[In the following essay, Mandrell analyzes the language of El burlador de Sevilla, focusing on de Molina's concerns with how the linguistics of the play affected seventeenth-century Spanish society.]

Critical wisdom holds that the four seductions in Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra are important in an external, referential sense and in an internal, structural one, that they serve to prove a point regarding Spanish society in general as well as to establish the structural frame and dramatic rhythm within the comedia. The social point of the seductions is straightforward enough: Don Juan respects neither the conventions of his own class (the nobility) nor those of his inferiors (the peasantry). Women of all classes qualify as potential objects of his desire. This fact, along with the division of the quartet of women into two noblewomen (the Duquesa Isabela and Doña Ana) and two villanas (Tisbea and Aminta), allows for a special kind of symmetry of action in the drama. Don Juan moves from the a seduction of an aristocrat to the seduction of a peasant, accomplishing his goal with apparently equal ease. So when Don Juan flees from Doña Ana, the third of his victims, it is only to be expected that he will end up with Aminta, since earlier he quite literally fell into Tisbea's arms while fleeing from the consequences of his seduction of Isabela. The drama is organized around the symmetry of the four seductions, around the way one seduction logically follows another.¹

Despite the apparent symmetries of structure, action, and dialogue, there are subtle differences between and among the episodes involving the four women in El burlador de Sevilla that encourage a far different reading of the function of seduction in the drama. Repetition of the act of seduction is not meaningful only in a formal sense, only insofar as it underscores the symmetry of action and dialogue and drives home the point about the wages of sin. Rather, seduction, because of its prominence and predominantly linguistic cast vis-à-vis the promise, suggests the linguistic issues that will be elaborated and eventually resolved during the course of the comedia.² Moreover, these scenes of seduction serve as a significant index of Don Juan's progression through and development in the drama, since each individual seduction is carefully presented in such a way as to complement the preceding action and to provide more information about how Don Juan achieves his goal in a society that would normally repress him.

This means that Don Juan's transgressions are not just cumulative, serial aggravations that add up to his punishment, but, rather, that they constitute a progressively complex exploration of the nature of language as it functions in the world, as Don Juan's tool in seduction, and, finally, as his undoing. In what follows, I wish to explore the linguistic implications of seduction as presented in this drama, relating them to concerns pertinent to seventeenth-century Spanish society and religious orthodoxy. My reading of El burlador de Sevilla will demonstrate the ways in which Tirso was profoundly concerned with language and its role in the world, its capacity to create and to establish certain truths as well as to deceive.

I

The linguistic concerns of El burlador de Sevilla are apparent from the earliest moments of the drama. Opening in medias res with the final moments of a lovers' rendezvous, the first scene demonstrates the crucial importance of the promise for the success of Don Juan's endeavors. Furthermore, this scene quickly establishes the two fundamental enigmas on which the subsequent action will be based:

Isabela. Duque Octavio,
por aquí
podrás salir más seguro.
Don Juan. Duquesa, de nuevo
os juro
de cumplir el dulce sí.
Isabela. Mi gloria, ¿serán
verdades,
promesas y ofrecimientos,
regalos y cumplimientos,
voluntades y amistades?
Don Juan. Sí, mi
bien.
Isabela. Quiero sacar una
luz.
Don Juan. Pues, ¿para
qué?
Isabela. Para que el alma
dé fe
del bien que llego a gozar.
Don Juan. Mataréte
la luz yo.
Isabela. ¡Ah, cielo! ¿Quién
eres, hombre,?
Don Juan. ¿Quién
soy? Un hombre sin nombre.
Isabela. ¿Que no
eres el duque?
Don Juan. No. (1-16)(3)

The role played by the promise in this scene is patently obvious: one form of “enjoyment” is exchanged for another as Don Juan swears once again (“de nuevo”) to “cumplir el dulce sí” in return for Isabela's favors. The two questions posed by this scene are also obvious: who is the “hombre sin nombre” and how did he succeed in getting into the Duquesa's bedchamber.

