Sex and Death
The Lives and Loves of Don Juan
Don Juan in a new adaptation by Edward Kemp
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1997 (JGH)
There may well have been a genuine Don Juan Tenorio, a notorious libertine who lived in Spain in the 14th century, but whatever his historical origins, the symbolic force of the character has long eclipsed the man. Don Juan, the ultimate voluptuary, is a familiar figure in the folklore of Europe. A man of “a thousand and three” adventures, he pursues women only to abandon them at the moment of triumph. He has provided writers and artists with a symbol endlessly adaptable to the mood and mores of their times, and while key elements of his story persist, it is the differences between versions which more often than not prove to be the most revealing.
He made his first notable appearance in literature around 1630 in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Playboy of Seville and the Stone Guest) by the Spanish monk Tirso de Molina. Here the Don seduces three women and ends up killing the father of a fourth, the night commander Don Gonzalo. At the end of the play the stone statue of the murdered man throws Juan into hell before he can repent. The essential and oft-to-be-repeated ambiguity of the character is thus established early on: Molina’s Don is presented as an honourable man because he believes in God and hell and shows a certain heroism in the way he chooses to defy divine retribution for as long as he can. But the monkish author also ensures we recognise that he is a bad Christian in his inevitably doomed attempt to put off the day of reckoning indefinitely.
For the next thirty years the legend was taken up by the commedia dell’arte in Italy, where the more serious religious and moral aspects of the character were downplayed in order to release his potentially more comic side. Meanwhile, two French plays appeared, one by Claude de Villiers in 1659 and another by Nicolas Dorimond two years later. It is likely that Molière was familiar with at least one of these, though his own Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre takes a typically hard-eyed serio-comic look at the character. Written in haste following the banning of Tartuffe, it was first performed in February 1665 and was itself taken off the following month by outraged clerics who again accused the author of being anti-religious.
Molière’s Don, while still single-minded in his pursuit of women, is not quite the same man of action he was in Molina’s play. Rather, he is more contemplative and given to reflecting on and even discussing his actions. The tone of the play also constantly veers between farce and something a lot more serious. The comic servant Sganarelle acts as a foil to the single-minded Don, disapproving of his master’s lifestyle but remaining faithful through fear, while the Don himself is a non-believer, espousing an Epicurean attitude to life which is at odds with both religious hypocrisy and its opposite, genuine piety. He is amoral, but is forced at the end to face the consequences of his actions.
During the course of the next century, the Don appeared in another Italian play, this time a comedy, El dissoluto, by the Venetian playwright Goldoni, but it was in 1787 that he came to feature in one of the greatest works in the canon, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.
Even before Mozart and Da Ponte got to him, Gluck had written a ballet based on his adventures and Giuseppe Gazzaniga had produced his own opera adapted from another play by the Italian Giovanni Bertati. But it was in Don Giovanni, the “Dramma giocoso” (merry drama) of Mozart and Da Ponte, that the widest range yet of character and mood found expression. This is typified by the opening scene in which the libertine attempts to ravish a hysterical Donna Anna, then duels with and kills her father as he comes to the rescue. This is counterpointed by the comic terror of the Don’s servant Leporello as he watches from the sidelines. It is said that much of the comedy was added as a sop to contemporary Viennese audiences who thought the story otherwise too grim, but this does not explain why the two elements, philosophy and farce, have so frequently gone hand in hand in the telling of the tale.
In fact, Mozart’s Don Giovanni is a typical product of the Enlightenment. During the 18th century, man had learnt how to live without the notion of a vengeful God and the prospect of eternal damnation. Indeed, the Age of Reason had spawned a range of libertine literature, particularly in France, where the works of de Sade and Choderlos de Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses had been among the most prominent. Both the latter novel and the Mozart opera certain endings in which the malefactors are duly and eventually punished – but not before the attractiveness of their wicked ways have been fully explored.
Libertine writing was in many ways an apt reflection of a corrupt and degenerate aristocracy which itself received its final comeuppance in the French Revolution. The lubricious heroes demonstrated a moral will to do precisely as they wanted, but they were also viewed as characters in reaction against their society. In positive terms, the libertine, though a licentious rake, could also show the Enlightenment in action: a freethinker reacting against religious convention. Betraying trust, flouting the convention of honour, and ignoring the sacredness of his word were all part of his imperative.
