SOURCE: Allain, Mathé. “El burlador Burlado: Tirso de Molina's Don Juan.” Modern Language Quarterly XXVII, No. 2 (June 1966): 174-84.

[In the following essay, Allain argues that El burlador de Sevilla is “a carefully constructed aesthetic whole in which form and content are inextricably united.”]

It was Tirso de Molina, a devout Mercenarian priest, who introduced into Western literature the figure of the archlibertine, Don Juan Tenorio. Rakes there had been aplenty since the Satyricon and the Golden Ass, but Tirso gave the libertine a new dimension when he added the defiant invitation to the dead to the traditional stories of sin and retribution. Since 1630, when Tirso's Burlador de Sevilla was first published, Don Juan has been reinterpreted in every period and for every climate; the legend, its origins, and its metamorphoses have been studied until enough scholarship accumulated to justify a specialized bibliography. Yet the later versions—especially those of Molière, Mozart, Byron, Shaw, and Zorrilla—have eclipsed the original so completely that only four pages of the Don Juan bibliography¹ are needed to list the critical works on El burlador.

Few of the Tirso critics, moreover, have concerned themselves with El burlador as an aesthetic product. Many Spanish studies, especially the early ones, are devoted to defending the Hispanic origin of the Don against Farinelli's claim for Italian sources.² American scholars have been mostly concerned with establishing the text or explicating individual passages. Most of the recent studies treat Don Juan as a social, psychoanalytical, or biological phenomenon, and, generally speaking, they show more interest in Don Juanismo than in Don Juan, more concern for the myth than for the play. Consequently, Tirso's merits are often limited to his creation of a universal character, and the play is dismissed as “hastily and even roughly written.”³

Yet, when Tirso's play is studied within its baroque context and viewed as an expression of the baroque spirit,⁴ it becomes clear that the striking figure of the Don is subordinated to the total meaning and that El burlador de Sevilla is a carefully constructed aesthetic whole in which form and content are inextricably united.

Joaquín Casalduero was the first to point out the organic unity of El burlador and to find its theme in a contrast of points of view. According to Casalduero, the play, mirroring the conflict of the baroque soul, opposes the terrestrial and temporal point of view, which considers the burlador successful, to the spiritual and eternal point of view, which holds that the burlador deceives only himself.⁵ To relate these two points of view, Tirso uses the oaths made with mental reservation. Casalduero's interpretation is invaluable in that it recognizes Don Juan's function as a link between conflicting attitudes. However, to appreciate the complexity of Tirso's dramatic structure and the irony of his meaning, we must recognize the contrast between eternity and time, between material and spiritual, as part of a broader, more ambiguous, and no less baroque contrast between appearance and reality.

There is no unanimity among scholars about the definition of the term baroque and even less agreement about the characteristics of the baroque. All students of the Spanish baroque, however, include among its essential features disenchantment with life and disillusion with earthly reality, both of which are summed up in the word desengaño. As Ludwig Pfandl points out, this feeling was nothing new in Spain; in the sixteenth century, however, it had merely invited man to “view life sub specie aeternitatis,” whereas in the seventeenth it led him to reject finite reality as illusory and to view life as a dream.⁶ The distrust of life and its corollaries, skepticism, pessimism, and insecurity, found their expression in the burla. As Tirso uses the term, a burla may be a joke which exposes false appearances by contrasting them with reality; it may be a trick which frustrates expectations and reveals them as illusory; or it may be both at once.⁷ Its double and somewhat ambiguous function—deception and the revelation of deception—is the key to the structure and meaning of Tirso's play.

