In this series, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. This is the second of a two-part OTD blog by Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan, Director of The Byron Society. The first was released yesterday to mark the bicentenary of Byron completing and Cantos III and IV of Don Juan and dispatching them to England. Click here for the first part.

In the previous post, I discussed the first Act of what is, I think, both the worst adaptation of Byron’s Don Juan and also the funniest in its ham-fisted attempts to simplify the delicious subtleties of one of the greatest and most complicated poems in the English language into a low-brow theatrical romp fit for the masses. This is the ‘three-penny Acting drama’ titled Don Juan: A Musical Drama in Three Acts, attributed to Charles Milner, a bizarre creation which reduces Byron’s satirical epic to a series of fighting and fornication scenes complete with a score of songs and what the author’s stage directions hubristically describe as ‘ballets’.

At the end of Act I, Juan has seduced (or been seduced by) both the beautiful Donna Julia and her equally libidinous maid, discovered the cuckolded husband Don Alfonso in a compromising position with Juan’s own aunt, Donna Inez, and finally sauntered off stage to take a ship from Spain in search of pastures new. During the brief interlude, as the curtains lower, the stage directions describe a ‘picture’ showing a ship tossing in storm-swept seas before being struck by lightning, at which point it slowly sinks.

In a decision that renders this production more like an episode of Love Island (with its insistently titillating emphasis on copulation and conflict), Milner opted to discard Byron’s brilliant cannibalism episode. Perhaps he felt that the killing and eating of the hapless Pedro might put his audience off. Certainly, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to light-hearted ditties and dances – though I imagine the Monty Python team would have been able to make it work. Anyway, I digress.

The curtain rises on a sea-cave, with a half-naked and unconscious Juan watched over by two beautiful oriental women. It is worth noting that Milner’s Haidee is far more insipid and his Zoe far more caustic than their Byronic counterparts, as the playwright transforms these characters into the stock dramatic figures of the buxom innocent and shrewish servant, playing to the less-refined tastes of his lower-class audience.

When Haidee, who suffers none of the issues with language barriers which render the progression of Byron’s island romance so protracted, offers her person and her wealth to Juan, our hero is all offended aristocratic dignity at the thought of so ‘low’ a connection. His outrage is conveyed in a series of asides to the audience, and it is easy to imagine Laura Honey in her male guise hamming it up:

Juan: Have I the honour then of addressing a princess in her own right, was your father a monarch?
Haidee: At least, at home his will was absolute, here he dwelt, and none dared here resist his pleasure: but at most ties he dwelt upon the sea, and brought such treasures thence.
Juan: Aye, I understand – contraband, smuggler upon a large scale. (Aside.) Tea. Tobacco.
Haidee: And conquered ships, and brought home many captives.
Juan: (Aside.) Oh, pirates and cut-throats to boot! This is a creditable connection.
Haidee: He died at sea!
Juan: (Aside.) Hung at the yard-arm! (II.i)

In a peculiar way, however, I find this scene more realistic than Byron’s idealised scene of immediate and improbable romance. As Haidee continues to enumerate her own charms, including great wealth, our Juan is revealed to be financially, as well as sexually, shameless. ‘I’m in a good thing!’ he exclaims at last, sweeping Haidee into his arms and taking her up on all of her offers.

The curtain drops on this touching scene and on wander a group of rollicking sailors bellowing sea-chanties. Their leader, Lambro, appears and we learn that – surprise, surprise – he has not drowned but merely been blown off course. He and his piratical band wander off the stage and the curtain rises once more to display Zoe and a drunken slave, Cyrus, in a ribald scene carefully calculated to appeal to the coarse, jingoistic humour of Milner’s audience:

Cyrus: Well missee Zoe, what you think of all dis fine affair? What do you tink of your misses and of our new massa? Dim diblish hansom, and they like you and me.
Zoe: I think that she is mad!
Cyrus: As for me, missee, poor black man, me niber tink not at all, it enough for him to workee, workee, when cross old massa make him, and now it enough for him to drinkee, drinkee, now young massa giv him holiday, him very fine man. (II.ii)

This is followed by a deliberately ludicrous conversation between the newly returned Lambro and Cyrus, the latter’s ears still ringing from a hefty box on the ears by an outraged Zoe when he suggested they have sex (‘you no hab me for chum-chum, me bery nice all sugar and brandy’). Lambro thus learns about his daughter’s affair with Juan and stalks off in high dudgeon towards the palace.

