Dom Juan Reading Order

Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665) by Molière is the most enigmatic, disturbing, and episodic of Molière's plays — a comédie en prose (uniquely, in prose rather than verse) written hastily in the months when Le Tartuffe was banned, drawing on the Don Juan legend (Tirso de Molina, Dorimon, Villiers) but transforming it into something unprecedented: a comedy of ideas in which the libertine hero uses philosophical wit, class privilege, and ultimately religious hypocrisy as successive strategies for eluding moral accountability. The play was performed fifteen times and withdrawn — either by Molière himself (pressured by the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, which identified the libertine arguments as equally dangerous as Tartuffe's hypocrisy) or by the censors. Unlike the other Don Juan plays, Molière's Dom Juan is not finally punished for his sexual libertinism but for his most recent strategy: the decision to adopt the appearance of piety as his final mask. The Statue of the Commander functions differently here than in the other versions — it is not simply divine punishment for libertinism but a confrontation between two absolutes (atheism and the supernatural) that the play refuses to resolve. The play was not published in an authorized text in the 17th century; later productions were heavily edited, and the original text was suppressed until the 19th century.