[In the following essay, Wade analyzes the character of Don Juan, concluding that the trickster's lone virtue is his courage.]

If measured by its progeny in world literature, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra is the most important play of all time.¹ Surprisingly, no book of criticism has been written about the play; one may contrast Hamlet, for example, about which many volumes and thousands of pages have been composed. It is true that numerous editions have been made of the Burlador (and none of them really adequate), and certain things have been said about some of its aspects, especially its possible sources. But the paucity of material is striking for such an important play, and the lack of commentary will surely be remedied as scholars begin to appreciate better the drama's supreme significance.

One element of the Burlador that demands careful consideration is the character of Don Juan. Again, surprisingly, there has been little comment on this most important element of the play. The present brief paper is an effort to remedy this lack. In the space permitted we shall have opportunity only to approach Don Juan in the most elementary way, to delineate his character as this is offered directly by the lines of the play itself. We shall recall those words and passages that describe his actions, hear his utterances about himself, examine the passages that tell us about him as others remark on his actions. What we shall hope to compile is a set of statements on which scholars may agree and on which subsequent comment of a less elementary nature may be based. Lest the reader regard our effort as trivial—since we shall often make statements about what seems to be obvious—we may perhaps be permitted the reminder that this is a necessary task that has demanded doing for a long time.

We shall attempt to make our delineation of Don Juan's character as descriptive as possible. We shall therefore try to keep at a minimum an explanation of the character, for explanation—indeed a necessary, and a standard, procedure in criticism but one that may not always be based on verifiable facts within the play—is likely to be more open to controversy than is description. Most of all we shall try avoid evaluation, for this procedure—again a very effective one as a major approach to literature—is not as elementary and fundamental as is needed for this first systematic assessment of Don Juan's character.² We shall assume that our interpretation of those words, lines and stanzas that help to describe his character is not too far from their original meaning to have reasonable adequacy for the twentieth-century reader, even though it is realized that the meaning we now attach to the play's language can never be exactly that which the author and his contemporaries understood by it.³

Our first task, then, is to examine those lines in which Don Juan's character is given direct elucidation by word or deed. These passages reveal first of all that Don Juan did certain things, committed certain deeds that are facts of the play and hence offer a minimum of danger for misinterpretation. It is entirely obvious, for example, that Don Juan did seduce Isabela and Tisbea, that he tried unsuccessfully to seduce Ana and then killed her father when the latter intervened at her call against the attempted seduction. He betrayed Aminta, first having driven off her novio Batricio by threatening him and by lying to him about a previous intimate relationship with Aminta. He met the ghostly statue of Don Gonzalo twice for interviews and was killed by the statue's handclasp as a punishment by heaven.

These very important facts of the action, and without which there would indeed be no play, are clear enough, but their bald recital gives little hint at Don Juan's character except the obvious conclusion (and here we must for a moment have recourse to explanation rather than description) that as a seducer and murderer he is driven presumably by whatever motives and impulses seducers and murderers are moved to do what they do. These motives might of course have an attempt at an elucidation at this point without examining the play's lines in detail for data, but, to repeat, it is our aim to seek out all possible help from the lines before drawing conclusions about the protagonist's character, conclusions that we hope scholars may accept as accurate according to the facts of the play. That is, we should like to offer conclusions that are open to the least possible debate. This will of course hold true not only for the action that involves the seductions but also for the action surrounding Don Juan's interviews with Don Gonzalo and the young libertine's punishment.

It is convenient to begin with the fundamental facts of Don Juan's identity. He is Don Juan Tenorio (I, 577-578; II, 668), son of the camarero mayor of King Alfonso de Castilla (I, 570-571; II, 697-698). The father's name is Diego, as numerous lines of the play make clear (although the name is implied as being Juan rather than Diego at II, 669, where the error of the Burlador's reviser from the earlier Tan largo version of the play is amusingly manifest). Don Diego, by virtue of his high office, is “el dueño de la justicia, / y es la privanza del rey,” as Don Juan reminds Catalinón at III, 164-165. (See also III, 238-242, 330.) The Tenorio family, which includes Don Juan's uncle Don Pedro (whom we meet at the beginning of the play in Naples), is of noble ancestry; “antiguous ganadores de Sevilla,” as Don Juan tells Aminta (III, 237-238).

