Don Juan (Spanish) and Don Giovanni (Italian) is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many writers. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, by Tirso de Molina, is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630. Evidence suggests it is the first written version of the Don Juan legend. The second work in Spanish literature about this man is the play Don Juan Tenorio, by José Zorrilla, written in 1844.

Don Juan is used synonymously for "womaniser", especially in Spanish slang.

The Don Juan legend

Don Juan is a rogue and a libertine who takes great pleasure in seducing women and (in most versions) enjoys fighting their champions. The legend's force is either his raping or his seducing a young noblewoman, and killing her father. Later, in a grave yard, Don Juan encounters a statue of the dead, and, impiously, invites him to dine with him, the statue gladly accepts. The father's ghost arrives for dinner at Don Juan's house, and, in turn, invites Don Juan to dine with him in the grave yard. Don Juan accepts, and goes to the father's grave where the statue asks to shake Don Juan's hand. When he extends his arm, the statue grabs hold and drags him away, to Hell.^[1]

Character

The first, recorded tale of Don Juan is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina. Its publication date ranges from 1620 to 1625, although it appeared in Spain as early as 1615. Don Juan is an unrepentant womanizer who seduces women, either by disguising himself as their lovers or by promising marriage. He leaves a trail of broken hearts, angry, jealous husbands, and outraged fathers; finally, slaying a certain Don Gonzálo. Later, when Don Gonzálo's ghost invites him to supper in the cathedral, he accepts, not wanting to appear a coward.

Depending upon the rendition of the legend, Don Juan's character is seen from one of two perspectives: a simple, lustful womanizer who seduces wherever he can, and as a man who loves every woman he seduces, with the gift to see her true beauty and intrinsic value. The early versions of the legend of Don Juan portray him in the former light.

Other Don Juan literature

Another, more recent version of the legend of Don Juan is José Zorrilla's (1817–1893) nineteenth century play Don Juan Tenorio (1844) wherein Don Juan is a villain. It begins with Don Juan meeting his old friend Don Luís, and the two men recounting their conquests and vile deeds of the year past. In terms of the number of murders and conquests (seductions), Don Juan out-scores his friend Don Luís. Outdone, Don Luís replies that his friend has never had a woman of pure soul; sowing in Don Juan a new, tantalizing desire to sleep with a Woman of God. Also, Don Juan informs his friend that he plans to seduce his (Don Luís's) future wife. Don Juan seduces both his friend's wife and Doña Inés. Incensed, Doña Inés's father and Don Luís try avenging their lost prides, but Don Juan kills them both, despite his begging them not to attack, for, he claims, Doña Inés has shown him the true way. Don Juan becomes nervous when visited by the ghosts of Doña Inés and her father; the play concludes with a tug of war between Doña Inés and her father, for Don Juan, the daughter eventually winning and pulling him to Heaven.

In Aleksandr Blok's poetic depiction, the statue is only mentioned as a fearful approaching figure, while a deceased Donna Anna ("Anna, Anna, is it sweet to sleep in the grave? Is it sweet to dream unearthly dreams") is waiting to return to him in the fast-approaching hour of his death.

In the novella La Gitanilla (The Little Gypsy Girl), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the character who falls in love with the eponymous heroine is named Don Juan de Cárcamo, possibly related to the popular legend.

The 1736 play titled Don Juan (Don Giovanni Tenorio, ossia Il Dissoluto) was written by Carlo Goldoni, a famous Italian comic playwright of the time.

In Phantom of the Opera, the title of the opera written by the Phantom is Don Juan Triumphant.

In the musical Les Misérables, in the song "Red and Black" Grantaire compares Marius to Don Juan.

The Romantic poet Lord Byron wrote an epic version of Don Juan that is considered his masterpiece. It was unfinished at his death, but portrays Don Juan as the innocent victim of a repressive Catholic upbringing who unwittingly stumbles upon and into love time and again. For example, in Canto II he is shipwrecked and washed ashore an island, from where he is rescued by the beautiful daughter of a Greek pirate, who nurses him to health: a loving relationship develops. When her pirate father returns from his journey, however, he is angry and sells Don Juan into slavery, where, in turn, a Sultan's wife buys him for her pleasure. Lord Byron's Don Juan is less seducer than victim of women's desire and unfortunate circumstance.

