Byron's "Don Juan" Cantos 1-5 Annotated
Annotated and illustrated edition of Byron's comic epic
This is an annotated and illustrated edition of the first five Cantos of Byron's comic epic poem, Don Juan. It's a tale of the "Odyssey turned inside out" (Peter Cochran), "the most readable poem of its length ever written" according to Virginia Woolf, and "by far the greatest comic poem in English" in the view of Germaine Greer.
Please download "Don Juan Cantos I - V", annotated and illustrated (5.5MB).
So why the notes (again)?
Because Byron's genius is not always apparent to readers today who have not had the same background in the Greek and Roman classics and probably don't recall their 19th Century European political or scientific history, nor share the bitter resentment that Liberals like Byron felt at the "Concert of Europe's" 1815 restoration of the same rotten, revanchist monarchic order that Napoleon had briefly crushed.
Byron writes passionately and satirically about all of these things. My notes are mainly to help readers get the jokes: to see just what this brilliant, passionate, misbehaved, rather conflicted young man (in his early 30s) was getting at. And to demonstrate his genius, of course.
I'm not the only editor of an annotated version of the poem. There have been several annotated editions in the past such as Isaac Asimov's annotated version, illustrated by Milton Glaser, from 1973 (now out of print). Just recently, in 2024, Longmans published a scholarly version edited by Jane Stabler and Gavin Hopps ($600 from Amazon!). But the first of these is now hard to find even in used-book stores and the second is, well... overpriced.
In composing the notes I have drawn on a range of Byron scholars (especially the late Peter Cochran) and editors, as well as on my own researches. I've also added illustrations - more often than not images of academic paintings - that sometimes elucidate the verse, sometimes echo it, sometimes just brighten the page.
I have uploaded the Annotated Cantos I - V to archive.org. I have also made a version that can be read by the LLMs.