Tisbea recognizes in Don Juan his status as an hidalgo (I, 667), a status made clear repeatedly, and so plain a fact of the play as to make unnecessary further references to substantiate it. Only a gentleman, in the meaning of the term at that time, could be given the title of conde granted him by the King (III, 328, 760-761). He is very much of the inner circle at the court, for King Alfonso, before he learns of Don Juan's multiple crimes, refers to him (III, 777-778) as an “gentilhombre de mi cámara, … y hechura mía.” The King's willingness to favor Don Juan (again until he learns of his many crimes), is based on his great liking for Don Diego; see II, 12, 20-21; III, 705-707.

Don Juan, then, is of the select inner circle, in favor with Alfonso until his exceptionally scandalous and criminal conduct causes even the King as well as the boy's own father to decide that he must be punished—and with death. (The King's decision is at III, 1021-1022, and Don Diego's concurrence in the immediately following lines.) Until destruction falls upon him during his second interview with the statue (at III, 969-970), Don Juan refuses to believe that he will be punished by the law or, until on some far off day, by heaven. His conviction on this score is voiced repeatedly throughout the play. He considers secular punishment as very improbable because of his father's power in the court, and because of the father's unwillingness to punish a son (III, 164-165). He is even so bold as to return to Sevilla against Alfonso's orders (III, 175-176); the latter had exiled him to Lebrija (II, 386-419), the town of which he is to be made conde.

Thus Don Juan is what we should today call an incorrigible youth, a perhaps not-so-juvenile delinquent. (We are never told his age, but this is perhaps less than twenty; we recall the mocedades of Pedro Girón, later the famous duque de Osuna, when he was still in his 'teens.) That he belongs to a social circle whose men are likely to bear a bad name is indicated by the remark of Aminta at III, 131-132: “La desvergüenza en España / se ha hecho caballería.” A further indication of this is made clear by the long conversation between Don Juan and Mota in II, 154-213; here, one of the favored pursuits of our two young gentlemen is seen to be whoring, and Mota's exploits in the same passage betray him as the wenching trickster of Don Juan's own stripe. (Cf. also the intrusion of the name of Don Pedro de Esquivel at line 207 of the passage; Don Pedro is obviously another young blood of their own kind.) It is also clear that the exploits of the type preferred by Don Juan are looked upon with disapproval by other members of the court circles both in Italy and in Spain. Don Pedro in Italy is shocked by his nephew's seduction of Isabela (I, 81-93), just as he had been upset by the boy's previous exploit with the unnamed lady of reference above. The King of Naples is greatly concerned at the action of Isabela and her lover at the beginning of the play; in Spain, Don Juan's father tries unsuccessfully to get him to mend his ways (II, 378-425),⁴ while King Alfonso, at first indulgent toward the youth whom he so far considers only wayward (even though he calls Don Juan's exploit in Naples an “atrevimiento temerario” at II, 8) is, as we have seen, determined on his severe punishment at the end of the play. Even Catalinón, largely although not completely inured to his master's delinquency, expresses his dismay as also his conviction that Don Juan is making sure for himself of the severe punishment that is to be the inevitable reward for such conduct. (Catalinón's expressions of his belief, inspired at times by his fear for himself as an accomplice in his master's crimes, hay be read at I, 901-903; II, 308-314; III, 166-174, 178-181.)

That Don Juan has a clear knowledge that he is violating both secular and divine law is a fact of the play. That he is perverse as moralists define the term is also a fact. We have already seen that he depends on his father's influence at court to avoid castigation by the King, while his scorn at the idea of heavenly punishment is revealed in the famous refrain, “¡Qué (or tan) largo me lo fiáis!”⁵ This exclamation occurs nine times in the play (at I, 904, 944, 960; II, 405; III, 120, 473, 585, 601, 940), and its expression leaves no room for doubting Don Juan's satirical and cynical rejection of the idea that his misdeeds may receive punishment at any early date. He does believe in the idea orthodox for his time that one will be punished eventually for evil-doing; we recall his desperate plea for confession and absolution at III, 966-967. But to him it is quite incredible until his very last moment that it is he who can be punished, and moreover by a special dispensation of heaven. (The fact of his punishment by God's decision is made clear by the statue's pronouncement in lines 952-958 of the third Act.)

