Lothario

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Lothario is a male first name which came to connote an unscrupulous seducer of women in The Impertinent Curiosity, a story-within-the-story in Don Quixote.

The Novel of The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious

Don Quixote, Part One contains a number of stories which do not directly involve the two main characters, but which are narrated by some of the picaresque figures encountered by the Don and Sancho during their travels. The longest and best known of these is "El Curioso Impertinente" (the impertinently curious man), found in Part One, Book Four. This story, read to a group of travelers at an inn, tells of a Florentine nobleman, Anselmo, who becomes obsessed with testing his wife's fidelity, and talks his close friend Lothario into attempting to seduce her, with disastrous results for all. In Part Two, the author acknowledges the criticism of his digressions in Part One and promises to concentrate the narrative on the central characters (although at one point he laments that his narrative muse has been constrained in this manner).

Adaptations

Lothario is also a character in the play The Fair Penitent (1703), by Nicholas Rowe. In the play, Lothario seduces and betrays Calista.

An allusion is made to Lothario in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! when referring to Charles Bon, the proclaimed ladies-man and woman-seducer who is about to marry a woman while already being married.^[1]

In the opera "Mignon" by Ambroise Thomas, Lothario is the elderly father of the heroine and in no way a seducer.

Pop Culture

In the popular game Sims (Sims 2 and 3), there is an pre-created character named Don Lothario. It is obvious that, like Lothario, he is a womanizer because it is implied through his memory that he tried to seduce a married Bella Goth before she disappeared, married Bella's daughter Cassandra, and openly cheats on Cassandra with Nina and Dina Caliente as well as Kaylynn Langerak.^[2]

See also

Novels portal

• Giacomo Casanova
• Don Juan

Notes

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