Tirso seems to have assumed a Platonic hierarchy of reality in which the real was found in a supernatural world of immutable values, the eternal realm of infinity. The natural world of finitude is real in so far as it partakes of ideal reality and reflects its ideal order. Man, with his immortal soul and mortal body, belongs to both the infinite and the finite, the timeless and the time-bound. His mortal nature is an amoral animal vitality—Don Juan—which mere human endeavor is powerless to tame, since human endeavor can control only the lowest level of reality, the artificial realm of art and social values. This last level is, at its best, a copy of copies, and, at its worst, an attempt to substitute man's creation for God's. Mistaking the artificial realm for true reality makes life appear ephemeral and dreamlike.

Such a dreamlike world is presented in El burlador. The play is an elaborate network of deceptions in which each deceiver is in turn deceived. Isabela thinks she deceives the King when she receives her lover in the palace, but she is deceived by Don Juan's impersonation. Don Pedro thinks he deceives the King when he allows his nephew to escape, but in fact he has been deceived by Don Juan's feigned humility. Octavio thinks he is deceiving the King by taking the chance to escape that Don Pedro offers him, but Don Pedro is in reality tricking the duke into an escape which will make him appear guilty. Tisbea thinks she can deceive natural instincts, but the Don's eloquence soon tricks her into falling in love, and she who laughed at passion becomes the laughingstock. Doña Ana is nearly deceived by the Don when she attempts to deceive her father's watchfulness. The Marqués de la Mota exchanges cloaks with Don Juan to deceive Beatriz, but Don Juan uses the cloak to gain entrance into Ana's bedroom. When the Marqués exclaims, “La mujer ha de pensar / que soy él,”⁸ he does not realize that Don Juan has tricked him into deceiving himself and Doña Ana. Aminta deceives Batricio, but she is deceived in turn by Don Juan, who deceives her father as well—fair payment for the shabby trick the old man is playing on Batricio.

The feeling of unreality is heightened by the unreliability of appearances. People are never what they seem. Isabela, the duchess, is in truth easy prey for a seducer. Although Tisbea boasts of her frigid disposition, she is, in fact, so inflammable that less than a hundred lines after seeing the Don she holds him in her arms (482-580) and then quickly passes from foreseeing the fires of passion (619) to being consumed by them (633). Aminta, who seems perfectly innocent and quite untouched by the corruption of palace and city, reveals herself as eager for finery and position as is the most grasping court lady.

Emotions are as inconstant as appearances. Octavio waxes lyrical about his love for Isabela, but he is quick to assume that she has been unfaithful and agrees eagerly to marry Doña Ana, whom he has never seen. It is enough for him that Ana is from Seville, which produces handsome women. In the last scene he goes back to Isabela as readily as he abandoned her. Isabela, on the other hand, does not mourn over the loss of Octavio. Nor does she object when the King pairs her off with Don Juan, whose nobility is known to the world. She bewails her stained reputation, but any husband will do to cleanse it; with Don Juan dead, she accepts Octavio. Aminta's love for Batricio is expressed in hyperbolic terms: “por ti ser luna merezco; / tú eres el sol por quien crezco” (1702-1703). But Batricio does not long remain the sun for which she grows once she hears the nobleman's dazzling offers. The Marqués de la Mota is involved in nightly escapades while passionately courting Ana. The flimsiness of their emotions makes them easy quarry for the burlador, who strips off their masks and exposes their illusions about themselves and about each other.

The people who surround Don Juan are an easy target for ridicule because, in mistaking man-made artifices for reality, they have replaced emotion by a stereotyped sentimentality borrowed from literary conventions. Octavio, with his pompous sentiments and his contempt for the direct love-making of servants and washerwomen, belongs to the tradition of labored courtship embodied by Madeleine de Scudéry in the Carte de Tendre. La Mota could be the galán of any comedia de capa y espada. Aminta belongs in a pastoral idyll, and Tisbea, as Casalduero points out (p. 4), in a piscatorial eclogue. Don Juan's tricks expose their emotional pretense because his sensuality, brutal though it may be—“esta noche he de gozalla” (686)—is genuinely experienced. Confronted with an emotion which is real, the conventional shams collapse like a house of cards.