Thus it is a fact of the play that Don Juan is perverse, and this in accordance with his own ideas of what perversity is; that is, a deliberate flouting of civilized custom, of statute law and of the moralistic bases on which his society rests. He is intensely evil, as he himself of course knows. Not that he ever uses this term to himself, however. It is not a desire for evil for its own sake that drives him; he is not first of all deliberately satanic in his perversity, even though Catalinón refers to him as Lucifer at II, 729. Rather, it is the pleasurable fruits of his evil that seduce him (is he not first of all the hedonist?), and he prefers to seek out the burla for the titillation it provides his (to us) grotesque and cruel sense of humor rather than the sexual pleasure of the love trysts.⁶ Hence our recollection of his own words at the beginning of this study:

Sevilla a voces me llama
el Burlador, y el mayor
gusto que en mí puede haber
es burlar una mujer
y dejalla sin honor.

If these words are not sufficient to betray him as first of all the burlador, the trickster, rather than the relatively uncomplicated and merely sensual lover driven only by his lust, let us recall other lines to help clarify the point. At I, 891-894, in answer to Catalinón's query whether he plans to seduce Tisbea, Don Juan replies,

                                                            Si burlar
es hábito antiguo mío,
¿qué me preguntas, sabiendo
mi condición?

Again, he savors in advance his conquest of Ana: “Ya de la burla me río” (II, 301). And, enjoying in acticipation his deceiving of Aminta, he exclaims: “La burla más escogida / de todas ha de ser ésta” (III, 160-161). A little later, when he enters Aminta's bedroom and she looks at him at first surely with eyes of disbelief and then with increasing fright, he prolongs the pleasure of his trickery by exclaiming,

                                        Mira
despacio, Aminta, quién soy.

(It is at the end of this scene where he refers to himself in an aside as “el Burlador de Sevilla.”) The word burla comes out again as the predominat element of the Aminta exploit, for at III, 812 Octavio recognizes Don Juan's conduct with her as a burla. When Catalinón calls him “El Burlador de España,” his master replies, “Tú me has dado gentil nombre.” (II, 445). Again, when Catalinón, preceding his master's attempt at the seduction of Ana, asks him, “¿Dónde vamos?” (II, 500), Don Juan responds, “adonde la burla mía / ejecute,” and a line further along he exclaims, “El trueque adoro.” The trueque refers to his exchange of cloaks with Mota so as to betray him as well as Ana, a joke that is to be double; that is, not only sexual but cuernal:

CATALINóN.
Echaste la capa al toro.
D. Juan.
No, el toro me echó la capa.

(The same kind of double burla is of course directly involved in three of his four exploits, for with Isabela he deceives Octavio, with the abortive attempt to seduce Ana he plans to betray Mota, and with Aminta he batrays Batricio. The joke at Batricio's expense concerns also Don Juan's mocking his rustic table manners: III, 17-42. Only with Tisbea is there no direct involvement of a deceived male.) Even as death stalks him unbeknownst to him—for he is soon to have the first of his two fateful interviews with the statue—he savors his deceit of Aminta: “Graciosa burla será” (III, 441).

Having, then, seen what Don Juan thinks of himself and his actions as the burlador and as the lover (but this latter only secondarily to the other), we might examine the words of some of the other characters about him. Catalinón refers to him as “castigo de las mujeres” (I, 895), as “el gran Burlador de España” (II, 236), as “langosta de las mujeres” (II, 436), and describes in this passage the omnivorous quality of his sexuality (exercised habitually as an expression of his love of the burla even though the passage lacks the word):

Fuerza al turco, fuerza al scita,
al persa y al garamante,
al gallego, al troglodita,
al alemán y al japón,
al sastre con la agujita
de oro en la mano, imitando
contino a la Blanca niña.

(III, 186-193)⁷

His pursuit of sex wherewith to perpetrate his burlas is accented by his conduct with Mota at II, 154-205, where the two exchange notes on the courtesans of Sevilla. Thus although Mota's words with Don Juan help to characterize the latter only as a gentleman, a friend and a boon companion in sexual exploits, their actions do indeed speak louder than Mota's words. Again, in his social intercourse with Octavio and Mota in II, 106-377, 466-506, Don Juan is the suave and courteous caballero whose demeanor leaves nothing to be desired, but Catalinón characterizes him in his burlas as “cruel” (II, 164), and the term is quite acceptable for the four seductions in which Don Juan becomes involved. For his attitude toward the courtesans he and Mota talk about, “cruel” is admirably descriptive, since, among other matters, it concerns the heartless perros muertos of II, 206-213, 483-497. Don Juan's attitude toward his father as Don Diego urges him to mend his ways (II, 378-425) is obviously one of impatience at the older man's insistence on a more moral type of conduct, and it also involves again a contemptuous disregard of what to the reader is seen to be heaven's warning to him to change his ways before it is too late. When he decides to re-enter Sevilla against the King's orders, his attitude is insolent in the extreme; his decision (one soon to be carried out) startles even Catalinón, used to his extremes (III, 175-177).

