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...