SOURCE: Rodríguez, Alfred. “Tirso's Don Juan as Social Rebel.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 30, No. 1 (Spring 1978): 46-55.

[In the following essay, Rodríguez concentrates on Don Juan's pattern of “social defiance” in El burlador de Sevilla.]

Ortega y Gasset's identification of Don Juan with vital authenticity—with that fundamental exigency of life that makes all impediments to its fulfillment, whether imposed by reason or society, cause for rebellion—clarified this literary creature's myth-figure status:

Tal es la ironía irrespetuosa de Don Juan, figura equívoca, que nuestro tiempo va refinando, puliendo, hasta dotarla de un sentido preciso. Don Juan se revuelve contra la moral, porque la moral se había antes sublevado contra la vida. Sólo cuando exista una ética que cuente, como su norma primera, la plentiud vital, podrá Don Juan someterse.¹

We concur with this appraisal of the Don Juan: myth-symbol of the dynamic rebelliousness that underlies Western man's distinct ability—and willingness—to challenge taboos and burn totems. We feel, however, that the important textual basis for this representational myth-value (the tirsian character's constant, unrelenting offensive against the basic pillars of human sociability, against the sine qua non imperatives and codes that make social existence possible) has not been sufficiently analyzed.

The most direct and complete evaluation of Don Juan as social rebel, as defier of social as differentiated from religious or ethical norms,² is Professor A. A. Parker's marvelous summary:

And in fact none of the four seductions perpetrated by Don Juan is merely a sin of sexual indulgence; each is aggravated by circumstances that make it heinous. The seduction of Isabella is treachery towards a friend (Octavio) and, above all, an act of lese-majesté since it was committed in the royal palace. The dishonouring of Tisbea is aggravated by the violation of the law of hospitality, which should be sacred to the receiver. Ana's seduction is accompanied by a shameless betrayal of friendship and murder. And finally, the seduction of Aminta entails the breaking up of a wedding, the profanation of a sacrament … But on the erotic level alone Don Juan's exploits are more than merely personal disorder (or, as the ‘myth’ would have it, the individualistic assertion of ‘energía vital’): the attendant circumstances make them a social disorder. Because Don Juan is the negation of ‘caballerosidad’ in every respect, he disrupts all social ties, and society itself will fall apart and disappear if his anarchism is allowed to prevail. Behind the breathlessly swift action, dominated by the swaggering anarchist, there lies the theme of social order …³

We are in substantial agreement with Professor Parker, especially with regard to the first three escapades in El Burlador de Sevilla. Don Juan's aggravating anti-social behavior is in each case unmistakable, and the successively manages to undermine such basic pillars of social order and human conviviality as a) the respect and homage due hierarchical superiors (lese-majesté when it involves the royal person), b) the sacred law of hospitality, c) the hallowed precept of male friendship, and d) the sacrosanct immunity of a fellow human's life.⁴

Since these breaks with fundamental imperatives of social order have been duly noted, our only concern in returning to them is to stress what Professor Parker's recapitulative summary had, necessarily, to avoid: the cumulative structural and stylistic textual evidence of Tirso's carefully orchestrated projection for literary effect. We hope to underscore, in this fashion, just how essential to the playwright was his character's anti-social dimension.

First, the seduction that opens the play. Parker's reference to Tirso's direct insertion of the lese-majesté matter via the king's own words (‘yerro cometido en mi ofensa’)⁵ doesn't begin to suggest the care actually expended by the playwright in highlighting his character's subversion of the hierarchical respect/homage imperative. To begin with, the palace setting is basic to the conception of the opening scene; more than equal to its other major elements: the sin (sexual incontinence) and its victim (duchess).⁶ What is more, Tirso—although he strains verisimilitude in order to do so—effects a direct confrontation king-Don Juan. A king coming forth from his chambers, candle in hand, at the sound of trouble in the palace corridors is not as shocking in the Spanish baroque as it would have been a century later (or today, for that matter), but even then it must have been deemed somewhat forced. Sufficiently so, in any case, to reveal Tirso's very decided interest in having his Don Juan's defiance of royal hierarchy take place directly, unequivocally.⁷