Commentators on the Don Juan world figure have made much of his personal valor, which shrinks from facing nothing, not even the evident danger of hell's punishment. This courage is often mentioned as the trait that more than any other makes him admirable to those who like him. (The other most admired trait is his insistence on personal freedom against all restraint, whether of this world of the next. Commentators, however, are careful not directly to base their praise of this drive for personal freedom on his sadism and his animalistic urge to mate with all possible females.) Let us see whether the Burlador's Don Juan has this personal courage.

It is apparent that the maximum of courage is shown when Don Juan faces the statue, for he of course recognizes it as supernatural. (The servants are extremely fearful at the apparition, thus accentuating their master's valor.) Having faced the ordeal of the first interview unflinchingly (cf., for example, III, 548-550, 634-639, 645-647), and having promised the statue to visit him the next day in his chapel, Don Juan then confesses (664-675) that he has been greatly afraid: “se me hiela el corazón.” Thus he exhibits what we often are told is the height of courage: having felt and confessed his fear, he overcomes it and reassures himself of his own valor (676-687), resolved to keep the second appointment with the statue. It is a part of his courage to be the exhibitionist: “por que se admire y espante / Sevilla de mi valor.” He has been the exhibitionist all along, as we have seen a number of times when he confesses to his pleasure at having been known as the burlador of Sevilla and indeed of all Spain.

Don Juan does keep his second appointment with the statue, having suppressed his fear and having brushed off Catalinón's remonstrances; he feels, for one thing, that his gentlemanly honor as well as his courage is involved; cf. 642-643 with 871-872. He greets the statue with equanimity although fearful within (937); at 891-892, and 895-896 he denies that he was afraid at the time of Don Gonzalo's murder. In a moment or two the statue agrees that he shows courage, “Valiente estás,” surely knowing that very soon now heaven will strike down this criminal who has flouted God's will. Again denying his fear, Don Juan gives the statue his hand, even though he knows of its infernal heat from the first interview (668-670). As he takes the hand he is unable to restrain his cry of terrible pain from its burning, and it is hell's own fire that now consumes him.

So Don Juan has great, well-nigh superhuman courage. Other of its evidences are minor in comparison with that shown during the interviews with the statue, and after this proof, one is willing to accept his words and actions at other places in the play as evidence of genuine courage rather than braggadocio. He did save Catalinón from the sea in Act I, risking death to the point of having become unconscious from near drowning. At the beginning of the play, he is willing to face the palace guard in sword play although badly outnumbered (I, 37-40, 42). Altogether, there is no reason at all to doubt his physical courage as a fact of the play.

CONCLUSIONS

And so we have reached the end of those major evidences in the play that tell us directly who and what Don Juan is. Once more we stress the word “directly,” for, as was made clear at the beginning of the study, we have desired only to state what the facts of the drama are as regards Don Juan's character. (Of the major inferences that may be drawn through explanation of the facts we shall offer no account here; it is in these inferences that scholars are quite certain to present controversial matter on which agreement may be difficult, as on certain past occasions.)