Moreover, Don Juan's victims are easy to deceive since they rely on an artificial order to control the Don. Just as conventions could not curb his sensuality, so the social order proves ineffectual in checking his course. Instead, he exposes its futility from the very first scene.

The play opens in darkness and confusion as Isabela discovers Don Juan's deception. She calls on the social order—“¡Ah, del rey! ¡Soldados, gente!” (20)—and the King of Naples comes in, with torches and retainers, to dispel darkness and disorder. The King's endeavors are set at naught by Don Juan, who shifts the blame to an innocent and escapes unpunished. The first episode ends in confusion, with Isabela in disgrace and the King deceived while Don Juan flees and Octavio escapes.

The Tisbea episode opens on the shore of a symbolically peaceful sea which is described with a wealth of idyllic images—pleasant breezes, sweet bird songs, green branches, rustic music, pleasure boating, leisurely fishing. When Don Juan appears, the sea, grown tempestuous, becomes linked with violent fire metaphors, and the scene ends on a note of disorderly passion symbolized by the raging sea.

Gonzalo's lengthy description of Lisbon in the next scene is not, as it has been called, a “monstrous” interpolation⁹ thematically unrelated to the play. It is an ironical comment on man's attempt at civilization and order. In contrast to the tempestuous sea of the preceding episode, the ocean near Lisbon is an element subdued by man, whose ships it bears obediently and whose fishing nets it fills generously. The land, like the sea, has been domesticated. As he enumerates the wonders of Lisbon, Gonzalo gives precise measurements: there are 630 cells in the convent of Odivelas, 1,130 farms from the convent to the heart of the city, and 30,000 houses between the plaza del Rucio and the seashore. Because man has measured the earth and numbered its inhabitants, he believes himself in control of the universe. Deceived by this illusion, the King of Castile proceeds to manage the social order by arranging a marriage for Gonzalo's daughter, Doña Ana. But his choice of husband shows how deluded he is, for the intended bridegroom is the archdisrupter, Don Juan Tenorio.

The futility of the royal attempt becomes obvious in the next scene, during which Don Juan creates complete chaos amid increasingly violent fire images which culminate in the metaphorical blaze of Tisbea's last speeches: “¡Fuego, fuego, zagales, agua, agua! / ¡Amor, clemencia, que se abrasa el alma!” (1045-46).

This violent climax is followed by another attempt at order. The King of Castile, who has learned of Don Juan's Neapolitan escapade, hopes to salvage Isabela's reputation by marrying her to Don Juan. He tries to restore Don Diego Tenorio's peace of mind by forbidding Octavio to challenge Don Juan. Having pacified Octavio with the hand of Doña Ana, the King leaves, satisfied that all problems have been resolved. But Don Juan's reappearance ushers in the Doña Ana episode, which ends with the attempted rape of the lady and the murder of her father. Desperately trying to restore order, but hopelessly ineffectual, the King orders the arrest and execution of the innocent Marqués.

The Aminta episode opens on a tranquil note with a wedding feast, symbol of the social order. The festivities are soon turned to confusion by the arrival of Don Juan, who seduces the bride and flees. The search for a social solution to the problem presented by Don Juan continues in the following scene when the Don's earlier victims, Isabela and Tisbea, go off together to seek redress and human justice from the King. However, at this point a new dimension enters the play, interrupting the neat alternation between the attempts at order by those who live on the lowest level of reality—the King, Aminta, Tisbea, the Marqués, Isabela—and the frustration of their attempts by the man who lives at the second level of reality—Don Juan.

Although Don Juan is not a conscious religious or social rebel, his assumptions transform him into one. He does not deny explicitly the existence of a supernatural world: the questions he addresses to the statue show clearly that he accepts the dogmas of salvation and damnation. But his refrain—“¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!”—shows clearly that the dogmas have no immediate reality for him. His world is the here and now, the natural world of things and people. When the King of Naples asks, “¿Quién eres?” Don Juan's laconic answer summarizes his attitude: “¿Quién ha de ser? / Un hombre y una mujer” (22-23), a man and a woman who exist only as physical and social entities.

