[In the following essay, Evans discusses how de Molina, through his characters and language, exposes the cruelty and horror of human desire in El burlador de Sevilla.]

El burlador de Sevilla shares with Tirso's other plays a preoccupation with stereotypes of role and gender, but whereas, say, in El castigo del penséque, La mujer por fuerza, and La firmeza en la hermosura his focus is on viragos and timid or inept men, in this play attention is fixed primarily on an ideal of virility that had taken root throughout Europe by the beginning of the seventeenth century. As the burlador not just of Sevilla but also of España (p.655a), Don Juan seems in some respects through one particular dimension of his complex persona to embody a nation's stereotype of the virile man. While virility is allowed a temporary and illusory status as a symbol of assault on the stabilities and decay of civilised life, Tirso is nevertheless plainly in sombre mood in El burlador de Sevilla. More despairing of human achievement, glancing more anxiously than in the comedies at the darker patterns of life, Tirso is here simultaneously excavating—at the metaphysical level—human fears of the unknown, of the supernatural, and of death, and also highlighting—at the socio-political level—the seamier side of Empire, probing the social and ideological sources of moral decay. The play is a reversal of the notion found so ofteny in Golden Age literature that men and women are capable of self-transcendence through love, the self's privileged access to recognition of the divine structure of the universe. In a play full of dazzling baroque technique and eerie suggestion, Tirso exposes through Don Juan's vampiric, insatiable and fatal thirst for sexual conquest, the cruelty and horror of desire.

Like Lope, who perhaps had fewer reservations about celebrating the ideal of the Superman, an age's oneiric projection of its own unconscious aspirations to divinity, Tirso adopts an ambivalent attitude to his protagonist's exploits, to the release through his dramatised heroism of a nation's inner quest. There are plays—such as the Pizarro trilogy—whose male characters recall the less ambiguous panegyrics of, for instance, Guillén de Castro's Cid plays, but in many of the great comedies, where the narrative frequently hinges on female lessons in humility, responsibility and sensitivity, Tirso displays a lower degree of tolerance for the Superman. In El pretendiente al revés, the Duke of Brittany is taught that he cannot trample over others, especially not his wife, whom he insensitively attempts to use as an ally in his seduction of another woman; in Don Gil de las calzas verdes Don Martín learns that he cannot easily extricate himself from a relationship with a woman whom he has compromised and whom he may have made pregnant; El Aquiles and El melancólico reveal the extent to which a less rigid definition of role and gender, a tolerance of a certain degree of male feminisation, a little more of the gentle man and somewhat less of the macho man, is more acceptable in the pursuit not only of personal but also of social relationships. El Aquiles and El melancólico both concentrate on men straining to live up in public to the ideals of stereotyped virility.

In El burlador de Sevilla, too, such moral considerations underlie the play's imaginative structures, but before reaching them one is expected to focus momentarily on the amoral appeal of brío and the freedom from convention it seems so thrillingly to promise.

It has sometimes been fashionable to treat the play in a way suggesting that its naïve purpose was simply to construct an Aunt Sally of a character whose sole raison d’être is to be condemned in the name of virtue. Morality plays, sermons, tracts are of course the true homes of simple moral lessons, certainly not El burlador de Sevilla, a play, like much else Tirso wrote, that thrives on ambiguity and paradox. Don Juan is a sort of Everyman, “el pequeño mundo del hombre”, a site for the release and interplay of conflicting attitudes, desires, ambitions, ideals, aspirations and fears. For that reason he is not only an “hombre sin nombre” (p.634b), a representative of all men, but also the simultaneously nameless and over-named impersonator of Don Octavio, the Marqués de la Mota, Hector, Aeneas, and various other ideals, shabby or respectable, of heroism, nobility and virility. Put another way, he is the phantom, in some senses the monstrous incarnation, of his interlocutors' fears and desires and, by extension, the “other” self of the audience, the dream embodiment of our fears and desires. After all, he is at once all these characters and none of them, a screen on whom expectations, desires and illusions are projected, a shadowy figure assuming the shapes and fancies of a hollow world full of conforming mediocrities denied individuality.