Here, the audience finds a scene of deliciously over-the-top fantastical luxury and after a series of songs extolling the delights of drunken hedonism and true love, accompanied by what the stage directions optimistically call ‘a Characteristic ballet’, Lambro bursts in. The angry father attempts to shoot Juan, Haidee shrieks and flings herself protectively in front of him, Lambro’s ‘ruffians rush in’, Juan is overpowered during yet another interminable fight scene, Haidee collapses and her lover is borne offstage.

Thus concludes Act II.

We re-join the hapless hero in the third and final Act, and Milner clearly couldn’t resist the opportunity for yet more crude vulgarity in the combination of a Spanish nobleman, a British sailor and a Constantinople slave market. It is here that we meet Will Johnson, probably the only truly funny character in this somewhat laboured theatrical production. Although based on Byron’s experienced man-of-the-world John Johnson, whereas the original character is a subtly John Bullish sort of figure, Milner’s Will Johnson is himself a caricature of the brash, ruddy-faced symbol of Englishness found in contemporary satires and prints.

The brave but buffoonish sailor, whose mouth is stuffed with naval cant and expletives, takes Juan under his wing and offers an amusing commentary on the ongoing sale proceedings in a series of humorous asides:

Johnson: Pick-‘em out, damme it that chap don’t think he’s selling red herrings

Johnson: Does he mean chimney ornaments?

Johnson: Split my mainsail, they are rare judges here, it’s the first time I was ever complimented on my beauty. (III.ii)

Bought by the eunuch Baba, Johnson and Juan are hustled into the palace haram. While Juan is carried away, Johnson remains onstage and catches sight of a British naval frigate sailing on the Bosporus in the distance. His ‘true heart of [presumably English] oak’ is predictably heartened by the sight.  

Juan, meanwhile, has been led into an oriental paradise. Brought before the unsurprisingly beautiful Gulbayez, he responds with a typically rakish fervour, gobbling up her hand with passionate kisses. Having got her attention, he then coyly refuses to consummate the relationship until she grants him his freedom, and in the following scene the two of them haggle like fishwives at a market stall. Suddenly, this mercenary sexual foreplay is interrupted as Baba bursts in to warn his adulterous mistress that her husband, the Sultan, approaches. Juan is bundled, protesting, into a woman’s robes in the nick of time.

Unlike Byron’s version, where the next canto opens with a disguised ‘Juana’ infiltrating the labyrinthine depths of the seraglio and ogling a succulent bevy of nubile odalisques, Milner couldn’t resist including one final fight scene (his musical drama has all the predictability of a Jason Statham movie). Juan, instead of concealing his identity, casts off his feminine clothing and starts to fight with the Sultan’s attendants. Just when it seems he will be overpowered, Johnson bursts through the window with a horde of British sailors recruited from the nearby naval frigate, saving the day to cries of ‘Old England for ever’. On this rousing note, Juan and his comrades escape.

Surprisingly, however, the stage directions suggest that after the gallant Johnson and his troupe return to the ship, accompanied by much ‘splitting of mainsails’ and ‘damme’s’, it is sunk by Turkish canon fire. ‘The Sultan triumphs’ conclude the stage directions laconically. This deliberate undercutting of patriotic fervour makes for an inexplicably downbeat ending to a light-hearted but decidedly odd production.

Lacking finesse and arguably the most maladroit adaptation of Byron’s poetic masterpiece, there is nevertheless a peculiar charm to Milner’s Don Juan: A Musical Drama in Three Acts, and I hope that one day someone will decide to put on another performance of it!

Contact Anna Mercer (mercerannam@gmail.com) if you want to suggest a future post for this series. More details here

In this series, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of literary and historical events of the Romantic period. Today, on the 19th of February 2020, we celebrate the bicentenary of Byron completing and Cantos III and IV of Don Juan and dispatching them to England. This is the first of a two-part OTD blog by Dr Emily Paterson-Morgan, Director of The Byron Society.

On February 19^th, two hundred years ago today, Byron sent his publisher John Murray ‘four packets containing Cantos third and fourth of D J‘ [1].

At this point, Don Juan was already infamous, widely denounced by reviewers and readers alike for its sexual and religious infidelity, its political effrontery, and general tone of satirical bravado. The British Critic dismisses Don Juan as a ‘narrative of degrading debauchery […] not only begotten but spawned in filth and darkness’. The Edinburgh Review condemns the ‘poisoned strains’ of a poet who ‘dethroned virtue and piety’ in his struggles to ‘exalt and endear scenes of conjugal infidelity’. The Quarterly Review, meanwhile, expressed fears for those ‘on whom its poison would operate without mitigation’ and kindle ‘ungovernable passion’, presumably resulting in a wave of orgiastic degeneracy spreading across England [2]. Murray himself seems to have viewed it as an incredibly high-risk form of cultural terrorism; ‘the die is cast as in a gambling game’ he wrote to Byron the day after ‘having fired the Bomb’ of Don Juan into the unsuspecting public [3].