And there is more. Besides the king's words, cited by Parker, there are a number of additional references, right there, to the grave anti-social nature of Don Juan's defiance of the hierarchical structure: Don Pedro's very first words, for example, in utter amazement, ‘¡En tu cuarto, gran señor, voces!’; and the exchange between the king himself and Isabela, ‘Di, mujer: ¿qué rigor, qué airada estrella te incitó, que en mi palacio, con hermosura y soberbia, profanases sus umbrales?’, ‘Ofensa a mi espalda hecha es justicia y es razón castigarla a espaldas vueltas.’ All this while neither Isabela nor the king emote over the purely ethical matter, the unchaste conduct itself.

When everything is added, it is clear that—quantitatively, at least—lese-majesté is the most stressed single aspect of the first Don Juan adventure. It is so even when compared to the sexual exploit itself, and it is Isabela—instantly more preoccupied by her social transgression than by her purely ethical predicament, by the context of her sin than by the sin itself—who very aptly sets that tone. As a major, if not the major facet of the playwright's esthetic intent, Don Juan's social rebellion, in this instance, should certainly have received greater consideration than it has from scholarly readings.

Tirso set the circumstances as he did (within the palace, in direct and personal conflict with the king) in order to establish immediately—and spectacularly, with extraordinary theatrical acumen, in actual fact—the daring nature of his grandiose creature. Don Juan's demonic ‘atrevimiento’ is naturally heightened by the stature of the entity defied, and Tirso very effectively begins at the very top. In so doing, the playwright sets a pattern of behavior—parallel to, but transcending the immediate and more shocking sexual activity—that fixes on Don Juan as defier of civilized man's fundamental socializing capabilities. The pattern, thus established from the very first, holds throughout, as we shall see, and would become in time (as the more immediately shocking sexual activity diminished in both ethical and social significance)⁸ the main-spring of the myth-figure's stature in the Western World.

In the second adventure, Tirso's protagonist moves to the opposite end of the social scale to effect his inevitable seduction.⁹ Again, it is likely that the playwright chose special circumstances in order to heighten the Don Juan's demonic presence and aggravate, as Parker has it, the primary sexual misconduct. Again, however, the aggravating addition comes to consume an inordinate proportion of the writer's creative effort, an extraordinary portion of the entire incident's preparation and implementation. The pattern set by the first seduction is thus immediately reinforced.

In this instance, the aggravating feature is Don Juan's direct violation of the law of hospitality.¹⁰ The initial preparation is carefully studied. The shipwreck, the precarious state of the surviving protagonist, are nor merely mise en scène devices. They inevitably set the stage, when reinforced by Tisbea's love at first sight,¹¹ for making the girl's humble home the key to inserting the hospitality situation under the most favorable Christian conditions. The hospitality imperative might have been invoked under less drastic circumstances, but those prepared by Tirso make the future victim all the more deserving of a sacred consideration that she never receives.

The subsequent development is, in this sense, no less carefully implemented. In the very few verses (actually less than 150) dedicated to planning the seduction, implementing it, and then fleeing, Tirso manages to underscore the protagonist's subversion of the law of hospitality in an unmistakably cumulative manner. Twice within just fifteen verses he has Catalinón comment: ‘¡Buen pago a su hospedaje deseas!’ and ‘¡Pobre mujer! Harto bien le pagamos la posada.’ That very scene begins, as well, with Don Juan's order (verbally resisted by Catalinón) to steal two get-away mares, a manner of preparatory violation of hospitality (against the host's property) that will culminate, cumulatively, with the trickster's seduction of his hostess.¹²

Tirso's most important reinforcing device is magnificently provided, however, after the fact. The burning of Tisbea's humble hut, whether figurative or real, brings this second seduction to a rousing conclusion. If we can assume that the hut has in fact been set afire by Don Juan, as a diversion to facilitate his escape, Tirso has brought to a most graphic extreme his character's defiance of the social code in question. What more can one do, symbolically, than burn down the house into which one has been hospitably invited, in which one has been hospitably nursed and cared for? If, on the other hand, the fire referred to is only figurative (an extension to the hut, to the love-nest, as it were, of the fires burning within Tisbea), there is still much to make it an effective device for insisting, quite poetically, upon Don Juan's defiance of the code of hospitality. Tisbea identifies the fire with the hut (even relishes its burning, for this reason): that is, recognizes and underscores the role of the defiance of hospitality in her personal downfall.

