SOURCE: Graham, Peter W. “All Things—But a Show?” In Don Juan and Regency England, pp. 62-88. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.

[In the following essay, Graham examines the impact of popular spectacular theater on the style of Don Juan.]

The pantomimes of the ancients no longer exist. But in compensation, all modern poetry resembles pantomimes.

Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments

In England and the English, that insightful study of culture and character in the last years before Reform, Bulwer-Lytton observes that Byron would never have put a coronet above his bed had he not written poems.¹ This statements tells something about the Regency Ton, an aristocratic and determinedly amateur set of people; but it also shows some important things about Byron: his insistence on being recognized, wherever he was, for what he was (an “English milord”) and his coexistent ability or need to be seen as more than just that, as the citizen of many worlds. In Don Juan this cosmopolitan ability or need reveals itself in literary matters as well as social and political ones.

As we have already seen in the first two essays, the densely allusive poem seriously and playfully draws not only upon “real life”—Byron's and everyone else's, in a broad sweep from history to gossip—but also upon the widest possible range of literary genres, authors, and periods. Byron's models for Don Juan are classical works and modern ones, poems, novels, and plays, masterpieces and less exalted productions (such as Letters from England). All of these he manages to bend and blend to suit his own purposes. The many literary realms toured by the composing presence of Don Juan, the motley coat he wears on his pilgrimage, and the hybrid nature of his utterances make it impossible to point out a source for a passage in Don Juan, though many critics from Elizabeth Boyd on have accurately indicated the multiplicity of source materials and usefully characterized the nature and extent of particular sources.² But how are these many sources—utterly diverse in sense, subject, style, and period, variably successful in achieving what they set out to do, some of them admired and some wickedly mocked by their borrower—subsumed into one work: and a work with a consistent, effective, strongly individual tone at that? My intent here is to answer that question by looking at how the conventions, subjects, and attitudes of a particular generic microcosm, that of popular spectacular theater—the little world from which the “motley coat” mentioned just above is borrowed—influence and parallel Don Juan. I am not suggesting that this influence excludes others. In the case of Byron at least, one is closer to the truth in approaching the study of literary influence as an enterprise of gathering rather than ruling out—and many of the features I shall present as coming from spectacular theater can also be discerned in conversational or “middle style” poetry or in the art of the Italian improvvisatore. This essay's intent, then, is to examine one particular source among the many—but that one, I suggest, offered Byron a precedent and way to be inclusive, to assimilate all and any sources in his melting pot of a poem.

The extent of Don Juan's relationship to spectacular theater is inadequately acknowledged despite the explicit connection Byron himself makes in canto 1 and despite Frederick L. Beaty's excellent short study “Harlequin Don Juan,” an essay convincingly arguing that Byron's poem draws usefully upon the various comic Don Juan plays that, riding the wake of Mozart's Don Giovanni, swept over London in 1817 and the years following—just when Byron took “our ancient friend” as nominal subject.³ The comparative neglect of this influence is understandable, partly because spectacular theater is like Don Juan a shifty and heterogeneous phenomenon, partly because until fairly recent times the works contained in “subliterary” genres have not been widely seen as worth serious examination. My goal in this essay is to look at how two closely allied national variants of spectacular theater, England's pantomime, burletta, and extravaganza, and Italy's commedia dell'arte, resemble, and may have influenced, Don Juan. Byron's interest in English theater, high and low, was long-standing; and the commedia was a form of entertainment popular and ever-visible at Venice, where he was living when he wrote the earlier parts of Don Juan. It seems likely that the commedia of the world in which he moved and British journals' accounts of what was being staged in that world he had left behind would evoke by association Byron's memory of plays and pantomimes he had formerly enjoyed. Memory, present experience, and the secondhand knowledge offered by reading could well combine, as in fact they often do in Don Juan, to show Byron the rich and happy comic potential of Don Juan, that epic hero and poetical subject he makes great show of choosing arbitrarily, and only after many other possibilities have been raised and dismissed.

Examining the character of Don Juan as he appears in the various forms of spectacular theater can show that Byron's comic don is not quite the unprecedented and idiosyncratic production Leo Weinstein describes in The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, where he states that “By taking the utmost liberty with hero and subject, Byron opened the way to what amounts to license. Henceforth Don Juan becomes a name that an author may freely bestow on any hero, just so long as he has some adventures with women.” But surveys of the archetype have been made and well made.⁴ Accordingly, I shall say comparatively little about theatrical Don Juans and Giovannis previous to the time when Byron and his readers “all have seen him in the pantomime.” Instead, most of my efforts will go toward showing Byron's familiarity with spectacular theater and exploring his poem's affinities with the genre.

Whether we read the resemblances as sources or parallels, we can find in them a key to some of Don Juan's distinctive structures, features, and propensities. Like spectacular theater, Byron's poem is improvisational, topical, eclectic, accumulative, volatile, characterized by rapid and formulaic inversions and transformations, and dominated by the resourceful and potent being (shall we say actor?) who serves as transformer and who constructs what order there is. In offering Byron a precedent and method for assimilating diverse materials (among them the poem's many and varied other influences) through transformation and construction, spectacular theater might even be seen as the poem's ultimate influence. And this double dramatic influence, an imported and domesticated but quintessentially English taste subsequently modified by Italian experience, vividly expresses and embodies the sort of cosmopolitanism Byron advocates in his poem.

If one interesting topic not to be treated at length in this essay is the history of Don Juan's various incarnations, theatrical and otherwise, another equally interesting matter calling for concise rather than exhaustive discussion here is the nature and conventions of English spectacular theater, particularly pantomime, and the Italian commedia dell'arte from which pantomime derived and diverged. Readers interested in detailed consideration of these fascinating theatrical enterprises are encouraged to refer to some of the books indicated in the list of cited works. For now, let me just sketch the basic lines of spectacular theater as it existed in Byron's day.⁵ After doing that, I shall go on to examine Byron's involvement with the several forms of spectacular theater, discuss the resemblances between them and Don Juan, and analyze in some detail the most richly pantomimic interlude in the poem. First, some background on pantomime and commedia.

The Greek components of the word pantomime, joining as they do the notion of universality with that of acting or imitating, suggest a comprehensiveness of range, an ability to perform all parts high or low, tragic, comic, or parodic, that one might claim as the essence of Don Juan. But in Byron's day and our own the word pantomime meant and means something rather different. As Byron uses it in Don Juan, pantomime refers to an increasingly conventionalized form of popular entertainment centered on the pursuits of the Italian commedia dell'arte characters—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and Clown, among others. In commedia, which developed sometime during the sixteenth century, these characters, distinctively costumed and masked and based on Italian regional types, act out improvisational, acrobatic farces in which the theme is always romantic intrigue. The particulars of plot and scene vary widely, being specified by a corago, or stage manager, in the form of a brief narrative or “argument” to which the actors spontaneously add their personal understandings of the traditional characters as they devise the actual lines, jokes, and comic business of the play.

English pantomime, a more thoroughly scripted form of spectacular theater, differs from commedia most notably in the conventions of plot and scene. Romantic intrigue may lie at the heart of commedia, but the breadth of this topic and the large number of commedia characters allow for almost infinite variations on the theme. Whatever the details of the plot may be, the setting is generally the same: an all-purpose street scene containing several houses equipped with plenty of doorways, windows, trapdoors, and concealed entries and exits for farcical involvements, exchanges, deceptions, and pursuits. In contrast to the simple commedia scene, early nineteenth-century pantomimes provided a wide variation of elaborately contrived settings. Thus a pair of reversals: Visual and mechanical intricacy of scene gives pantomime the variety that commedia achieves through twists and turns of plot; and like the predictable yet serviceable commedia street scene, the bones of pantomime plot remain the same, however the surface may be garnished.