Don Juan's identity is not, in fact, revealed until much later in the first act, after the conclusion of the scenes involving the Duquesa. But this does not mean that the character who seduced the Duquesa remains anonymous. When his uncle undertakes to punish the man who was caught in the Neapolitan palace, he learns that the culprit is none other than his nephew. To Don Pedro's demand, “¡Di quién eres!” Don Juan insolently replies, “Ya lo digo: / tu sobrino” (53-54). Yet Don Pedro neither addresses nor refers to Don Juan by name. Identity is established first and foremost by means of blood ties, and Don Juan remains an “hombre sin nombre” throughout these opening scenes, indeed, up until Catalinón reveals various details about the burlador's family as well as his name to Tisbea at the beginning of the second scene of seduction (570-78). With the unexpected help of his name and noble lineage—unexpected since the burlador enjoins Catalinón in this same scene to keep his name a secret after the manservant has already given Tisbea the full particulars (679-84)—Don Juan proceeds with his plan to seduce the pescadora.

This second seduction not only reveals the name of the burlador, it also shows Don Juan to good advantage in terms of his facility with the spoken word. (One should also note that Tisbea is an equally adept speaker.) The linguistic implications of this scene do not, however, pertain only to the burlador, since it is the controlling force of language as it functions in society as a system of exchange mutually agreed upon by Don Juan and Tisbea that is revealed here. As the peasant astutely remarks, “Mucho habláis.” Don Juan, not to be outdone, replies even more smoothly, “Mucho entendéis” (695). The one flatters the other's gift of speech, the second flatters the powers of comprehension of the first. If there is any doubt as to this emphasis, Tisbea tells Don Juan, “Yo a ti me allano / bajo la palabra y mano / de esposo” (938-40; emphasis mine). Later, after she has been tricked, she laments, “Engañóme el caballero / debajo de fe y palabra” (1017-18; emphasis mine). Don Juan gives his word in this exchange as he did in the first instance, but he does so without intending to fulfill the desire of the other individual involved.

Although we are somewhat closer to understanding the first scene of the drama—since the identity of the “hombre sin nombre” is now known—we still do not know precisely how Don Juan gained access to the Duquesa's chambers, even though it seems clear that language is somehow implicated in the entire process. The question of “how” remains a mystery only until the third seduction, Don Juan's encounter with Doña Ana. The stage is set for this burla when Don Juan and the Marqués de la Mota scheme together to play a trick on Beatriz, a woman of questionable honor. In order to fool Beatriz into thinking that Don Juan is the Marqués, the latter gives his cape to the burlador. The plan is for Don Juan to present himself to Beatriz, to pretend that he is the Marqués, and to enjoy the woman's favors.

Earlier in these scenes involving the Marqués and Doña Ana, however, Don Juan was entrusted by one of Doña Ana's ladies to deliver a missive to his aristocratic friend. His curiosity piqued by the “papel,” Don Juan opened the note and read of Doña Ana's desire that the Marqués should come to her under the cover of night, wearing his red cape, in order to make love to her and thereby to thwart her father's plans to marry her to another man, one she does not love. Unable to resist the opportunity offered to him, Don Juan relays the message, but not the missive itself, adding one piece of misleading information not found in the original “papel”: that the Marqués is to present himself at Doña Ana's door at midnight and not at eleven o’clock as suggested in the letter. Don Juan has thus created the conditions for a far more cleverly vile burla than the one that he and the Marqués had planned together. Instead of going to the home of Beatriz, Don Juan goes to the home of the beloved Doña Ana, where he is assured of gaining access, since he is wearing the Marqués' red cape. This third seduction comes to an abrupt end when Doña Ana realizes that the man in the red cape is not the Marqués. Her cries for help bring her father Don Gonzalo; and Don Juan is forced to kill the Comendador in order to escape.