There are narrow functional and psychological senses in which Don Juan is, as an “hombre sin nombre”, the impostor or “other” of these characters and, in consequence, of course, of ourselves. But he is also, in a wider sense, all that civilisation regards as “other” and refuses to recognise in itself. In connection with the first, largely dramatic and psychological issue it may be useful to recall Ovid; the second may benefit from a reading of Freud.

As A. K. G. Paterson has noted, there are countless echoes of Ovid throughout Golden Age art, particularly Tirso's. In presenting us with a character in flux, the play indirectly recalls the Metamorphoses, but it is also full of veiled references to the Ars Amatoria. The advice to all dedicated seducers to learn the advocate's verbal arts, to cultivate making outrageous and impossible promises to one's victims, to override embarrassment at betraying one's closest friends, for instance, are only three examples of Ovid's hidden presence in the play. But perhaps even more significant than these is the passage in the same text where Ovid suggests that the most successful seducer will be he who, acting like a kind of Proteus, can turn himself into an endless variety of shapes and selves:

Qui sapit, innumeris moribus aptus erit,
Utque leves Proteus modo se tenuabit in undas,
Nunc leo, nunc arbor, nunc erit hirtus aper.
His iaculo pisces, illa capiuntur ab hami:s
His cava contento retia fune trahunt.

In being Octavio, Mota, Hector, Aeneas and “Don Juan Tenorio”, the latter a self-dramatisation of a social ideal, Don Juan is Tirso's Proteus, the scourge of stability and convention, the emblem of a civilisation's ideological contradictions. He is at once the crystallisation of civilised creencias, and a character eager for the glare for publicity (for “notoriety” as Gaseno's far from contemptible metathesis in the “Tenorio/notorio” pun [p.680b] makes clear). Purely in psychological terms Don Juan is plainly not to be treated exclusively as an example of Juan Huarte de San Juan's choleric man. He includes the choleric man in his repertoire of selves but, as a character capable of variation and inconsistency, he is the dramatisation of a notion of human identity expressed perhaps most provocatively by Pico dell Mirandola in De dignitate hominis: “Quis hunc nostrum chamaeleonta non admiretur?”

But in so far as Don Juan is Tirso's spokesman for society, there is clearly a desire to articulate the positive as well as the negative features of Golden Age life, its aspirations as well as its repressions. As so many have noticed, Don Juan is characterised by the demonic, but what still remains to be underlined is that his loco amor, in some senses the symbol for a way of life, stems as much from doctrina, which one might more narrowly define as the repressions of his background—which are only implicit in the play—as from his own idiosyncratic personality, which in any case is a composite of living and literary ideals and commonplaces. The investigation of the origins and nature of repression is nowhere more brilliantly undertaken than in Freud's work, most notably Totem and Taboo and Civilisation and Its Discontents.

There Freud illustrates the ways through which in responding to social drives towards the control of sexuality and aggression, civilisation not uncharacteristically succeeds in overstepping the mark and achieves a surplus repression. But the repressed reappears, sometimes in monstrous form. On this reading, Don Juan the bestial demon, a character in metamorphosis from man to beast, the insatiable áspid, serpiente, of transgression and desire, is himself the reappearance of repressed instinct, a dramatisation of the revolt by the unconscious against the excesses of civilisation, a clash perhaps best epitomised by the tense relationship between Don Juan and Don Diego, his father. The relationship between these two characters has at least two dimensions of serious relevance to this issue: the first is related to the purely personal, psychologically realistic intimacy between a father and son, of the kind Golden Age drama specialised in sometimes so brilliantly (Enrico and Anareto, Pedro and Juan Crespo and so on). In these exchanges between father and son we note a certain degree of affection, goodwill, and naturally, of concern. But beneath all this there lies in El burlador de Sevilla a second dimension of conceptual implications, centring on the ideological struggle that is only dimly apprehended by Don Diego and Don Juan as they confront each other on the battleground of family honour.

