SOURCE: “El Burlador de Sevilla: A Tragedy of Errors,” in Philological Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1, January, 1957, pp. 61-71.

[In the following essay, Wardropper presents an in-depth discussion of de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla.]

“Todo este mundo es errar.”¹

The point about Tirso's Don Juan is, not that he is a profligate, but that he is a deceiver, a source of error. He broadcasts burlas about Spain and Italy. Burlas are contrived engaños, the opposite of veras. In Part I of Don Quixote the knight is the victim of a series of engaños, more or less fateful misunderstandings; but in Part II, especially in the events at the court of the Duke and Duchess, he is the victim of burlas, deliberately engineered misunderstandings. The aristocrats' pleasure, in their casa de plazer, is the fruit of mischief, of la malicia—the Satanic force in the allegory of the time. In this sense Don Juan too is Satanic:² out of malice he perverts the idea of truth held by others. El burlador de Sevilla, then, like Don Quixote, La vida es sueño, El criticon, Los sueños, and so many other seventeenth-century Spanish works, is concerned with nothing less than an examination of the nature of truth, and man's perennial failure to apprehend it and live up to it.

Don Juan's motive in deceiving is the same one that caused the Duke and Duchess to establish an elaborate house and household of deception: selfish pleasure. The burla is a deceit practised for amusement, for sport; its object is to entertain. Thus Don Juan boasts:

Sevilla a voces me llama
el Burlador, y el mayor
gusto que en mí puede haber
es burlar una mujer
y dejalla sin honor (II, 268-72).

El gusto, the hedonistic principle that Lope first equated with lo justo, and later opposed to it:³ this is the primary motive of Don Juan, as it was of the Comendator in Fuente Ovejuna. In each case the result of identifying pleasure with justice is libertinage, confusión, anarchy.⁴

Don Juan's burlas are directed against all that is most sacred in the social order. He is an iconoclast, upturning conventional secular morality. Whereas the pícaro does not possess or understand “la negra que llaman honra,”⁵ Don Juan appreciates and possesses it, but perversely seks to destroy it. As a result he is destroyed by honor.

Don Juan is a man of honor except in his dealings with women. Catalinón makes this clear in an aside:

Como no le entreguéis vos
moza o cosa que lo valga,
bien podéis fiaros dél,
que, cuanto en esto es cruel,
tiene condición hidalga (II, 160-4).

In the game of seduction this occasionally honorable man will, nevertheless, use honor as a weapon against even a male opponent. The onslaught on Aminta is successful because her novio Batricio leaves the field, believing, through Don Juan's suggestion, that he has been dishonored by his wife-to-be. Don Juan exults:

Con el honor le vencí,
porque siempre los villanos
tienen su honor en las manos,
y siempre miran por sí …
que el honor se fué al aldea
huyendo de las ciudades (III, 101-4; 107-8).

With women, of course, the burla is successful because Don Juan, deemed to be a man of honor by his victims, gives a word he has no intention of keeping. He promises unequivocally and shamelessly; it is only when he is asked to swear that he allows himself a private escape clause. He does not hesitate to say to Tisbea:

y te prometo de ser
tu esposo (I, 930-1).

But when she agrees to be fully his only

bajo la palabra y mano
de esposo (I, 941-2),

he has to parody the formula of secret marriage or, as the Scots say, marriage by covenant:⁶

                              Juro, ojos bellos,
que mirando me matáis,
de ser vuestro esposo (I, 942-4).

An oath taken on someone's beautiful eyes may deceive, but it does not bind. Soon he will try the same trick on Aminta, swearing by her hand. And when she insists on an oath containing a greater risk of perjury, he makes his false step:

                              ruego a Dios
que a traición y alevosía
me dé muerte un hombre … muerto:
que, vivo, ¡Dios no permita! (III,
279-82)

This aside, a mental reservation, is as much a joke as swearing by Tisbea's eyes. But, unfortunately for Don Juan, he has invoked the name of God, and his deceitful behavior has clashed for the first time with a realm of absolute truth and absolute power. For God has the power of miracles, and can turn this joke against its perpetrator.

