see everything once with attention’, but psychologically distressed to the point of being scarcely able to hold it steady. And when it is over, when Haidée, Lambro and the place where they lived have all been swept away, a crisis declares itself in the poem.

McGann has argued persuasively that when he began Don Juan, Byron thought of the Donna Julia episode in what is now Canto I as complete in itself—a companion piece to Beppo—not recognizing until early September 1818 that he was in fact launched on an epic.⁴ The shipwreck of Canto II and the romance of the island into which it leads comprise a clearly defined second unit of the poem. But the problem of where to go from there, of what could possibly succeed this second unit, was far more acute than the question of what to do with Juan after the mingled mockery and tears of the Julia affair. The episode of the island, after all, comes to an unequivocally tragic conclusion, ends in a desolation which leaves neither the narrator nor the reader with anything at which to laugh. The only large-scale event in the entire poem, including the shipwreck and the Siege of Ismail, of which this is true, it threatens not only the balance, the characteristically mixed tone, of Don Juan, but the very possibility of its continuation. Byron must have recognized this. If Juan—not to mention the reader—was to overleap this catastrophe, while retaining our interest and respect, some way had to be found of letting go of Haidée and the experience she symbolized, without forgetting, let alone dishonouring, either.

Byron's characteristically brilliant solution to the problem posed for the entire poem by Haidée's death can be found in stanzas 80 to 94 of Canto IV. It is a solution made possible, to a large extent, by his life in Venice. When Juan stumbles up, ‘wounded and fetter'd’, ‘weak still with loss of blood’, on to the deck of the slave-ship in which he has been quite literally ‘cabin'd, cribb'd, confined’ since his violent expulsion from the island, he discovers that although he appears to have been transported from the world of Shakespearean romance to that of tragedy, at least the players are there with him in Elsinore. They are players of a very special and composite kind. Raucocanti and his associates testify to the deep impression left on Byron by Shakespeare's use of the travelling actors, the tragedians of the city, in Hamlet, but also to his memories of time spent on the Drury Lane Committee in London. More immediately, they derive from his residence in Venice, and regular attendance at the Fenice there: an opera house which (as he rapturously assured his sister Augusta in a letter of the 20th of January 1817) was not only cheaper but much finer than anything London could provide. Like Byron's Marino Faliero or Jacopo Foscari, Raucocanti, the loquacious buffo of that modest Italian opera company sold into slavery by its Machiavellian impresario, is both Shakespearean and Venetian: yet another testimony of the kind of artistic cross-breeding encouraged by Byron's exile in Italy.

Raucocanti's function in Don Juan is crucial. For one thing, the little buffo allows Byron to build a bridge between The Tempest and Hamlet. Hamlet is a play of great overall importance in Don Juan, not only for the number of specific verbal echoes but because—especially in Canto IX—it can be seen to colour the climate of long stretches of the poem. Byron's indebtedness to this particular Shakespearean work might seem predictable, given the general romantic obsession with its hero. His interest, however, is characteristically individual. He seems far less drawn to the melancholy, introspective figure of the prince himself—the main focus of attention for contemporaries—than to other characters and aspects of the work: Polonius, Gertrude, the gravedigger, the ghost or, as here in Canto IV, the travelling actors. Also, Byron is keenly alive, as Coleridge or Goethe for instance were not, to the comic qualities of the play. That may be one reason why he found it so easy to sense the underlying connection between Hamlet and The Tempest—the noblest of Shakespeare's revenge plays, as it has been called—and so to remember Elsinore as well as Prospero's island in a Mediterranean context.

The association in Byron's mind of Hamlet with The Tempest begins back in Canto III. Lambro, returning to find that everybody in his house has recovered quite expeditiously from the shock of his death and is engaged in feasting of the bounty of that ‘new patron / Who seem'd to have turn'd Haidée into a matron’ (44), had not only represented a type of Odysseus. When Byron observes on Lambro's behalf that ‘certainly to one deem'd dead returning, / This revel seem'd a curious mode of mourning’ (49), the wedding that followed with such indecent haste upon the funeral of old Hamlet (so much so indeed that it seemed to the prince as though the same banquet did double service for both) nudges at the reader's memory. It seems to have been at the back of Byron's mind as well. Just before Lambro's entry, he describes Haidée, in an allusion that McGann rather surprisingly seems to have missed, as ‘defying augury’ (IV. 24) just as Hamlet did before his own death: ‘Not a whit, we defy augury’. But it is by way of Raucocanti that Byron's creative use of Shakespeare declares itself most strikingly, and also serves to rally his poem at a critical juncture. Just as, in Shakespeare's play, the actors arrive to cheer everybody up—including, for a moment, young Hamlet himself—after the funeral of the old king and the prematurely convivial marriage, so Byron is able to use their equivalents in Don Juan to persuade us that nothing is ever quite the end, that even after the painful, long delayed and seemingly final disaster of the island, the show can and will go on.

Raucocanti's dramatic monologue (82-89), his quite unsolicited, scabrous and detailed personal description of the other members of the travelling company is, in its way, as brilliant as anything Robert Browning ever produced in the genre. It makes one wonder how critics could ever have claimed that Byron had no gift for the creation of character, that he never speaks with any voice but his own. Like Browning's ‘A Toccata of Galuppi's’, Raucocanti's monologue draws inspiration from the festive, the carnivalesque in Italian life. But it shocks at the same time that it delights the reader. As Raucocanti gabbles on, exposing in the process the intricacies of his own nature quite as much as those of the other members of the troupe, we are suddenly made aware of something hitherto obscure: the extraordinary and, in a sense, artificial extent to which the Juan/Haidée relationship had been independent of the spoken word. That independence was in part—but only in part—a product of the fact that these two initially could not understand each other's language. When Haidée, back in Canto II, bent over Juan and

          … told him, in good modern Greek,
With an Ionian accent, low and sweet,
That he was faint, and must not talk, but eat.
… Juan could not understand a word,
          Being no Grecian.

(150-51)

It was the smell of Zoe's cooking that made Haidée's point, even as (later) Zoe's sign language prevented him from gorging himself to a degree hazardous for a starving man. As for Haidée, illiterate, Byron informs us, even in her own tongue, she

… read (the only book she could) the lines
          Of his fair face, and found, by sympathy
The answer eloquent, where the soul shines
          And darts in one quick glance a long reply;
And thus in every look she saw exprest
A world of words, and things at which she guess'd.

(162)

Later, the narrator assures us, Juan picked up at least enough Romaic to be able to suggest to Haidée that stroll along the sea-beach at the end of which they consummate their love. But it is plain that (in sharp contrast with Juan's earlier affair with Julia) this relationship—the libertine's wish-dream of a perfect sense experience which remains itself while at the same time reaching out to incorporate a world of pure spirit—to a large extent bypasses language.

Even towards the end of their story, Juan and Haidée have apparently progressed only to a kind of private, half-gestural speech—‘like unto birds’, the narrator says—known only to them, as though they were the sole examples of some rare species. Which, in a sense, they are. No promises are exacted or made in the arcane and special language these two have devised, no constancy sworn, no marriage proposed. Pared down to the minimum, it is fundamentally extra-social. Juan's first love, Julia, had been highly articulate in a common tongue—whispering ‘I will ne'er consent’ just before consenting, in her diatribe against Alfonso, in her letter of farewell. But it is not until she is obliged to plead with Lambro for Juan's life that we actually hear any words that Haidée speaks. They prepare us, simply by being uttered at all, for the shattering of the idyll. But that idyll really becomes a thing of the past, allowing the next section of the poem to get underway, only when Raucocanti embarks on his monologue in Canto IV. In doing so, he forcibly reminds Juan, and the reader, that all the time there has been a world elsewhere.

It is an intensely social world. Raucocanti's little company, tenor and bass, prima donna, baritone, castrato and dancers, suddenly presents Juan with a kind of microcosm of the contemporary European civilization he had for a time escaped. As the buffo goes on describing the qualities of his fellow performers and how they live, the images of Haidée's island—sea-cave and sunsets, throngs of dancers, story-tellers, the snow-white ram wreathed with flowers by childish hands, even that dubious itinerant, the poet who sang ‘the isles of Greece’—not only come to seem like the stuff that dreams are made on, they acquire the quality of an operatic scene: entrancing but unreal, something constructed out of canvas and false lights, peopled by players who, when the show is over, will be at one another's throats, intriguing to carry off ‘Count Cesare Cicogna’ from some elderly Roman princess, or scheming to get their relatives a job.

Although Raucocanti's world is of an indubitably fallen kind, it is remarkably hard to dismiss, or even condemn. Raucocanti himself may be ‘a busy character’, but the scene in which he plays is not, after all, ‘dull’, when Byron comes once again to confront it. On one level a ‘blackguard’, as the narrator calls him, and certainly spiteful and malicious, Raucocanti nonetheless bears himself under trying circumstances with ‘gaiety and grace’. Byron may be continuing the parallel with The Tempest when he makes the little buffo cheerfully press Juan to come and hear him sing next year at ‘the fair of Lugo’—he has, after all, no more assurances that he will ever be released from slavery than Shakespeare's Stefano does of realizing his ambition of getting off the island and exhibiting Caliban for money in England. But there is something endearing about Raucocanti's irrepressible optimism, about the aplomb with which he accepts what has happened to him and immediately sets about speculating how if only ‘the Sultan has a taste for song’, the whole seedy troupe may yet be in a way to prosper.

Things equally strange have, of course, been known to happen. Byron's own note on the Raucocanti passage is interesting. Of the fictional hi-jacking of the Italian opera company he writes:

This is a fact. A few years ago a man engaged a company for some foreign theatre; embarked them at an Italian port, and carrying them to Algiers, sold them all. One of the women, returned from her captivity, I heard sing, by a strange coincidence, in Rossini's opera of ‘L'Italiana in Algeri’, at Venice, in the beginning of 1817.⁵

Byron was understandably delighted by the ‘strange coincidence’ which allowed him to hear a woman who had escaped from slavery in Algiers, singing in an opera whose plot is about the escape of an Italian girl from the harem of the Bey of Algiers. It confirmed him in his characteristic belief that there was something wrong with things ‘all fiction’, and that there should always be ‘some ballast of fact for the most airy fabric’, pure invention being ‘but the talent of a liar’. A vertiginous compound of imagination and truth, in a way validating the fantastic plot of Rossini's opera, his recollections of the strange fortunes of the Italian singer at the Fenice also helped him to set his epic on an even keel again, after an episode which had carried an abnormally light ballast of fact. It seems even to have suggested where the poem could go next: to a harem, although Juan will meet Gulbeyaz and Dudù not in Algiers but in Constantinople.

We never know what became of Raucocanti himself, left chained to the tenor, a man he hated with what Byron, obviously remembering his days at Drury Lane, calls ‘a hate found only on the stage’ (93). Although the narrator promises, at the end of Canto IV, to describe the various destinies of the captives in ‘further song’, he never does so. Only Juan himself and his new friend Johnson are carried over into the next canto. Raucocanti and his associates simply vanish into that slipstream of oblivion which has already claimed a number of characters in the poem without explanation. In ensuing cantos, it will swallow up not only Johnson, but even the woman Byron is about to introduce as his ‘third heroine’: Gulbeyaz, the Sultaness who dominates Cantos V and VI. In the case of Raucocanti and the opera troupe, Byron's reticence does not matter. Like the players in Hamlet, who also disappear after Act III into a future about which we know nothing, they have fulfilled their purpose in the poem.

I have been trying in this essay to say something about the way in which Don Juan is put together: a method in which are combined that extraordinary flexibility we have always known about—our sense of the poet's freedom to incorporate anything he chooses, to move not only in terms of digression, but of plot in any new direction that invites him—with a refined and conscious artistry that we have only belatedly given Byron credit for possessing. I've been concerned primarily with the subtlety of his use of Shakespeare, through direct allusion and also through larger, unstated parallels with The Tempest and Hamlet, as a way of complicating our response to the Haidée episode. And with the creative intelligence which recognized so acutely just what the character of that episode was and how special the strategy would need to be which permitted the poem both to consolidate and to continue on its course beyond it. It is not the least of the many paradoxes of Don Juan that for a work in some ways so random, it should also end up being so finely planned. Byron may not have any clear idea, note or text, about the word or the incident that will come next: he retains, as the Raucocanti episode demonstrates, a vivid sense of what he has already written, and of its relationship to what he is about to commit to paper.

Notes

1. All quotations from Don Juan refer to the edition by Jerome J. McGann, in The Complete Poetical Works, Vol. V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

2. See the Commentary, p. 690 of McGann's edition of Don Juan.

3. See my earlier essay, ‘Byron and the Mythology of Fact’, Nottingham Byron Lecture, 1968.

4. Jerome J. McGann, Don Juan In Context (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), pp. 59-60.

5. To John Murray, Venice, 2 April 1817.