Don Juan

Don Juan, legendary hero in many folkloric tales, and the prototype of the unrepentant libertine.

The story of Don Juan originated in Europe in the Middle Ages. The first formal literary treatment of the story was the play El burlador de Sevilla (The Libertine of Seville, 1630) attributed to Tirso de Molina. In this, the promiscuous Don Juan has seduced the daughter of Don Gonzalo, military commander of Seville. After killing the commander in a duel, Juan goes to the graveyard and cynically invites the victim's funerary statue to a feast. Coming to life, the statue accepts, appears at the feast and returns the invitation. Back at the graveyard the statue grabs Don Juan and casts him into hell. An important later Spanish version, still popular, is the verse play Don Juan tenorio (Don Juan the Rake, 1844) by José Zorrilla y Moral. About 1657 travelling Italian actors performed the story as a pantomime in France. There it was later dramatized by several French playwrights including Molière, who wrote Don Juan; ou, Le festin de pierre (Don Juan; or, The Stone Banquet, first acted in 1665). The theme was treated in 17th-century England by Sir Aston Cokayne in The Tragedy of Ovid (1669) and by Thomas Shadwell in The Libertine (1676). The story and character of the hero were greatly changed by later writers, including Lord Byron in his mock epic Don Juan (1819-1824) and George Bernard Shaw in his comedy Man and Superman (1903). The legend has also inspired musical masterpieces, most notably the opera Don Giovanni (1787) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, and the symphonic poem Don Juan (1889) by Richard Strauss. Both of these works portray Juan as a tragicomic hero, destroyed by his obsessive search for the ideal woman.