Doña Ana's seduction resembles the opening scene of El burlador de Sevilla insofar as neither scene of seduction in which a noblewoman is involved shows Don Juan at work.⁴ Rather, each scene is brought to a close within the play even as the events leading up to those final moments are external to the drama per se, meaning that the point of the first and third seductions would seem to be the discovery of the imposter and not the actual fact of the seduction, Tirso, however, makes one significant addition to the presentation of the third seduction: although the play does not portray the seduction of Doña Ana, it does represent the events leading up to Don Juan's entry into the house of the Ulloas. The inclusion of these scenes involving Don Juan, the Marqués, Catalinón, and Doña Ana's servant provide us with the answer to the second question posed by the opening scene of the drama. How does Don Juan gain access to a noblewoman's chamber? He does so both by being an especially adept opportunist who successfully manipulates the personalities and the intricate events surrounding him, and by being a skillful actor.⁵ Still more important, Don Juan, as an actor, takes his cues from a written text, in this instance, Doña Ana's letter.

The essence of Doña Ana's letter furnishes the burlador with his next role in the drama, it provides him, ironically enough, with his next papel. Enclosed in the papel sent to the Marqués is a dual message that is fully apprehended by Don Juan in his role as its bearer. So when Don Juan says of the appearance of the letter, “A mí el papel ha llegado / por la estafeta del viento” (1308-09), he not only comments on the unexpected manner in which the letter (papel) for the Marqués materializes, but also on the way another role (papel) “arrives.” To the question of how Don Juan gains access to the noblewomen we must answer that the burlador is not just an actor, he is a masterful interpreter of the written word.

Yet the papel not only provides Don Juan with the role he plays in the third seduction, it also provides him in the fourth seduction with the means by which he convinces Batricio that Aminta had already promised herself to the burlador. As Don Juan explains to Batricio, “Al fin, Aminta, celosa, / o quizá desesperada / de verse de mi olvidada / y de ajeno dueño esposa, / esta carta me escribió / enviándome a llamar, / y yo prometí gozar / lo que el alma prometió” (1864-71). Don Juan again assumes the role intended for another, this time portraying a wronged lover. In the context of this new seduction, Don Juan becomes the papel's destination, the lover, and Batricio is cast as the wrongful and unwanted husband—and all of this is attributed to the hand of the most likely illiterate Aminta. While Don Juan is adept at intercepting and representing papeles, he is equally skilled in reinterpreting those texts and roles with another end in mind.

Don Juan's skill as an actor—as an interpreter and reinterpreter of the written word—is developed in the fourth and final seduction in the domain of the spoken word and social discourse, conflating the presentation of Don Juan's modus operandi in the second and third seductions (where, in the seduction of Tisbea, the discussion centered around questions of the spoken word and, in the case of Doña Ana, the question at hand pertained to a written text). During the pastoral interlude of the scenes involving Aminta and her wedding party, the fourth victim says upon hearing Don Juan's seductive words. “No sé que diga; / que se encubren tus verdades con retóricas mentiras” (2051-53). Her averment of doubt points to the inherently linguistic aspects of the burlador's skills, and to the fact that Don Juan seduces when the moment is most propitious for the exercising of his facility with the spoken word. Like Tisbea, Aminta exacts a promise from her would-be lover, in response to which Don Juan solemnly swears, “Juro a esta mano, señora, / … / de cumplirte la palabra” (2068-70).

Seduction in El burlador de Sevilla appears, first, to be much more than a structural device and, second, to have much more to do with questions of language than is usually acknowledged. As seduction is related to the promise, it suggests certain types of contractual obligation that are not specific to sexual relations between men and women but, rather, that have as much or more to do with society as a whole. Thus, we must look at other aspects of the comedia if we are to understand the ways in which Don Juan's linguistic facility allows him to deal with the world at large.

II

The reinscription of Don Juan's linguistic facility and of his reliance on a textual model takes place primarily in the context of his interactions in the exclusively male world of affairs of state and honor in a progression similar to his development over the course of the four seductions. This progression takes shape in a series of increasingly violent skirmishes and encounters between the burlador and his male antagonists, beginning with the King of Naples and his men who intrude during the final moments of the rendezvous with Isabela. In the first instance of such an encounter, Don Juan's perfidy is opposed to the moral rigor of the Rey de Nápoles. In the scenes involving Tisbea, on the other hand, Don Juan has brief—and in appearance not hostile—contact with the fishermen, including Tisbea's suitor, Anfriso. With his attempt on the honor of Doña Ana, the nature of the affront to traditional mores intensifies, resulting in Don Juan's open combat with Don Gonzalo. Finally, with the seduction of Aminta, the second and third scenes of seduction collapse into one as Don Juan tricks Batricio, the husband, and enters into his plans with the help of Aminta's father, Gaseno: “Pero antes de hacer el daño / le pretendo reparar; / a su padre voy a hablar / para autorizar mi engaño. / Bien lo supe negociar; / gozarla esta noche espero. / La noche camina, y yo quiero / su viejo padre llamar” (1904-11).