Don Juan recognizes the existence of a social order, not as a normative principle, but as an obstacle to his caprice. He scoffs at relative institutions and relative standards. Either there are absolute, immutable laws rooted in a transcendental reality, or life is but a disorderly illusion in which man's attempts at order are bound, sooner or later, to founder upon the reef of human vitality. As the symbol of that vitality, Don Juan rejects such an order and exposes its illusory nature. Thus, he sees more clearly than those who mistake convention for order, or relative institutions for absolute standards. But in rejecting the social order explicitly and denying the transcendental order implicitly, Don Juan can view life neither comically nor tragically.

The tragic view assumes a cosmic order the disruption of which must be expiated by the offering of a sacrificial victim—the tragic hero who, innocent, guilty, or ambiguous, is driven from the society whose sins he takes upon himself. The comic view assumes a social order from which the hero may originally deviate, but to which he is finally reunited. Denying the existence of a cosmic order and the validity of a social order, Don Juan sees life neither as comedy nor tragedy, both of which assume a meaningful order. He sees life as a joke which has a point, but no meaning.

If life is a joke, it is important to laugh last, as does Don Juan, who deceives everyone and is himself undeceived. The world view of the burlador seems triumphant as he sweeps away all obstacles and successfully dominates physical and social reality, the only reality he acknowledges. But his triumph comes to an abrupt halt when he discovers the tomb of Gonzalo and stumbles upon eternity.

The world of eternity has been suggested before. Don Pedro, Tisbea, Aminta, Don Diego, and Catalinón have warned the Don repeatedly of death and judgment. But Don Juan has shrugged off all the warnings: “¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!” Death and eternity are very distant, and the endless cycle of encounter-seduction-possession-flight is very absorbing. Yet, as the play progresses, the references to time are more frequent and the sense of haste more pressing. Don Juan's constant preparation for flight and his constant projection into the future (Casalduero, pp. 6-9), which finally obliterate the present, produce an oppressive sense of frenzy. Eternity, on the other hand, moves very slowly.

The revelation comes in the awesome moment of silence when Don Juan retreats step by step, his eyes fixed on the advancing statue. In that moment the tables are turned on the burlador because there is, after all, a supernatural realm to which he must account. Unlike his victims, he has refused to be deceived by artifices. But his refusal to be deceived is purely negative. Having exposed the falseness of the artificial world, he stops at the natural level and does not reach for the supernatural realm, the true ground of reality.

The scenes which follow the invitation to the dead develop and explore Don Juan's failure to acknowledge anything above the natural world. On a stage set for disorder, the Don enters, jaunty as ever. Knocking is heard. Fearlessly confident of his ability to cope with any representative of human justice, Don Juan orders the servant to investigate. The servant returns panic-stricken, and Catalinón, rather reluctantly, goes to the door. He returns—stumbling, falling, babbling incoherently—a farcical figure, but the farce ends when the door opens before the supernatural.

Confronted with the world he has denied, Don Juan attempts to re-establish normal patterns. He greets Gonzalo with conventional courtesy, chats genially with Catalinón, and treats the presence of the Stone Guest as an ordinary occurrence. Ordered to converse with the guest, Catalinón addresses the emissary of eternity as if he were a visitor from a foreign land:

¿Está bueno? ¿Es buena tierra
la otra vida? ¿Es llano o sierra?
¿Prémiase allá la poesía?
…
                                                            ¿Hay allá
muchas tabernas? Sí habrá,
si Noé reside allí.
…
Señor muerto, ¿allá se bebe
con nieve?