Moreover, according to Harold Bloom, the Edmund character in King Lear, by William Shakespeare, anticipates the Don Juan archetype by a few decades, while intellectual philosopher Albert Camus represents Don Juan as an archetypical absurd man in the essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). In Philippine literature, Don Juan is the protagonist of the Ibong Adarna story, who, though portrayed in a good light, is known to have a weakness for beautiful women and tends to womanizing, having at least two simultaneous relationships (Doña Maria, Doña Leonora, Doña Juana). George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman also is a Don Juan play; described by Shaw in its preface.

Pronunciation

In Castilian Spanish, Don Juan is pronounced [doɴˈχwan]. The usual American pronunciation is IPA: /ˌdɒnˈwɑːn/, with two syllables and a silent "J". However, in Byron's epic poem it humorously rhymes with ruin and true one, suggesting that it was intended to have the trisyllabic spelling pronunciation /ˌdɒnˈdʒuːən/, close to the /ˌdɒnˈdʒuːan/ common in Britan today.

Chronology of works derived from the story of Don Juan

• 1630: Tirso de Molina's play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra
• 1643: Paolo Zehentner's play Promontorium Malae Spei
• 1650: Giacinto Andrea Cicognini's play Il convitato di pietra
• 1658: Dorimon (Nicolas Drouin)'s Le festin de pierre, ou le fils criminel
• 1659: Jean Deschamps, Sieur de Villiers's play Le Festin de Pierre ou le Fils criminel
• 1665: Molière's comedy Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre
• 1669: Rosimon's Festin de pierre, ou l’athée foudroyé
• 1676: Thomas Shadwell's play The Libertine
• 17th century: L'ateista fulminato, Italian play by unknown author
• 1714?: Antonio de Zamora's play No hay plazo que no se cumpla ni deuda que no se pague o convidado de piedra^[2]
• 1736: Carlo Goldoni's play Don Giovanni Tenorio ossia Il dissoluto
• 1761: Christoph Willibald Gluck and Gasparo Angiolini's ballet Don Juan
• 1787: Giovanni Bertati's opera Don Giovanni, music by Giuseppe Gazzaniga
• 1787: Lorenzo da Ponte's opera Don Giovanni, music by Mozart
• 1813: E.T.A. Hoffmann's novella Don Juan (later collected in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier)
• 1821: Byron's epic poem Don Juan
• 1829: Christian Dietrich Grabbe's play Don Juan und Faust
• 1830: Pushkin's play Каменный гость (Kamenny Gost', The Stone Guest)
• 1831: Alexandre Dumas' play Don Juan de Maraña
• 1834: Prosper Mérimée's novella Les âmes du Purgatoire
• 1840: José de Espronceda's El estudiante de Salamanca
• 1841: Franz Liszt's Réminiscences de Don Juan on themes from the Mozart opera
• 1843: Søren Kierkegaard's Either/or in which he discusses Mozart's musical interpretation of Don Giovanni
• 1844: Nikolaus Lenau's play Don Juan
• 1844: José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio
• 1861: Charles Baudelaire's poem Don Juan aux enfers
• 1862: Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's verse drama Don Juan
• 1872: Alexander Dargomyzhsky's opera The Stone Guest
• 1874: Guerra Junqueiro's poem A morte de D. João
• 1878: The Finding of Don Juan by Haidee, painting by Ford Madox Brown
• 1883: Paul Heyse's "Don Juans Ende"
• 1888: Richard Strauss' symphonic poem Don Juan
• 1903: George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman
• 1902–5: Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Las sonatas
• 1906 : Ruperto Chapí's opera Margarita la tornera, based on José Zorrilla's dramatic poem. This features a seducer of women known as Don Juan Alarcon.
• 1907: Guillaume Apollinaire's novel Les exploits d'un jeune Don Juan
• 1910: Gaston Leroux's novel Phantom of the Opera, which includes an opera called Don Juan Triumphant.
• 1910–12: Aleksandr Blok's The Commander's Footsteps (Шаги командора).
• 1912: Lesya Ukrainka's Stone Host (Кам'яний господар), a dramatic poem.
• 1913: Jacinto Grau's play Don Juan de Carillana; also, the play El burlador que no se burla (1927) and the essay Don Juan en el tiempo y en el espacio (1954)
• 1921: Edmond Rostand's play La dernière nuit de Don Juan
• 1922: Azorín' Don Juan
• 1926: Ramón Pérez de Ayala's novel and play Tigre Juan
• 1926: Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, silent film with Vitaphone soundtrack.
