Don Juan Tenorio by José Zorrilla: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

It is carnival night in Seville. At the Laurel inn, kept by Cristófano Buttarelli, Don Juan Tenorio and Don Luis Mejía meet to settle a bet made a year before: which of them could do more harm. Each recounts his exploits before the crowd, they compare lists, and Don Juan wins: thirty-two men killed in duels and seventy-two women seduced, against twenty-three and fifty-six.

Stung, Don Luis says one conquest is missing: a novice about to take her vows. Don Juan raises the stakes: he will win a novice and Don Luis’s own fiancée, Doña Ana de Pantoja. Listening in disguise is Don Gonzalo de Ulloa, the knight commander, father of Doña Inés, a girl of barely seventeen raised in a convent who had been promised to Don Juan in marriage. Don Gonzalo breaks off the match. Don Diego, Don Juan’s father, is there too, and disowns his son.

The four acts of Part One take place in a single night: Don Juan uses his servant Ciutti and Brígida, Inés’s duenna, to reach her, while Don Luis tries to protect Doña Ana. Part Two takes place five years later, on another night, and opens in the Tenorio family mausoleum.

Zorrilla takes up the Don Juan legend, which in Spanish theatre goes back to The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (1630), attributed to Tirso de Molina: the seducer, the dead man’s statue and the supper with it. Zorrilla’s change is the ending: instead of punishment, repentance and a love that saves. It is a work of Spanish Romanticism: moonlit nights, duels, excess and the supernatural on stage.

It is written almost entirely in eight-syllable lines, quick and easy to remember, and many are quoted by heart, such as “¿No es cierto, ángel de amor, que en esta apartada orilla más pura la luna brilla y se respira mejor?” (“Is it not true, angel of love, that on this secluded shore the moon shines more purely and one breathes more freely?”). In Spain and Mexico it is a tradition, kept for more than a century, to stage it every year around All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead.

José Zorrilla was born in Valladolid on 21 February 1817 and died in Madrid on 23 January 1893. A poet and playwright, he is one of the leading figures of Spanish Romanticism. He made his name in 1837 with a poem in memory of the writer Mariano José de Larra, and went on to stage dozens of plays.

He wrote Don Juan Tenorio in twenty-one days and sold the rights cheaply, so he earned nothing from its many revivals. He lived in France and Mexico, joined the Royal Spanish Academy and in 1889 was crowned national poet in Granada.