(2361-70)

The questions are those that might be asked of a traveler recently returned from the Indies. But the attempt at natural intercourse with the supernatural stresses the horror of the statue's presence. Yet Don Juan and Catalinón can cope with the situation only by reducing it to terms they understand. Since their understanding is limited to the natural, their failure is basically a failure of imagination.

The song performed by the servants reiterates the Don's belief that life is long and the day of accounting far away. Reassured by the repetition of “¡qué largo me lo fiáis!” (just as Catalinón is reassured by wine), Don Juan partially recovers his aplomb. He boasts of his conquests and listens complacently as Catalinón begins the catalogue of his adventures. The statue, who has remained wrapped in an awesome silence throughout their nervous chattering, indicates, silently still, that the servants must withdraw. The petty world of mountains and iced wine, poetry prizes and deceived women, must be cleared away; the Don must remain alone with eternity.

Don Juan has been shaken. Death had always been for him a metaphor for love-making—“muerto soy” or “Ando en pena”—or a threat held over those who stood in his way. Now he realizes it is the door to eternal damnation, but, reluctant to admit his own mortality, he inquires about the statue's salvation. The statue ignores his questions, invites him for the following night, and leaves, refusing the assistance of torches: “No alumbres; que en gracia estoy” (2457). The one who has found the eternal light of grace has no need of man-made light.

Don Juan has been warned about the supernatural, then confronted with it. But clinging to his level of reality, he dismisses the burning hand and frigid breath of the statue as mere products of his imagination. Noble, strong, overflowing with vitality, he reiterates his defiant confidence in his own powers. That confidence seems fully justified. The King, shuffling suitors as if they were chess pieces, tries again to create order. Octavio gloats over the prospect of revenge. Aminta and Gaseno rejoice at the hope of justice. But the human schemes of revenge and punishment are always circumvented by the clever burlador. When Don Juan reappears, he has no reason to doubt his ability to cope with the world. The King has received him well; the beautiful Isabela will be his wife that very night. The world seems to serve the trickster, who scoffingly reaffirms the temporal and natural world as sole reality: “Sólo aquél llamo mal día … en que no tengo dineros” (2651-53). And he goes off cockily to keep his dinner appointment, rejoicing at the thought of Seville's wonder when it hears of his new feat. His encounter with the supernatural has simply provided him with an occasion to stun the town.

The necessity for the second banquet scene becomes clear. Don Juan must be given every chance to acknowledge the existence of the supernatural before the tables are turned and the burlador finds himself burlado. The second banquet is a gruesome parody of the first. Don Juan is served scorpion and vipers; he is given vinegar to drink; the song performed is an ominous warning. The Don's own tricks are turned against him.¹⁰ He deceived Aminta by swearing by a dead man, but it is a dead man who now avenges her; he reassured his victims deceptively, just as the statue reassures him now: “Dame esa mano; / no temas” (2740-41). And when he asks for a priest to confess and absolve him, the statue's answer, “No hay lugar; ya acuerdas tarde” (2762), is an inverted echo of Don Juan's refrain, “¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!” Don Juan unsheathes his dagger, but his blows encounter only air. The weapons that served well enough to dominate finite reality are ineffectual against infinity, and the burlador, who has so often burned with the fires of feigned love, is now consumed by the very real fires of hell.

The joke seems complete. The burlador whose deceptions revealed the deceptiveness of appearance is tricked because he has misunderstood the nature of reality. Yet Tirso's irony goes one step further. Don Juan has been carried off to hell; his accounts have been settled. His tricks are exposed one by one, and the shadowy figures who surrounded him can reconstitute their little world, still unaware of the illusory nature of its order and its value. The King and the lovers can resume playing at love and government, forgetting that the social order has been restored only because heaven intervened. Throughout the last scene the ineffectualness of human justice is ironically pinpointed as each revelation of Don Juan's tricks brings from the King a befuddled “¿Qué dices?” When Catalinón relates the Don's dreadful end, the King recovers his self-possession, orders the celebration of marriages, and, to keep forever the memory of the events, commands the transfer of Gonzalo's tomb to Madrid. But the supreme irony is that the monument will perpetuate a misunderstanding, for, despite what King, father, and victims believe, Don Juan was not punished because he seduced women and insulted the dead. If that were the case, the statue would have carried him off in the first banquet scene. Don Juan damns himself because he chooses the temporal and natural world even after encountering eternal and supernatural reality.

