SOURCE: "Byron's Laughter: Don Juan and the Hegelian Dialectic," in The Byron Journal, No. 11, 1983, pp. 40-3, 46.

In the essay below, Proffitt examines the function of the comic aspects of Don Juan.

In his preface to Man and Superman, Shaw ridicules Byron's Don Juan as being a mere "vagabond libertine." Shaw was wrong. Byron's "hero" is, by force of circumstance, a vagabond; but he is no libertine. He is as essentially chaste and as passive as Shaw's own Tanner—never the seducer, always the seduced. Shaw, of course, disparaged Shakespeare, too—his disparagement being a sure sign of his debt. But my point is not that Shaw was influenced by Byron. Given Shaw's own chastity and contrariness, he would probably have come up with a chaste, passive Juan in any event. But Byron! What was he doing with such a hero?

Before I attempt an answer to this question...