But just as divine justice seizes on this step to punish Don Juan, honor—the secular moral code—catches him out too. For Don Juan, with men of his own social rank, keeps his word. Catalinón, a great believer in marriage as a remedy for the youthful sowing of wild oats, urges his master to go to the wedding that has been arranged with Isabela, instead of to the stone feast; Don Juan replies indignantly:

¿No ves que di mi palabra? (III, 867).

and rushes to his doom. Ironically, this word were better not kept. But Don Juan's honor was at stake. He has accepted the invitation proudly, insisting to the ghost that he is what at least four women know he is not: a man of his word and a gentleman.

                              Honor
tengo, y las palabras cumplo,
porque caballero soy (III, 641-3).

If it is anything, honor is a part of the fabric of mutual trust that gives stability to the social order. It is supposed to make predictable the behavior of the caballero who claims to be honorable. Don Juan succeeds in his deceits precisely because he destroys the conventions on which human coexistence is based. His conduct thus threatens the whole social order. But in the same way his conduct is made possible because the social order has already been more or less corrupted; for Don Juan is, more than an eccentric phenomenon, a symptom. He is the greatest, not the sole, burlador; the Marqués de la Mota and other rakes run close on his heels. A rotten society has spawned these men who, knowing truth, despise it. For this reason El burlador de Sevilla carries a bitter social criticism.

The chief target is the institution of favoritism, la privanza. And the point about la privanza is that, while the King has an undoubted right to raise whom he pleases to positions of authority, those so favored have an especially hard moral responsibility: they must subordinate personal feelings to the public good. In other words, royal favorites should not themselves have favorites. But human nature being what it is, they do in fact give special treatment to their friends and relatives. A privado is therefore, almost by definition, one who betrays the royal trust. This doctrine, familiar to readers of Quevedo, is carefully enunciated in the play.

Both in Spain and in Naples the courts are dominated by relatives of Don Juan—Don Diego, his father, and Don Pedro, his uncle. This fact allows the deceiver to operate with impunity in both kingdoms. It also accounts for the atmosphere of political corruption that is apparent in the play. While there is nothing wrong with the social order itself, there is something wrong with those who head and administer it. And the error of these men is, not political, but ethical. Expediency, disguised as prudence, has replaced the moral judgment in them.

So in the first scene—in Naples—a picture is drawn of a realm governed by pleasure-seeking and expediency. When things go too far, when pleasure exceeds its limits, neither the King nor Don Pedro appeals to a moral principle: they simply try to save appearances. The King tries to hush up, in the name not of honor but of prudence,⁷ the scandalous duping of the Duchess Isabela. Don Pedro disobeys the King's order to arrest the malefactor for reasons of family solidarity, and is thereby led to a series of lies and injustices which include the false accusation of the Duke Octavio, righted by the further wrong of allowing him to escape, in contravention of the royal command. Don Pedro tells Octavio that he is presumed to be guilty (knowing full well that it is his nephew who is really the guilty one), and yet explains to him the circumstantial evidence against him,

por si acaso me engaño (I, 276).

In this way a highly placed official loses without qualms his personal integrity as a noble.⁸

Don Juan comes to count on receiving favors from favorites. He is sure that the law will never catch up with him:

Si es mi padre
el dueño de la justicia,
y es la privanza del rey,
¿qué temes? (III,
163-6)

If the law had intervened there would have been less tragedy. Don Juan would have committed fewer crimes and—what is more important, given the theological intent of the play—fewer sins. Fewer persons would have been involved in tragic situations of his making.

Thus, even from an ethical, non-social point of view, it would have been better if Don Juan had run afoul of the law. This is the meaning of Catalinón's reply to the question just quoted:

                              De los que privan
suele Dios tomar venganza
si delitos no castigan (III, 166-8).

Malefactors may be sure of ultimate divine punishment, but it is God's will that a preliminary temporal punishment should be meted out in this world.⁹ Don Juan's career of debauchery is a clear example of how others are led to immorality when a sinner is left immune. In a certain sense the play is a plea for law enforcement.

Don Juan, then, deceives in a deceit-full society. It is hardly necessary to add that he also deceives himself. His self-deception—the distortion of his own moral values—is best studied in the situations calling for bravery. His courage is first established when he risks his life to save Catalinón from the waves. But this brave act is a consequence of his basic error: the assumption that death will not catch up with him until he is an old man. Bravery in Don Juan turns out to be a kind of rashness: a failure to estimate the odds against him, the result of a perverted sense of values. Catalinón admits his fear of attending the stone feast. Don Juan mocks him, asking, since he fears Don Gonzalo dead, what he would do if he were alive (III, 548-50). He crects this particular question into a general principle:

el temor y temer muertos
es más villano temor;
que si un cuerpo noble vivo,
con potencias y razón
y con alma, no se teme,
¿quién cuerpos muertos temió? (III, 678-83)

This, of course, makes nonsense of conventional beliefs. One is supposed to be afraid of the noumenal, as Catalinón is. The fact, and Don Gonzalo dying recognizes it, is that Don Juan is really a coward:

Seguiráte mi furor,
que eres traidor,
y el traidor es traidor porque es cobarde (II, 545-7).