The play is then an extended metaphor: “La vida es burla,” a joke in which the best joke is that life is not a joke because there is death and there is hell. The very structure of the play, deception fitting within deception, illusion covering illusion, is a revelation of its meaning: those who disguise reality are tricked by the burlador, but the prankster who treats life as a joke tricks himself into damnation.

Notes

1. Armand Edwards Singer, Bibliography of the Don Juan Theme: Versions and Criticisms, West Virginia University Bulletin, Series 54, No. 10-1 (April, 1954), pp. 148-51.

2. Arturo Farinelli, “Cuatro palabras sobre Don Juan y la literatura donjuanesca del porvenir,” in Homenaje á Menéndez y Pelayo en el año vigésimo de su profesorado (Madrid, 1899), I, 205-22.

3. Gerald Brenan, Literature of the Spanish People (Cambridge, Eng., 1951), p. 215. Even Charles V. Aubrun, who has given the best interpretation of the play, thinks it rather shoddily put together (“Le ‘Don Juan’ de Tirso de Molina: Essai d'interprétation,” BH, LIX [1957], 26-61).

4. I. L. McClelland's Tirso de Molina: Studies in Dramatic Realism, Liverpool Studies in Spanish Literature, Third Series (Liverpool, 1948) is illuminating about the technique of Tirso as a baroque dramatist. E. H. Templin's article, “The burla in the Plays of Tirso de Molina” (HR, VIII [1940], 185-201), shows the relationship between the burla and the baroque temper. In “Night Scenes in Tirso de Molina” (RR, XLI [1950], 261-73), the same scholar calls attention to special baroque effects in the play. Myron A. Peyton also emphasizes the baroque elements of trickery (“Some Baroque Aspects of Tirso de Molina,” RR, XXXVI [1945], 43-69). Bruce W. Wardropper studies the nature of truth and man's tragic failure to apprehend it (“El Burlador de Sevilla: A Tragedy of Errors,” PQ, XXXVI [1957], 61-71). Américo Castro treats Don Juan as a baroque hero: “Prologo” to El vergonzoso en palacio y El burlador de Sevilla, Clásicos Castellanos, II (Madrid, 1932), pp. 1-16; “El Don Juan de Tirso y el de Molière como personajes barrocos,” in Hommage à Ernest Martinenche: Études hispaniques et américaines (Paris, n.d.), pp. 93-111. Only Joaquín Casalduero, however, gives an interpretation of the whole play as a baroque masterpiece (Contribución al estudio del tema de Don Juan en el teatro español, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol. XIX, Nos. 3, 4 [Northampton, Mass., 1938]). Casalduero's study led Otis H. Green to admit that the play had to be reconsidered from the point of view of workmanship (“New Light on Don Juan: A Review Article,” HR, VII [1939], 117-24).

5. Contribución, pp. 12-13.

6. Historia de la literatura nacional española en la edad de oro, trans. Jorge Rubió Balaguer (Barcelona, 1933), pp. 42, 247.

7. E. H. Templin, “The burla in the Plays of Tirso de Molina,” pp. 185-201.

8. El burlador de Sevilla, in Cuatros Comedias, ed. John M. Hill and Mabel Margaret Harlan (New York, 1941), lines 1551-52; all quotations are from this edition.

9. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Estudios y discursos de crítica histórica y literaria, III (Santander, 1941), p. 76.

10. Archimede Marni, “Did Tirso Employ Counterpassion in His Burlador de Sevilla?” HR, XX (1952), 123-33.