As with the first seduction of the play, the aggravating circumstances of the second are very carefully and effectively stressed. So much so, that one is left with the distinct impression that the socially defiant dimension of Don Juan was a very major part of Tirso's creative effort. The pattern noted while dealing with the aggravating circumstances of the first seduction now appear unmistakable.

Don Juan's third seduction is also very definitely carried out in parallel simultaneous defiance of another imperative of human sociability: male friendship.¹³ As in the escapade just analyzed, Tirso again carefully prepares a clear and inescapable underscoring of his character's specific social defiance. No extraordinary preparation is necessary, and none takes place, in the first seduction: the setting is the thing, the palace itself. No great preparation will be possible, as we shall see, in the last seduction of the play, because a measure of chance strengthens the protagonist's impulsive actions. But a careful preparation is an essential feature of seductions two and three, in which the special social imperative respectively highlighted must be underscored for maximal effect.

To begin with, the encounter between Don Juan and the Duque Octavio (Isabela's lover, the person supplanted by the trickster in Naples) is rather superfluously irrelevant (occurring in Act II, scene II) if its finality is anything other than to artfully to turn the public's attention to the specific facet of social anarchy at hand: the subversion of the friendship bond between men. Professor Parker is quite correct in listing the reprehensible betrayal of Duque Octavio's friendship as an aggravating anti-social factor in Don Juan's seduction of Isabela, but he, of course, had read the whole play. Tirso, however, avoided stressing this fact in Act I (where it might have beclouded the socially anarchic facet that he did wish to stress there, lese-majesté), and very adeptly discovered it to his public, retrospectively, precisely when he was about to focus (in Act II) upon this new facet of Don Juan's anti-social behavior.

Then, following immediately upon the clever introductory ploy just analyzed, the audience is presented with the lengthy conversation between Don Juan and the Marqués de Mota. This lengthy conversation, if it were not patently directed to underscoring the protagonist's anarchic betrayal of the basic friendship code, would certainly be irrelevantly digressive. As it is, the rather detailed listing of common past sexual escapades and the joking preparation of future experiences of the same kind appears dedicated, primarily, to establishing one unequivocal fact: that the Marqués de Mota and Don Juan are intimate friends of long standing.¹⁴

Tirso yet one more time, after the two preparatory scenes noted (with the Duque Octavio and the Marqués de Mota, respectively) and before the actual violation of the friendship code, underscores the social code about to be violated. Don Diego speaks to his son, upbraiding him for his Neapolitan adventure:

¿En el palacio real
traición y con un amigo?
Traidor, Dios te dé el castigo
que pide delito igual.

Under these circumstances, don Juan proceeds to deceive Doña Ana, his best friend's beloved, simultaneously breaking one of the sacred principles of human sociability: altruistic friendship between male peers. But in this instance, as Professor Parker has duly noted, the aggravating anti-social presentation, intended to second the primary sexual misconduct of the protagonist, is multiple. In effecting his sexual deed (while flying directly in the face of so powerful a socializing imperative as that of friendship), Don Juan has had to kill another being, Doña Ana's father. Homicide, the specific disregard for a ‘prójimo's’ right to life, is presented in El Burlador de Sevilla much more on sociological than on ethical grounds.¹⁵ In effect, the test of self-defense (tacitly employed in the play, since Don Juan is never tried) is, while perfectly valid in any moral judgment, only minimally exculpatory from the viewpoint of society, deprived of the services of one of its own by one of its own. It is significant that Tirso dedicates so much time to stressing Don Gonzalo's services to the kingdom, and, after his murder, to stressing the nation's loss at his untimely death.

