Don Juan, my first encounter with Molière

Sooner or later, I had to read France’s most important playwright, so here we go. The translation I read was by George Graveley. 

1/ I will again quote Salvador de Madariaga: 

“Don Quixote, Sancho, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Faust are the five great men created by man. Resembling in this the great men made directly by the Creator, their forms have been covered in each generation by a new over-growth of legends, opinions, interpretations, and symbols. Such is the privilege of those living beings of art who by sheer vitality impress their personality on the collective mind of mankind.” (Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology, chapter “The Real Don Quixote”) 

The character of Don Juan originates in the 1630 Spanish play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest by Tirso de Molina, which I read last year when exploring the Spanish Golden Age. The curious part is that the original is barely known—if you look at the other figures, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are original, and Goethe’s Faust may be the most famous and influential version but Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is also a celebrated play—not only is The Trickster of Seville nowhere near as famous as Molière’s 1665 play Dom Juan, and the 1887 opera Don Giovanni by Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, but I also think that very few people know about its existence, or recognise the name Tirso de Molina. 

2/ Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan is a sociopath, who stops at nothing once he desires a woman, including disguising himself and pretending to be her lover in the dark, which is obviously rape but which also is cheating—that’s not exactly a seduction, is it? Molière’s Don Juan is more like the Don Juan in my head and in popular culture: a womaniser and manipulator. 

“DON JUAN So you think we should be tied for ever to the first object that takes our fancy, forswear the rest of the world, and have no eyes for anyone else? […] Constancy is only for fools. Every pretty woman has the right to attract us, and the mere accident of being seen first should not rob the others of their privilege of making prey of our hearts. Beauty delights me wherever I find it, and I fall a willing slave to the sweet force with which it seeks to bind me…” 

(Act 1) 

That’s an excellent depiction of the mind of a womaniser. And when we see him at work, well well well… the scene of him and the two peasant girls, Charlotte and Marthurine, is hilarious. 

3/ Molière is hilarious. There’s a funny scene where Don Juan tells his servant Sganarelle that he doesn’t believe in anything—not God, not hell, not the devil, not even medicine. 

“SGANARELLE You must have a very unbelieving soul. But look what a reputation emetic wine has got in the last few years. Its wonders have won over the most incredulous. Why, only three weeks ago, I saw a wonderful proof myself. 

DON JUAN What was that? 

SGANARELLE A man was at the point of death for six whole days. They didn’t know what to do for him. Nothing had any effect. Then suddenly they decided to give him a dose of emetic wine. 

DON JUAN And he recovered? 

SGANARELLE No. He died. 

DON JUAN An admirable effect, truly. 

SGANARELLE What? For six whole days he couldn’t die; and that finished him off at once.” 

(Act 3) 

Hahahahahahaha. 

4/ Compared to Tirso de Molina’s play, this one is tightly controlled—The Trickster of Seville has a four-page speech about Lisbon that adds nothing to the plot (to this day, I still don’t know what that’s about). 

Molière also gives us a much more interesting and memorable character. Both Don Juans are scoundrels, of course, but Molière’s has more charm and seductive power. The playwright humanises him by letting us see his perspective—Don Juan sees himself as open and generous, an appreciator of beauty, a lover of women—he also has some honour and courage, such as when he saves a man from robbers. Molière also depicts a warm friendship between Don Juan and his servant Sganarelle—they talk and banter and argue, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—Sganarelle is repulsed by Don Juan’s actions and afraid of losing his job but at the same time also charmed by him—so we too are charmed by Don Juan, or at least we can see his charm.

(Jane Austen would have liked this play, I think). 

5/ My friend Himadri said: 

“Molière makes more of Don Juan than just as satyromaniac. He is a man wedded to rationality, to reason. But the irrational is also an aspect of life, whether Juan accepts it or not. And it’s precisely this irrational aspect that destroys him.

One may even consider the statue to be symbolic of the irrational in Juan’s own psyche, but which he refuses to accept.”

Excellent play.

The Trickster of Seville by Tirso de Molina: the original Don Juan

1/ In Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (which is rather good), Salvador de Madariaga writes: 

“Don Quixote, Sancho, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Faust are the five great men created by man. Resembling in this the great men made directly by the Creator, their forms have been covered in each generation by a new over-growth of legends, opinions, interpretations, and symbols. Such is the privilege of those living beings of art who by sheer vitality impress their personality on the collective mind of mankind.” (Chapter “The Real Don Quixote”)

With Faust, he means Goethe’s—I only know Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus. It’s interesting that the other examples are all from the 17th century (more or less)—I already know Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza—I might as well get acquainted with Don Juan. 

The character of Don Juan originates from Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville and the Guest of Stone, published in 1630, and I read the translation by South African poet Roy Campbell. 

2/ In a letter in 1813 to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen wrote:  

“… The girls were very much delighted, but still prefer “Don Juan”; and I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting character than that compound of cruelty and lust.” 

