Generally credited as the creator of Don Juan, one of the most famous characters in literature, Tirso de Molina (1580-1648) is largely unknown to English readers. He wrote within an extraordinary literary milieu (the Spanish Golden Age--Velazquez, Ribera, Cervantes...) and left his own mark. This book presents three of his best known works, never before translated in one collection: the Don Juan play, a theological play and a court comedy. Don Juan is recognized as a masterpiece of psychological portraiture and has been the subject of countless analyses, and diagnosed as a misogynist, a repressed homosexual, a misanthrope, a narcissist. However he may be interpreted, the reader senses that in Don Juan, Tirso was probing a dark area of the human spirit. The playwright is known for his realistic and penetrating psychological portraits of women. His female characters are forceful, cunning, witty and courageous, and their frank and unabashed sexuality is striking for the age--so much so that Tirso was censured and eventually banished from Madrid.

Generally credited as the creator of Don Juan, one of the most famous characters in literature, Tirso de Molina (1580-1648) is largely unknown to English readers. He wrote within an extraordinary literary milieu (the Spanish Golden Age--Velazquez, Ribera, Cervantes...) and left his own mark. This book presents three of his best known works, never before translated in one collection: the Don Juan play, a theological play and a court comedy. Don Juan is recognized as a masterpiece of psychological portraiture and has been the subject of countless analyses, and diagnosed as a misogynist, a repressed homosexual, a misanthrope, a narcissist. However he may be interpreted, the reader senses that in Don Juan, Tirso was probing a dark area of the human spirit. The playwright is known for his realistic and penetrating psychological portraits of women. His female characters are forceful, cunning, witty and courageous, and their frank and unabashed sexuality is striking for the age--so much so that Tirso was censured and eventually banished from Madrid.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Tirso de Molina enjoys enduring popularity as a writer of irreverent comedies, though his critical reputation as a major dramatist rests largely on his more serious works.

Tirso de Molina has been the subject of less than half as much scholarly research as either of his Golden Age counterparts, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Tirso's only mythological play, El Aquiles, remains one of the least studied of his plays, and when studied, is generally considered in isolation from the rest of his dramatic production. The Achillean Hero in the Plays of Tirso de Molina traces the development of the figure of the Achillean hero in three of Tirso's plays, El Aquiles, La vida y muerte de Herodes, and La venganza de Tamar, and in doing so connects the early mythological play to the dramatist's later works.