Tirso de Molina: El Burlador de Sevilla

I'm not entirely satisfied with myself in writing this.  My original goal was to read and write about this seminal book in Spanish, but as you can see, I've failed in at least the latter part of that goal.  My Spanish simply isn't up to the task yet.  And even though I read the original 17th century text in Spanish, glued to a dictionary,  I wouldn't say that I succeeded in that either.  The highly colloquial and idiomatic language used, especially by Catalinón, remains opaque.  I understood the words, but often their implication escaped me.

But even within those constraints, even clouded by my intermediate Spanish and 400 years of linguistic change, the genius of Tirso de Molina is unmistakeable.  The dramatic imagination required to have created this work is so far out of the realm of what was being created at that time is astounding.  There are those who say that the basic building blocks of the legend predate Molina, but no proof seems to be extant for such a claim.  It is perhaps true that Molina drew from a variety of Spanish legends for his masterwork, but this is certainly no mere adaptation of a folk tale.  It does not seem to be exaggeration to say that Molina gave birth to Don Juan, rather tahn simply giving him a voice.

Neither is this mere entertainment.  Each character is there to deliver a message, but most marvelous to this reader is that it remains open to dispute what the message of the play itself is.  It would be easy to craft a case that Molina, a devout monk, was crafting a cautionary tale about sacrificing one's soul to earthly delights, and the dangers of relying on the sacrament of confession to ensure one's own salvation. But suppose that Don Juan had managed to go to confession just before meeting with the stone guest.  Such is not out of the realm of possibility.  What, then, would have been his fate?  Would the sacrament have saved him from damnation?  The play would ahve taken on an entirely different meaning.  This question opens the way for a reading of El Burlador as an indictment, rather than an endorsement, of the Church's approach to sin.  In fact, isDon Gonzalo's innocent but sudden death without that sacrament any different than Don Juan's?  The fact that he reappears as an agent of Hell does not indicate a favorable end for him, however potent his revenge.

On every level to which I have access, this play is a masterwork.  Molina's dramatic instincts are positively Shakespearean in their precision; he knew exactly what to put on the stage.  His characters are all indelible, and the eponymous villain so much so that he has become inextricable from world culture.  Underneath these skillful layers, however, lies perhaps the best part of the play: its earnest wrestling with an irresolvable philosophical question in terms accessible to even the lowest of brows. Would that my Spanish were strong enough to discern if the topmost layer, the words themselves, are of as incredible a quality.  I suspect that they are, and perhaps I will one day be able to appreciate them.  But even if they were as dry as stone, the play would still be a pillar of world literature.