Let us now see just what those bones are and how they are arranged. In Byron's day a pantomime typically was a one-act play divided into some twelve to twenty-two scenes and consisting of two parts, the opening and the harlequinade. The opening, which was the shorter part and the one that generally provided the title of the play, might draw its specifics from classical myth (Vulcan and Venus), popular legend (Friar Bacon and the Brazen Head), a nursery tale (Dick Whittington), a literary production, whether masterpiece or minor work (Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Combe's Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque), or a well-known play or opera (Mozart's Don Giovanni). Whatever the source of the details, though, the plot is unvarying. A pair of young lovers wish to marry but are opposed by a despotic older man who wields paternal authority over the girl, whether or not he is her actual father. His grounds of opposition are the young man's inferior social or financial status, and that opposition expresses itself in an unsuccessful campaign to change the maiden's mind followed by an attempt to have her suitor killed or kidnapped, which proves equally unsuccessful because a benevolent agent (generally female and always equipped with supernatural powers rather than social and economic ones—thus a fit counterbalance to the hostile father figure) intervenes, chiefly on behalf of the lovers but sometimes secondarily to punish a minor indiscretion of which they are guilty. The supernatural intervention constitutes the “transformation scene,” a spectacular effect that divides opening from harlequinade. Here the benevolent agent, typically speaking in rhymed couplets, turns the young man into Harlequin and the girl into Columbine, the petty tyrant into Pantaloon, the comic servant or duenna into Clown, the socially and economically preferable suitor (if there is one in the opening tale) into Dandy Lover or Lover pure and simple. Harlequin is assigned a quest or task, the completion of which will demonstrate his worthiness, and provided with a magic bat to help him in his labors.

From this point, all is harlequinade. Harlequin pursues his quest (and thereby Columbine) while eluding Pantaloon and his allies. Speechless during the harlequinade, Harlequin performs feats that are largely gymnastic, acrobatic, and visual. He leaps and soars, vanishes or suddenly appears through trapdoors, rises to great heights and swoops down from them courtesy of stage machinery. His preeminent weapon against Pantaloon and his attendants is the magic bat, which gives him, like the guiding presence who provided it, powers of transformation. He animates the furnishings of a scene, freezes his foes or sets them in hapless movement, makes food appear or disappear, heals wounds, raises the dead. His tricks, or “visual similes,” are a principal means of satire in pantomime: the slap of a bat enacts transformation and thereby alters the audience's understanding of an object, character, or setting by disclosing its previously undetected resemblance to something else.

The slapstick comedy dominated by Harlequin's antics (and increasingly Clown's, for reasons we shall see) holds the stage until the harlequinade's penultimate scene, called the “dark scene” because it always occurs in some gloomy place—a grotto, cave, tomb, ruin, or desolate landscape. Here Harlequin, having accomplished his task, embraces Columbine, whom he has won. But in so doing he relinquishes the bat with which he has won her. It is a Freudian field day: Pantaloon recovers the means of potency, reasserts his dominance over Columbine, and threatens to punish Harlequin. Now the benevolent agent intervenes yet again. She reconciles the characters and transports them to an exotic and elaborate final scene, which offers the apotheosis of love and, sometimes, the return of original identities.⁶

The outline above might describe more or less accurately English pantomime from the age of John Rich to the present. The conventional features that distinguished early nineteenth-century pantomime from what preceded and followed it are responses to several constraints, first among them the restrictions established by the theatrical licensing laws enacted in 1737. These regulations limited the use of dialogue to certain “patent houses,” Drury Lane and Covent Garden, but permitted a wider range of theaters to stage loosely defined entertainments consisting of rhymed musical comedy with songs, recitative, slapstick stage business, and spectacular effects. Among the dramatic forms that circumvented the Licensing Act were burletta, extravaganza, and pantomime—which like burletta and extravaganza was not an utterly speechless form of theater, though its audience's understanding of what goes on certainly does not hinge on the words.⁷

Early nineteenth-century pantomime was also shaped by forces less abstract than the licensing laws. Until the present day of film and television, theater had always been the artistic genre most directly responsive to public tastes and values; and pantomime was—as it remains—a particularly accurate and collaborative theatrical reflection of what the masses, as opposed to a cultural elite, demanded. What the early nineteenth-century paying public called for was provided by such resourceful and responsive arrangers of spectacle as Thomas Dibdin of Drury Lane and Charles Farley of Covent Garden. But perhaps the most crucial determinant of what pleased the public in Byron's day was the comic brilliance of the actor Joseph Grimaldi, in tribute to whom clowns are now called “Joey.” Grimaldi's tastes, talents, and preferences in roles combined with the licensing restrictions, the abilities of the theatrical arrangers, and the demands of the public to make pantomime what it was in the years between 1806, when the great success of Harlequin and Mother Goose (in which Grimaldi first acted the role of Clown) stabilized its conventions, and 1823, when Grimaldi retired. During these years, Mayer claims, the form was at its best: “pantomime in this period, by the very nature of its wide scope and satiric tone, was an unofficial and informal chronicle of the age.”⁸ It is a striking coincidence that the dates bracketing the age of Grimaldi are equally useful for indicating the start and close of Byron's poetic career.

The son of Giuseppe Grimaldi, ballet master at Drury Lane and Sadler's Wells, “Joey” or “Joe” Grimaldi possessed a genius as cosmopolitan as was the art in which he excelled, or as I am arguing Don Juan to be. George Augustus Sala characterizes Grimaldi's peculiar powers as the product of two cultures: “He seems to have possessed a talent for pantomimic expression so eminently the gift of the Italian race allied to a strong sense of popular English humour. The happy combination of the fine perception and high colouring which suits John Bull's blunter sense of humor has vanished with him.”⁹ Grimaldi's preference for playing the role of Clown, the figure who generally emerges from a servant or duenna in the transformation scene, greatly altered the character of the harlequinade. Clown as Grimaldi presented him was no mere comic henchman in the service of absurd patriarchal authority, and thus a butt for Harlequin's bat-induced humor, but instead a free and potent mocker himself. As Mayer describes him, the Clown portrayed by Grimaldi and his son J. S. Grimaldi as an incarnate spirit of satiric buffoonery: “Clown had a buoyancy, a barely suppressed impudence and irreverence that encouraged pantomime audiences to share vicariously and willingly condone his seeming impatience with manners, his mockery of class distinctions, his disregard for property, and his absolute disrespect for authority. If Clown had fixed traits, they were all ones that mocked convention and exposed social habits pretending to morality or self-conscious graciousness. He rebelled against stuffiness and tradition and did what others wished to do but never dared.”¹⁰

The Grimaldi Clown brings all Harlequin's physical agility to his role, but also demonstrates a supple, creative wit that rivals and ultimately surpasses the trick work Harlequin achieves with his bat and its invisible ally the stage machinery. Comparing the younger Grimaldi with his father, the Times reviewer of 27 December 1823 pays elegaic tribute to “Joey” in these telling words: “Apart from all twisting and tumbling there was so much intelligence about everything he did.”¹¹ Grimaldi's Clown deployed this intelligence in acts of “construction,” figurative presentations based on the same assumption underlying Harlequin's transformations—namely that objects share unperceived relationships that can be disclosed through artful juxtaposition. Clown begins with a seemingly random collection of articles, things united only by the fact that none of them belongs to him. He proceeds, much in the fashion of a Regency cartoonist or of the composing presence in Don Juan, to marshal these diverse objects into a bizarre order—a human shape, vehicle, or monster, a laughable still life that can become still funnier when Harlequin's bat animates it to its creator's utter befuddlement.

Clown's new prominence and independence were delightful in themselves, but they tended to diminish the harlequinade by rivaling or eclipsing the antics of Harlequin and to weaken the comic pursuit by making Clown, as a subversive persecutor of Pantaloon, an implicit ally to the young lovers. Another device that compromised the classical commedia shape of the harlequinade was the “diorama,” the elaborate scenic effect introduced into pantomime during the Grimaldi era and retained to this day as a key ingredient of English spectacular theater. The diorama entertained but also edified as it carried audiences not just to the world of Gothic, Oriental, or mythic fantasy but to real places (English, Continental, Eastern) they might otherwise experience only by traveling—a luxury denied to the general populace at most times, and particularly during the Napoleonic period. Also introduced as an occasional novelty into Regency pantomime was the cross-dressing that, in Victorian times, became an obligatory feature of the entertainment.

Though “dame” and “principal boy” were not yet pantomime conventions in the early years of the century, Grimaldi acted “Queen Rondabellyana” in Harlequin and the Red Dwarf, played the duenna who becomes Clown in Harlequin and Asmodeus, and in Harlequin Whittington represented Dame Cecily Suet while “a very clever little dog” acted the part of her cat.¹² There were other instances of men acting the female benevolent agent or wearing women's dress for disguise in the harlequinade;¹³ and “breeches roles” for actresses, though not the defining feature they would later become, were not unknown. Interestingly for our purposes, Don Giovanni was probably the most celebrated of these transsexual impersonations. Moncrieff's extravaganza Don Giovanni (1817) first featured in the title role Mrs. Gould, “whose masculine habits won her the name of ‘Joe’ Gould”;¹⁴ but the role came to be particularly associated with Mrs. Gould's successor, the “English Adonis” Madame Vestris. Writing in the high noon of Victorian pantomime, George Vandenhoff paid retrospective tribute to her memorable achievement: “Vestris was admirably gifted, cut out, and framed to shine en petit maître. … Believe it, reader, no actress that we now have (1860) can ever give an idea of her attractions, the fascinations, the witcheries of Mme Vestris in the hey-day of her charms.”¹⁵ We can well imagine that Byron would have heard of such “witcheries” even in Venice.

Although Byron's knowledge of Madame Vestris's bravura performance and the other interesting English burlesques and transformations inflicted upon Don Juan's character after the great London success of Don Giovanni would have to be secondhand, in the years prior to his self-exile he had direct experience of English spectacular theater and considerable admiration for its practitioners. Byron's letters and Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi both attest to Byron's interest in Grimaldi's performances from 1808 on.¹⁶ If we could seat Byron in the Covent Garden audience watching “Joey” reenacting his role of Scaramouch in the “tragic pantomimic ballet” of Don Juan that opened on 20 November 1809, there would be straightforward and convincing evidence of a causal link between pantomime and epic poem. But that evening must be seen as a different sort of anticipation in Byron's life: 20 November 1809 found him not in London but pausing on his travels through Greece to stop at Missolonghi, where he would die some fifteen years later. Although there is no solid proof that Byron knew and admired Grimaldi's performance in Don Juan, Dickens speaks of the relationship that evolved between the men as friendship, though their acquaintance started awkwardly due to some facetious hostility on Byron's part when the two met at Berkeley Castle in October 1812. The actor and the poet seem to have met both at private parties and at Covent Garden, where Byron would sometimes wait in the wings to resume a conversation interrupted by a performance. There is palpable evidence of Byron's continued esteem for the comic actor and his talents. On his departure from England in 1816, Byron presented Grimaldi with “a valuable silver snuff-box, around which was the inscription, ‘The gift of Lord Byron to Joseph Grimaldi,’”¹⁷ a courteous memento of the sort one sovereign offers to another. Byron, fond of seeing himself as the Napoleon of poets, habitually admired preeminence in others; and his gracious valedictory gesture here strikes a note of sincere regard rather than mere formality.

There is a still more interesting connection between Byron and Thomas John Dibdin, the prolific writer of musical comedies who along with Alexander Rae succeeded Whitbread as manager of Drury Lane Theatre during the years when Byron was officially and informally active in that theater's affairs. As a member of the subcommittee for management, Byron gave more than a noble name to the Drury Lane committee, much to Lady Byron's regret. His involvement with the actors and management was both personal and businesslike. He read manuscripts, even served as go-between for writers of plays, notably Coleridge and Maturin. Once, at least, a brief note to Dibdin shows Byron closely attentive to the smallest details of a Drury Lane offering. The subject of Byron's criticism—a matter of diction and decency—and the tone he takes on that subject are amusingly identical to what he would chafe under some years later when Hobhouse voiced a collective concern about Don Juan's morality: “Dear Sir,—is not part of the dialogue in the new piece a little too double, if not too broad, now and then? for instance, the word ‘ravish’ occurs in the way of question, as well as a remark, some half dozen times in the course of one scene, thereby meaning, not raptures, but rape” (LJ 4:304).

As the salutation quoted above suggests, Byron's relationship with Dibdin does not appear to have been a close one; but the comic playwright's lyrics stayed in Byron's mind long after the period of association at Drury Lane had ended. It is from Dibdin's play The British Raft that Byron drew the phrase “tight little island,” an epithet he was famously fond of applying to his native land, and especially when he was resident of a much smaller and yet much less constrictive island society, Venice (see, for instance, LJ 5:136). Similarly, when Byron chose to mock Henry Gally Knight in one of the doggerel ballads he enjoyed including in his letters to John Murray, the original he travestied was a Dibdin song, “The Grinders” (LJ 6:28 n. 4). During his Italian exile Byron did not encounter Dibdin's plays only in memory or the London papers, though. One night at Venice's Benedetto theater he saw a French farce Dibdin and Kinnaird had translated for Drury Lane. “It turns upon a Usurer personating a father—” recalls Byron as he writes to Kinnaird, “and did not succeed at D[rury] L[ane]. I think it was better acted here than there.———What were the odds at that time—against my seeing the same farce at Venice?” (LJ 5:140; see also LJ 5:143).

What odds indeed? Perhaps not such long ones. Though theater began as a communal ceremony, it has also proved a highly portable commodity. Itinerant actors, alone or in troupes, have traveled far and wide, taking their native dramas with them; and if Byron could watch at Venice a French play he had formerly seen in London, he also could and did reacquaint himself with Italian works, most notably the comedies of Goldoni, plays he had once viewed on the English stage and now could appreciate in their proper cultural frame. If Venice set Goldoni in context, Goldoni also seemed to set Venice in context for Byron. His letters show that he sometimes conceived of the cosmopolitan life he was enjoying as one of those plays brought to life: “I am at present on the Brenta—opposite is a Spanish Marquis—ninety years old—next his Casino is a Frenchman's besides the natives—so as Somebody said the other day—we are exactly one of Goldoni's comedies (La Vedova Scaltra) where a Spaniard—English—& Frenchman are introduced;—but we are all very good neighbours, Venetians, &c. &c. &c.” (LJ 5:238).

