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Marleen de Vries: "Séducteurs néerlandais: Don Juan aux Pays-Bas"



Abstract:

The Netherlands have a special relationship with one of the biggest seducers of European literature: Don Juan. The first uncensored text of Molière's Festin de pierre had to be published in Amsterdam in 1683 due to the severe censorship in France. Furthermore, the Story of Don Juan was extremely popular in the Netherlands during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, when six different adaptations in Dutch language were published. Strangely enough, these adaptations did not follow the uncensored Amsterdam text. They are all very careful in religious matters and present Don Juan mainly as an unreliable seducer. One could therefore state that the process of mythologization of Don Juan started with the laws of censorship, which in the Netherlands were as repressive as in France. The popularity of the Festin de pierre is explained by the fact that the male type of the unreliable seducer was at the time wellknown, as demonstrated by the author, journalist and painter Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677-1747).




AsK, jan 2011



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