Here Tirso depicts the clash of instinct, particularly the libido, against the law of the father, more specifically the law of surface values, of order, propriety, decorum and loveless marriages based on property, of class and hierarchies. Don Juan's paroxysms of sexual indulgence are in some respects expressions of Tirso's conviction that we are all at some time or another in our lives tempted to transgress, to yield to excess and outrage, simply in order to feel truly alive.

Though Don Juan is the character most identified with the negative snake/devil imagery, it is worth noting that these associations are regularly made by others (e.g. p.637a, p.639b, p.641a, p.664b, p.665b, p.666b), and that, moreover, they are deliberately used by Tirso as a means of typifying society at large. There is even a calle de la Sierpe (p.659b). This pattern emphasises the point that Don Juan is a social hyperbole, a heightened dramatic synecdoche of the values and contradictions of his background. The imagery is not intended to set him apart, but rather to give him a context which the audience will recognise in broader, social terms as his real place of definition. The same is true of the images of childhood and immaturity.

The early attempt to vindicate Don Juan's “irresponsibility” on the grounds of mocedad (p.652a), naturally tunes in with the age's devotion to brío, to which Don Juan himself before the Comendador's statue draws attention: “… tengo brío / y corazón en las carnes” (p.683a) Cervantes, in Don Quijote, part one, to take only one other example from the period, puts the case with precisely the same degree of equivocation as Tirso when he describes his own hero's behaviour like this:

Decía esto con tanto brío y denuedo, que infundió un terrible temor en los que le acometían; y así por esto como por las persuasiones del ventero, le dejaron de tirar; y el dejó retirar a los heridos, y tornó a la vela de sus armas, con la misma quietud y sosiego que primero.

Tirso's invocation of brío is not the only echo of Don Quijote in the Burlador: there are many Cervantine touches here, as elsewhere in Tirso's work, but particular mention could be made too of Catalinón's aping of Sancho's desire to be a governor in hoping through his master to become one day a count. Pressing the Cervantine analogies a little further it is just possible from one point of view to argue that Don Juan is in some respects the heir to Don Quijote, or perhaps even St Teresa herself, in the way he hurls himself with such vigour into his chosen field of exploits. The audience is expected temporarily to suspend moral judgment and to become instead awe-struck by the tonic sight of Don Juan's frenzied vitality and natural insubordination, his refusal to contemplate submission, his flouting of convention and his undistracted dedication to selfish needs and desires. In the pursuit of his vocation he has the outrageous fanaticism and unbending will of Don Quijote and St Teresa, recalling in the process Tirso's casual assault on pusilanimidad in the prologue to the Cigarrales de Toledo. In mythic terms he is also a version of Prometheus (at one point in the play Don Juan is actually described as a giant [p.639b]), following the pattern so lucidly and suggestively phrased by Marcuse when he talks of the “predominant culture-hero” as the “trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain”. Yet it is clearly not Tirso's purpose to make us wholly sympathetic to his Satanic hero. Don Juan's primary function is to stir the audience into recognising the social hypocrisies masking the undeniable truths of existence.

At a trivial level, the reverse side of all this brío is of course, as Deibe has argued, an appalling immaturity. Don Juan is the negative twin of the hero who dares test the limits of life. Creating endless roles for himself which ultimately succeed only in distancing himself from any substantial and life-enhancing values, he victimises women to the glory of his narcissistic omnipotence, oblivious of his own rapidly withering humanity. Like so many of Tirso's other niño, admittedly less malign, heroes (like Rodrigo in El castigo del penséque), he fails to progress beyond a retarded notion of love's nature and wealth. Yet once again, as with the devil imagery, the play is careful to use niño vocabulary and its figurative resonances not to isolate Don Juan, for amor niño, it should be remembered, is a concept first mentioned by the King of Naples (p.637b), and subsequently embroidered by Octavio (p.638a). The point is simply that Tirso is quite clearly determined to argue that his devil-child is a horrifying product of the age, a brilliantcomplex image of a culture's social and moral contradictions. This is not to argue that Tirso, a more or less respectable Friar in the Order of Mercy, is writing radical drama with programmes for reform, merely that as one of the age's most gifted and profound dramatists, he is compelled to express what he clearly sees as the ironies and failures of a hopelessly muddled culture still reeling from the effects of expulsion from Paradise. Tirso is Golden Age society's dramatic barometer of conscious repression and unconscious desire.

