The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest  

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The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra) is a play by Tirso de Molina, published in Spain around 1630 and set in the 14th century. Evidence suggests that it was the first written version of the Don Juan legend.

Overview

In the Golden Age ("Siglo de Oro") of Spanish literature, the figure of Don Juan is introduced. Tirso de Molina's morality play, El Burlador de Sevilla, first depicts the character as a morally and socially abject, conscienceless debauchee and sexual predator.

Molina's play is set in the fourteenth century and its protagonist, the titular El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra — a.k.a., Don Juan — may have been modeled on characters in the earlier Golden Age plays, such as Leucino in Juan de la Cueva's Infamador (1581) and Leonido in Lope de Vega's Fianza Satisfecha (1612).

Molina's original Don Juan has more in common with our contemporary understanding of the fictional psychopath, as the character is guiltless, loveless, impulsive, and altogether lacking insight and judgment into his own actions and those of others. At the end of El Burlador de Sevilla, Don Juan is dragged down into hell by the ghost of the father of his first conquest (whom he had killed), while maintaining a consistent lack of remorse or regret for his wrong doing. Indeed, so self-absorbed that he was proud of the perverse depravity that marked his life.

Over time, via the subsequent works of Molière and Mozart, the legendary figure of Don Juan gradually lost his abject — or "psychopathic" like — qualities and became the archetype of a charming and manipulative womanizer. As a seductive and heroic transgressor who craves worldly experience and ultimately meets with his damnation, Don Juan has come to resemble Dante's Ulysses. In some later versions of the story — like Molière's (from 1665) — Don Juan repents.

The real-life exploits and writings of eighteenth-century figures like Giacomo Casanova and the Marquis de Sade can be seen as a revival of the Don Juan myth. In particular, Sade's writings seem to explode the Don Juan archetype and alter it beyond recognition by endowing it with extravagantly perverse psychopathic traits and behaviors.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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