SOURCE: Smith, Hilary S. D. “The Pícaro Turns Preacher: Guzmán's de Alfarache's Missed Vocation.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 14, no. 4 (October 1978): 387-97.

[In the following essay, Smith examines the sermons in Guzmán de Alfarache, concentrating on Guzmán's role as a preacher.]

It must become apparent to even the most casual reader of Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache that the work is full of sermons; that not only the digressive discursos (a favourite term applied to contemporary printed sermons) but also complete chapters are cast in a homiletic mould.¹ Whereas Unamuno expressed his dislike for this novel by calling it “una sarta de sermones enfadosos y pedestres de la más ramplona filosofía y de la exposición más difusa y adormiladora que cabe”,² Herrero García was not being intentionally disparaging when he defined the picaresque novel in general as “un sermón con alteración de proporciones de los elementos que entran en su combinación”.³ Later critics have analysed the constituent “sermons” both theologically and according to the rules of rhetoric. Some claim that Alemán has cast Tridentine teaching on Original Sin and Justification into a “modern” form; others, that the work continues the medieval miscellany tradition.⁴ Common to these interpretations is the assumption that it is Mateo Alemán who is the “preacher” of all these sermons and pseudo-sermons and, as the undisputed author of the novel, he is so in one respect. However, there are at least three different types of sermon or digression, corresponding to three distinct personae within the novel: Guzmanillo the pícaro, Guzmán the penitent turned preacher and author Mateo Alemán himself. The controversial “duality” of the narrative, stressed by Molho and others in support of a strongly didactic reading, is in fact more akin to a triad, in which the preacherly element acts as a link between fiction and history. In one sense it is the universalizing element which bridges the gap between Guzmanillo's fictional involvement in the world's iniquity and Mateo Alemán's own evidence of man's inhumanity to man, which permeates all his writings. Yet Guzmán the preacher is not just a disembodied moralizing voice: he has been endowed with all the antecedents and circumstantial detail which go to form an ente de ficción. The character must be taken seriously, as well as the morality, and this involves considering Guzmán's qualifications to preach, how he invokes the traditional “figures” of the preacher and his awareness of a congregation. At each point we should ask ourselves whether Alemán intends Guzmán's claims to be a penitent turned preacher to be taken seriously.

Alemán seems to have believed that it was important to establish Guzmán's credentials, particularly his academic ones, in the Declaración para el entendimiento deste libro, so that the reader should know from the outset that this would be no ordinary criminal speaking. Nevertheless, already in the Declaración a slight shadow of doubt is thrown on the sincerity of any preaching that Guzmán will do, if only by negative inference:

Y no es impropriedad ni fuera de propósito si en esta primera [parte] escribiere alguna dotrina; que antes parece muy llegado a razón darla un hombre de claro entendimiento, ayudado de letras y castigado del tiempo, aprovechándose del ocioso de la galera. Pues aun vemos a muchos ignorantes justiciados, que habiendo de ocuparlo en sola su salvación, divertirse della para estudiar un sermoncito para en la escalera.

(96)

The juxtaposition of Guzmán's “dotrina” with the petty criminal's “sermoncito” suggests that both could be interpreted as empty, histrionic gestures, irrelevant to any personal purpose of amendment. The Declaración is chiefly concerned with decorum: with the setting of a stylistic tone for the book, rather than with the communication of a moral standpoint, since Alemán appears to wish to keep Guzmán's future conversion as a surprise.⁵

Well before his conversion the pícaro Guzmán is equipping himself for a preaching mission. He manages while in Italy, and with the encouragement of the benevolent Cardinal, to become proficient in Latin, Greek and Rhetoric. He then studies Arts and Theology for seven years (several years longer than the minimum required of a preacher in the Carmelite order, for example,⁶ at Alcalá, renowned for its school of Biblical studies, and is on the point of becoming ordained as a priest when he meets, and falls violently in love with, Gracia, who will become his second wife. The idea of studying Theology had come to him as the “Heaven-sent” answer to the question: “¿Qué tengo ya de hacer para comer?”, which Guzmán asks himself after his career as a merchant has ended in bankruptcy. He reasons:

Yo tengo letras humanas. Quiero valerme dellas, oyendo en Alcalá de Henares, pues la tengo a la puerta, unas pocas de artes y teología. Con esto me graduaré. Que podría ser tener talento para un púlpito, y, siendo de misa y buen predicador, tendré cierta la comida y, a todo faltar, meteréme fraile, donde la hallaré cierta.

