Don Juan

Don Juan, legendary hero in many folklore traditions, originating in Spain, who is the prototype of the unrepentant libertine. The old Spanish tale recounts the promiscuous Don Juan's seduction of the daughter of Sevilla's military commander. After killing the commander in a duel, Juan cynically invites the victim's funerary statue to a feast. The statue comes to life, seizes the defiant Juan, and drags him down to hell.

The first formal literary treatment of the story was the play El burlador de Seville (The Libertine of Seville, 1630) attributed to Tirso de Molina. 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 traveling Italian actors performed the story as a pantomime in France. There it was later dramatized by several French playwrights including Molière, who wrote Dom 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.