Don Juan

Don Juan (Spanish: [doŋ ˈxwan]), also known as Don Giovanni (Italian), is a legendary fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. The original version of the story of Don Juan appears in the 1630 play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina. The play includes most of the elements found and later adapted in subsequent works, including the setting (Seville), the characters (Don Juan, his servant, his love interest, and her father, whom he kills), moralistic themes (honor, violence and seduction, vice and retribution), and the dramatic, supernatural ending in which Don Juan dines with and is then dragged down to hell by the stone statue of the father he had previously slain. Tirso de Molina's play was subsequently adapted into numerous plays and poems, of which the most famous include a 1665 play, Dom Juan, by Molière; a 1787 opera, Don Giovanni, with music by Mozart and a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte largely adapting Tirso de Molina's play; a satirical and epic poem, Don Juan, by Lord Byron; and Don Juan Tenorio, a romantic play by José Zorrilla. By linguistic extension, from the name of the character, "Don Juan" has become a generic expression for a womanizer, and stemming from this, Don Juanism is a non-clinical psychiatric descriptor.