(II, iii, 4 [798])

This is clearly a counsel of expediency, made more pressing by the desire to use the Church as a sanctuary against his sundry creditors, and as such it is roundly condemned by the penitent Guzmán. However, this self-castigation is swiftly followed, as so often in the course of the novel, by a condemnation of the many others who also take orders for the wrong reasons. It may be read, therefore, either as preaching (as befits the penitent Guzmán) or as self-justification (a natural reaction of his younger, sinful self, Guzmanillo) or as satire (appropriate to the purposes of the author, Alemán, but not inconsistent with those of either pícaro or penitent). Guzmán's second marriage puts an end to his plans to be ordained, or even to graduate, and thus he has, strictly speaking, no entitlement to engage in preaching, despite having all the academic and rhetorical equipment to do so.

Guzmán should also be considered in his capacity as a hearer of sermons, since another requirement for the apprentice preacher which he does, in fact, fulfil is that he should listen to good preachers and model himself on their techniques.⁷ At every stage of his life Guzmán is an assiduous churchgoer and often, like his renegade father before him, parades his piety conspicuously.⁸ Three sermons are reported in the novel; two in part and one in its entirety. The first to be quoted (I, i, 1) is one preached during Lent in Madrid to the Consejo Supremo. It is not explicitly stated whether Guzmán was present in the congregation—quite possibly not—but all he gleans from the sermon is a joke against escribanos, the culmination of a pulpit attack on lawyers as a class. Guzmán uses it as an illustration in his first “pseudo-sermon” on the same subject, prompted as much by vindictiveness as by a desire to edify his readers. In so doing he emulates many a bona fide preacher before him in borrowing from fellow-preachers, either legitimately or in plagiaristic fashion.⁹ This type of sermon is a sermo ad status, addressed to a specific group or class in society and a mode of preaching particularly popular in the Middle Ages.¹⁰ It is popular with Guzmán too, and he is adept at rounding on representatives of the professions or the privileged classes in order to rebuke them. In the month of pícaro such sermonizing digressions sound like satirical attacks springing from personal grievances, envy or a dissident attitude to society. In the mouth of a bona fide preacher, however, they are merely commonplaces such as may be found in any collection of contemporary sermons. Nevertheless, such castigatory or satirical sermons were not considered the province of young and inexperienced preachers, as the famous Dominican preacher Fray Agustín Salucio points out in his Avisos para los predicadores del Santo Evangelio in the 1580s:

El reprender es a lo que más fácilmente se nos va la lengua, o por el gusto que se halla en decir mal de lo malo que se conoce en otros, o porque la reprensión parece que pone al que la hace sobre los reprendidos o porque trae consigo las más veces venganza o de las personas o de las cosas. Y en la venganza, ya se ve que hay satisfacción y, por consiguiente, contento … como sería lavar sus manos con sangre ajena y mostrarse blanco con tiznar a todos.¹¹

We shall often have occasion to see Guzmanillo's vengefulness in action during the novel, but perhaps the mature Guzmán has conquered this sinful inclination? Throughout the novel Guzmán harangues successively merchants, lawyers, doctors and masters of servants, using sometimes the vosotros form (494, 554) and sometimes hermano o hermana (620) or Señor vecino (793). He also uses such phrases as “Abra cada cual el ojo” (800) and “Pregúntese a sí mismo” (ibid.) and on at least one occasion seems unsure whether he is preacher or author: “Ya le oigo decir a quien está leyendo que me arronje a un rincón, porque le cansa oirme” (774). In the previous sentence he had offered to tell some funny stories, “con que la señora doña Fulana, que ya está cansada y durmiéndose, con estos disparates hubiera entretenídose”, and in the following chapter he speaks of “la señora Hernández que me oye” (813), in an ironic aside.

This first sermon, despite its allusions to cases of sinners of all kinds being converted by their experience that crime does not pay (“al famoso ladrón reformaron el miedo y la vergüenza”),¹² bears no direct reference to Guzmán as hearer and, indeed, it is directed at a congregation (of lawyers most probably) of which he can have no part. The second sermon by a genuine preacher which we find in the novel is quite another matter. It is preached in the presence of the reader, as part of the narrative rather than the digressive thread, and is directed unequivocally at Guzmán—a congregation of one—by the elder of a pair of priests whom he meets on the road to Cazalla (I, i, 4). Shocked by the young boy's desire for revenge on the innkeeper's wife who has served him with rotten eggs on his first night away from home, the priest takes as his text “Love [Forgive] thine enemies” (Matthew V, 44 and Luke VI, 27) and constructs a sermon of definitions and confirmations, taken from the lives of the Saints, which ends with a variant on the preacher's traditional concluding prayer Quam mihi et vobis &c which links Grace and Glory:

Volvedles gracias por los agravios y sacaréis dello glorias y descansos.

