Don Juan was invented as a sermon against leaving repentance until later
The original Don Juan was not meant to be admired. A Spanish friar writing around 1630 created the seducer to scare young people who assumed a deathbed confession would wipe their sins clean. His motto, roughly what a long time you are giving me, is the boast of a man who thinks hell can wait.
The playwright was Tirso de Molina, the pen name of Gabriel Tellez, and his Trickster of Seville fixed nearly every element later writers used: the Seville setting, the servant, the seduced woman, the father Don Juan kills, and the grisly finale in which the dead man's stone statue comes to dinner and drags his killer to hell. Tirso gave Don Juan devilish traits, a shape-shifter who disguises himself and twists language, a man without a name. The point was theological: some sins carry a penalty no last-minute contrition can avoid. The play also reflects Golden Age Spain's obsession with honour, which hinged on the chastity of a family's women.
Later versions bent the ending to their times. In some he is denied salvation, in others he walks into hell unrepentant, and in some he is pardoned. Mozart's Don Giovanni, first staged in Prague in 1787, has been called the opera of all operas and inspired writers from Pushkin to Kierkegaard. Jose Zorrilla's romantic Don Juan Tenorio of 1844 is still performed across the Spanish-speaking world on 2 November, the Day of the Dead. Byron's comic epic made the name rhyme with ruin, reflecting an old English habit of anglicising Spanish names.
Interpreters keep reinventing him. In Nikolaus Lenau's retelling, which inspired Richard Strauss's tone poem of 1889, he chases women hoping to find an ideal one and finally wills his own death in despair. The Spanish endocrinologist Gregorio Maranon argued that he was not a model of masculinity at all but a case of arrested psychosexual development, and during Spain's 1918 flu epidemic he even served as a metaphor for the microbe. Albert Camus saw him as an absurd hero who multiplies what he cannot unify.
Jane Austen called him a compound of cruelty and lust, yet found no stage character more interesting. His name now simply means a womaniser, and Don Juanism survives as an informal psychiatric label.
Source: Don Juan