•  ?: Serafín and Joaquín Álvarez Quintero's play Don Juan
• 1934: Miguel de Unamuno's Don Juan
• 1934: The Private Life of Don Juan, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.'s last film
• 1934–49: André Obey: Don Juan
• 1936: Ödön von Horváth's Don Juan kommt aus dem Krieg
• 1938 Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel "After the Death of Don Juan"
• 1942: Paul Goodman's novel Don Juan or, The Continuum of the Libido, edited by Taylor Stoehr, 1979.
• 1946: Suzanne Lilar, play "Le Burlador", an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis.
• 1949: Adventures of Don Juan, film starring Errol Flynn
• 1953: Max Frisch's Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie; also Nachträgliches zu Don Juan
• 1954: Ronald Frederick Duncan's play Don Juan
• 1955: Ingmar Bergman's play Don Juan
• 1956: Buddy Holly's song Modern Don Juan
• 1958: Henry de Montherlant's play Don Juan
• 1959: Roger Vailland's play Monsieur Jean
• 1960: Ingmar Bergman film Djävulens öga(The Devil's Eye)
• 1963: Gonzalo Torrente Ballester's novel Don Juan
• 1969: Jan Švankmajer's Don Šajn (Don Juan); a short retelling of the Don Juan legend featuring live-action, stop-motion animation, and marionettes.
• 1970: The Stoned Guest, a half-act opera by P. D. Q. Bach
• 1973: Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme..., a film starring Brigitte Bardot
• 1974: Derek Walcott's play, The Joker of Seville
• 1975: Lars Gyllensten's novel I skuggan av Don Juan (In the shadow of Don Juan)
• 1977: Joni Mitchell's song and album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter
• 1988: The Pet Shop Boys song "Don Juan", which used the story as a metaphor for the seduction of the Balkans by Nazism during the 1930s
• 1990: Almeida Faria's novel O Conquistador (The Conqueror).
• 1991: Georges Pichard's Exploits d'un Don Juan, comic from Apollinaire's novel
• 1992: The song, "The Statue Got Me High" by They Might Be Giants, is a contemporary, semi-abstract retelling of Don Giovanni.
• 1995: Don Juan DeMarco, film starring Johnny Depp in the role of Don Juan, and also starring Marlon Brando
• 1997: David Ives' comedy Don Juan in Chicago
• 2003: Gregory Maupin's play Don Juan, A Comedy (a new adaptation)
• 2004: Peter Handke's novel Don Juan (erzählt von ihm selbst) ("Don Juan (Told by Himself)")
• 2004: Georgi Gospodnov's play D.J.
• 2005: José Saramago's play Don Giovanni ou O Dissoluto Absolvido (Don Giovanni or The Dissolute Acquitted).
• 2005: Jim Jarmusch's film Broken Flowers.
• 2006: Andrzej Bart's novel Don Juan raz jeszcze (Don Juan: once again)
• 2006: Joel Beers' play The Don Juan Project (an examination of the myth's relevance in contemporary times)
• 2006: Don Juan in Soho, a play by Patrick Marber
• 2007: Douglas Carlton Abrams's novelThe Lost Diary of Don Juan^[3]
• 2008 Cinque variazioni sul "Don Giovanni" di Da Ponte-Mozart, five plays of Vittorio Caratozzolo

Also there is a book from Jozef Toman with name The life and death of don Miguel de Manara.

Both the Flynn and Fairbanks versions turn Don Juan into a likeable rogue, rather than the heartless seducer that he is usually presented as being. The Flynn movie even has him successfully foiling a treasonous plot in the Spanish royal court. Shaw's play turns him into a philosophical character who enjoys contemplating the purpose of life. Beers' play turns him into a poetic, epic character recoiling from the debasing popular image of womanizer and cheap lover.

References

1. The Legend of Don Juan, Theatre Arts at the California Institute of Technology.
2. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_de_Zamora
3. The Lost Diary of Don Juan

Further reading

• Macchia, Giovanni [1991] (1995). Vita avventure e morte di Don Giovanni (in Italian). Milano: Adelphi. ISBN 88-459-0826-7. 

• Said Armesto, Víctor [1946] (1968). La leyenda de Don Juan (in Spanish). Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. 

External links

• Dom Juan de Molière : Plot overview (in French)
• Encyclopædia Britannica article about Don Juan

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Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "Don Juan". Image Credit.

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