The situation of the opening scene is recapitulated in the last seduction in inverse fashion. Where Don Juan committed an affront to the King and had to be duly punished, he now proceeds by receiving the father's blessing. What appears to be an act of submission before the authority of another is, in fact, another burla. Don Juan will trick the father much in the same way that he tricked Batricio and will play on the avarice of both the father and the daughter. Like the scenes of seduction, these confrontations between and among the male characters follow a carefully plotted path in which specific moments and conflicts are reworked, seemingly to Don Juan's advantage.

Moreover, as a counterpoint to these encounters between and among the many male characters, Tirso inserts several scenes in which the Rey de Castilla decides affairs of state and social well-being with various officials of his kingdom. Don Juan's irreverence in the face of authority is not, then, surprising, particularly in view of other events in the play and the nature of the action overall. Still more significant is the way that this authority reveals itself and takes shape in El burlador de Sevilla and the dramatic world therein, since it bears a close relationship to Don Juan's linguistic facility. In contrast to Don Juan's empty promises, performatives devoid of any intent to fulfill the letter of his word, the commands of the Kings of Naples and Spain embody an obvious intent to impose their individual will on the events and lives under their jurisdiction.⁶ The royal edicts emanate from the putative central force in the drama to affect all under their rule. That Don Juan disrepects and disobeys these edicts and their bearers is significant on the level of plot. But, because Don Juan disregards both the force of the promises that he makes and the authority embodied in the directives of others, the linguistic cast of the seductions carries over into Don Juan's dealings in the world of men.

The two lines of inquiry in El burlador de Sevilla outlined thus far (the one associated with the seductions proper and serving to reveal Don Juan as an actor, the other deriving from Don Juan's dealings with figures of worldly authority) converge and come into sharp focus in Don Juan's encounters with the sepulchral statue of the Comendador. Like the burlador's exchanges with the other male characters, his dealings with the statue reveal the hierarchical ordering of this world. Furthermore, this series of exchanges succeeds in placing the burlador in a situation in which he must make and keep a promise. The result of his burla is a reciprocal invitation that Don Juan, giving his word as a “caballero,” promises to honor. In a recapitulation of all that has transpired between the burlador and his female victims, Don Juan promises to dine at the Ulloa chapel.

At the same time, this encounter brings into focus the other skirmishes and encounters between Don Juan and the male characters of the drama. A representation of Doña Ana's father (and in crassly psychoanalytic terms, the Oedipal “father” that Don Juan killed in order to possess the “mother”) and an agent of God, the statue functions as an overdetermined avatar of the Father. He thereby recalls the previous exchanges between father and sons, and not just those between the burlador and Don Diego and Gaseno, the two other fathers in the drama, but those involving the other male figures, too, since Don Pedro Tenorio also plays a protective role not unlike that of a real or even a surrogate father. Even Anfriso can be included in this schema, since he is described by Tisbea as “un pobre padre / de mis males testigo” (2199-2200); the fact that Anfriso is her suitor and will later become her husband does not obviate his function as figure of paternal authority for Tisbea.⁷ In meting out divine justice, then, the Statue serves to emphasize blood ties, as at the opening of the drama: he represents all of the various “father” figures, and functions as a symbolic father, in the role of what Jacques Lacan has called the “paternal metaphor” or “nom du père.”⁸

Guy Rosolato defines the paternal metaphor in this way: “Personne distincte, c’est-à-dire perçue comme capable de faire alterner sa parole et son désir, il devient l’autorité interdictrice. Auteur originel et autonome des lois, il en devient le principe, pour être crainte admiré, puisque l’enfant lui délègue par la toute-puissance de ses pensées un pouvoir sans limites, quoique obscur dans ses raisons, qui protège et punit.”⁹ Particularly in his guise as an agent of Dios, the symbolic father embodies and adumbrates the complex set of laws by which society—and the individual as constituted in society—is controlled. This set of laws, rather, this authority, is not only materially real but also symbolic, manifest in those conventional systems of signs within which action and social interaction take place, including and appearing most obviously in the powers that determine the uses and ends of language.

