SOURCE: “Language and Seduction in El Burlador de Seville,” in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter, 1988, pp. 165-80.

In the following essay, Mandrell analyzes the language of El burlador de Sevilla, focusing on de Molina's concerns with how the linguistics of the play affected seventeenth-century Spanish society.

Critical wisdom holds that the four seductions in Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra are important in an external, referential sense and in an internal, structural one, that they serve to prove a point regarding Spanish society in general as well as to establish the structural frame and dramatic rhythm within the comedia. The social point of the seductions is straightforward enough: Don Juan respects neither the conventions of his own class (the nobility) nor those of his inferiors (the peasantry). Women of all classes qualify as potential objects of his desire. This fact, along...