Perhaps it is worth recalling that the dramatist whose works Byron's life here imitates was a master of the commedia dell'arte—and produced a Don Juan play (Don Giovanni Tenorio ossia il dissoluto) that despite its mediocrity has certain things in common with Byron's masterpiece. One can detect the similarities by looking at the reasons why historians of the Don Juan motif deprecate Goldoni's version. Mandel sees the Goldoni don as lacking “his folk vigor, his humor, and his intelligence”; and Weinstein characterizes Goldoni's play as an unhappy “modernization” that “reduces the grandiose Burlador to an ordinary, vulgar seducer” and diminishes the mythic catastrophe to a naturalistic one.¹⁸ Of course, the story of Don Juan is more pretext than text for Byron, and his poem aims to demonstrate its narrator's vigor, humor, and intelligence rather than the protagonist's. Thus what constitutes a weakness in Goldoni's work can be a strength or a neutral feature in Byron's—yet the attributes themselves may be more or less the same. Perhaps the most striking common quality the two works share is a teasingly confessional air. Theater historians generally agree that public interest in the play rose less out of any literary or theatrical merits than out of the general knowledge that material from Goldoni's life found its way into the play. In the discussion of canto 1 we have already seen how Byron's disapproving but fascinated readers detected the poet's personal affairs scattered throughout Juan's story; and as Elizabeth Boyd points out, Byron would have known about the dramatist's mixing autobiography with the story of Don Juan from “an amusing and notorious passage” in the Goldoni memoirs, a book Byron valued highly enough that, having sold his first copy in the 1816 auction of his library, he three years later traded Thomas Moore a copy of Ariosto for a replacement.¹⁹

My chief reason for mentioning Goldoni at this point is not to compare his treatment of Don Juan with Byron's but to stress the connection between real life and theatrical illusion, a point made explicit in Byron's letter quoted above. Fresh ways of looking at relations between acting and being, play and reality, England and Italy, past and present, converged on Byron in various ways, some of which we have already seen, as he was writing Don Juan. But nowhere in Byron's prose does this question of identity's boundaries and the means of getting beyond them present itself more richly than in the following passage, where yet again we find ourselves at a pantomime. Here, however, the masked thespian is none other than Byron, and what he is enacting both is and is not his own life. “In the Pantomime of 1815-16—there was a Representation of the Masquerade of 1814—given by ‘us Youth’ of Watier's Club to Wellington & Co.—Douglas Kinniard—& one or two others with myself—put on Masques—and went on the Stage amongst the οι πολλοι—to see the effect of a theatre from the Stage.—It is very grand.—Douglas danced amongst the figuranti too—& they were puzzled to find out who we were—as being more than their number.—It was odd enough that D.K. & I should have been both at the real Masquerade—& afterwards in the Mimic one of the same—on the stage of D.L. Theatre” (LJ 9:36-37).

This passage appears in “Detached Thoughts,” the remarkable journal Byron maintained between 15 October 1821 and 18 May 1822, a period that found him living chiefly at Pisa and refraining, as he had promised the Contessa Guiccioli, from continuation of Don Juan. He would resume the poem some two months after abandoning these prose “Thoughts”—or, more precisely, he would assimilate their gossipy and elegaic particulars into the story of Juan, whose adventures in English society are the bulk of incident in the final cantos. The quotation shows that Byron's experience contained a connection with Regency theater still closer than his involvement with Drury Lane would generally afford—and it also hints at certain attitudes and conventions important to the composition and understanding of Don Juan. This theatrical escapade clearly displays Byron's familiarity with and enjoyment of pantomime—his love of mystification—his recurring need to transcend limitation—to experience everything. For Byron, it is not enough to know theater as the audience does. He must have the view from the stage as well, not so much because he needs to feel himself an actor but because in a mutable world, unstable to its very foundation, the actors in a pantomime are the most blatant players of parts, but not the only ones. A masked actor is more obviously role-playing than is an unmasked one—any actor is more clearly assuming an identity than is any member of the audience—anyone present at the ritual is more evidently cast in a part than is someone bustling by outside the theater. Nonetheless, in the world Byron and the rest of us experience, everyone is both an actor and a spectator. In going masked on stage to see how the collaborative venture of theater looks from there, Byron demonstrates in life and art that in living our lives we are all creating roles, whether we be poets, seducers, slaves, empresses, soldiers, politicians, highwaymen, or poet laureates.

This episode of the perpetually theatrical Byron acting, for once, on a professional stage rather than in the theater of personal relationships has a complexity not yet fully acknowledged. In writing down these words among his “Detached Thoughts,” Byron reenacts or relives a past moment of acting and living. Recording the experience, Byron “authorizes” that moment, an anonymous reenactment (Byron and Kinnaird being masked, not known even by the performers) of an earlier enactment, also masked and technically though not completely anonymous in that the spectators familiar with Watier's Club at least could guess who masquers might be. Now what if anything is “real life” in all these embedded roles? What is “acting”? I find it impossible to answer that question except with another one, a query posed in Don Juan: “What after all, are all things—but a Show?” (DJ 7.2). The Byronic self-dramatization through combined self-revelation and self-concealment that we see crystallized in this biographical incident is one of the great puzzles and great pleasures of Don Juan.

It is interesting for a reader of Don Juan to notice that the Watier's masquerade honored Wellington, whose name appears at the start of canto 9, written a few months after the “Detached Thoughts” were put aside. The subject of the pantomime, which was entitled Harlequin and Fancy, or the Poet's Last Shilling, also deserves attention. In this entertainment, Harlequin's bat is associated with the writer's pen. An impoverished poet foreswears Fortune and invokes Fancy, under whose sponsorship he transforms his life—by writing a pantomime. The reflexiveness of Harlequin and Fancy is comparable to that of Don Juan, widely recognized as being a poem about its own composition. The pantomime's connection between writing and money suggests moments of poetical moneygrubbing (the laureate's, Wordsworth's, and the self-confessedly avaricious narrator's) in Don Juan's Dedication and first canto. The mock soliloquy in which the pantomime poet asks himself what to write obviously derives from Hamlet, a work alluded to and “colouring the climate” throughout Don Juan but especially in canto 9.²⁰ Here in Harlequin and Fancy we see the starving poet as prince of Denmark, his late last shilling in the role of Ghost:

To write and what to write, that is the question
Whether 'tis nobler in the Bard to write
The Bowl and Dagger of the Tragic Muse
Or to take arms against a host of critics,
And make a pantomime—to fly, to run
To jump and by a jump to say we 'scape
From Pantaloon, the Clown, and every foe
That Harlequin is heir to. 'Tis a transformation
Devoutly to be wished.(21)

“To write and what to write?” That is the poet's perennial question. It would be characteristic of Byron to recognize and exploit the ironical possibilities announced here. Byron, like the pantomime poet, saw himself as ill-used by Fortune—having been once courted (in the days of the Watier's Club masque and the Drury Lane production being recalled), then vilified, by a canting public. Why not embrace Fancy and the fanciful device of transformation? Why not have a joke on the fickle, provincial English public by constructing, as Grimaldi's Clown might, an English epic out of the least promising, most outrageous materials: that collection of odds and ends Byron refers to when he claims “Almost all Don Juan is real life—either my own—or from people I knew” (LJ 8:186). And why not take as the means of reanimating these odds and ends the transforming pen, or wand, or bat, of pantomime?

