Don Juan – el más universal de los mitos literarios españoles
Don Juan – the most universal of the Spanish literary myths

Summary/Abstract: We have to start by asking whether Don Juan can be considered a myth. This is the question that Jean Rousset was asking himself at the beginning of his book <<The Myth of Don Juan >>. But the definitions of the myth are numerous and varied and it is not easy to answer .The first authors that spoke about the myth of Don Juan were Ramiro de Maeztu, Victor Said Armesto and Francisco Agustin. There is no doubt that it is the most universal of the Spanish literary myths. Don Juan didn’t need much time to forget about his first author, to travel across the world, speaking all the languages and becoming the main character in many novels, dramas, essays, works, etc., written or composed by famous authors like Byron, Moliere, Goldoni, Pushkin, Balzac, Alejandro Dumas, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Apollinaire, Montherlant, G.B. Shaw, Victor Eftimiu, Stendhal, Albert Camus, Gregorio Marañon, José Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, or Mozart. Francisco Márquez Villanueva emphasized the “semiological unstableness “ of Don Juan and he thought that he was a “ timeless and boundless myth “; every period had its Don Juan and it identified itself with him , or with his victims . Kierkegaard noticed that the first Don Juan is not a seducer and more, in Tirso’s work, Don Juan does not seduce the women, he just deceives and dazzles them promising a brilliant marriage. Maybe Tirso did not want to make his main character look like a seducer, but more like a sinner that gets his punishment (let’s not forget that Tirso was a friar). But the following authors made him the very archetype of the seducer.

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