In El burlador de Sevilla, the Statue is both an agent of God's will, a supernatural verbe de Dieu, and a kind of synecdoche, representing as he does all of the father figures in the comedia. Thus, he assumes the terrestrial role of the divine “figure of the Law.” By holding Don Juan to a promise, the Statue tacitly holds him answerable for all of his promises; and the fact that Don Juan discovers a linguistic loophole in the form of intention does him little good.

Still, the issue of Don Juan's intent is, of course, central to the linguistic questions that we have been discussing, as is the Statue's symbolic role. Behind Don Juan's promises to his female victims there was no intent at all, or, rather, there was the intent not to honor the appearance of intent inherent in the performance of a promise. When Don Juan swears to “cumplir el dulce sí” his intention is completely otherwise. Don Juan's sins against society are, therefore, not so much sins of carnality as they are sins of linguistic perversion. In this regard the Marqués de la Mota is hardly any better than his friend and cohort; and Doña Ana's attempt to betray the honor of her family—and her father's word—is equally symptomatic of a widespread social problem. Don Juan's failure to keep his promises thus threatens the social fabric in a society in which speech is the one essential way of making a contract.¹⁰

Emphasis on the spoken word and verbal contracts derives in part, perhaps, from the relative illiteracy of the Spanish population (although the literacy rate in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain was, in fact, higher than originally thought¹¹). But this emphasis probably derives as well from the power of the Church in Spanish society, from patristic theories of the sign, and from the importance of these theories for the religious doctrines associated with the sacraments, the linguistic aspects of which are most apparent, and most pertinent for this discussion, in the sacrament of marriage.¹² Matrimony is the only sacrament in which the two individuals directly involved act as the ministers of the sacramental rite. It is, therefore, a form of contractual agreement effected in language, one accomplished by a pair of individuals who act as instruments of Christ in the granting of their consent. Matrimony also has worldly importance apart from the role it plays in religious and spiritual life and apart from the strictly biological function of reproduction that it both institutionalizes and monitors. As Augustine teaches, “Habeant conjugia bonum suum, non quia filios procreant, sed quia honeste, quia licite, quia pudice, quia socialiter procreant, et procreatos pariter, salubriter, instanter educant, quia thori fidem invicem servant, quia sacramentum connubii non violant.”¹³ The enactment of the marriage rite constitutes the performance of a verbal contract that has a bearing on all society in that it “procreates” on a social level. This sacramental rite is thereby present in day-to-day life as a part of conventional contracts and exchanges. Don Juan, by freely promising to many without, in fact, intending to honor any of the promises, by perverting the linguistic basis of religious doctrine on the sensitive issue of the sacrament of marriage, contravenes and profanes not only those doctrines and sacraments but also menaces the very foundations of society.

The chaos created by Don Juan—erotic and linguistic—is therefore justly punished. The sheer magnitude and number of his misdeeds render him dangerous, even fatal. There is, however, an element of scapegoating involved in the meting out of this just recompense.¹⁴ As we have noted, Don Juan is hardly the only deceitful individual in the world portrayed in El burlador de Sevilla, a fact that Bruce W. Wardropper succinctly sums up in one phrase, “Don Juan deceives … in a deceit-full society.”¹⁵ So, even though Don Juan is not and cannot be mistaken for the innocent victim of sacrificial ritual, neither is he the only character in the comedia deserving of punishment. He is not merely a perpetrator of evil, but also a victim insofar as he pays for the sins and transgressions of others as well as for his own misdeeds. In this way, his actions serve to unify society against him and his death restores unity to society itself. Finally, Catalinón's timely announcement of the burlador's even more timely demise allows the king to set the world immediately to right by ordering everyone to marry: “¡Justo castigo del cielo! / Y agora es bien que se casen / todos, pues la causa es muerta, / vida de tantos desastres” (2852-55).

