The relation of Keats to Shakespeare seems straightforward: lifelong admiration; the desire to imitate him; delight in Shakespeare’s use of language; approval of Shakespeare’s bypassing of the ethical in order to enter myriad kinds of human experience through negative capability; and wonder at his imagined worlds. Byron’s complex, shifting and almost never straightforward relation to Shakespeare is unlike this. Yet Byron, I will argue, is more pervasively, though less devoutly, Shakespearian than Keats.