At the end, in the presence of mortality, Don Juan is afraid:

¡Valgame Dios! todo el cuerpo
se ha bañado de un sudor,
y dentro de las entrañas
se me hiela el corazón (III,
664-7).

But he still maintains his fiction of fearlessness: “Yo, temor?” (III, 948) Rejection of this error, a frank recognition that there are times when men ought to be afraid, would have saved not only his life but his soul. It is probably admitted fear—of the Lord, of the noumenal—that saves Catalinón.

Don Diego's error consists in being too much a father, and too little a magistrate. The King decides to marry off and exile Don Juan, rather than punish him more severely, because of his father's merits:

                              y agradezea
sólo al merecimiento de su padre (II, 20-1).

Later, he bestows still one more dubious honor on the son, creating him Count of Lebrija, again because of the father's past services:

Merecéis mi favor dignamente,
que si aquí los servicios ponderamos,
me quedo atrás con el favor presente (III, 705-7).

Don Juan's treatment is based, not on what he is, but on what his father has done. He lives beyond the law in a reflected favor.

Now Don Diego sees nothing wrong in this. He consistently uses his influence at court to intervene in his son's behalf. He even has a certain grotesque pride in Don Juan's “tantas y tan extrañas mocedades” (II, 43). Too late he realizes his son's true nature. He is, as much as any of the deceived women, the dupe of Don Juan. Only when the evidence of wickedness accumulates is he disillusioned:

¡Ay hijo! ¡Qué mal me pagas
el amor que te he tenido! (III,
783-4)

Finally, when he consents to the execution of his son (III, 1023-7) he has forfeited the King's trust:

¡Esto mis privados hacen! (III, 1028)

What, fundamentally, is the King shocked at? Not at the human failing that causes Don Diego to shield his erring son, but rather at his basic assumption that youth excuses all excesses. This theme—the overindulgence of age for youth, and youth's disrespect for age—runs through the play. The elderly feel that young men must be allowed to sow their wild oats. In this attitude is another of the relaxations of strict justice of which Don Juan takes advantage. With his uncle he actually invokes the principle himself:

Mozo soy y mozo fuiste;
y pues que de amor supiste,
tenga disculpa mi amor (I, 62-4).

Don Pedro, in the name of mocedades, lets him escape. “Esa mocedad te engaña,” (I, 117) he observes futilely, not realizing that it is he who has been deceived by a youthful guilt that he believes to be—somehow—innocence. Don Diego and Octavio almost draw swords on this same issue.

Octavio Eres viejo.
Don Diego Ya he sido mozo en Italia.
Octavio No vale fuí, sino soy.
Don Diego Pues fuí y soy. (Empuña.) (III,
764-5; 770-1)

The point of this debate lies in the theological “message” of the play: that, since death comes unexpectedly, every moment may be one's last; that youth is as subject to sudden death as age; that repentance and absolution may not be possible at the moment of death.

To be a reminder of this fact is Catalinón's function. He is the voice of Don Juan's conscience, a constant reminder of death. The first time he fulfills his purpose, on the occasion of the seduction of Tisbea—

Los que fingís y engañáis
las mujeres desa suerte
lo pagaréis en la muerte (I,
903-5)—

he provokes the famous response that becomes the principal refrain of the play: “¡Qué largo me lo fiáis!” Unperturbed, he continues to sermonize on these lines:

Tú pretendes que escapemos
una vez, señor, burlados,
que el que vive de burlar
burlado habrá de escapar
pagando tantos pecados
de una vez.

Don Juan ¿Predicador te vuelves, impertinente? (II, 308-13)

But each time he reminds his master “que hay castigo, pena y muerte” (III, 181) he hears the creditor's reply:

Si tan largo me lo fiáis,
vengan engaños.(10)

The imagery always calls to mind a system of banking. Don Juan never denies his debt—to God, not to society!—but always assumes that the foreclosure date will somehow never come round.¹¹

Catalinón frequently uses, as above, the first person plural. He identifies himself with his master in their life of deceit. He is an observer, a mirón, of the game of seduction:

y por mirón no querría
que me cogiese algún rayo
y me trocase en ceniza (III, 172-4).

