2. The "Dedication" (written but not published with the first two cantos) roundly attacks Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and then as viciously berates Lord Castlereigh (British Foreign Secretary). Why does Byron attack each? What connection is there between the literary and political attacks? How useful is the "Dedication" as an introduction to the poem?
3. An immediate challenge, both to the poet and his readers, is the ottava rima stanzaic form (ABABABCC), which sends the poet into extremes of ingenuity in finding rhymes and which shifts from alternate rhymes to a couplet. To make matters more difficult still, lines (and hence rhymes) often have little relation to actual sentence structure. What are the uses that Byron makes of this stanzaic form? What range of poetic possibilities does it allow, especially in mood? Is there a recurring tension between Byron's demanding stanzaic form and what he wants to say (or seems to want to say)? Is the problem of writing stanzas one of the plots of the poem?
4. The poet wants a hero and (apparently arbitrarily) has chosen Don Juan. Has he made a mistake? Is Don Juan a hero? Does he develop in the course of the poem (which does, after all, trace his chronological aging)? What are his characteristics? Do we come to like him, or merely see him as the passive victim of the poet and of a variety of forces in the poem? What is his relation to the familiar Don Juan from Molière, Mozart, and the puppet shows? (Did Shaw have Byron in mind when he wrote Man and Superman?) What is his relation to the Byronic hero?
5. The poet tells us (rather insistently) that his poem is an epic. In what senses can one describe it in those terms? Is it, instead, mock-heroic, and, if so, how would you compare its mock heroism to that of Pope? Is there a relationship between Byron's claim to be writing an epic and his claim to be writing a moral poem?
6. The heroic or anti-heroic qualities of the protagonist and the poet's claim to be writing an epic lead naturally to questions about the nature of heroism and its survival in modern times. What is the relation of heroism to politics? Why does Byron see such figures as Washington as heroic? But what do you make of his treatment of Souvaroff in Cantos 7 and 8? What is the relationship between moral or political evaluation of a hero to admiration of his personal qualities?
7. The treatment of war in Cantos 7 and 8 raises questions about the ways in which that topic gathers and combines a series of still more basic themes: the force of male bonding, hierarchical (military) command structures in relation to individual decisions, the forces of necessary, the sources and varieties of human cruelty, and so forth. If one sorts out these issues, can one arrive at Byron's politics? Can one have a politics, given the experience of war?
8. The shifts in tone--in individual stanzas, within cantos, and across the entire poem--may be one cause for the differences in interpretation. Some critics see the poem as tragic, others as comic, others as satiric. What are the arguments for each of these descriptive terms? Does any seem more plausible than the others? If one sees shifting tone as a major formal characteristic of the poem, what are the generic implications of that view?
9. The plotlessness of the poem is another of its generic puzzles, since the pattern of action is often a defining characteristic of genre. Individual episodes, of course, have plots, but these seldom correspond to the division of cantos (or even of groups of cantos), and they are often left annoyingly unfinished (as, of course, is the poem itself). Setting aside its generic characteristics, what are the intellectual and thematic implications of plotlessness?
10. There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain
As any of Morality's conditions;
So little do we know what we're about in
This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting. (9,
xvii)
What is the epistemological position that the narrator has reached in the last of these
lines? To what degree is it characteristic of the whole poem? Does Byron's
epistemological skepticism) suggest a serious philosophic treatment, or is it merely a
joke? (Bertrand Russell has a section on Byron in his history of western philosophy.)
11. Juan has, as we would expect, a number of love encounters, from Haidée to Catherine the Great, from his fellow harem concubines to "the phantom of her frolic Grace--Fitz-Fulke" (16, cxxiii). Does love mean the same thing throughout the poem? Is there a roughly similar mixture of sexuality and sentiment throughout? Does Byron universally approve of it or (assuming he does not universally disapprove) does he always see it as paradoxical and comic? Is the poem a catalog of possible romantic combinations? To what degree is love less a topic in itself and more a key to other topics?
12. The question of love naturally raises the question of Byron's treatment of women in Don Juan (to say nothing of his treatment of them in real life). Are women universally negative--or at least universally self-centered? Are there standard characteristics that Byron would identify as typically feminine? Can one make a distinction between his off-hand remarks and his more extended treatment of women characters?
13. How important does Juan's rescue of Leila seem (Canto 8) or promise to be? What importance does it have for the action described at the time? What implications does she promise for his character or for the plot in the future? How would you differentiate his relationship to Leila from his relations to other women?
14. Does the contractual relationship between us readers and the poet of Don Juan seem stable? Do we have clear expectations about the poem and about the narrator's statements (about the nature of his ironies, for example)? Or is he a narrator (a) whom we never can believe and (b) whose values we cannot or should not accept? If we have an unstable relation to the narrator both as a reporter of fact and as an articulator of what Plato calls "right opinion," what kind of meaning can the poem have for us?