Unsurprisingly given this sort of fervid histrionics, commentaries, adaptations and continuations abounded. One of the first (radical publisher William Hone being typically quick off the mark to seize an opportunity to hurl abuse at his staunchly Tory competitor) was Don John: or Don Juan Unmasked, written and released by Hone just a week after Byron’s ‘Bomb’ first hit the shelves in June 1819. This was followed by Don Juan Canto The Third, again poking fun at Murray’s shamefaced embarrassment about his pet poet’s stylistically and thematically provocative epic satire, which led him to conceal both of their identities when the first two Cantos were published. ‘[D]on’t think you can bamboozle folks’ Hone writes tauntingly in the Preface. He then assumes Byron’s voice in the opening stanza:

Miss Haidee and Don Juan pleaded well;
At least my publisher of late so tells me,
Although the world he does not chuse to tell,
Yet, every body knows ‘tis he who sells me:
To sing what furthermore the pair befel,
(As he declines my book and thus compels me,
Because my “guinea trash” he will not own,)
I send this Canto in to Mr. Hone. [4]

With unanticipated foresight, pre-empting both the popularity of cheap editions of Don Juan with the lower classes and the rift between poet and publisher, these lines suggest that Byron has despaired of his priggish publisher’s mealy-mouthed morality and decided to offer his ‘guinea trash’ to the more open-minded and popularist Hone.

Meanwhile, Murray’s furtive behaviour (‘the world he does not chuse to tell’) paved the way for an inevitable series of piracies. Perhaps the best known, thanks to Isaac Robert Cruikshank’s gorgeous illustrations – which possess all the colourful vibrancy, attention to detail, and staginess of the best satirical prints produced by his famous father – is George Smeeton’s Don Juan Cantos I – V. I was lucky enough to snap up a copy last year (Fig 1) at a bargain price as, sadly, it is missing one of the illustrations.

This pirated edition was only possible because Murray also published Cantos III-V anonymously, despite favourable responses from many of his coterie. ‘What sublimity! what levity! what boldness! what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!’, exclaimed John Wilson Crocker flamboyantly on returning Cantos III and IV. He then vehemently castigates Murray for the ‘great injustice’  he did Don Juan by his frightened refusal to affix his and Byron’s names to the publication, ‘smuggl[ing] it into the world and, as it were, pronounc[ing], it illegitimate in its birth’ [5].

But it is not the piracies or the parodies which I want to consider today, but rather the adaptations.

There is one particularly ham-fisted production which, for sheer awfulness, takes the proverbial biscuit. Yet for years it has exerted a peculiar fascination, luring me back again and again. This is the ‘three-penny Acting drama’ titled Don Juan: A Musical Drama in Three Acts, attributed to Charles Milner (fig 3) [6]. It is a truly bizarre mishmash of stock Byronic tropes, actual lines lifted from the original Don Juan, slapstick comedy, and unnecessarily numerous fight scenes, all enmeshed in the narrative framework of the first five cantos of Byron’s amatory epic. Attempting to reproduce the light-hearted bawdiness of early eighteenth-century cuckolding comedies – which Byron so successfully adapts in the burlesque tone of ‘Donny Johnny’ – Milner only achieves the sort of heavy-handed heartiness found in Victorian music halls and the Christmas Panto [7].

Milner’s Don Juan is a much more typical effusion of this traditional character that Byron’s, despite his fresh-faced youth, an aristocratic libertine comprised of flash and flattery. Not content with having conquered the lovely Julia’s heart, in the opening scene he also successfully seduces her maid Antonia. Launching into one of the periodic bouts of badly-written song which punctuate this theatrical pantomime he tries to kiss her:

Juan:
Come hither, fair one, let me sip
The balmy dew from off thy lip,
Nor turn that charming face away,
In which the beams of beauty play.
Antonia:
Desist, thou trifler, come not near,
Beware the rising anger here;
Did pertness ever equal this,
I dare you sir to steal a kiss. (I.i)

Methinks Antonia doth protest too much and it is somewhat unclear exactly who is being seduced in these lines. Cue an amorous embrace, romantically lit by flickering torches. An added eroticism was produced by the fact that the female manager of the theatre, Laura Honey, played the role of Don Juan, producing a succession of titillatingly quasi-sapphic encounters as the young Spaniard dallies first with Antonia (played by a Mrs Young) and Julia (played by a Miss Robinson), then Haidee (Miss Holmes), and finally Gulbayez (Miss Grossteste).