Just as the rooter for a successful player may claim, by custom, a part of the gain, a barato, so he, watching a losing player, may expect to pay part of the penalty. He wonders if he can escape scot free:

¿Mas si las forzadas viene
n a vengarse de los dos? (III,
518-9)

But his sense of solidarity with his master does not blind him to the truth. He could feel pity for the victims of the burlas (II, 723, etc.). He was aware that the obverse of a burla is tragedy:

Graciosa burla y sucinta,
mas siempre la llorará [Aminta] (III, 442-3).

Eventually, perhaps because he is sympathetic, perhaps because of dramatic necessities, he escapes being dragged down to hell with Don Juan.

If Catalinón has erred, it is only by association. He is, fundamentally, a good man; perhaps that is the significance of his name.¹² But it is important to realize that, among the principal characters, he is exceptional. Most of the others err, either morally or in judgment. This has been sufficiently demonstrated for Don Juan, and his father and uncle. It remains to be shown that the women are as much the victims of self-deception as of Don Juan's deceits. The theme that women, in their trust of men, are naïve and prone to disillusionment is announced in the first scene: Isabela mistakes, not the intentions of her lover, but his very identity.¹³ And the theme, in the characteristic manner of this play, is restated as a refrain:

¡Mal haya la mujer que en hombres fía! (III, 394, etc.)

El burlador de Sevilla is full of these significant refrains, for it is conceived as much lyrically as dramatically.

Tisbea, the next victim, has erred in rejecting suitable lovers of her own social class, in “killing them with disdains” (I, 461). She commits the same mistake as Laurencia, in Fuente Ovejuna, and Diana, in El desdén con el desdén. Her frigidity in love is transformed by her encounter with Don Juan into the chastizing fire of unrequited sexual desire, against which she cries out in her final refrain:

¡Fuego, zagales, fuego, agua, agua!
¡Amor, clemencia, que se abrasa el alma! (I, 999-1000 etc.)

But she also placed too much trust in lustful man. The fearful refrain,

¡Plega a Dios que no mintáis! (I, 613, etc.)

reveals her misgivings: she trusts a perjurer's word against her better judgment.

Aminta, the most difficult of Don Juan's conquests, insists on extracting from him an oath taken on the name of God. Yet even she fails to recognize the duplicity in the man's manner.

                              ¡Qué mal conoces
al Burlador de Sevilla! (III, 299-300),

comments Don Juan. She is blinded by his assertion that he is a caballero (III, 235). But it is she who has just told Belisa that

La desvergüenza en España
se ha hecho caballería (III,
131-2).

Batricio, her novio, has a truer picture of the caballero, in his repeated rhyming of this word with “mal agüero” (II, 672-3, etc.). But he is ashamed into a sense of inferiority—and thus into an unreasonable trust—of Don Juan when he finds himself constantly reprimanded, like a child, with the words “grosería, grosería” (III, 24, etc.).

Among the objects of Don Juan's attention only Doña Ana is realistic. She does not, like Isabela, mistake the intruder's identity (II, 516-9). Nor does she, like Tisbea and Aminta, fall a prey to flattery—possibly for lack of time, because her father, unlike Don Juan's, does not hesitate to seek temporal justice, even if he must be killed in the process. At any rate Don Juan is able later to assure the ghost:

A tu hija no ofendí,
que vió mis engaños antes (III, 963-4).

Doña Ana and her father, Don Gonzalo, are the only ones to triumph over Don Juan: they hold firm to an unselfish moral principle, honor. But since in Don Juan's Spain justice is partial they must triumph in death.

For the other characters in this tragedy of errors there is no moral victory, only bitter disillusionment, the conviction of a great truth. Don Juan had contracted a debt of sin that should have been repaid in full before the plazo expired. But only the Banker knew the expiry date. And having failed to pay, by repentance and absolution,¹⁴ Don Juan lost all his assets: life itself and hope of salvation. The voices from the dead pronounced the moral: debts must be repaid, because credit expires:

Que no hay plazo que no llegue
ni deuda que no se pague.
Esta es justicia de Dios:
quien tal hace, que tal pague (III,
932-3; 957-8)

After such a message the mass wedding of the victims, sinners all, must have been a grave affair.