What is of interest is that Tirso should have felt obliged—especially after two successive projections of an aggravating anti-social facet to parallel his character's sexual misdeeds—to double the dosage. This underscores the playwright's interest in maintaining a spotlight on the anti-social dimension of his character; a dimension which, by the time this third episode is reached, may well have required—for dramatic effect upon a public swiftly becoming insensitized to such behavior—that redoubling reinforcement. In any case, the pattern established in the first two episodes is now, in this fashion, somewhat altered. We shall have occasion to note that this newly altered pattern extends—perhaps confirming our hypothesis as to its esthetic finality—to the last episode of El Burlador de Sevilla.

The closing seduction, Don Juan's adventure in the peasant world of Aminta and Batricio, decisively confirms the myth-figure's patterned defiance of the most fundamental social imperatives. In having his protagonist come upon the peasant wedding of Aminta and Batricio, Tirso consciously chose to work within the established parameters of an oft-used dramatic theme of his day, a plot element used, for example, in Peribáñez, Fuenteovejuna and El mejor alcalde, el rey. What all these Lope de Vega plays have in common with the final seduction of El Burlador de Sevilla are two significant conditions: the sexual abuse involves a married woman,¹⁶ and the abuser is very definitely of superior social rank.

These two conditions speak to different social imperatives, represent violations of two distinct norms of human sociability. The first mentioned—the only example of such in all of Don Juan's escapades, which itself signals the playwright's differentiating intent—is that a marriage has already taken place. The woman taken has already been duly assigned by society to a specific member of the same. Adultery, breaking the basic social imperative of absolute respect for one another's women,¹⁷ is very definitely anarchically anti-social activity. Since no manner of viable social existence is possible, on the human level,¹⁸ without some form of this social imperative, and since no solution to its defiance is possible short of death and social conflict (unlike sexual abuses where no marriages are involved),¹⁹ such violations are of grave social consequences and are usually judged and punished accordingly.²⁰

The other condition cited—that the defier of the adultery restriction be of superior social rank—violates (in a most sensitive area, that of sexual possession and social confirmation thereof) another fundamental code of human sociability: the just restraint of herarchical superior vis à vis hierarchical inferior, a manner of noblesse oblige. This represents—with something of an expected baroque structural symmetry—the other necessary pole of ‘hierarchical respect for superiors’ defied by Don Juan in the first seduction of the play. It is just as essential an imperative, as basic a compact and as fundamental a requirement for any manner of peaceful social co-existence.²¹

The adultery per se requires no further elaboration; it is quite direct and unequivocal. The manner of its specific implementation in El Burlador de Sevilla is, however, very revealing of Tirso's broad anti-social intent. It is interesting, for example, that it differs significantly, in one single respect, from parallel developments in Siglo de Oro theatre (Fuenteovejuna, Peribáñez, El mejor alcalde, el rey): no violence is required. It is this differentiating condition that suggests the playwright's conscious sociological finality. Unlike Lope de Vega, whose peasants are so often romantically ennobled beings, Tirso has given us—in the world of Dos Hermanas that fills the final part of El Burlador de Sevilla—one of the very few realistic, ungilded views of Spanish peasantry that our romantic Siglo de Oro theatre offers.²² Whereas Lope's ennobled peasants are prompted to a manly (noble) defense of their rights, their women, Tirso's ignoble peasant characters realistically act out their peasant psychology and ways. Lope's noble-peasants create a dramatic tension thereby that is most effective, most theatrical, but do so at the expense of realistic social distinctions. In some instances (notably that of Peribáñez, but also even in Fuenteovejuna or El mejor alcalde, el rey), Lope's ennobled peasantry leaves the distinct impression that there exists but an accidental or quantitative, rather than an essential or qualitative difference between noble and peasant.

