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PARTISAN REVIEW
deron in depth, but superior to both in direct observation of the
human passions, and above all, those of women. His work is full of
remarkable characterizations of women. Don Juan belongs in the
series, partly because of his equivocal sexuality, but mainly because
his character has no shape of its own, but is delineated by the
women who surround him. Take them away and Don Juan would
vanish. Which is why it took a great expert on the feminine soul to
create the soul of Don Juan.
It has been said that Tirso de Molina acquired this knowledge
in
the confessional. This cannot be true. The confessional could pro–
vide him with nothing more than anecdotes, for as far as the biology
of the soul is concerned, that is all that sins are. Tirso learned the
deep lesson of life on his travels around Spain and America, during
his sojourns at the Court and in Toledo (which was a suburb of
Madrid), and above all, in his dealings with theatrical people, who
were addicted to all the courtly passions, which reached the ears
of the Father Confessors only as expurgated echoes.
If
it is true
that Tirso was a natural son of the Duke of Osuna, he may have
inherited much of his shrewdness from that great lord, the exalted
Viceroy of Naples, in love with power and pleasure, and himself
one of the most interesting figures of the Spanish Renaissance.
It was the school of humanity from which Tirso learned so
much, and in which we must look for the origins of the legend of
Don Juan; not in the old chronicles, not in the genealogy of the
name Tenorio, as the scholars of the nineteenth century supposed.
The name Don Juan Tenorio, which has led scholars a long
way off the track, has no historical significance whatever. There
have always been Spaniards named Tenorio. Some of them, no doubt,
had reputations which were not exactly edifying. Some may have
been local Don Juans, or at least habitues of gambling houses and
brothels, but none ever acquired the proportions of a myth. One
of them, for example, a certain Cristobal Tenorio, an authentic Don
Juan, and a contemporary of Tirso de Molina'S, seduced and ab–
ducted Lope de Vega's daughter, as Amezua has pointed out, fatally
wounding the Phoenix of Geniuses.
Tirso de Molina did not have any particular Tenorio in mind
when he wrote his play. He probably chose the name at random.
.But like all the creations of genius, it had a profound significance
