Tirso de Molina, pseudonym of Gabriel Téllez, one of the outstanding dramatists of the Golden Age of Spanish literature.

The most powerful dramas associated with his name are two tragedies, El burlador de Sevilla (“The Seducer of Seville”) and El condenado por desconfiado (1635; The Doubted Damned). The first introduced into literature the hero-villain Don Juan, a libertine whom Tirso derived from popular legends but recreated with originality. The figure of Don Juan subsequently became one of the most famous in all literature through Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera Don Giovanni (1787). El burlador rises to a majestic climax of nervous tension when Don Juan is confronted with the statue-ghost of the man he has killed, and deliberately chooses to defy this emanation of his diseased conscience. El condenado por desconfiado dramatizes a theological paradox: the case of a notorious evildoer who has kept and developed the little faith he had, and who is granted salvation by an act of divine grace, contrasted with the example of a hitherto good-living hermit, eternally damned for allowing his one-time faith to shrivel. Tirso was at his best when portraying the psychological conflicts and contradictions involved in these master characters. At times he reaches Shakespearean standards of insight, tragic sublimity, and irony.... More • http://www.britannic ... le-9072613 View • Books • Images • Videos • Search Related • Poets • Literature • Renaissance • Spain • Theology • Writers • People