SOURCE: Barton, Anne. “Don Juan Reconsidered: The Haidée Episode.” In Byron, edited by Jane Stabler, pp. 194-203. Edinburgh Gate, Eng.: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998.

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...