By the time Mozart wrote the opera, Joseph II of Austria, after having pursued a liberal regime in religion and society, was beginning to have doubts. Licentiousness was on the rise, and by 1785 he was revoking several of his earlier laws, quashing reforms in the interests of order. Don Giovanni is the conscienceless psychopath whose actions show the logical outcome of too much liberality. Without retribution in an afterlife, society could only continue to function on a basis of trust between individuals, and the Don was nothing more than the threat of anarchy made concrete.
After pursuing the character to his logical conclusion, therefore, it is little wonder that the next century took a different approach. Don Juan next appears in Byron’s long mock-epic “satire upon abuses” in society, which came out between 1819 and 1824, possibly inspired by Shadwell’s The Libertine. Here, the poet presents the hero as an innocent swept up in a series of picaresque adventures, and indeed he is so unlike his legendary predecessors that one wonders why Byron felt the need to invoke the name of the famous Don at all. He is, above all, a young man sowing a few wild oats along the way but not single-mindedly pursuing a campaign against the values of society like his predecessors.
But since Voltaire in the middle of the previous century, the episodic tale had given authors much source for satire and Byron’s recent reading of Italian masters, in particular in ottava rima, had suggested that here was a form he could turn to his own use. The poem covers all the emotions, swooping from romantic longing to deepest melancholy, while remaining clear-eyed enough to deflate sentiment and expose the hypocrisies of religion, love and war.
Ironic in tone, conversational and epigrammatic, Byron’s Don Juan “is an epic of modern man, who, despite romantic longings, has reluctantly come to terms with the world as it is – and has found it amusing”.
Spanish playwright Jose Zorrilla y Moral (1817–1893) next utilised the character in Don Juan Tenorio, and here the hero is ultimately redeemed by a noble and good-hearted woman whose love saves him from being dragged off to hell at the last moment. Still widely performed in Mexico as part of the Todos Santos (All Saints’ Day) celebrations on 2 November, the Dia de Muertos or Day of the Dead itself, it was first performed in 1864, proved an immediate hit with Mexican audiences, and now forms part of the traditional festivities every year. Its mixture of religiosity and entertainment chime well with the Mexican attitude to death, that is, one of cheerful acceptance. Its theme of the conscienceless seducer also suits the machismo ethos of Mexican manhood. When it was first written, the educated classes enjoyed the verse, while the less well educated were amused by the broader themes. These days, it is even sometimes used as a vehicle for political comment.
This century, Bernard Shaw has most effectively invoked the character in his Don Juan in Hell, a play-within-the-play Man and Superman. Here the Don is shown as a wit and philosopher in typical Shavian antithesis to the normal view of the figure. Hell is painless and a refuge for all those who love beauty and idleness. Juan gives his views on the Life Force, suggests he is not as black as he is painted, and resolves to leave for Heaven forthwith. “Don Juan,” the inevitable Preface tells us, “was consumed with a passion for divine contemplation and creative activity, this being the secret of the failure of love to interest him permanently.”
Shaw’s line was that man was no longer the victor in the battle of the sexes, that women had always been the pursuers, far more ruthless and cunning than men, and in the early years of the 20th century, empowered as their earlier sisters had never been: “when women are wronged they do not group themselves pathetically to sing ‘Protegga il giusto cielo’: they grasp formidable legal and social weapons, and retaliate.”
And it is still on the stage that the Don has continued to be presented by various hands, most notably Rostand (La dernière nuit de Don Juan, 1910), Horváth (Don Juan Came Back from the War, 1937) and Max Frisch (Don Juan, or the Love of Geometry, 1953); also in 1953, he even appeared in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real.
After six hundred years, the power of the legend remains undiminished. So potent and familiar is it that in the 1970s Clive James was able to title an article about the poet Philip Larkin Don Juan in Hull, while Jean Blake White’s novel Don Juan de Marco relocated a latter-day would-be Don to a magical realist South America. With the character’s ability to reflect the cultural philosophy of the times, it may not be too long before we see Dona Juanita or even a Ms Donna Giovanna. After all, through all his incarnations, the one thing the Don has never been is constant.