Don Juan, a celebrated dramatic figure, the hero of a Spanish story, who stands as the southern realisation of the same subordination of the whole nature to self-gratification which under the colder northern skies has found expression in the conception of Faust. In Faust the development of the idea proceeds in the region of the intellectual as contrasted with the sensuous in Don Juan; and accordingly the former has found its highest expression in poetry, the latter in music. The ideal of the Don Juan legend is presented in the life of a profligate who gives himself up so entirely to the gratification of sense, especially to the most powerful of all the impulses, that of love, that he acknowledges no higher consideration; and partly in wanton daring, partly to allay all uneasy misgiving, he then challenges that Spirit in which he disbelieves to demonstrate to him its existence in the only way he holds valid—through the senses.
This ideal career is aptly enough localised in one of the most luxurious cities of the once world-monarchy of the Saracens—Seville, and the char- acters wear the names of the ancient noble families of the place. The hero of the story, Don Juan, is described as a member of the celebrated family Tenorio, and is sometimes represented as living contemporary with Peter the Cruel, sometimes with Charles V. His chief aim is the seduction of the daughter of a governor of Seville, or of a nobleman of the family of the Ulloas. Being opposed by the father, he stabs him in a duel. He then forces his way into the family tomb of the murdered man, within the convent of San Francisco, causes a feast to be prepared there, and invites the statue which had been erected to his victim to be his guest. The stone guest appears at table as invited, compels Don Juan to follow him, and, the measure of his sins being full, delivers him over to hell. At a later period the legend came to be mixed up with the story of a similar profligate, Juan de Maraña, who had in like manner sold himself to the devil, but was at last converted, and died as a penitent monk in the odour of sanctity.
The story is probably a very old one. It is said that a poem with the like moral, El Ateista Fulminado, by an unknown author, was familiar in the monasteries long ere, in the first half of the 17th century, the legend of Don Juan was put into form by the monk Gabriel Tellez (Tirso de Molina), in El Burlador de Sevilla y Convivado de Piedra. This drama was transplanted to the Italian stage, and soon found its way to Paris, where numerous versions of it, among others Molière's Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre (first acted 1665), made their appearance. The latter provoked virulent criticism, and its full text was not printed for many years. It was put on the English stage by Shadwell under the title of The Libertine (1676). In the end of the 17th century, a new Spanish version of Tellez's play was prepared by Antonio de Zamora, and brought out on the stage. It is this version that forms the groundwork of the later Italian versions and of Mozart's opera. It was first put into an operatic form by Vincenzo Righini (1777); the text of Mozart's Don Giovanni was written by Lorenza da Ponte (1787). Through this famous opera the story became popular all over Europe, and has since furnished a theme for numbers of poets, playwrights, and writers of romance. Alexander Dumas has a drama, Don Juan de Marana; Byron's Don Juan follows only the name, and to some extent the character, of the original; and Prosper Mérimée's novel Les Ames du Purgatoire, ou les Deux Don Juan, is founded upon it. See vol. iii. abt. 2 of Scheible's Kloster (1846).