Notes

1. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, Act II, verse 513: while this verse may be a later interpolation it is true to the spirit of the play.—All quotations are given, by Act and verse, from the edition by Américo Castro in Tirso de Molina, Obras, I (Madrid, 1910, Clásicos Castellanos).

2. Tirso's Don Juan is, of course, something less than Satanic in the Baudelairean sense. Consider, however, his advocacy of la malicia when he tells Aminta that, if her marriage to Batricio is not consummated,

   por engaño o por malicia puede anularse (III, 264-5).

3. Cf. R. Menéndez Pidal, De Cervantes y Lope de Vega (Buenos Aires, 1940), pp. 92-93.

4. See my study of Fuente Ovejuna, to appear in Studies in Philology.

5. Lazarillo de Tormes, Tratado III.

6. Justina Ruiz de Conde, in El amor y el matrimonio secreto en los libros de caballerías (Madrid, 1948), gives a good account of the historical and literary vogue of secret marriage. After it is banned by the Council of Trent as an abuse, it survives as a literary convention. In Scottish law, uninfluenced by the Counter-Reformation, it lasted until 1935.

7. Esto en prudencia consiste” (I, 24).

8. Don Pedro's rôle in this scene is in marked contrast to Clotaldo's rapidly-reached decision to turn over for execution one whom he presumes to be his son. In La vida es sueño Clotaldo and Rosaura are the only characters consistently faithful to unselfish principles. Clotaldo's loyalty and obedience to the King, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice a newly found blood tie, save him from the general desengaño and punishment at the end.

9. Don Diego keeps remitting to God the punishment that it is his duty to mete out. Cf. especially Act II, Scene XI, which ends with the verse (424): “A Dios tu castigo dejo.”

10. III, 182-3. The lesson is repeated so often that Don Juan attains a reflex blunt awareness of death in the moments before he sins; but his immediate repudiation of the warning is equally automatic. Cf. the confusion of values in his “prayer” before seducing Aminta:

    Estrellas que me alumbráis, dadme en este engaño suerte, si el galardón en la muerte tan largo me lo guardáis (III, 117-20).

11. This interpretation of the phrase “¡Tan largo me lo fiáis!”—the obvious one—is clearly expounded in Karl Vossler, Escritores y poetas de España (Madrid, 1944), p. 62.

12. Catalinón, as various textual allusions make clear, is a name with a meaning. Successive generations of editors have stated, without justification, that it means “coward.” Frank Sedwick (Bulletin of the Comediantes, VI [1954], No. 2, 4-6) correctly refutes this interpretation. Professor Leo Spitzer, consulted by me, supported the theory that the name is a compound of Catalina (on the analogy of Marica=maricón). This leaves the semantic problem of what Catalina suggested in popular speech in Tirso's time. Correas gives a saying alluding to the saint's goodness: “‘Una santa Catalina,’ por santa y buena: es una santa Catalina; parecía una santa Catalina: pensábamos que era una santa Catalina” (Samuel Gili Gaya, Tesoro lexicográfico, s.v. Catalina). Possibly Catalinón suggested something like “tin god” to seventeenth-century readers. Bruno Migliorini, Dal Nome proprio al nome comune (Genève, 1927), does not discuss the problem of Catalinón.

13. A completely pessimistic view of woman is taken by all of the male characters: cf. vv. I, 153-6; 356-8; II, 53-4; III, 727, etc. Catalinón describes his master as the “castigo de las mujeres” (I, 897), which implies their guilt. The burla is woman's just punishment, as Tisbea confesses:

    Yo soy la que hacía siempre de los hombres burla tanta; que siempre las que hacen burla, vienen a quedar burladas (I, 1015-8).

    It may be that the error of Octavio, who has nothing good to say about women, lies in the exaggeration with which he attributes all his woes to Isabela and her sex: “Huyendo vengo el fiero desatino / de una mujer,” he says (II, 53-4). But he would scarcely have blamed Isabela if she had gone to bed with him, her official lover. This would have been fornication, however, in Christian law. His rage against Isabela is directed at her having been duped, at her having made a not too simple mistake in identifying her lover!

14. At the end he beseeches Don Gonzalo: “Deja que llame / quien me confiese y absuelva.” The reply is: “No hay lugar; ya acuerdas tarde” (III, 966-8).