(167)

Guzmán will use other versions of the “gracia y gloria” prayer when he comes to preach his own sermons or pseudo-sermons.¹³ Unfortunately, this particular sermon has little effect (“fue trigo que cayó en el camino”) since desire for revenge is an abiding element in Guzmán's personality and one which dictates many of his adventures.¹⁴ It is also a leit-motif of the interpolated novelle.

The third sermon to be remembered and recorded by Guzmán early in the novel (I, ii, 3) shows the boy very clearly in his role as hearer of sermons and is the most interesting of the three. It is a sermon preached by an Augustinian in Madrid on the text “Let your light so shine” (Matthew V, 16). According to Guzmán this was another sermo ad status, this time addressed to the Church hierarchy (“dio una rociada por los eclesiásticos, prelados y beneficiados”). They should be setting a good example of integrity in the administration of the trust placed in them, or at least that is the impression that Guzmanillo takes away. His immediate reaction on hearing the sermon is to apply its message to one of his father's cronies in commercial sharp-practice: he should have been there to hear it, thinks the boy, complacently. However, later that night, as he tosses and turns on a lumpy, vermininfested mattress (Is it his bed or his conscience which makes him lose his sleep? Guzmán-Alemán is deliberately ambiguous), Guzmanillo recapitulates the whole sermon in his head and sees a further application: “tocaba en común a todos … hasta la vileza de mi abatimiento”. He now sees himself as part, a very humble part, of the Mystical Body of Christ. Before dropping off to sleep he makes some good resolutions, addressing himself as tú. The next morning, however, in the cold light of day, he reviews the sermon yet once more, only to reach yet another conclusion: that the sermon was really aimed at princes and ministers of justice rather than princes of the Church. Although he does not explicitly subtract himself from the congregation addressed, he does so implicitly, since he is talking of and to office-bearers and professional people, a group to which he cannot as a pícaro belong. Moreover, he links the sermon's message to his preoccupations before hearing it—indeed, that was the only reason he reported it—which was his meditation on vanas honras. This meditation is now resumed and Guzmán makes a swift transition from being the recipient of one sermon to the preacher of another, in pseudo-catechetical form (“¿Qué es el oficio de la luz? … ? Cuál es la propiedad de la cera?” etc.), ostensibly on the same text. The tú now addressed is “la tal persona”, a minister of justice or simply the reader, although the convention is maintained that the passage is a consideración belonging to the past time of the narrative. This transition from pícaro to preacher corresponds to the “salto del banco a la popa” (139) that Guzmán makes throughout the novel, anticipating his final transformation from galley-slave to freed friend of the captain (it is in the “popa” that he denounces the conspiracy of his fellow-convicts), or, less cynically, from sinner to penitent. On this particular occasion it is the phrase “a mi juicio de ahora y entonces”, preceding the final interpretation of the sermon, which juxtaposes pícaro and preacher and makes them speak with one voice.

The coincidence of the two Guzmáns at this point (elsewhere they are less easy to distinguish) has been interpreted as an attempt at theological realism: the description of a first glimmering of Grace at work in the soul. The first application of the sermon would, seen in this light, represent the instinctive reaction of the unredeemed man who judges others and spares himself. There then intervenes a phase of conversion and enlightenment, during which the sinner recognises his own guilt but also God's mercy, working within a universal framework which includes him. Finally comes a more confident and considered “preaching” phase, in which the penitent looks again at the sins of others and seeks to warn them of their error. Unfortunately, these successive stages are superimposed upon each other in such a way that they fuse together, and the tone and personality of the narrating voice might persuade many readers to identify a single Guzmán who is either a hypocrite or a confirmed backslider. Many readers, however, would attribute the phenomenon to authorial awkwardness rather than to irony.