I have just tried to suggest how English and Italian spectacular theater—especially pantomime, most particularly Harlequin and Fancy—offer subjects, vehicles, roles, and a supply of tricks that could prove useful to Byron in the composition of Don Juan. Now it is time to step into the world of the poem and to see what evidences of spectacular theater we can find there. The second of Leigh Hunt's 1817 Examiner essays on pantomime asserts that “The three general pleasures of a Pantomime are its bustle, its variety, and its sudden changes.”²² All these features distinguish Don Juan with equal validity. Within the poem, bustle, variety, and sudden changes are consequences or companions of transformation, that most important device Don Juan shares with pantomime. All three features characterize both the plot and the intellectual flow of the poem—and here again, comparison with pantomime proves illuminating. As David Mayer understands it, Regency pantomime was not conceived to be systematically and single-mindedly satiric: “Its structure enabled fleeting comedy or satire to be directed at many topics without requiring that they be shown in a logical or plausible sequence. It was more effectual by being random rather than precise. A few laughs on one topic and the action of the pantomime moved on to another subject”²³—and so it is with Don Juan. Those laughs are frequently achieved though the device called construction—and again, so it is with Don Juan. For instance, we have already seen in the Southey essay how the Byronic narrator builds a witty and substantial digression on human knowledge out of apples: Adam's and Sir Isaac Newton's. (DJ 10.1-3) Similarly, in the canto we are about to consider at some length, construction operates in the forms of historical resonance and linguistic resemblance, adding three queens (Semiramis, Caroline the wife of George IV, and less importantly for the moment Catherine the Great) and two words (courser and courier) to make a wonderfully economical yet intricate illustration of the premise that “Love like religion sometimes runs to heresy.” (DJ 5.61)

An art that ranges wide, moves fast, and fills the scene to bursting runs the risk of undiscriminating eclecticism or superficiality or both. Mayer recognizes these as the besetting problems that keep Regency pantomime from offering the best chronicle of its age, though he concludes that these flaws are not fatal ones: “Still, the two qualities which are pantomime's weakest, lack of discrimination and lack of profundity, when coupled with its greatest strength, its comprehensiveness, permit seeing this portion of the nineteenth century as Britons of no special perceptiveness were likely to view it.”²⁴ But suppose a similar sort of chronicle offered by a Briton of extraordinary perceptiveness. Suppose that the chronicler is writing a sprawling work over a period of years, and hence is free from the obligation of fitting his vision into the two or so hours an audience will sit without squirming—always able to amplify, change his mind, return to subjects he has presented earlier. Furthermore, suppose this chronicler an expatriate poet, independent of British censorship and consequently free to mock religion, royalty, and politics, three institutions protected from pantomime satire by the lord chamberlain's examiner of plays. What you have supposed is the circumstances that could produce a pantomime with variety and rapidity as well as profundity achieved through recursion, with comprehensiveness and sharp though artfully underplayed discrimination. What you have supposed is Don Juan.

For Don Juan and spectacular theater alike, one important way of achieving “realism” is through features just discussed—the topical references and details from contemporary existence that so often provide the raw materials of improvisational humor. But truth to life calls for a certain universality along with accurate specificity if an allusive work is to speak to audiences after the fashions, events, and people it presents are gone. In theater exploiting the old commedia types, the timeless element of realism does not come from psychological complexity of the kind exhibited by a Shakespearean character: Caliban, for example, in the course of a single play. Instead, the sense of reality or vitality comes more gradually through a series of theatrical encounters with the character, as the result of what Allardyce Nicoll calls “the dramatic presentation of accumulative personalities.”²⁵ The essence of Harlequin does not vary. It is as formulaic as his obligatory costume. But when we see his character in play after play, pantomime scene after pantomime scene, commedia situation after commedia situation, the very act of endurance over time and through space makes him a real presence to us. Thus also Don Juan, that “variation of the English Harlequin,” as Beaty terms him.²⁶ Byron's chosen protagonist comes alive for us partly because of his having endured as a literary tradition, having sinned his sad or merry way though work after work, and partly because of the many situations and scenes through which Byron insists that we follow him in the course of the full yet unfinished poem.

One great advantage attending on this sort of accumulative character development is that, as is the case with psychological realism, there is room for inconsistency, a real enough quality in life but one fatal to other dramatic methods of comic delineation through type. Jonson's Volpone, his identity compressed into a single play, cannot lapse from foxiness without ceasing to be himself. But Harlequin or Don Juan can vary wildly. Each impression, whether it builds on or contradicts what is already there, is part of a character that is the sum of its particular presentations.

If seeing how spectacular theater creates character can help us understand Don Juan, so can knowledge of pantomime's plot. Don Juan may seem an errant epic, but it seems that way largely because of the digressions, those dazzling moments of transformation, topical satire, and verbal construction achieved by a narrator who behaves sometimes as benevolent agent, sometimes as Grimaldi Clown. Digressions aside, the plot is in fact a clear and simple one—and that simplicity emerges most clearly when we consider the narrative sequence in the light shed by our awareness of pantomime conventions. Canto 1, the part of the story set in Don Juan's native country, can be seen as analogous to the opening of English pantomime. Certainly this tale of young though adulterous lovers parted by a cuckolded father-husband (remember Alfonso's fifty years to Julia's twenty-three) has at least as much in common with pantomime as it does with the Don Juan myth. Juan's transformation into Harlequin is oblique but evident, I think:

Here ends this canto.—Need I sing or say,
          How Juan, naked, favour'd by the night,
Who favours what she should not, found his way,
          And reach'd his home in an unseemly plight?

So says the narrator in stanza 188, though in fact thirty-four and a half stanzas remain to be sung. The last thing that has happened within the narrative is the struggle between Alfonso and Juan, an encounter that realistically strips away a garment that, in pantomime, would be removed from the young lover by magic. It falls to a supposedly benevolent, certainly female agent, Juan's mother, to provide a new costume, and a new identity (that of Harlequin Traveler), and a quest (“To mend his former morals, or get new”)—but those final thirty-four stanzas, increasingly remote from the narrative and progressively closer to the narrator, who progressively comes to resemble the author, remind us who really is enacting the change. It is Byron, the truly benevolent and truly potent transformer, who sends Juan off on his harlequinade in various costumes and through assorted cultures. The order is certainly not random. Juan's travels recapitulate a sort of cultural evolution. He goes from animal existence (shipwreck) to a primitive community (Lambro's island) to an Eastern despotism to Catherine the Great's Europeanizing Russia to what the implied reader of the poem is likely to consider the pinnacle of civilization, which Juan progressively ascends: from Western Europe to England to London, and finally to an aristocratic country house—Whig emblem, as Malcolm Kelsall has put it, of power's diffusion “away from the centralised autocracy.”²⁷ As the exotic scenes change, Juan's costumes vary from rags to Greek finery to Ottoman drag to a Cossack artilleryman's uniform to Russian court dress and finally Anglo-dandaical impeccability.

We must not push the parallels too far or forget that Byron's comic epic has models other than spectacular theater. A technical or narrative transformation of the sort seen in pantomime does occur between cantos 1 and 2, as the boy is dispatched on his travels like Harlequin sent off on his quest. Still, Juan develops psychologically (as Tom Jones does, for instance) as well as accumulatively, and his personal transformation from naïf to cosmopolite takes place gradually—starting in canto 5 and continuing through canto 8. The chief agent of this transformation may be seen as Byron, or “Byron,” or the Byronic narrator with his “supernatural machinery,” but his assistant, a character incarnate in the pantomime world of the poem, is the practical philosopher whose name is an Anglicized doubling of Juan's and who plays experience to the Spanish youth's innocence—that is to say, John Johnson. The way in which English values embodied in Johnson preside over Don Juan's transformation is a matter for the fifth essay, “England in Don Juan.” For now our concern is with the most clearly pantomimic interlude in Don Juan, the seraglio episode in canto 5, where our awareness of the story as artifice is heightened by such pantomime devices as sudden and drastic scene changes, exotically artificial settings, recurring personal transformations and gender reversals, blatant manipulation of characters and events by various stage managers, inside, outside, and above the narrative.

As the canto opens Don Juan, whom we have just seen chained in a company of actors, is dramatically situated in the slave market at Constantinople. The crowd scene's contrived quality is stressed: “Like a backgammon board the place was dotted / With whites and blacks, in groups on show for sale” (DJ 5.10). So is the flimsy, backdrop quality of the city itself: “Each villa on the Bosphorus looks a screen / New painted, or a pretty opera-scene” (DJ 5.46). Purchased, Juan is dispatched to the splendor of the seraglio, and it proves a place “Which puzzled nature much to know what art meant” (DJ 5.64), a place where “Wealth had done wonders—taste not much” (DJ 5.94). The stanza last quoted goes on directly to acknowledge that “such things / Occur in orient palaces, and even / In the more chasten'd domes of western kings” (DJ 5.94). Thanks to these words, the gaudy unreality of canto 5's mise-en-scène cannot be seen as a simple slap at Ottoman aesthetics. Even as he evokes an exotic empire through which he once traveled, Byron also calls to mind both the insistently picturesque “Eastern” stage sets of many a West End pantomime and the more sturdily built if not much more authentic or chasten'd dome from which many such sets were imitated: the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion. Interestingly and appropriately enough, Byron here draws inspiration from a London fashion he helped promote, through writing his Oriental tales and setting a personal example (his and Hobhouse's Albanian costumes having been the making of more than one fashionable masquerade), and not least through having furnished Dibdin with some two hundred drawings of Turkish costumes. Byron claims to reject inspiration in the act of embracing it, though, for Eastern details offer him a temptation to do what he has done often and profitably in his literary past from Childe Harold on, to create a lush verbal diorama for the reader. Thus the narrator grows insistently prominent as Juan, Johnson, and Baba the eunuch are winding “through orange bowers and jasmine, and so forth,” eminently describable backdrops

(Of which I might have a good deal to say,
          There being no such profusion in the North
Of oriental plants, “et cetera,”
          But that of late your scribblers think it worth
Their while to rear whole hotbeds in their works
Because one poet travell'd 'mongst the Turks).

(DJ 5.42)

This crotchety rejection of easy success in pandering to his audience's love of the picturesque may apply specifically to horticultural description, but it has wider relevance in the canto. Byron seems positively compelled to intrude personal or cross-cultural references that pull out the Turkey carpet from under readers' feet whenever there is the faintest chance that the narrative and its setting will prove absorbing or engrossing enough to offer an illusion of reality rather than just an illusion. This wonderfully perverse parenthesis and other similar references, which constitute a sort of chronic parabasis in the comic tale, will be a major topic of the essay (ch. 5) treating English elements in cantos 2-9. For now, let it be enough to recognize the perfect timing of the pantomimic “bustle and variety” such rhetoric injects. Byron's cultural contrast and autobiographical intrusion make themselves felt just at the dangerous moment when the reader's critical intellect, lulled by pure description, might go to sleep.

Like the backdrop, the characters of canto 5 are perfect specimens for spectacular theater. The assorted slaves and enslavers from the pirate ship offer a striking crowd scene to start. Juan and Johnson, physically attractive in their different national ways, are perfect “stage gentlemen.” Indeed, as Johnson immediately notices (DJ 5.13), they are the “only gentlemen” among the “motley crew”—and that adjective “motley” is crucial—of the canto. Johnson applies the phrase to the various folk for sale at the slave market, but it refers equally well to the people of the palace, all those singled out for particular description being freakish or incomplete, physically and spiritually “ungentlemanly” in different ways. Baba the eunuch, the matched set of mute dwarves who open doors (and close lives) on command, Gulbeyaz the favored bride, and the sultan himself are all flattened out, spectacular figures—people diminished to roles. They are that way partly, I think, because of generic constraints and partly because of thematic ones. The two pressures work together superbly: Byron has chosen a self-evidently “unnatural” form for this episode to show that a palace (Oriental or Occidental, it matters not) is not a hospitable environment for what is natural or what is best in humanity. The headquarters of a despotism is an uncongenial backdrop for that improvisational play we call the human comedy.

Instead, Byron plays out against the imperial stage set an amorous farce of forcible disguise and crude stereotyping, a situation that might prove merely ridiculous but when skillfully handled can allow for crossed purposes, surprises, and rapid role reversals—the sort of situation that has been a staple of pantomime, especially from Victorian days to the present. The sultana Gulbeyaz, having seen Juan and Johnson at the slave market, has commanded Baba to purchase the promising lad for her personal use, the mature man for some unknown end. To be smuggled to the lady's apartments, Juan must submit to a transformation: he must dress, and play, the part of a harem girl, a prospect the highborn Spaniard finds outrageous. Casting Juan in this role is an act of transformation beyond the powers of a slave and eunuch like Baba. Only the voice of independent, sensible, securely masculine experience could convince Juan here—and just how the change comes about is a matter for later discussion when we go into John Johnson's role in Juan's education.

But come about it does, and Byron's use of pantomime cross-dressing enriches, and thereby transforms, the stock humorous device. Dressing a man as a woman may be a comic turn that never fails to amuse a British audience, but the joke does not in itself make any point about traditional gender roles and their underpinnings. Byron, however, is interested in exploring such roles, along with their political, philosophical, and psychological implications.²⁸ In the scene with Gulbeyaz, Byron obliges Juan not merely to wear the trappings of femininity, but to take upon himself less tangible yet more cumbersome attributes conventionally ascribed to women, while the sultana, operating from her position of power, acts with prerogatives conventionally reserved for men. But the situation is no simple reversal. As we shall see, Juan(na) and the sultan(a) are potential and essential mirrors of one another. Each seems equally well characterized by the mixture of qualities said to be projected (or reflected) by Gulbeyaz's eyes: “half-voluptuousness and half command” (DJ 5.108). Each is in a certain sense a man in women's clothes—Don Juan by dint of nature, Gulbeyaz thanks to the social accident that gives her prestige and permits her to be dominant, imperious, and aggressive. As their comic encounter begins, social masculinity takes precedence over the biological sort. Gulbeyaz is the amorous predator; Juan, the reluctant quarry.

