DON JUAN, a legendary character, whose story has found currency in various European countries. He was introduced into formal literature in the Spanish El Burlador de Sevilla y convi dado de piedra, a play which was first printed at Barcelona in 163o, and is usually attributed to Tirso de Molina; but the story of a profligate inviting a dead man to supper, and finding his invitation accepted, was current before 163o, and is not peculiar to Spain. The available evidence goes to show that Don Juan is a universal type, the subject of local myths in many countries, that he received his name in Spain, and that the Spanish version of his legend has absorbed certain elements from the French story of Robert the Devil. The character of Don Juan as the incarna tion of perverse sensuality and arrogant blasphemy, may be con sidered as the creation of the author of El Burlador. The drama was apparently more popular in Italy than in Spain, and was fre quently given in pantomime by Italian actors, a company of whom took the story into France in 1657. It was dramatized by Dorimond in 1659 and by De Villiers in 1661; their attempts suggested Le Festin de Pierre (1665) to Moliere, who substituted prose for verse, reduced the supernatural element, and inter polated new comic effects. The story was introduced into England by Sir Aston Cokain in his unreadable Tragedy of Ovid (1669), and was the theme of The Libertine (1676) by Shadwell. El Burlador was recast, but not improved, by Antonio de Zamora early in the 18th century, and a hundred years later the character was endowed with a new name in Espronceda's Estudiante de Salamanca. But the most curious resuscitation of the type in Spain is the protagonist in Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, which is usually played in all large cities during the first week in Novem ber, and has come to be regarded as an essentially national work. It is in fact little more than an adaptation of the elder Dumas' Don Juan de Marana, which, in its turn, derives chiefly from Merimee's novel, Les Ames du Purgatoire. Byron's Don Juan resembles Ulloa's murderer in nothing but his name.
The sustained popularity of the Don Juan legend is undoubtedly due in great measure to Mozart's incomparable setting of Da Ponte's mediocre libretto. In this pale version of El Burlador de Sevilla the French romantic school made acquaintance with Don Juan, and hence, no doubt, the works of Merimee and Dumas already mentioned, Balzac's Elixir d'une longue vie, and Alfred de Musset's Une Matinee de Don Juan and Namouna. The legend has been treated subsequently by Flaubert and Barbey d'Aurevilly in France, by Landau and Heyse in Germany, by Sacher-Masoch in Austria and in a highly modernized form by G. B. Shaw (Man and Superman). It has always fascinated com posers. Mozart's Don Giovanni has annihilated the earlier operas of Le Tellier, Righini, Tritto, Gardi and Gazzaniga; but Gluck's ballet-music still survives, and Henry Purcell's setting—the oldest of all—has saved some of Shadwell's insipid lyrics from oblivion.