This movement to marriage en masse, towards the nuptials of Octavio and Isabela, Anfriso and Tisbea, the Marqués and Doña Ana, and the consummation of the marriage of Batricio and Aminta, is, of course, a convention of Golden Age comedias. But despite the conventional nature of this final scene, we must note that, for all of the havoc that he wreaked, Don Juan himself instigated this happy ending. As a kind of destructive erotic force in the world, the burlador either channeled existing or incited new attractions, acting very much like a seventeenth-century version of the Platonic daemon, Eros, or, in his Roman guise, Cupid.¹⁶ Isabela, for instance, is so unsure of her suitor that she must ask him to swear once more to uphold his promise to marry her after he, or the man playing his part, has “enjoyed” her favors. The other noblewoman in the drama, Doña Ana, finally gives herself up to her lover the Marqués when it appears that she is to be married by her father and her king to someone else: Don Juan. Tisbea, a prime example of the mujer esquiva, shuns all suitors only to fall victim to her arrogant pride. By attempting to marry above herself, she is an easy mark for Don Juan's promises. In this way, too, Aminta falls into Don Juan's trap, although initially with some misgivings. If it seems, then, that the burlador disrupts the harmony of an idyllic world, destroys happy conjugal unions, the truth is, in fact, otherwise. Only at the end of the anarchical path stretching from Italy to Spain is matrimony resurrected as the symbol of social harmony, since it is only after Don Juan's perfidy that Octavio, the Marqués, the prideful Tisbea and greedy Aminta, set aside their individual desires and content themselves with their lot as part of a union leading to some common good.

Don Juan thereby serves a social function in two senses. First, he unifies society against him and assumes the collective burden of guilt. Second he engenders the conditions by which desire is directed towards matrimony in socially productive ways. Although Don Juan may not seem to play strictly a positive role in the world portrayed by Tirso in El burlador de Sevilla, he does serve a significant social function by showing how love construed in terms of Christian matrimony can bring individuals into closer union with the deity and can thus benefit the common good of all mankind. Like his mythical forebear, Eros, Don Juan is a daemonic force in the world, the means by which Tirso's all too human souls are led to a sacramental union. Don Juan's failed promises are contradicted by the potential good of the four mutual promises to be made at the end of the drama. In this way, the inquiry into the uses, abuses, and ends of language is brought to an end. The character who relies on the written word for his cues is duly punished; and the rest of society reaffirms its sustained commitment to social order by means of verbal contracts. It would not be misleading to identify Don Juan with Freud's Eros or “life instinct,” as the force that, “by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, preserving it.”¹⁷

III

It is important to see that the lesson of Tirso's comedia is not merely a moral one but that it also pertains to the crucial relationships between sign and referent and between word and deed so prominent in current discussions of literature. Tirso's play advocates nothing less than the fidelity of a performative action and proposes as inevitable the connection between literature and the world. The consequences of this assertion are significant for understanding the precise nature of a written text in a world of spoken language, since, although Doña Ana's letter signifies, in and of itself, both seduction (because it invites the Marqués to enjoy [gozar] “tu esperanza … y el fin de tu amor” [1336-37]) and the making of a promise (“y yo prometí gozar lo que el alma prometió” [1870-71]), it takes on its real meaning only once it is brought into the realm of the spoken word and human action. In other words, a papel is meaningful only in potentia and its meaningful nature remains a merely potential force until it is acted upon, just as, in fact, Don Juan acts upon the contents of Doña Ana's letter and acts within the parameters that it establishes. The written text assumes a worldly force when it has been drawn into the world by the action and discourse it engenders. This in turn underscores the impact of Tirso's comedia in that it, too, transcends its status as a text only when it is performed; thereby, it functions as a meaningful force in the world when it engenders, through its performance, human action.