Alemán appears to have been aware of this problem of characterisation and, in addition to the rather clumsy device of the Declaración, he frequently makes Guzmán draw the reader's attention to the discrepancy between what he is saying and his ostensible character as an unreformed pícaro: “¿Quién mete al idiota, galeote, pícaro, en establecer leyes ni calificar los tratos que no entiende?” (115). Later he retorts to a similar doubt he has himself put into our minds: “No mire quien te lo dice sino lo que te dice” (139). The sacred office of preacher and his usefulness, he implies, are not invalidated by the apparent unworthiness of the practitioner. Nonetheless, Spanish preaching manuals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries echo the premiss of the classical rhetorics that the preacher should first and foremost be a good man and preach by example.¹⁵

De tal manera había de vivir un predicador, que cuando le viesen ir por la calle, dijessen: “Véis allí el sermón puesto por obra”.¹⁶

Guzmán's answer to such an objection is that his life is indeed an example, but an exemplum vitandum: “a mi costa y con trabajos proprios descubro los peligros y sirtes” (485). He has also made a sermon of his life in the sense that he has illustrated every doctrinal or satirical point with examples from his own experience; a habit dear to preachers of all ages, but discouraged by at least one theorist.¹⁷ It is, in fact, one of the positive merits of the novel that everything in it has been passed through the narrator's own experience. It is not just a parallel structure of adventures and moralising digressions but an organic whole: life as lived and reflected upon by a single individual. Everything is grist to Guzmán's mill: “soy como los borrachos, que cuanto dinero ganan todo es para la taberna” (610). He returns repeatedly to the same themes and the same personal preoccupations like one obsessed.

In answering other objections to his suitability to preach Guzmán invokes several of the traditional “figures” of the preacher. All of them exemplify the preacher's role as critic and moralist, but I hope to be able to demonstrate that each bears a negative as well as a positive charge and their context often casts doubt on whether they validate and confirm the wholesomeness of Guzmán's preacherly activities. For example, at the end of the third sermon reported and his own pseudo-sermon on the light shed by good works (I, ii, 3), he says:

Pues aún conozco mi exceso en lo hablado, que más es dotrina de predicación que de pícaro. Estos ladridos a mejores perros tocan: rómpanse las gargantas, descubran los ladrones. Mas, ¡ay, si por ventura o desventura les han echado pan a la boca y callan!

(271)

This is a paraphrase of Isaiah LVI, 10-11: “His watchmen are blind … they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark”, and it is very frequently assumed that priests and particularly preachers in their castigatory role are dogs who protect and keep in order their flock.¹⁸ It is, however, an ambiguous symbol, since dogs are also Cynics and occupy a lowly place in the world, as does the pícaro.¹⁹ Cervantes plays on this ambiguity in El coloquio de los perros, a work with a strong flavour of the picaresque, in which the dog Berganza, who is telling his life-story, moralizes like a preacher about his adventures as the canine equivalent of a mozo de muchos amos. The masters themselves are the rascals, not the pícaro, and yet his companion Cipión reminds Berganza that his “preaching” comes dangerously close to murmuración or malicious fault-finding: indeed, it is a characteristic of dogs to be interested in excrement, their own and that of others. It is quite possible that in drawing attention to this discrepancy of tone and incipient self-righteousness Cervantes is having a dig at the novel Guzmán de Alfarache, just as he seems to be doing in the Quixote when he introduces the convict Ginés de Pasamonte who is writing an interminable autobiography on his way to the galleys. Often, it is true, the sermons of Guzmán sound suspiciously like murmur-ación, although it is a vice, allied to that of judging by appearances, that he is quick to discern and condemn in others.²⁰ The symbol of the dog is a dualistic one: he stands for what is most noble in men (loyalty, humility, charity) as well as for his savage greed and opportunism.²¹ Moreover, a contemporary Franciscan preacher, Fray Diego de la Vega, tells us that “el hombre que es fácil en murmurar y dezir mal de su próximo … es semejante al perro que llevaba atravessado por el muslo alguna saeta”.²²

Another “figure” which reflects the dual nature of our narrator is that of the physician or surgeon who seeks to heal, even though he may in the process hurt, with his words of truth—the two-edged sword of the Word of God.²³ Again Guzmán anticipates and answers imaginary objections:

Ya dirás que te predico y que ¿cuál es el necio que se cura con médico enfermo? Pues quien para sí no alcanza la salud, menos la podrá dar a los otros … ¿Qué nos podrá decir un malo que no sea malo?

