Serving Don Juan: Decorum in Tirso de Molina and Molière

Serving Don Juan: Decorum in Tirso de Molina and Molière ROBERT BAYLISS Although from quite different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, both Larry W. Riggs and George Mariscal identify a definitive marker ofthe"earlymodernity"generallyascribed to sixteenthand seventeenth-centurywestern Europe: a convergence ofand 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 ofpublic theaters andprofessionaltheaterindustries inthe midst ofthis sea change, and in each country authors ofpopular comedy drew upon such discursive pluralityto 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 ofthe neoclassical precept ofdecorum in our efforts to trace the ways in which this broader cultural shift translates to early modern theatrical practice. Decorum's 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 ofcase-study, namely through the two versions ofthe Don Juan myth penned byTirso de Molina (in El burladordeSevilla, 1630) and Molière (in DomJuan ouleFestin dePierre, 1665).A focus on the servants attendingto 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 heterogeneitythat decorum was meant to systematically address. Earlymodern dramatists'conception ofcharacter and their means of linguisticallyrepresenting it werelargelydictated bydecorum,in essence 191 192Comparative Drama 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 discursivelyrepresented by Tirso and Molière constitute divergent"readings" ofdecorum in terms ofthe sociallyand culturallymarginal figure ofthe servant and his ethical position vis-à-vis the noble protagonist. While the socially marginal voice ofTirso's Catalinón continues to be read as a kind of"moral conscience"in the play,2 1 will qualifysuch a reading in light of the insights gained from a comparison to Molière'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 preciselywhere, in different ways, both Tirso and Molière situate the comic tension and dramatic irony oftheir 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 ofthe plays at least since the heyday ofthe New Criticism, especially in the case ofEl burlador de Sevilla. Indeed, since the Spanish Romantic playwright José 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, Molière, and Tirso, the notion ofDon 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 ofearly modern comedywould serve as a filter through which any ostensiblymoralist 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 Molière plays, this study proposes a more nuanced analysis of theircomic treatmentthat considers more carefullythevoices from which such a moralist critique is enunciated.As a pillar ofthe codes ofcomedy, decorum bears social and ideological implications that complicate any notion of a socially marginal servant's "moral authority," and this problem is preciselywhere the two playwrights diverge in their treatments of Robert Bayliss193 domestic servants attending to a morallybankrupt antihero.Thus,where Sganarelle's frustrated attempts to sermonize"frombelow"simultaneously appeal to and impede the audience's identification with his moralist perspective , Catalinón's ethically ambivalent voice engages the audience metafheatrically with a firm grounding in the aesthetic dimensions...