Episode 315: “Don Juan” by Moliere, Introduction and Act 1

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Today on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina and Thomas begin a new series discussing Moliere’s farcical play Don Juan. They open the discussion with some background on Moliere’s plays in general, as well as other drama of this time period, then the origins of the story of Don Juan itself. After this introduction, Thomas and Angelina read some of the play and discuss some of the key characters and ideas presented in the opening acts.

If you missed this year’s annual Literary Life Online Conference, “The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Quickeneth: Reading Like a Human”, you can still purchase the recordings at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Commonplace Quotes:

Where the imagination is concerned there is no room for collective authority.
Hugh Kingsmill, from The English Genius

“You know where we come from here – whence we derive, I mean. We are clerks, medieval clerks leading this mental life that is natural and healthy only to men serving a transcendental idea. But have we that now? And what then does all this thinking, poring, analyzing, arguing become – what but so much agency of pent-up and thwarted action?…Don’t you think we could be a dangerous, unbalanced caste once the purposes have gone and the standards are vanishing?”
Michael Innes, from Death at the President’s Lodging

Books and Links:

Tartuffe and Other Plays by Moliere (trans. by Donald Frame)

The English Genius by Hugh Kingsmill

Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes

The Spanish Friar by John Dryden

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

Song to a Fair Young Lady Going Out of Town in the Spring

by John Dryden

Ask not the cause why sullen spring
So long delays her flow'rs to bear;
Why warbling birds forget to sing,
And winter storms invert the year?
Chloris is gone; and Fate provides
To make it spring where she resides.

Chloris is gone, the cruel fair;
She cast not back a pitying eye:
But left her lover in despair,
To sigh, to languish, and to die:
Ah, how can those fair eyes endure
To give the wounds they will not cure!

Great god of Love, why hast thou made
A face that can all hearts command,
That all religions can invade,
And change the laws of ev'ry land?
Where thou hadst plac'd such pow'r before,
Thou shouldst have made her mercy more.

When Chloris to the temple comes,
Adoring crowds before her fall;
She can restore the dead from tombs,
And ev'ry life but mine recall.
I only am by love design'd
To be the victim for mankind.

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