(II, i, 1 [484])

Once again it is a listener rather than a reader with whom Guzmán seems to be talking, and this is taken up by a third “figure”, that of the trinchante or maestresala: the carver or butler at the feast who shares out the food to the assembled guests, bearing in mind their individual tastes and digestive capacity.²⁴ The image is often used in the context of the preacher's duty to accomodate his doctrine to the needs and circumstances of his congregation, to be relevant to their real situation in life as well as to their intellectual capacity to digest and absorb it: “lo sútil y dificultoso que tiene hueso que roer a los que tienen mejor dentadura, más sabiduría, más alto entendimiento”.²⁵ The food to be apportioned in an orthodox sermon is the Bread of Life or the Gospel message, but Guzmán interprets it as the handing out of a medicinal criticism, an antidote (atriaca) to the posion of sin. He alone does not eat the food or, by implication, take the medicine, since he is so busy treating others: “todos comen, todos quedan satisfechos, y él sólo sale cansado y hambriento” (485). This might well confirm us in our impression that much of his preaching is an attempt at deflecting criticism from himself onto others, an equivalent ploy to that used by Lázaro in his “confesando yo no ser más santo que mis vecinos”.²⁶ Furthermore, the preacher's need for universality in his sermon is equated with the secular author's need to content a varied readership. In both a sermon and a printed book many men are being addressed simultaneously but individually, in the tú form as “dear reader”, as though each were the sole object of the discourse. Here Alemán the author joins his voice to that of Guzmán the preacher, reiterating what might be called the para todos: the need to provide variety in fiction and to address all kinds and conditions of men through a single medium.²⁷ The characterization of Guzmán as preacher is not so evident at this point and we may therefore read much of what follows as Alemán's own discurso, although this is not always easy to confirm.

Finally, even the subtitle Atalaya de la vida humana which Alemán gave to the Second Part of his novel, contains a “figure” of the preacher used by Bartolomé Ximénez Patón in the treatise El perfecto predicador (Baeza, 1612).²⁸ The “watchtower” or “watchman” of the Old Testament²⁹ is there linked to the depiction of Hercules in Alciati's emblem of eloquence, [no. 93 in B. Daza's Spanish translation, Lyons 1549] as seated in a high place, like a pulpit, with golden chains coming from his mouth which “hold” his audience. It is, however, the most ambivalent of all the figures mentioned so far, since, in addition to the defensive functions of the watchtowers of the Old Testament, commanding a wide view over the countryside to spy out approaching enemies, it is also used on several occasions in the Libro de buen amor and other medieval texts to mean a vantage point from which birds of prey swoop down on their victims.³⁰ This connotation is reinforced by its use in germanía, or thieves' slang, to mean “thief”.³¹ Thus it is an appropriate noun to stand in apposition to Guzmán's name on two counts, since throughout the novel he is both thief and preacher. He either has his eye on the main chance or on his assembled congregation, who might well shift uneasily on their seats beneath his sterm, accusing gaze. We also find the word used in a contemporary sermon thus:

Los murmuradores son de ordinario las atalayas del pueblo, traen hechos centinelas los ojos, notando lo que pasa … para ir cebando el fuego que en sus lenguas encienden.³²

The image here seems to take on aspects of the hilltop beacon.

Atalaya is used only twice in the body of the novel, and on the first occasion it stands as a symbol of the Devil, the enemy of the human race, who, like a human enemy:

es una atalaya que con cien ojos vela, como el dragón, sobre la torre de su malicia, para juzgar desde muy lejos nuestras obras.

(I, ii, 5 [290])³³

Nonetheless, in the sermon on “Love thine enemies” Alemán had made a genuine preacher claim that a man's enemy is in fact his best friend, since he draws attention to his faults and does not flatter him (162-3). On the second occasion that the word is used, in the author's (not Guzmán's) preface to the Second Part, it is as a symbol of the book's didactic intention: “descubrir—como atalaya—toda suerte de vicios” (467). Both uses of the word imply that the atalaya is an elevated vantage point, or an observant person perched on that vantage point, and common to both is a concern to lay bare the sins and secret intentions of mankind, both in general and in particular.³⁴ The originality of the Guzmán de Alfarache is that its narrator-protagonist is alternately “up there” and “down below”, observer and observed. From the ground-level, worm's-eye view of the pícaro what counts is success or failure in this life, which may owe as much to chance as to “fuerza y maña”. Money, too, can always sway the balance and make the difference, in this world, between the “thief” and the “merchant” (I, ii, 6 [298-9]; II, ii, 3 [611-12]; II, iii, 2 [770]). From the elevated, bird's-eye view of the preacher both life and eternity are spread out in a moral panorama in which patterns of good and evil are explicitly set out. In the Guzmán these two perspectives are not merely juxtaposed but frequently intertwined, so that the reader frequently feels that a pícaro has climbed up into the pulpit bringing his cynical, worm's-eye view with him. All that he has adopted of the preacher's role is his rhetoric and a claim that he is inspired by the best of motives, whereas he has himself prepared us to distrust motives by unmasking his own father's hypocrisy.