Tirso de Molina, much more interested in sociological basics (at least in El Burlador de Sevilla), needs be much more realistic. If anything, given his stipulated sociological intent, he exaggerates the qualitative or essential differences between his nobleman (Don Juan) and his peasants: intelligence, will, confidence. No force, therefore, is required for Don Juan's enterprise amongst peasants,²³ because force is, first of all, classless (could just as effectively have been employed in a noble context), and secondly, because its use, or even its necessity, would automatically imply a noble and defensive capacity in the offended parties. No, Tirso—in a most realistically comedic manner—has his protagonist openly deceive (by dint of superior intelligence, personality and forcefulness) all the peasants that he encounters: Aminta, Batricio, Gaseno. The more foolishly naive that the latter are made out to be,²⁴ the more striking Don Juan's superiority, the clearer the hierarchical distinction intended, and, consequently, the more forceful the dramatist's projection of his protagonist's direct violation of another crucial imperative of orderly social living: the just restraint—noblesse oblige—of the powerful and better vis à vis the weak and inferior.²⁵

Again, as in the third seduction, Tirso has reinforced the anti-social dimension of the fourth and last seduction by doubling the number of basic social imperatives contravened: adultery and grave abuse of power and position. The re-doubling pattern introduced as a direct highlighting device with the third escapade persists here because, obviously, the need to which it responded persists as well. More important, however, is the fact that the underlying pattern (which the re-doubling merely underscores somewhat) is definitely maintained throughout.

In conclusion, we thought it would be enlightening to single out—as a significant dimension of conscious creativity in his best known play—the social defiance that Tirso built into his enduring characterization. The upshot of our special focus is the revelation of a Tirso de Molina who was very much aware of the transcendental sociological possibilities of his character's rebellious nature. In fact, so consistent is the social (as differentiated from the ethico-theological) defiance in El Burlador de Sevilla, so carefully organized is its presentation (artfully prepared and underscored in each and every one of the four significant episodes in the play), that it is very difficult not to conclude that the playwright consciously considered its projection a major finality of his masterpiece.

Notes

1. J. Ortega y Gasset, El tema de nuestro tiempo (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1938), p. 64.

2. The differentiation is difficult and involves a certain amount of overlapping. Certain thematic aspects of El Burlador de Sevilla are, in effect, decisively theological: that identified with the refrain (‘tan largo me lo fiáis’) and the relation to the dead that promotes the play's ‘stone guest’ dimension. The distinction between the personal sin and its anti-social consequences is problematical but possible: lust is sinful, for example, whether it results in an anti-social adultery or, in many ages and in many places, a perfectly social visit to a brothel.

3. A. A. Parker, The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age (London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1957), p. 13. This very brief survey was originally presented as a paper.

4. Two more pillars of social life defied and shattered by Don Juan will be added when we deal with the fourth and final seduction, with respect to which we disagree with Professor Parker.

5. Parker, p. 13. Not included in our earlier quote because it is a footnote.

6. Although not immediately apparent in this very first seduction, the other elements cited will be repeated in undifferentiated fashion: sin (lust and deceit) and women (very little differentiated beyond gender, actually, whether duchess or fisher-woman). It is the setting, in each case, that will stand out differentially.

7. The short dialogue, Don Juan-king of Naples, is extremely meaningful in this sense:

   ¿Quien eres?
   ¿Quién ha de ser?
   Un hombre y una mujer.

   It has usually been interpreted to underscore the basic sexual nature of the protagonist; but it could be interpreted as a defiant and anarchic declaration of equality, which would repeal hierarchical submission.

8. The sexual identification of Don Juan receives its coup de grace with the advent of freudian thought. Its detrimental effect upon the myth-figure status of Don Juan (in so far as the latter might depend on the sexual) may be seen in such works as Marañon's Amiel or Unamuno's Tres novelas ejemplares. It is against this background, in fact, that Ortega y Gasset restored myth-figure status to the great Spanish characterization; but by insisting, as we have noted, on the Don Juan's rebellious, anti-social dimension. For a presentation of all sides, with a corresponding bibliography, see G. E. Wade's introduction (pp. 17-26) to Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (New York: Scribners, 1969).

9. The oft-noted fact that Don Juan's victims are seduced in generally different ways, depending upon their social status (noblewomen only without willful consent), indicates Tirso's keen awareness of the socially based conventions of his day.

10. The author's unmistakable insistence should not escape the reader, yet it seems to have been very often overlooked. As one example of the author's insistence meriting little or not comment, see G. Delpy, ‘Réflexions sur El Burlador de Sevilla,’ Bulletin Hispanique, 50 (1948), 463-67.

11. Not enough has been made of this important differentiating factor. Tisbea is the only victim in the play who truly loves Don Juan. This is an important aggravating addition, of course, to the character's terrible violation of a sacred social tenet, because Tisbea's heartfelt love is automatically fused with other elements proper to the hospitality imperative, such as housing and nursing the ingrate. Our insistence on the sociological implications in no way detracts from Tirso's attractive development, thereby, of the ‘justo castigo de mujer desdeñosa’ theme. An added derivation from Tisbea's uniqueness as loving victim is an explanation of the break with the perfect baroque symmetry at the play's end. Tisbea is the only Don Juan victim for whom no ready solution is at hand, possibly because she is the only one—being truly in love—for whom a substitute mate is not a satisfactory solution.

12. The importance of this preparatory violation of hospitality—the theft of the host's property—is revealed by Tisbea's own desperate final words:

    Gozóme al fin, y yo propia
    le di a su rigor las alas
    en dos yeguas que crié,
    con que me burló y se escapa.

13. The violation of the friendship code was very much a literary theme in Tirso's day. See, for example, J. B. Avalle-Arce, ‘El cuento de los dos amigos,’ in Deslindes cervantinos (Madrid: Edhigar, 1961).

14. Psychological, anthropological and sociological basics have not changed since Tirso's day. The shared sexual experience of young males—which abounds in the literature of our own day (Portnoy's Complaint, to mention one example)—remains a potent group-binding phenomenon.

15. Traditionally—and still very much invoked by primitive man, or civilized man when he reverts to the primitive, such as in times of war—the only homicide considered reprehensible was that of a member of one's own clan or social group.

16. El mejor alcalde, el rey might be thought an exception, but neither character (Sancho, Elvira) considers their status as unmarried (Act II). The nobleman's interruption of the marriage feast itself is a common feature of Fuenteovejuna, El mejor alcalde, el rey and El Burlador de Sevilla, and what it promotes—the initial sexual possession of another's bride—suggests a conscious reminiscence of the ‘pernada’ (the ancient right of superiors to first sexual call upon the women of vassal inferiors) a right altered and weakened in the early history of Western Europe, as society became more and more compactual and less impositional.

17. In a very logical correlation, the more primitive and precarious the stage of social cohesion, of societal development, the greater the emphasis on the unforgivability of adulterous behavior. This seems clearly to pinpoint the precedence of the directly societal over the ethical in this matter.

18. Hypothetically, at some stages of human social development there may well have been ‘group families’; but this would have little bearing on social imperatives within the Western World and its very long identification with monogamous pair-bonding.

19. Marriage, the most common righting of a sexual wrong, is impossible under adulterous conditions; and this important sociological difference explains the grave social character of adultery relative, say, to fornication.

20. The extreme penalties of the Old Testament are a perfect example, and they applied to both males and females.

21. All social relationships are necessarily bilateral and reciprocal; and this is so, quite logically, of hierarchical relationships within society itself. If one has only rights and another has only duties, the relationship is, of necessity, unstable, always on the verge of revolutionary alteration.

22. In this respect, see, for example, N. Salomon, Recherches sur le thème psysan dans la comedia au temps de Lope de Vega (Bordeaux: Univ. Bordeaux, 1965).

23. Don Juan, availing himself of such shortcomings as illiteracy, ably plays on the characteristically peasant vices: greed, false pride, cowardice.

24. Tirso admirably turned moments of great comical relief (like Gaseno's deception or Aminta's appearance at court, thinking herself ennobled by Don Juan's promises) into ideal reinforcements of his protagonist's final defiance of social co-existence.

25. Tirso's sociological intent is clear in Batricio's complaint before the king:

    ¿Dónde, señor, se permite
    desenvolturas tan grandes,
    que tus criados afrenten
    a los hombres miserables?