It may not be entirely platitudinous to recall that El burlador de Sevilla, like any work of art, is a texture of interwoven threads, some new, some borrowed, some inherited, all in some senses fashioned by history and culture. The “intertextual” contexts of the play include, as I have argued, Ovid, Cervantes, Pico della Mirandola, Juan Huarte de San Juan, but also, quite clearly, both Lope de Vega, whose general influence on subsequent drama in Spain needs no further comment here, and Seneca. Seneca's influence on Golden Age dramatists, like Juan de la Cueva and Rojas Zorrilla, both of whom had a profound taste for atrocities, has largely been noted, but Lope and Tirso, normally admired for their greater sense of decorum, are not incapable of Senecan horror and savagery themselves. The severing of heads in El mayordomo de la Duquesa de Amalfi, El bastardo Mudarra and Fuenteovejuna, the supernatural moments of El rey don Pedro en Madrid and El burlador de Sevilla, are scenes of almost unexampled outrage, clearly relying on Senecan antecedents. The stone guest—though in some ways, as Terence May and Pidal have argued, reincarnations of ancient European legends—is closely modelled on Senecan figures of revenge of the kind described by Andromanche in The Trojan Women, who return to torment their mortal enemies. The formula of pagan revenge tragedy is transformed here into its Christian equivalent, where alongside the secular revenge sought by the victimised women (Tisbea uses the word “venganza” [p.672b]), there is the spectacle of a higher revenge taken by the stone guest who, still bearing some of the pagan, Senecan hallmarks, embodies seventeenth-century notions of divine justice that are at least partly inspired by the Old Testament text “Vengeance is mine, and I will repay”. The all too pitifully human thirst for retaliation and retribution in this life, described by Bacon in the essay on revenge as the pursuit of “wild justice”, is contrasted with divine justice, the only kind of revenge which will not prove to be, as Ford puts it, in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, “its own executioner”.

The lamentable shortcomings of a civilisation's systems of order and belief, coupled with Don Juan's brazen exposure of its hypocrisies, his unhesitating gratification of the urges of his primal will, and his singleminded, playful, commitment to self-indulgence (life is a game to Don Juan, for “en el juego / quien más hace gana más” [p.675a]), all combine to reduce the impact of the conventional moral lesson which, of course, in many respects the play teasingly offers. So, though he is consumed by demonic tendencies, and though he is condemned, as Parker argues, as a betrayer—sent, we must therefore assume on Dante's assurance, to the very heart of hell for this vilest of sins—Don Juan is Tirso's, perhaps the Golden Age's, most outrageous monster not simply because of his own contempt for anything that does not serve his own inescapably selfish purposes, but also because, as he passes like a whirlwind of aggressive, infernal desire through every level of society, he reveals that the monstrous, the diabolical, is by no means restricted to easily-constructed scapegoat figures of eccentricity. Tirso allows one to wonder whether in seventeenth-century Spain the monstrous had become almost banal in its diffusion.

None of these remarks is intended to suggest, however, that Don Juan is Tirso's creation of an invariably knowing eiron, deliberately or crusadingly denouncing the prim tyranny of seventeenth-century life and ideology. Rather, that as an ambivalent character of mixed youthful vitality and diabolical corruption he is the play's paradoxical figure of disenchantment and smugness, of revolt and subjugation, of repression and desire, a character, in contrast to society's greater hypocrites, mercifully immune from the prig's urge to dispense moral blandishments and pseudo sentiment.