The concept of seduction with which we began, either when construed traditionally in terms of sexual seduction or when read as an unproblematic structural device, fails to apprehend and to interpret fully those linguistic dimensions of the drama that we have been discussing here. Rather, seduction is presented in El burlador de Sevilla in its more etymologically strict sense, as a “leading astray” (Latin, se + ducere) as a linguistic seduction dependent on the worldly complexity of making empty promises. As such, the seductions in this comedia serve to emphasize what is at stake in various aspects of speech, the danger of breaches in a previously agreed upon linguistic economy being, of course, nothing less than the collapse of social order. It seems to me that this is the point at which El burlador de Sevilla can be read as following upon ideas in Juan de la Cueva's El infamador (1581), since Leucino's defamations affect society in ways similar to Don Juan's perversions of the promise; and Tirso's comedia finds its rightful place in a literary culture obsessed with the relations between language and literature on the one hand and with reality on the other.

In conclusion, it is important to note that the recent trends in criticism that would radically separate literature from the world, or a word from its worldly referent, exercise the same type of seduction practiced by Don Juan in that such approaches rely on a rhetoric that is forceful yet nonetheless skeptical of its worldly import. In terms of such an analysis, El burlador de Sevilla, a work initially intended as a meaningful and instructive commentary on the linguistic vices of society, as a literary demonstration of the possibly incompatible ends to which language might be applied, might well result in a formally analyzed “text” ironically imprisoned within that selfsame system of deception that it would have—that it should have—exposed. But these limitations can be avoided. Recognition and recuperation of the worldly importance of language restores to Tirso's comedia the lessons pertaining to linguistic aspects of seduction that it so carefully adumbrates and exemplifies.

Notes

1. For an elaboration of this point of view, along with a discussion of the concomitant social implications, see A. A. Parker's seminal “The Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Method of Analysis and Interpretation.” The Great Playwrights, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Doubleday, 1970). 1: 694. See also Joaquín Casalduero, “Introducción,” El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, Letras Hispánicas, 58, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1978) 13-23, for a structural interpretation of seduction in the drama. I will cite El burlador de Sevilla from an advance copy of the forthcoming edition by James A. Parr (Madrid: Taurus); all references will be given in the text by line number.

2. On the notion of the promise in Don Juan, see: Joaquín Casalduero, Contribución al estudio del tema de Don Juan en el teatro español (1938: rpt. Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1975) 19-39; Xavier A. Fernández, “Estudio Preliminar,” El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (Barcelona: Alhambra. 1978) 18-25; and Shoshana Felman, Le Scandale du corps parlant. Don Juan avec Austin ou la séduction en deux langues (Paris: Seuil, 1980), which serves as a touchstone for my own analysis of the promise in El burlador de Sevilla.

3. Useful commentary on this opening scene includes: Manuel Durán and Roberto González Echevarría, “Luz y oscuridad: La estructura simbólica de El burlador de Sevilla.” Homenaje a William L. Fichter. Estudios sobre el teatro antiguo hispánico y otros ensayos, ed. A. David Kossoff and José Amor y Vázquez (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 201-09; and Arturo Serrano Plaja, “Un no de Don Juan y un no a Don Juan. (Notas sobre El burlador de Sevilla,” Segismundo 9 (1973): 17-32. Since criticism on El burlador de Sevilla is voluminous I will cite only those studies that are crucial to my own interpretation.

4. In fact, there is some question as to whether or not Doña Ana is actually seduced and early commentators are as confused as more recent critics. Wardropper, for instance, seems to think not, but there has been continuing discussion. See Wardropper, “El burlador de Sevilla: A Tragedy of Errors,” PQ 36 (1957): 70; Vicente Cabrera, “Doña Ana's Seduction in El burlador de Sevilla.” BCom 26 (1974): 49-51; Luis González-del-Valle, “Doña Ana's Seduction in El burlador de Sevilla: A Reconsideration,” BCom 30 (1978): 42-45; and José M. Ruano de la Haza, “Doña Ana's Seduction in El burlador de Sevilla: Further Evidence Against,” BCom 32 (1980): 131-33.