Moreover, his tone is more reminiscent of Ecclesiastes than of any Evangelical preacher, since he is more inclined to fulminate against the foulness of man's deceit than to assure his “congregation” of their promised salvation in Christ. He seems to wish to “convict” his reader, or hearer, of sin and make it impossible for him to escape the general condemnation of Original Sin: “Mas para que no te me deslices como anguilla, yo buscaré hojas de higuera contra tus bachillerías. No te me saldrás por esta vez de entre las manos” (II, i, 1 [483-4]). The tone-of-voice could hardly be further from that used in the confessions of more famous converted sinners like Augustine of Hippo, Teresa of Avila or John Bunyan. Furthermore, he speaks of his life-story, in the next sentence, as “aquesta confesión general” and while this is partly true in the conventional sense, as A. A. Parker has pointed out,³⁵ it is also true in another sense: as a common confiteor in which Guzmán takes the role of the priest, leading the faithful to a rehearsal of their manifold sins and wickedness. However, he is a priest who is incapable of pronouncing absolution, and not only because he has not been ordained. He has merely chosen part of the priest's mission and that part which is most liable to abuse, offering no message of consolation. Joined to the rather dubious circumstances of his conversion, Guzmán's priestly and preacherly role may well strike us as slightly sinister. It certainly throws a fresh perspective on the novel as something other than the autobiography of a reformed delinquent.

Notes

1. They frequently begin with a thema or text, accompanied by a complementary prothema from a learned source, and proceed “por distinctiones” or divisions, each one supported by authorities from Scripture or Greek philosophy and illustrated by myths, fables and, in the last resort, Guzmán's own experience. Good examples are I, i, 7 and I, iii, 4. (Future page references, included within the text of the article, will be to F. Rico's edition, in La novela picaresca española I, Barcelona, 1970).

2. “¡Ramplonería!” (1905) in Ensayos (Madrid, 1966), i, 677.

3. “Nueva interpretación de la novela picaresca”, RFE 1937, 349. This is taken up by M. Molho in Introducción al pensamiento picaresco (Salamanca, 1972), pp. 69-70.

4. I am referring principally, and in the broadest terms, to A. A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh, 1967), and to Edmond Cros, Protée et le gueux (Paris, 1967).

5. The Declaración implies that the novel was already complete in 1599, but does not explain why it was divided into two parts without these being published simultaneously. Alemán claims that Juan José Martí “stole” his manuscript for the Second Part, but only the first third of the “false” Second Part published by Martí, under the pseudonym of Mateo Luján could conceivably have been penned by Alemán, see D. McGrady, Mateo Alemán (Twayne, New York, 1968), pp. 113-117, and it is generally believed that Alemán's original manuscript was incomplete. This neither proves nor disproves that Alemán intended Guzmán's conversion from the outset, however.

6. Constitution of Alcalá, 1599: “… que no se dé licencia de aquí en adelante a ningún religioso para predicar si no huviere oído Artes y Teología tres años o por lo menos dos, o sea licenciado en Derecho Canónico”, in Constitutiones carmelitarum discalceatarum, 1567-1600 (Rome, 1968), p. 368.

7. See the Regulae concionatorum in Institutum Societatis Iesu (Rome, 1870), ii, 16.

8. Compare the passage “Tenía mi padre un largo rosario …” (113) and Guzmán's description of his own “santidad fingida” at the end of the novel: “el rosario en la mano, el rostro igual y con un ‘en mi verdad’ en la boca—por donde nunca salía—robaba públicamente de vieja costumbre” (861).

9. Printed collections of sermons, both in Latin and in the vernacular, purported to revive the flagging inspiration of hard-pressed rural clergy in their weekly sermon, but their authors also use the fact of plagiarism as an excuse for appearing in print in the first place: “—porque tengo aviso de que lo han impreso sin mi licencia algo trocado, me será forzoso hacer nueva impresión añadida y correcta, para que conste quál es el original verdadero” (Fray Diego Murillo, Discursos predicables … del Adviento, Saragossa, 1610, sig. *8v).