As he sets about making his conquests this structural principle of ambiguity, a feature designed to provoke in the audience a dual attitude of empathy and detachment, Don Juan forces us to be content with neither an exclusively romantic view of him as a daring embodiment of Renaissance brío, nor with a predominantly theological notion of him as a conventional personification of evil. Tirso allows one to be as repelled by his moral squalor as drawn to the positive side-effects of his admittedly unwitting social critique. What Calderón perhaps tried with varying degrees of success to do with some of his auto devils, Tirso strikingly achieves through his portrayal of Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla: the creation of a character, like Milton's Satan, or Shakespeare's Richard III, who is alternatively irresistible and repellently evil, another of the characters one might add to A. P. Rossiter's list of “angels with horns”. Though we are expected to include moral judgments in the range of responses we make to the sensuous pleasures and intellectual challenges of El burlador de Sevilla, we make them against the background of the clashing voices of theology and morality. This is, as Paterson has remarked of another play by Tirso, the drama of experience, not of theological debate.

While most spectators would deplore Don Juan's scandalous and shocking victimisation of Tisbea, Aminta, Isabela and Ana, few would not also feel some sympathy, however transient, for his shameless urge to disrupt the normality of universally frantic quests for monogamous unions. At a frivolous level the play generally satirises the fetishisation of female virginity (a topic most eloquently but, by today's standards, somewhat hysterically treated in Vives' Instrucción de la mujer cristiana), practised by comedia lovers devoted to the double standard. Though as a matter of convention, and perhaps some urgency, nuptials are being arranged for him, Don Juan never interrupts his relentless celebration of the transgression of marriage, the violation of its sanctity, and the exposure of the humbug of scores of comedia unions. “Burlar una mujer y dejarla sin honor” (p.656b) has, naturally, an overridingly offensive tone, but if one looks beyond literal meanings, one can see an unmistakable assault on sanctimonious contemporary attitudes to sexuality, usually imposed by men on unsuspecting or bewildered women. From one point of view, there is quite possibly a literary joke in Don Juan's siege of marriage, perhaps a moment for Tirso to reveal the arbitrariness of a dramatic device used conveniently as a way of cloaking a play's multiple thematic problems and various contradictions, a tired convention which serves at once to articulate the audience's wish-fulfilments and also, as Walter Kerr puts it, to allow everyone to go home. Yet Tirso's spirit of transgression, embodied in Don Juan, extends beyond purely literary satire: Don Juan's recklessness seems designed to make one probe, or at least question, the respective foundations of social and moral certainties.

An atmosphere of repression shrouds the entire play, and since women are its primary victims, it is worth scrutinising the extent to which they are already vulnerable to exploitation even before Don Juan's predatory intervention in their lives. Though all four women are depicted in ways that are designed to reveal negative sides to their character, it is probably unproductive to argue, like Deibe, that they are deliberately cast in a predominantly unfavourable light so as to fit in with his allegedly “frailuna” and “misogynistic” view of women. Where he does expose the negative features in the pshychology of the play's women Tirso is at pains to excavate their origins. The case of Isabela is especially illuminating from this point of view.

Most significant is the way Tirso uses her as a way of drawing attention to the silencing of women in public life. In other plays Tirso's splendid ingenio-touched women are seen overcoming their silencing through recourse to charades, disguises, feignings and other ruses: the woman dressed as man in Don Gil de las calzas verdes, masquerading as another woman in La villana de Vallecas, pretending to be devout and above carnality in Marta la piadosa, or deaf to love in No hay peor sordo …, are all vivid examples of Tirso's concentration on the release of women's voices through ingenio. But through Isabela in El burlador de Sevilla Tirso prefers not to concentrate on the ingenious woman's dependence on wit as a means of self-expression, choosing instead to focus on the act of silencing itself.

Isabela has been making love to Don Juan, whom she mistakes for Don Octavio, her lover, and when she finally discovers her error she succeeds in rousing the palace residents, last of whom is the king himself. He accepts Don Pedro's false account of the truth, and what begins as a family plot to conceal Don Juan's involvement in the incident (he is Don Pedro's nephew), soon becomes an unconscious male conspiracy to deny a woman the right to give her own version of the outrage. Isabela twice attempts to speak for herself, but on each occasion she is silenced by the “dead hand of a patriarch”:

Rey: Idos, y guardad la
puerta
de esa cuadra. Di, mujer:
¿qué rigor, qué airada estrella
te incitó que en mi palacio,
con hermosura y soberbia,
profanases sus umbrales?
Isabela: Señor …
Rey: Calla, que la lengua
no podrá dorar el yerro
que has cometido en mi ofens
a. ¿Aquél era el Duque Octavio?
Isabela: Señor …
Rey: No importan fuerzas,
guardas, criados, murallas,
fortalecidas almenas
para amor, que la de un niño
hasta los muros penetra. (p.637b)

The speech structures, the dismissive, insulting tone of the king's language are all part of a larger pattern of tyranny over women, unmistakably signposted later on in the play when in her absence Isabela's destiny is summarily but decisively fixed by Don Diego and the King of Spain. Such silencing gives a particularly ironic perspective to the remark made by Don Pedro to Don Octavio as he recounts the incidents at the palace, when at one point he remarks, “voces de mujer oímos” (p.639b). In such circumstances it is small wonder that women are sometimes driven to self-centred, negatively “monstrous” ways.

The silencing of Isabela contrasts sharply with the release of Tisbea's voice. Her brilliant opening speech is the expression primarily of revelry in freedom, not just from love but for its own sake. This is the licence of pastoral, the consolation of solitude in the airy expanses of nature, and as she develops her theme the audience, sharing through her language the pleasures of the country, finds welcome relief from the stifling figurative darkness of the previous scene in Naples. Her speech convinces us that like the burlador Tisbea seeks and imagines she is privileged to ignore social convention. Like Don Juan, she is a transgressor though, by contrast, a monster apparently of sexual abstinence. Tisbea is one of Tirso's strong, rare, prodigious heroines, thrillingly monstrous, displaying through the baroque flights of her language her confident, self-conscious independence and a studied, vivifying eccentricity. Her vocabulary of transgression is a sign of her inner strength, and as we hear her speak we see her framed by the sea, her place of definition, the eternal feminine, the pre-civilised cradle of life itself, though also of course of love and of oblivion. While we admire Tisbea's spirited allegiance to an ideal of freedom, we simultaneously fret over her seemingly inflexible disavowal of her own erotic instincts. We cannot help but feel that like other victims of self-delusion, she is misguidedly desecrating the sacred place of an invisible but powerful goddess, Aphrodite herself. Her denial of love in the setting of the goddess of love's own domain is as striking and as arrogantly foolhardy as Don Juan's rejection of God's law in the cemetery. Tisbea's meeting with Don Juan by the seashore is the equivalent of Don Juan's encounter with the stone guest amid the tombstones, a refusal by mere mortals to admit that there is more to life than is dreamt of, paraphrasing Hamlet, in their philosophies, and significantly in both settings stone imagery plays a crucial part in Tirso's figurative and narrative patterns.

As if anticipating the stone imagery connected with Don Gonzalo in Act III, Tisbea first talks of precious stones—the sea, according to her mercenary perceptions, is like an infinity of sapphires—and then describes herself as a rock. The references to sapphires warn us that Tisbea, like Aminta, is not uncontaminated by court or town values, and we are left to suppose that she may be additionally attracted to Don Juan through the promise of social advancement. But Tisbea is also stony, or rocky, because she is a creature of nature, a prodigy of elemental freedom. Moreover, beyond these drives there are, from another point of view, the negative implications of her flinty attitudes to love. These are primary and perhaps easily accessible meanings, but there are at least two other important implications of Tirso's use of language at this point in the play. First, if Tisbea is stony she is clearly destined, by analogy with the play's other character of stone, to be an avenger. But where Don Gonzalo is in one respect the living conceit of God's revenge, Tisbea is in some senses fated to be an avenger of exploited women. Second, and less positively, her stoniness suggests not physical but social and ideological immobilisation. While on the one hand Don Gonzalo's immobilisation is the timelessness of eternity, and, on the other, Don Juan's is the stasis of desire, Tisbea's is the paralysis brought about by esquivez and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of an unacknowledged appetite for both wealth and social status.

