ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, a further strand enters to complicate the picture by fusing Don Juan with a notorious Spanish profligate, this time a man who certainly existed and about whom a fair amount is known: Miguel Manara, who was born in Seville in 1626. Don Juan de Marana is brought up by a fanatically pious mother who tries to fill him with a dread of damnation, using a painting of souls tormented in Purgatory as a sort of didactic visual aid. In 1923, Bennett published his slimmed-down version of Dumas, Don Juan de Marana. In twentieth-century Spain, the most familiar and popular work still to figure Don Juan is not El Burlador, nor Antonio de Zamora’s melodramatic reworking of it, but Jose Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio of 1844.
