The Myth of Don Juan Onstage up to and through Victorian Times
The last third of the seventeenth century witnessed the introduction of the theme of Don Juan in England in grand style thanks to Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine, a play that was produced for the first time at Dorset Garden in June 1675 and published the following year. Shadwell had not read Tirso d...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2017-11-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/3289 |
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| Summary: | The last third of the seventeenth century witnessed the introduction of the theme of Don Juan in England in grand style thanks to Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine, a play that was produced for the first time at Dorset Garden in June 1675 and published the following year. Shadwell had not read Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla, but instead, his inspiration came from France, specifically from Le nouveau festin de pierre ou l'athée foudroyé by Claude La Rose, Sieur de Rosimond, which in turn revealed unquestionable borrowings from Dorimon’s, Villiers’s and Molière’s versions of the theme (Le festin de Pierre ou le fils criminel and Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre). All of these plays share serious overtones and vile Don Juan protagonists, which highly contrasts with the light-hearted treatment of the Don Juan story that was predominant in England and France through the nineteenth century. The passage from the seventeenth century’s moralising vision of Don Juan to its humorous counterpart in Victorian times constitutes the object of study of this article, which traces the inseparable trajectories of Don Juanesque works in the two countries. This paper explains how the initially tragic Don Juan came to be a favourite for light onstage entertainment between the years 1837 and 1901 on both sides of the Channel. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |