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THE THEATRE of DON JUAN by Oscar Mandel University Of

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THE THEATRE of DON JUAN by Oscar Mandel University Of The myth created and established, Professor Mandel traces its various Books manifestations, its accretions of symbol or new significant meaning, down to our own day, using a collection of THE THEATRE OF DON JUAN plays, as I have said before, as illus- by Oscar Mandel trative material interwoven in the University of Nebraska Press ..........$1 0 test. "For the purpose of this collec- tion, a Don Juan play is one which High Efficiency LASERS without cryogenic coolinq Reviewed by Harvey Ea leson, uses, adapts or alludes to the original professor of ~nglish legend . In eighteenth-century Like the Oedipus, Electra-Orestes, puppet plays Don Juan is not amor- and Faust legends, the Don Juan leg- ous; in nineteenth-century musical end has been one of the great sourc- comedy he is an oaf; in the twentieth- es of inspiration for artists in every century conceptions of Shaw and genre from literature and painting to Frisch he distrusts and even dislikes LASER Controls and Power Supplies music and ballet. In his new book women. " LASER System Engineering Oscar Mandel, associate professor of As Don Juan changed - he can Write for information and specifications English at Caltech, has done a great scarcely be said to have developed - service for both the scholar and the he represented first the "triumph of general reader in bringing together sensuality ." Then, naturally, as he the major theatrical works based on flouted some of the conventions of the legend, some of them hitherto not society, he easily became a symbol easily available. The book contains of revolt, politically, religiously. "Here nine plays, two of them puppet plays Don Juan is an atheist; there a Chris- and one the libretto for Mozart's Don tian At one time he is a thinker; at Giovunni. another a fool . He can be a gen- But the book is not just an an- tleman or a ruffian. And he may ap- thology, a collection of pieces illus- pear as hero, villain, or - often - as trating a certain theme. This is a both . They are the attributes book on the Don Juan legend and which give him his individual hu- the pieces are integral parts of the manity while he pursues his symbolic general discussion. For that reason I career of pure sensuality." found the book absorbing, as I would Professor Mandel calls the present not have done if it had been merely and third stage of Don Juan's evolu- MODEL K-10 50MEGWATT GIANT PULSE LASER a collection of plays about Don Juan tion his Molecular stage "for ours - particularly, as Professor Mandel might well be known as the Molecu- himself points out, since the plays lar age. The name points to the sci- on the whole are not very good ones, ence which dominates our lives; to even the one by the great Molikre. our habit of analyzing all things down Mandel writes, "The fact must be to their indivisible minimum; to the faced: Don Juan as a type of man dehumanization of life; to our sense remains in the end more interesting of isolation and fragmentation; to the than any of the plays, poems, or virtual abandonment of the idea of novels which gave him life." human progress; and to our small But the legend itself is basically a helplessness . The man in love is MODEL K-Dl good yam and the various purposes ripe for disappointment and failure. FAST RISE LASER DETECTOR to which it has been adapted during The scene darkens. Don Juan be- its life make interesting reading. Un- comes modem . And here is by like the Osdipus and the Electra- all odds the most important event in Orestes legends whose beginnings are the dramatic life of Don Juan. He lost in time, we know by whom and ceases to enjoy himself . what when the Don Juan legend was in- happened to Don Juan also happened vented. "The man who created Don in the fiber of our whole culture. Juan was a monk and dramatist of The irrepressible child of the Renais- the first half of the seventeenth cen- sance, who seems to have enjoyed tury, Gabriel Tellez, better known as even the scene of his damnation . Tirso de Molina, and considered to- crumbles into a shabby and uneasy day one of the four best playwrights psychological case." of Spain's Golden Age. In 1630 a I hesitate to call this work a schol- play entitled El Burlador de Sevilla arly book, because the epithet is usu- y convidado de piedra (The Jester of ally a polite euphemism for saying a Seville and the Stone Guest) appeared book is filled with recondite informa- under his name in a collection of tion and is dull. This book is a scholarly works by Lope de Vega 'and other work, but it is not dull. Scholars will authors' . No play of the Renais- find it on their own. What I wish to MODEL K-I sance has so vast a progeny as this do is recommend it to to people who 25-JOULE LASER undated piece which its author, not just like to read interesting books and even identified beyond all possibility haven't the remotest intention of ever of doubt, did not bother to include in writing an article or giving a lecture his own collected works." on the Don Juan legend. .
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