Spanish · 1579–1648
Gabriel Téllez was a Mercedarian friar who wrote plays under the name Tirso de Molina, spent two years in Santo Domingo on his order's business, and was eventually censured by a Castilian council of state for writing profane comedies unbecoming to his habit. He obeyed only partly. He left around eighty plays out of a claimed four hundred, among them sharp comedies with women who scheme better than the men and a theological drama about grace and damnation. His lasting act was to put on stage a Sevillian aristocrat named Don Juan Tenorio who seduces by promising marriage and is dragged to hell by a statue. Molière, Mozart and Da Ponte, Byron, Pushkin and Shaw all worked from that figure. Tirso ended his career as chronicler of his order and prior of a monastery in Soria.