10. See G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 247-65 and T. F. Crane, The Exempla … of Jacques de Vitry (London, 1890), notes to p. xxxix.

11. Ed. A. Huerga, Barcelona, 1959, pp. 155-6.

12. Alemán calls Guzmán “ladrón famosísimo” in the Declaración (96) and there are grounds for seeing the pícaro's conversion as one more example of the same phenomenon.

13. Particularly I, i, 1 (124) and II, iii, 3 (792).

14. This aspect is well brought out by M. N. Norval, “Original Sin and the ‘conversion’ in the Guzmán de Alfarache”, BHS 51 (1974), 346-64.

15. The most quoted authorities are Cicero, De oratore, I, ix, 35—36 and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, XII, i, 1-3. See B. Ximénez Patón, Eloquencia española en arte (Toledo, 1604), fol. 4: “en nuestros tiempos el predicador es el orador, y así en él son necessarios los requísitos que pone Cicerón en su perfecto orador.” A Christian preacher, because of the nature of his message, needs to be especially virtuous.

16. Fray Diego de la Vega, Empleo y Exercicio Sancto sobre los Evangelios de las Dominicas de todo el año (Toledo, 1604), i, 356-7.

17. Don Francisco Terrones del Caño, Instrucción de predicadores (Madrid, 1617; ed. F. G. Olmedo, 1946), p. 80.

18. Ibid., p. 65. Also Fray Pedro de Valderrama, Exercicios espirituales para la Quaresma (Barcelona, 1604), ii, fol. 21v-22.

19. See E. C. Riley, “Cervantes and the Cynics”, BHS 53 (1976), 194.

20. Especially in I, iii, 5 (387): “Cuántos, olvidados de sí, so desvelan en lo que no les toca: la conciencia del otro reprehenden, solicitan y censuran. Hermano, vuelve sobre ti, deshaz el trueco. No espulgues la mota en el ojo ajeno: quita la viga del tuyo”, and II, ii, 3 (619-20).

21. Biblical references to the dog are almost invariably unfavourable, probably since it was considered unclean under Jewish law.

22. Empleo y exercicio sancto, ii, 1608, p. 347.

23. Fray Cristóbal de Fonseca, Discursos para la Quaresma (Madrid, 1614), fol. 393v. Also Juan Pérez de Moya, Comparaciones o símiles para los vicios y virtudes (Alcalá, 1584), fol. 28v.

24. The maestresala seems to have been a distinctively Spanish figure, remarked upon by Bartholomé Joly on his journey in the Peninsula (1603-4). See L. Barrau-Dihigo, RH 20 (1909), 473.

25. Fray Pedro de Valderrama, Exercicios espirituales para todas las festividades de los Santos (Barcelona, 1607), p. 236.

26. It might be as well to re-read in this connection L. J. Woodward, “Author-Reader Relationship in the Lazarillo de Tormes”, FMLS 1 (1965), 43-53.

27. The seventeenth century in Spain saw a vogue for miscellanies of prose, verse and drama served up within a unifying fiction, such as Tirso de Molina's Los cigarrales de Toledo and Lope de Vega's El peregrino en su patria. Interestingly, Juan Pérez de Montalbán's miscellany Para Todos (Madrid, 1632), contains among other things a “Discurso del predicador”.

28. This rather rare treatise was seen in manuscript as early as 1604 by Lope de Vega, see Epistolario, ed. A. G. de Amezúa (Madrid, 1941), iii, 7.

29. Ezekiel XXXIII, 1-7 and Isaiah XXI, 6.

30. A. San Miguel, Sentido y estructura del “Guzmán de Alfarache” (Madrid, 1971), p. 68 f.

31. Diccionario de autoridades (Madrid, 1765), i, 457a.

32. Fray Diego de la Vega, Empleo, ii, p. 348.

33. Both the Greek Diabolos and the Hebrew Sathanas bear the sense of an Accuser or Calumniator, see Revelation XII, v. 10: “the accuser of our brethren”.

34. Norval (art. cit. pp. 358-9) comments on the “reverse picture” of the atalaya and finds it echoed in the phrase “velando con cien ojos”, with which Guzmán describes himself in II, iii, 9 (899).

35. Op. cit., p. 34.