Which version of Don Juan did she watch? I asked on twitter and there were 2 possibilities: John Halperin in The Life of Jane Austen thinks it’s the Mozart opera; David Selwyn in Jane Austen and Leisure says it’s a musical play/ pantomime based on Thomas Shadwell’s play. My twitter friend Annette Rubery added “I have the Biographia Dramatica of 1812 which says Shadwell’s Libertine was so impious it had not been represented on-stage for many years except in a ballet called Don Juan; or, The Libertine Destroyed.” 

So Jane Austen probably didn’t know the play by Tirso de Molina. 

Still, she’s familiar with the character and her fascination with Don Juan is no surprise—there are many Don Juans in her novels, the most charming of whom is Henry Crawford (so charming that some poor readers think Fanny Price should have married him). 

3/ The Spanish theatre tradition seems rather different from the English. Firstly, there’s a preoccupation with honour—specifically a woman’s honour—probably because Spain’s a Catholic country. As written in an earlier blog post, the figure of the jilted woman has popped up several times in the few Spanish plays I’ve read, and of course Don Juan, the archetype for womanisers, originates here. The theme of a woman’s honour does occasionally appear in Shakespeare, but it seems less dominant, less obsessive. 

Secondly, I have read 3 different Spanish playwrights so far and they—especially Calderón and Tirso de Molina—often write long speeches that don’t move the plot forward, long speeches that seem to pause the action and interrupt the flow. When I read Shakespeare, I never think “What is this long speech doing here?”, because his long speeches are generally either rhetoric (a character is persuading another person or a group of people, which moves the plot forward) or soliloquies (a character is thinking, which allows us to enter their mind).

In Spanish plays, there are moments when a character seems to deliver an oration to the audience rather than speak to others onstage—what would the other character(s) be doing then?—look at The Trickster of Seville, for example, why is there a 4-page speech about Lisbon? What does it have to do with anything? 

4/ There are some good bits in the play. 

“THISBE […] Here where the slumbrous suns tread, light 

And lazy, on the blue waves’ trance, 

And wake the sapphires with delight 

To scare the shadows as they glance; 

Here by white sands, so finely spun

They seem like seeded pearls to shine, 

Or else like atoms of the sun 

Gilded in heaven; by this brine, 

Listening to the birds, I quarter, 

And hear their amorous, plaintive moans

And the sweet battles which the water

Is waging with the rocks and stones…”

(Act 1)

Thisbe—Tisbea in the original—is a fishermaid (I’m not sure why Roy Campbell changes the name).  

She’s seduced by Don Juan. 

“THISBE […] Fire, oh, fire, and water, water! 

Have pity, love, don’t scorch my spirits! 

Oh, wicked cabin, scene of slaughter, 

Where honour, vanquished in the fight, 

Bled crimson! Vilest robber’s den

And shelter of the wrongs I mourn! 

O traitor guest, most curst of men, 

To leave a girl, betrayed, forlorn! 

You were a cloud drawn from the sea

To swamp and deluge me with tears!...” 

(Act 1) 

The entire speech is so good. It’s interesting that Tirso de Molina gives such an eloquent and tragic speech to her but not to Duchess Isabel nor Doña Ana. 

This is also a good bit: 

“MARQUIS God shield me! I hear cries and weeping

Resounding from the castle square.

At such an hour what could it be? 

Ice freezes all my chest. I see

What seems another Troy aflare, 

For torches now come wildly gleaming 

With giant flames like comets streaming 

And reeking from their pitchy hair, 

A might horde of tarry hanks.

Fire seems to emulate the stars 

Dividing into troops and ranks…” 

(Act 2) 

5/ I don’t have a lot to say about The Trickster of Seville. But I’d like to comment that if you look at the characters who have become archetypes, who have escaped their books as concepts (Don Quixote, Hamlet, Robinson Crusoe, Ebenezer Scrooge, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula, Captain Ahab, Bartleby, and so on), Don Juan is rather unusual in that its original version is not the greatest version and not the most famous—I would even say that it’s not very well-known at all, compared to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Molière’s version, and Lord Byron’s epic poem. 

Now you might mention Hamlet, but we don’t know much about the Ur-Hamlet, do we? And I would guess that Shakespeare’s play, not an earlier version, is where the character of Hamlet is truly born and from which he comes to develop a metaphorical life beyond the text. In contrast, Tirso de Molina already has a complete Don Juan in his play and later artists, as they retell the story, create something greater. 

You might now name Faust, but Faust is different from the other characters in that he doesn’t step out of a literary work—Christopher Marlowe and Goethe gave him more life and turned him into one of the greatest characters in literature, but he’s already a character in a folk legend.  

So in The Trickster of Seville, Tirso de Molina creates a Don Juan who is complete and who then exists beyond the play, but it’s neither the greatest nor the most famous version. 

6/ What do I think about The Trickster of Seville? I don’t think it’s a great play, the characters are not individualised (Don Juan is the only interesting character), but there are good bits in it. In this version, Don Juan is not just a womaniser and seducer but evil—a sociopath. 

I’d like to check out a few different versions of Don Juan.