5. On Don Juan as an actor see Daniel Rogers, Tirso de Molina: ‘El burlador de Sevilla’;, Critical Guides To Spanish Texts, 19 (London: Grant and Cutler, 1977), 33; and Henry Sullivan, Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), 77.

6. On the notion of the performative in language see J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975), especially 4-11.

7. This is one point at which I part company with Parr's fine edition. Parr emends this line of the comedia to read, “Un pescador, Anfriso, y un pobre padre / de mis males testigo” (2199). Obviously, the traditional reading of this line, which I give in the text, complements my reading of the drama and I therefore use it here.

8. On Lacan's notion of the “nom du père” see the following: “Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage,” “D’une préliminaire à tout traitement possible de la psychose,” and “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien” in Ecrits, La Champ Freudien (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 266-322, 531-84 and 793-828, respectively.

9. Essais sur le symbolique, Collection Connaissance de L’Inconscient (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 39.

10. There is an explicit indictment of written agreements in La estrella de Sevilla (Act 2, scene 4) in which two characters discuss a “contract” that is to be taken out on a third character. On this aspect of La estrella de Sevilla see Elias L. Rivers, “The Shame of Writing in La estrella de Sevilla,” Folio (1980): 105-17. A modified version of this article appears in Rivers' Quixotic Scriptures: Essays on the Textuality of Hispanic Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983), 79-87.

11. Recent studies indicate that the literacy rate in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Spain probably ranged between 50٪ and 65٪. See: P. Berger, “La Lecture en Valence, 1474 à 1504,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 11 (1975): 99-118; M.-C. Rodríguez and B. Bennassar. “Signatures et niveau culturel des témoins et accusés dans les procès d’inquisition du ressort du tribunal de Tolède (1525-1817) et du ressort du tribunal de Cordove (1595-1632),” Cahiers du Monde Hispanique-luso-brasilien 31 (1978): 17-47; C. Larquié, “L’Alphabétisation à Madrid en 1650,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 28 (1981): 132-57; J. E. Gelabert González, “Lectura y escritura en una ciudad provinciana del siglo XVII: Santiago de Compostela,” BH 84 (1982): 264-90; J. N. H. Lawrance. “The Spread of Lay Literacy in Late Medieval Castile,” BHS 62 (1985): 79-94.

12. A sacrament is the sensible sign of Christ's love for and union with the Church. The making of a sacrament entails both an action and the speaking of words in order to provide the possibility of grace and redemption. To translate this into the terminology with which we have been discussing El burlador de Sevilla, sacraments are a kind of performative, a complex action that takes place in language, in which the words spoken during the course of the accompanying action and the action itself join to form a sensible or visible sign of this process. The word both empowers and embodies the sacrament, which, despite its oral and transient nature is nonetheless powerful throughout all time: “Nam et in ipso verbo, aliud est sonus transiens, aliud virtus manens” (Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium 80, 3, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. [Paris: 1844-90], 35 [1845]: col. 1840).

13. De Sancta Virginitate 12, 12, Patrologiae cursus completus, 40 (1887): col. 401.

14. On scapegoating and the scapegoat mechanism in myth and ritual see René Girard, La violence et la sacré; (Paris: Grasset, 1972); “To double business bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); and Le Bouc émissaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

15. “A Tragedy of Errors” 65.

16. In Plato's Symposium, Socrates explains how he learned of Eros from Diotima:

    “What then is Love?” I asked; “Is he mortal?” “No.” “What then?” “As in the former instance, he neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between the two.” “What is he, Diotima?” “He is a great spirit [daemon] and like all spirits he is an intermediary between the divine and the mortal.” “And what,” I said, “is his power?” “He interprets between gods and men … through Love all the intercourse and converse of gods with men, whether they be awake or asleep, is carried on.” (202d, e; 203a; I cite from the Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954], 1: 504-55)

    In this context, it is instructive to consider the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, bks. 4-6 (a fine discussion of which is to be found in James Tatum's Apuleius and ‘The Golden Ass’; [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979], especially 49-68). Here, Cupid (Eros, love) is the daemonic force by which the human soul (psyche) can be bound to the gods in love and can thereby achieve immortality.

17. See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 19: 40.