Liberty and Licence

‘Liberty’ and ‘licence’ were important terms for Byron, with political, artistic and sexual connotations. The chapter begins by examining the tension between the paean to liberty in Byron’s sonnet prefixed to The Prisoner of Chillon and the narrative of the poem itself.In the first canto of Don Juan, Byron says that he is going to ‘take a liberty’ which is also poetic licence in moving the narrative forwards by six months. Byron presents this as a form of decorum because it means that he does not have to describe Juan and Julia making love. But when the poem jumps forwards to the next scene it is the most prurient in the canto. The chapter enlarges this episode into an enquiry into Byron’s conscious sustaining of a comic mode long present in English and Italian writing, but then under attack, which can handle erotic adventures with both warmth and delicacy.