Serving Don Juan: Decorum in Tirso de Molina and Molière

Abstract

Although from quite different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, both Larry W. Riggs and George Mariscal identify a definitive marker of the modernity generally ascribed to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century western Europe: a convergence of and competition between rival discourses (and, implicitly, the ideologies informing such discursive models) with both epistemological and ontological implications. (1) Both Spain and France witnessed the emergence and establishment of public theaters and professional theater industries in the midst of this sea change, and in each country authors of popular comedy drew upon such discursive plurality to entertain their audiences--as well as to comment on or critique the broader society in which dramatist, actor, and audience found themselves. This comparative study posits the importance of the neoclassical precept of decorum in our efforts to trace the ways in which this broader cultural shift translates to early modern theatrical practice. Decorums usefulness as a tool for navigating the complex web of intersecting modes of discourse at the early modern playwright's disposal is proposed by way of case-study, namely through the two versions of the Don Juan myth penned by Tirso de Molina (in El burlador de Sevilla, 1630) and Moliere (in Dora Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, 1665). A focus on the servants attending to the plays' title characters, and on the master-servant relationship formed in each text, illuminates the fundamentally different ways in which the two playwrights negotiate the discursive heterogeneity that decorum was meant to systematically address. Early modern dramatists' conception of and their means of linguistically representing it were largely dictated by decorum, in essence a neoaristotelian precept whose call for a unity of character or social verisimilitude is both literary and social, insofar as it prescribes a hierarchical social order both for the spectacle onstage and for the audience witnessing it. The master-servant relationships that are discursively represented by Tirso and Moliere constitute divergent of decorum in terms of the socially and culturally marginal figure of the servant and his ethical position vis-a-vis the noble protagonist. While the socially marginal voice of Tirso's Catalinon continues to be read as a kind of conscience in the play, (2) I will qualify such a reading in light of the insights gained from a comparison to Moliere's Sganarelle--a role originally performed by the playwright himself. Indeed, we will see that the relationship between the servant's voice and his claims to moral authority is precisely where, in different ways, both Tirso and Moliere situate the comic tension and dramatic irony of their plays. The moral dimension of the two works--in both cases punctuated by Don Juan's eventual demise in an act of divine justice--has dominated readings of the plays at least since the heyday of the New Criticism, especially in the case of El burlador de Sevilla. Indeed, since the Spanish Romantic playwright Jose Zorilla rewrote the story as an archetypal conflict between good and evil in which Don Juan Tenorio is spared damnation at the last minute, the Don Juan legend has been read in such exemplary terms. Despite the more satirical and comic presentations of the story by Byron, Moliere, and Tirso, the notion of Don Juan as moral exemplum has been retroactively applied to their works. I would argue that this mode of reading tempts the twenty-first-century critic to underestimate the degree to which the codes, conventions, and aesthetic concerns of early modern comedy would serve as a filter through which any ostensibly moralist critique would be represented onstage and interpreted by an early modern audience. While by no means denying the presence of a moral problem in the Tirso and Moliere plays, this study proposes a more nuanced analysis of their comic treatment that considers more carefully the voices from which such a moralist critique is enunciated. …