Byron's inversion of conventional roles is brilliantly, somewhat blasphemously highlighted as the sultana issues a command in interrogative form—“‘Christian, cans't thou love?’” (DJ 5.116)—and Juan bursts into tears. Weeping, he enacts and embodies the stock spiritual qualities generally ascribed to the woman in such amorous skirmishes. He loves another and intends fidelity to her memory. He disdains a physical liaison with someone else whom he does not love. He resents being objectified, reduced to a desirable thing by that powerful stranger's lust. But what troubles him most deeply is the forcible violation implicit in his circumstances and in Gulbeyaz's command. All the components of Don Juan's deepest being are for the moment denied. He is a noble Spanish Christian male in love with a woman not at hand—yet he is forced, in rapid succession, to adjust to being a slave, entertaining the possibility of Islamic circumcision, dressing as a Turk and a woman, and serving as the romantic toy of a woman who is his mistress in just the way that Haidée was not. Stripped of all his accustomed privilege, subjugated in every possible sense, our hero in heroine's costume is forced to feel feminine and reduced to behaving (or freed to behave, depending on how one chooses to look at it) in accordance with his disguise—but his crying is a womanly act with a difference, as both the narrator and Gulbeyaz note:

She was a good deal shock'd; not shock'd at tears,
          For women shed and use them at their liking;
But there is something when man's eye appears
          Wet, still more disagreeable and striking:
A woman's tear-drop melts, a man's half sears.

(DJ 5.118)

Paradoxically enough, Juan's expression of his feminine side is precisely what stresses his essential masculinity and evokes Gulbeyaz's innate but undeveloped womanliness. Wishing to console but not really knowing how, she finds herself for the first time able and inclined to nurture and sympathize: the “odd glistening moisture in her eye” mirrors and answers Juan's tears and demonstrates that “nature teaches more than power can spoil” (DJ 5.120). But while still unshed, the “woman's tear-drop” mentioned above cannot “melt” opposition; and in fact the sultana's incipient softening is perhaps what permits Juan to harden his heart and call “back the stoic to his eyes” (DJ 5.121). His reassertion of self-control is reflected in Gulbeyaz's resumption of her regal station. She now draws on both her masculine and her feminine powers to court Juan with a gesture superbly blended but nonetheless unsuccessful:

At length, in an imperial way, she laid
          Her hand on his, and bending on him eyes,
Which needed not an empire to persuade,
          Look'd into his for love, where none replies.

(DJ 5.125)

When her suit still does not prosper, Gulbeyaz instinctively makes an act of submission. She throws herself on Juan's breast and, playing the simple woman, enables Juan's simple manliness to reassert itself—as it does first with a proud look, then with a melodramatic speech beginning “‘The prison'd eagle will not pair’” (DJ 5.126) and grandiosely terminating “Heads bow, knees bend, eyes watch around a throne, / And hands obey—our hearts are still our own” (DJ 5.127).

I have recapitulated the details of the love duel this fully to demonstrate its great potential for presentation in pantomime. Most of the time, the two characters mutely express themselves through formulaic glances and gestures. When they speak, the words are blatantly theatrical. Juan's heroic resolves are only a little less incredible than is his feminine disguise; and anyone who entertains the notion that the Turkish sultana understands Juan's Spanish eloquence is making a suspension of disbelief tantamount to that required for entry into the international never-never land of Harlequin and Columbine. But however fully pantomime might present the situation, its nature precludes analyzing the implications of what has been enacted. Here then the Byronic narrator—the stage manager, if you will, he who would tack up the “argument” in a commedia performance—inserts himself by means of digression. When the encounter he has set in motion resumes, it is indirectly reported. We return to the exchange of significant glances, but now these looks are relayed and explained by the narrator, whose mediating presence is thereby felt if not literally seen: “If I said fire flash'd from Gulbeyaz' eyes, / 'Twere nothing—for her eyes flash'd always fire” (DJ 5.134).

We do not see but are informed of the sultana's rage and the exact sequence of thoughts it sends sweeping through her mind: to “cut off Juan's head,” “to cut only his—acquaintance,” “to rally him into repentance,” “to call her maids and go to bed,” “to stab herself,” “to sentence / The lash to Baba.” And then the climax: “but her grand resource / Was to sit down again, and cry of course” (DJ 5.139). By explaining the situation as he presents it, the narrator enriches the pantomimic scene. We come to know how Gulbeyaz feels—and a skilled actress could convey the range of feelings described—but also what she thinks. We infer from that prominently placed “of course” that the womanly tears now falling from her imperial eyes were inevitable after all. Just as inevitable, by implication, is Juan's reaction: “But all his great preparatives for dying / Dissolved like snow before a woman crying” (DJ 5.141).

To shed those tears that melt opposition is both the most artful and the most natural thing that Gulbeyaz could do. Juan's tears seared her; now hers soften him. “Juan's virtue ebb'd,” the narrator reports (DJ 5.142). This change of heart is conventionally feminine, in that it indicates the willingness to be wooed out of shyness or reluctance associated with coquettes from the golden age of nymphs and satyrs on. Here, though, the reversal signals Don Juan's return to manly form. He is ready to comfort a lovely woman in need of his attentions and in so doing to enjoy rather than resist the erotic adventure put in his path.

Gulbeyaz and Juan's awkwardly achieved Turko-Spanish détente seems well on the way to becoming true concord when the arrival of the sultan delays (forever, as it turns out) the kiss of peace. The sultan as Byron renders him is a stage Ottoman of the first order. Theatrically “Shawl'd to the nose, and bearded to the eyes” (DJ 5.147), he could as easily be played by a woman as by a man; and his stagily masculine appearance enhances the canto's air of androgyny. Though he has come to confer on Gulbeyaz the honor of a night in his bed, the sultan pauses to admire the newly arrived Juanna. His attention brings the disguise plot full circle, and with a piquant twist of the sort especially popular in pantomime, burletta, and the other forms of spectacular theater. By suggesting that both sultan and sultana are attracted to the stranger in disguise, Byron not only reflects, as pantomime is wont to do, a well-known situation (namely the king and queen falling in love with Pyrocles/Zelmane in Sidney's Arcadia). He also places the “boy-bride” of farcical convention within the plot generally associated with the “female page”—and the theatrical effect thereby achieved is more or less what would result were the central deception of Epicoene to replace Viola's act of impersonation in Twelfth Night. The mixture or reversal of dramatic conventions brings about on the metalevel a cross-dressing comparable to Juan's presentation as Juanna, or to that amusing moment in Harlequin Whittington where Grimaldi and the “clever little dog” present themselves as Cecily Suet and her cat.

Disguise and exchange of roles, surefire prescriptions for laughter though they may be in pantomime, can serve higher comic purposes—and Byron is quick to exploit them accordingly. Calling into question Juan's and Gulbeyaz's gender roles exposes the inadequacy of all externally imposed or superficially delineated identities. Such definitions, rapidly reversible and largely interchangeable, are not merely shallow but downright false—not identities at all but roles in the most literal sense. Tears, as we have seen, are the crucial determinant of the feminine role in canto 5's amorous face-off. Weeping, a natural human act conventionally deemed appropriate to one sex only, initiates Juan's assumption of the woman's part and Gulbeyaz's resumption of it. Tears thus serve as both catalyst and evidence of the canto's shifting balance of masculinity and femininity—or, as Susan J. Wolfson puts it, as “synechdoche for the demarcations of gender.”²⁹ The ease and swiftness with which that balance shifts or those demarcations are erased and redrawn demonstrates both the power of a surface matter (such as having drops of water spill out of one's eyes) to define a role and the essential absurdity of any such definition.

From start to finish, Don Juan stresses that “identity” as we tend to envision it consists of little more than the is-and-is-not of pantomime or masquerade. The poem's Dedication begins by presenting the difference in a man, the mask that is his vocation, and the super-mask that is his title: “Bob Southey! You're a poet—poet Laureate.” The last completed canto's final image is a tableau of cross-dressing that reverses neatly Don Juan's nocturnal impersonation of Juanna in the seraglio: as canto 16 ends, the spectral Black Friar's robe falls back to reveal a living and most fleshly woman: “The phantom of her frolic Grace—Fitz-Fulke!” (DJ 16.123). Between the poem's first and last moments, we find Juan always being himself by always acting the part that falls to him, always staying true to himself by keeping faith with the changing demands of time, place, company, and circumstance.

Even as it exposes the deficiencies of roles, Don Juan's pattern of disguise and reversal shows, in the very way that pantomime does, how those roles are to be transcended. The key is that all roles are roles—that like the transformations imposed by the benevolent agent of pantomime or the genial narrator of Don Juan, the parts humans play conceal as much as they reveal and reveal as much as they conceal. This point is perhaps most perfectly realized at Catherine's court in canto 9, where as “Love turned a Lieutenant of Artillery” Juan is charming youth transformed to conquering hero transformed to charming youth. The arrows and quiver of love turn into the sword and scabbard of war, then resume their former identities; Cupid's blindfold becomes a cravat and his wings a soldier's epaulets, then regain their romantic character. Each appearance is part of Juan's identity, but neither is his whole self.

Similarly, the psychosexual pas de deux Juan and Gulbeyaz enact forces each to experience the stock roles of man and of woman—thus to be for a time in touch with both the masculine and feminine sides of their natures. The serious effect of their farcical encounter is temporary wholeness and balance—momentary escape from the provinciality of gender. Both Gulbeyaz and Juan are changed, and in much the same way. She, the prisoner of palace life, for the first time enters into the feelings of another person. He, though less sheltered from the need to sympathize, nonetheless learns a lesson his mentor John Johnson has earlier in the canto pronounced well worth learning: “We know what slavery is, and our disasters / May teach us better to behave when masters” (DJ 5.23). Having lost all his hereditary advantages, even the most basic one of gender, Don Juan, once one of the ruling few, begins to discover how the world feels to the subordinate many. He grudgingly starts to see that attitudes can and should change, that different situations and cultures make different demands, that practicality must sometimes countermand honor and idealism. He commences the life of cosmopolitanism and more or less conscious mobility that notably distinguishes him in the rest of the poem—and makes this beginning because he has experienced the slippery, topsy-turvy, misruled, inconsistent side of life—a state of mundane reality but the special province of pantomime.

Notes

1. Edward G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, ed. Standish Meacham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 99.

2. Elizabeth French Boyd's Byron's Don Juan: A Critical Study (New York: Humanities Press, 1958; rpt.) is now over forty years old, but it remains indispensable for the student of Byron's literary sources. Chapters 6, 7, and 8, respectively titled “Byron's Library and His Reading,” “The Literary Background of Don Juan: Incidents,” and “The Literary Background of Don Juan: Ideas,” are especially crucial. Among the finest of more recent studies adding to our knowledge of Byron's sources are Hermione de Almeida's Byron and Joyce through Homer: Don Juan and Ulysses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Jerome J. McGann's Don Juan in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); the Don Juan portion of M. K. Joseph's Byron the Poet (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964); Cecil Y. Lang's essay “Narcissus Jilted: Byron, Don Juan, and the Biographical Imperative,” in Historical Studies and Literary Criticism, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 143-79; and Peter Vassallo, Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (London: Macmillan, 1984).

3. Frederick L. Beaty, “Harlequin Don Juan,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67, no. 3 (1968): 395-405. Beaty's piece not only indicates pantomime as a contemporary source for Byron's comic character Don Juan but also suggests, as I am doing, that the forms of pantomime and Don Juan are comparable.

4. Leo Weinstein, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959), 81. For other comparative surveys of the legendary figure, see George Gendarme de Bévotte, La légende de Don Juan (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1911); John Austen, The Story of Don Juan (London: Martin Secker, 1939); and Oscar Mandel, The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630-1963 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

5. Rather than produce an intricately annotated and slow-moving survey of pantomime and commedia conventions, I have tried to read widely, assimilate, and summarize. The account of spectacular theater that has resulted derives from the following works. David Mayer's Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806-1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969) has because of its period focus and its critical intelligence been my single most important source. Most readers will find that the most effective and economical introduction to pantomime in Byron's day is Mayer's second chapter, “The Structures of Pantomime, 1806-1836” (19-74). I have also relied on M. Willson Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968); Pierre Louis Ducharte, The Italian Comedy, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966); Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963) and A History of English Drama, 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952); and A. E. Wilson, King Panto: The Story of Pantomime (New York: Dutton, 1935). Throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Leigh Campbell Garrison, formerly my graduate research assistant, now a colleague in the VPI & SU English Department.

6. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 30-31.

7. Burletta and extravaganza are, like pantomime, forms of spectacular theater. Burletta was characterized by its champion George Colman the younger as “a Drama in Rhyme, entirely musical—a short comick piece consisting of recitative and singing, wholly accompanied, more or less, by the orchestra” (Colman quoted in C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature [Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1972], 77). Extravaganza, as described by its creator J. R. Planché, consists of “whimsical treatment of a poetical subject as distinguished from the broad caricature of a tragedy or serious opera, which was correctly described as burlesque” (quoted in Holman, Handbook, 216).

8. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 7.

9. Sala quoted in Wilson, King Panto, 73.

10. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 44.

11. Quoted ibid., 47.

12. Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, 291.

13. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 320-21.

14. Disher, Clowns and Pantomimes, 48.

15. Vandenhoff quoted in Wilson, King Panto, 135.

16. See Charles Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), 214-16 and 226-27, and Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 1:152 and n, 3:9, and 4:153 and n.

17. Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, 226-27.

18. Mandel, Theatre of Don Juan, 252; Weinstein, Metamorphoses of Don Juan, 51.

19. Boyd, Byron's Don Juan, 35, 165.

20. Anne Barton, “Don Juan Reconsidered: The Haidée Episode,” Byron Journal 15 (1987): 16.

21. Quoted in Mayer, harlequin in His Element, 77.

22. Leigh Hunt, Leigh Hunt's Dramatic Criticism, 1808-1831, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Octagon Books, 1977), 144.

23. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 6.

24. Ibid., 8.

25. Nicoll, The World of Harlequin, 22.

26. Beaty, “Harlequin Don Juan,” 405.

27. Malcolm M. Kelsall, Byron's Politics, 8.

28. Readers interested in pursuing this subject will certainly want to see Susan J. Wolfson's “‘Their she condition’: Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Gender in Don Juan,” English Literary History 54, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 585-617. Her reading of the poem's “transgressions of gender,” from linguistic cross-dressings to impersonations of the Juanna and Black Friar sort, is consistently insightful and solidly grounded. Her conclusion, that the poem “does not, finally, escape the roles fashioned and maintained by his [Byron's] culture, but it does explore the problems of living with and within those roles” (611), accurately characterizes one of Don Juan's most important preoccupations. But it strikes me that the poem offers as much transcendence as is possible in its recognition that human roles are roles—fashioned and maintained by a culture but enacted by individuals whose freedom lies in recognizing play (or what they do) for what it is.

29. Wolfson, “‘Their she condition,’” 288.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations appear in parenthetical references in the text:

CPW	Lord Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann
DJ	Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. Jerome J. McGann
G	Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, fascimile of the first edition, intro. James L. Ruff
LE	Robert Southey, Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons
LJ	Lord Byron, Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand
NC	Lady Caroline Lamb, A New Canto

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