After Juan and Antonia leave the stage in search of Julia, the audience meets the mistress herself, alone in her boudoir as she compares her husband (‘old barebones’) and her dashing young lover. At this point we are treated to the first of a series of extremely heavy-handed attempts to re-forge Byron’s brilliantly fluid conversational verses into prose. And what plodding, pedestrian prose it is. Instead of the subtle nuances of Julia’s delusive psychological sophistries which Byron creates, Milner offers the following passage, so clunky that one might almost be tempted to read it as a deft parody of the stock theatrical character of the adulterous wife – if the laboriousness with which it was constructed wasn’t so painfully obvious:

I am married, and therefore, ought to give up all idea of love, that’s certain, and yet, Juan is so handsome – so amiable – so vivacious – so – I can’t tell what he is – all that a young lady could wish in a lover – thus to abandon him, will be a terrible struggle, and very unpleasant – I will take advantage of Don Alfonso’s absence to see him once again, in the hope that my example may inspire him with fortitude, to persevere in the path of honour and virtue. (I.ii)

Following Juan’s entrance, Milner has the lovers sing some slightly nauseating duets, interspersed with stilted conversation that, again, draws on Byron’s original.

Indeed, Milner is as shameless in his plagiaristic appropriations as Byron – ‘the mocking bird of our Parnassian ornithology’ [8]. These range from the list of abstract ideals which force Julia to remain chaste (‘prudence, honour, virtue’), to Alfonso’s entrance ‘with half the city at his back’. At the same time, in the colloquialised adaptations, such as Antonia’s claim to prefer ‘a good stout cavalier’ over a scrawny little ‘cock-sparrow’ like Juan, we see Milner catering to the appetites of his audience, using recognisable English idioms to familiarise the foreign setting.

Following the farcical bedroom episode when Alfonso and his hordes search for the now-concealed Juan, the blustering cuckold pleads for forgiveness and blames his intrusion on an informer’s lies (‘a scoundrel whose ears I will cut off in the morning’). His grovelling ceases when he discovers a man’s hat (Milner seemingly deeming a hat funnier than shoes) and a slapstick fight scene follows during which Juan eventually escapes and stumbles home.

Subsequently, in the first notable divergence from Byron’s text, the audience is treated to a heatedly amorous scene between Alfonso and his lover Donna Inez. Inexplicably transformed from Juan’s mother into his aunt, Inez retains the same priggish pretence of public virtue – a virtue which in no way prevents her from conducting a torrid affair with her married neighbour (offering opportunity for further ribaldry and innuendo, doubtless much to the delight of the audience).

When Juan bursts in, Alfonso dashes behind a curtain, crouching unsteadily on a table in a split stage scene which allows the audience to both watch Juan and Inez’s conversation and chortle at Alfonso’s outraged asides as he learns that it is his young neighbour who has cuckolded him:

Juan: You don’t know what a pleasure it was to treat such a jealous, addlepated, old, ugly curmudgeon.
Alfonso: Old and ugly am I? […] Miserable Don Alfonso! (I.v)

Suddenly the table breaks, triggering a scene of comedic chaos as Alfonso rolls around on the floor, Inez screams, and Juan strides off chuckling to himself. Much hilarity, no doubt, ensues. Thus concludes Act I.

Click here for the second part of this OTD blog, complete with raucous sailors, drunken servants, a somewhat dubious ‘ballet’, and dramatic scenes of fearsome conflict and oriental romance.

Contact Anna Mercer (mercerannam@gmail.com) if you want to suggest a future post for this series. More details here.

References:

1. Letter of the 21st of February referring to the previous Saturday’s post. L. Marchand, Byron Letters and Journals (BLJ), VII.42.
2. All these reviews come from Donald H. Reiman’s The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers.
3. J. Murray to Byron July 16th 1819, in Andrew Nicholson The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron.
4. For more on these texts, see Peter Cochran’s transcript and editorial commentary here, and the transcript and commentary from the editor of the Hone Archive here.
5. John Wilson Croker to John Murray, 26 March 1820.
6. Don Juan: A Musical Drama in Three Acts (London: W. Strange, 1837). The only extant copies are published in 1837, but David West Brown has convincingly suggested it was originally sent to the Lord Chamberlain in 1828 and performed at the City of London Theatre shortly thereafter in English and Empire: Literary History, Dialect, and the Digital Archive.
7. BLJ 5.208
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in Andrew Rutherford’s Byron: Critical Heritage.