El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The play opens at night in the palace of the King of Naples. The Duchess Isabela discovers that the man with her is not her betrothed, Duke Octavio, but someone who has passed himself off as him: “Who am I? A man without a name.” It is Don Juan Tenorio, a young nobleman from Seville. His uncle, Don Pedro Tenorio, Spain’s ambassador, lets him escape over a balcony; the blame falls on Octavio, who flees to Spain.

Don Juan is shipwrecked on the coast of Tarragona. His servant Catalinón drags him out of the sea, and he is taken in by Tisbea, a fisher girl; that same night Don Juan seduces her with a promise of marriage and escapes on the two mares she had raised. Meanwhile, in Seville, King Alfonso XI plans to marry him to Doña Ana de Ulloa, daughter of the knight commander Don Gonzalo, unaware that Don Juan’s friend the Marquis de la Mota is in love with her.

Catalinón, Tisbea and even his own father warn him that everything is paid for at death, and again and again Don Juan answers: “¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!” (roughly, “That’s a long way off!”). His greatest pleasure, he says, is to deceive a woman and leave her dishonoured. Along the way lie a betrayed friend, a peasant wedding in Dos Hermanas and a tomb in a Seville church whose inscription calls for vengeance.

It is a Spanish Baroque comedia, written in verse in three acts and set in the fourteenth century, in the reign of Alfonso XI, across Naples, Tarragona, Seville and Dos Hermanas. Its subject is deceit and its punishment: Don Juan believes there will always be time to repent before he dies, and the play answers him through the statue: “Ésta es justicia de Dios, quien tal hace, que tal pague” (“This is God’s justice: as you do, so shall you pay”).

Its authorship is disputed. It was published around 1630 under Tirso de Molina’s name, but a related version, Tan largo me lo fiáis, was staged in Córdoba in 1617; some scholars attribute the play to Andrés de Claramonte, while others still regard it as Tirso’s. Whoever wrote it, it is the earliest fully developed stage version of the legend, later taken up by Molière’s Don Juan, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio.

Tirso de Molina is the pen name of Fray Gabriel Téllez, born in Madrid in 1579 (some sources say 1583), who died in Almazán, in today’s province of Soria, in 1648. A friar of the Order of Mercy, he lived in Santo Domingo from 1616 to 1618 and was a disciple of Lope de Vega.

In 1634 he claimed to have written some four hundred plays, among them Don Gil de las calzas verdes and El vergonzoso en palacio, and published five volumes of his drama.