Lothario

Lothario is an Italian name used as shorthand for an unscrupulous seducer of women, based upon a character in The Fair Penitent, a 1703 tragedy by Nicholas Rowe.

[1][2] 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.

[3] The Fair Penitent itself was an adaptation of The Fatal Dowry (1632), a play by Philip Massinger and Nathan Field.

[4] Edward Bulwer-Lytton used the name allusively in his 1849 novel The Caxtons ("And no woman could have been more flattered and courted by Lotharios and lady-killers than Lady Castleton has been").

[7] Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers (1857) wrote of "the elegant fluency of a practised Lothario".