Lothario
About Lothario
Lothario is a name used as shorthand for an unscrupulous seducer of women, based upon a character in The Fair Penitent, a 1703 tragedy by Nicholas Rowe. In Rowe's play, Lothario is a libertine who seduces and betrays Calista; and his success is the source for the proverbial nature of the name in the subsequent English culture. The Fair Penitent itself was an adaptation of The Fatal Dowry (1632), a play by Philip Massinger and Nathan Field. The name Lothario was previously used for a somewhat similar character in The Cruel Brother (1630) by William Davenant. A character with the same name also appears in The Ill-Advised Curiosity, a story within a story in Miguel de Cervantes' 1605 novel, Don Quixote, Part One, however the "Lothario" there is most unwilling to seduce his friend's wife and only does so upon the urging of the former, who recklessly wants to test her fidelity. Lothario is also the name of a rakish ex-priest featured in Charles Beckingham's 1728 poem "Sarah the Quaker to Lothario", whose perfidy drives his lover, Sarah, to suicide.
On the show — 3 mentions total
There's this amazing book called The Wager, which is all about this English ship which got sunk in. 1732. I've just finished it. One of the main sources of how it all went down, and there was cannibalism, there was mutiny, there was murder. One of the main sources is John Byron, who later became an admiral and got nickname Fowler-Wather Jack because everywhere he went, the worst storms in the world happened to him.
from 610: No Such Thing As Lily Allen In The Hellespont, 2025-11-20 at 00:36:34 · read transcript
Other times Lothario came up
That did seem to be the thing about Byron was that his poetry, as you're saying, that's laced with autobiography in it. The Lothario stuff, which is what he was known for in his real world. People are sort of reading it almost in the way that as we're talking, a new Lily Allen album has been released, yeah, which just lays out the life that she's recently experienced with her now ex-husband.
No Such Thing As Lily Allen In The Hellespont, 2025-11-20 · listen
Loads of his weddings. Wow. He's a Lothario. Weddings of his friends and family. Right.
No Such Thing As An Unlucky Fountain, 2026-07-02 · listen
More places from this episode
610: No Such Thing As Lily Allen In The Hellespont put 2 places on the map.
- Royal Theatre · Canada
Coordinates: -25.4439, -49.2434