[close]
Don Juan or The Feast with the Statue (Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre) is a French play by Molière, based on the legend of Don Juan. Molière's characters Dom Juan and Sganarelle are the French counterparts to the Spanish Don Juan and Catalinón, characters who would later become familiar to opera goers as Don Giovanni and Leporello. "Dom Juan" is the last part in Molière's hypocrisy trilogy, which also includes The School for Wives and Tartuffe. It was first performed on February 15, 1660, in the Palais-Royal, with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle.
The play's title and the name of the main character are often translated as "Don Juan".
The play was originally written in prose, and was withdrawn after 15 performances after attacks by Molière's critics, who considered he was offending religion and the king by eulogizing a libertine. The play was a costly failure. Sganarelle, Dom Juan's valet, is the only character who speaks up for religion, but his particular brand of superstitious Catholicism is used more as a comic device than as a foil to his master's free-thinking. As a result, Molière was ordered to delete a certain number of scenes and lines which, according to his censors, made a mockery of their faith. A severely edited text of the play was published for the first time in 1682, and it was revived only in 1687, after Molière's death, in a versified and softened version by Thomas Corneille (brother of Pierre Corneille). Corneille's adaptation was the only version of the play performed for nearly a century and a half. The play was produced in its original, uncensored version for the first time in 1884.
Molière drew his inspiration from the main character of a work by Tirso de Molina called El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. However, the characters from the two plays differ in several aspects. Molière's Dom Juan clearly states that he is an atheist, but the Don Juan of Tirso de Molina's original play is a Roman Catholic who believes that he can repent of his evil deeds many years later before he dies. However, his death comes sooner than expected and he finds that his attempts to repent and confess his sins are ineffective. In both plays the main character is condemned to Hell.