In conclusion, then, we have seen that the Burlador's Don Juan, the young noble of exalted lineage, is a gentleman, as this term was understood then. But beneath the suavity of his manners is the savage trickster who, often irresistible to women (cf. Tisbea's expression of attraction to him at I, 579-580), victimizes them through the burla, That is, he seduces them either through imposture (Isabela, Ana—although the seduction of the latter failed) or by a promise of marriage (Tisbea, Aminta). He is aware of the enormity of his offenses against secular and divine law, but is not evil only for the sake of evil. Rather, he is the hedonist who performs his deeds for the pleasure they afford, and this pleasure dwells not purely in the sensual thrill of his encounters, but, more substantially, in the jokes played on his victims and their menfolk. His deeds involve a large element of cruelty. In order to achieve his goals, he is willing to deceive even those who have most reason to assume his loyalty to them, his friends Octavio and Mota, his uncle Pedro, his benefactor and sovereign Alfonso. He is even willing to kill in order to escape the consequences of his misdeeds, and does kill Don Gonzalo. He takes advantage of his father's position of power at the court to perform acts he knows are evil, and for a time is successful in avoiding a day of reckoning. His unwillingness to face up to the fact of the inevitability of heavenly punishment unless he repents is made clear by his oft-repeated and scornful “¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!,” a hallmark of most of the Don Juans of world literature, for, as Stendhal observed of the Don Juan figure, “In the great market of life he is a dishonest merchant, who is always buying and never paying.” That is, Don Juan, a believer in the orthodox Catholicism of his time, knows he will be punished, but he wishes as long as possible to postpone giving thought to his own dreadful day of reckoning. His refusal to give consideration to his fate does not spring from his lack of physical courage, for this he possesses in major degree. He is an exhibitionist, performing his acts partly to gain the applause of others who approve of his behavior even though they may not dare to imitate it (or to gain the shocked disapproval of others whom he despises as less than truly virile). He is insolent toward the King, disrespectful of his father's wishes, headstrong in his exaggerated waywardness. May we not agree that it is a fact of the play that, as the moralist saw him in his own time and as moralists see him now, he has only one major virtue, his physical courage? All of his other major traits are evil, tending toward the destruction of the culture that begot and nourished him.

Notes

1. We choose to base what we shall say here on the Burlador de Sevilla rather than on the first version of the play, Tan largo me lo fiáis, that initially gave the definitive Don Juan figure to the world. Actually, the Don Juan of Tan largo is fundamentally the same character as in the Burlador, and since the latter version is much the better known to scholars, it seems preferable to use it for our present purpose. (For the relationship between the two versions of the play, see Wade and Mayberry in the Bulletin of the Comediantes, XIV, No. 1 [Spring, 1962] and also María Rosa Lida de Malkiel in the Hispanic Review, XXX, 275-295.)

2. We find it desirable to base our procedure partly on that explicated by Morris Weitz in his Hamlet and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism (Chicago, 1964). Professor Weitz, whether or not he succeeds in convincing scholars of the validity of his approach to literature, is at least to be commended for his effort to order the philosophy of criticism so that scholars may criticize on a more meaningful basis. In passing, our own previous comment on Don Juan's character is quite different from that which we are making in the present article. See our “Camus' Absurd Don Juan,” Romance Notes, I, 85-91, for an interpretation of the Don Juan figure of the Burlador in the light of Camus' delineation of his “absurd” type of man.

3. If the reader is skeptical of the thesis that our contemporary understanding of the language of the seventeenth century and of the mind that produced it is to a degree incomprehensible to us, he may find it profitable to consult Professor Weitz's book in those portions where it is shown that critics of Hamlet have found it impossible to agree on just how the Elizabethan mind approached its thought material. See also my “Interpretation of the Comedia,” Bulletin of the Comediantes, XI, No. 1, Spring, 1959.

4. There is an interesting passage at II, 40-44, where Don Juan's father Don Diego is speaking:

   … aunque mozo, gallardo y valeroso,
   y le llaman los mozos de su tiempo
   el Héctor de Sevilla, porque ha hecho
   tantas y tan extrañas mocedades,
   la razón puede mucho.

   The last line indicates the father's hope that reason may yet induce his wayward son to mend his ways; his had been a type of conduct that involves the “extrañas mocedades” that cause other young men to name him after the much-admired Trojan hero Hector, usually pictured, as is Don Juan in the play, as “mozo, gallardo y valeroso.” We are not told what the extrañas mocedades were, but it is quite certain that they were concerned mostly with burlas of the type perpretated by Don Juan in the play. One of these would be the adventure with an unnamed lady referred to in I, 77-80.

5. This exclamation has more detailed comment in our “El burlador de Sevilla: Some Annotations,” Hispania, XLVII, 751.

6. As Eric Bentley has it (The Life of the Drama, New York, 1964, p. 50), although his reference is to Molière's Don Juan rather than to the Burlador's, “his seductions are not displays of sensuality but of technique.” Oscar Mandel, in The Theater of Don Juan (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1963), proposes (p. 16) that Don Juan is first of all the sensualist. For the figure in its evolution subsequent to the Burlador this may indeed be true, but for our burlador it is not quite accurate.

7. We are quite doubtful that Catalinón's words are to be taken literally as an indication of homosexuality on his master's part. There is nothing else of this nature in the play. There is indeed an unsavory passage of similar kind at II, 334-337, but we take this passage, as we prefer to take that at III, 186-193, as Catalinón's greatly exaggerated way of commenting on his master's excessive sexual energy.