The curious aspect of Tisbea's soliloquy is that although she revels in her immunity from love, her language is nevertheless characterised by detailed evocations of the sensuous and tangible features of nature's delights. The communicative or ideational aspects of her speech inform us of her relief and satisfaction in esquivez, but its poetic dimensions—in Jakobson's sense—tell us something different and even contradictory. Following Freud we might want to say that taken as a whole her speech (pp.640-42) dramatises the clash between conscious restraint and unconscious transgression: the vocabulary of kissing (“sus riberas besa”), precious stones (“zafiros … aljófar”), and eroticism, particularly through fish imagery (“necio pececillo”), competes with the language of lofty seclusion (“obeliscos de paja / mi edificio coronan …” etc.). This language of transgression complements the play's insistent use of verbal and visual food imagery, and it is noticeable that Tisbea herself speaks of love as “una fruta sabrosa”. Food as a substitute for erotic pleasure is, of course, a topos of ancient and modern literature alike. So despite her intentional protestations we know from the language she uses almost in spite of herself that Tisbea is not immune to desire. For such a woman a man characterised only by gentlemanly qualities (“medido en las palabras / liberal en las obras / sufra do en los desdences / modesto en las congojas” as Anfriso might well be [p.641b]), and by an imposing physique, cannot on those grounds alone be seriously entertained as a lover. Anfriso clearly lacks that elusive inner blaze of passion that Don Juan alone seems capable of igniting.

However, despite the contradictions, Tisbea is at least a shade freer than Isabela, a step closer to independence in an idealised life so far infected as little as possible by the snares and confusions of civilization. Some way from Utopia, she can still at least here in the seclusions of nature, as poor Isabela could not, speak and articulate her dreams and desires. That seems to be the primary significance of her leisurely and perhaps unconscious recourse in the language of excess. Spared some of the more debilitating forms of social and psychological oppression, she is nevertheless, as her ambivalent soliloquy makes clear, not entirely exempt from the repressions and corruptions of civilised life. The dismantling of Tisbea's language reveals a woman unconsciously formulating perceptions and expectations of sexual fulfilment, all of which find their natural expression in the monstrous form of Don Juan.

Where by comparison with Isabela she had seemed through her gifted use of language in some respects independent and powerful, Tisbea pales almost into insignificance beside Don Juan whose access to real power, symbolised once more through language, is supreme. Daniel Rogers rightly notes that Don Juan's speeches are, to say the least, concise. By comparison with Tisbea's magnificent monologue, they are in some respects minimal. In a play where he did not hesitate to use long speeches of baroque dimensions—not only through Tisbea, but also in the Lisbon speech—whenever they were felt to be necessary dramatically, Tirso clearly sought through Don Juan's comparatively reticent linguistic idiosyncrasies not only to suggest the self-absorption of the narcissist, the self-sufficient tyrant of love showing no sign of immersion in the other reality of his partner, but also to indicate that having power de facto as a man the burlador has no need for perorations. It is sufficient for him, as a man, merely to look in order to exercise that power.

Tirso was clearly fascinated by language. Palabras y plumas, for instance, is full of commentary on language not only as a medium at once rich and impoverished but also as an instrument of power. Language there is frequently used in the service of tyranny, and the play is full of characters who are masters of rhetoric, repeatedly sabotaging meaning with linguistic virtuosity. Characters lead counterfeit lives through words but, significantly it is a woman, the play's principal female character Matilde, who inveighs against “palabras” in an important speech. In El burlador de Sevilla the play's women are once again our guides to the pitfalls of language: Aminta complains that Don Juan is a lisonjero who is full of “retóricas mentiras” (p.670b); so too does Tisbea even in the paradoxical remark “mucho habláis cuando no habláis” (p.644a).

Aminta's words are shorn of ambiguity, since they simply draw attention to the manipulations of rhetoric; but if, on the other hand, one looks at Tisbea's remark, one can detect at least two rich layers of meaning crucial to the play's over-all structure. First, even though Don Juan is verbally thrifty he clearly depends to some extent on the implied expansive aura of his Satanic appearance, the kinetics and visual presence that arouse the repressed longings of a sensual woman. But second, as Don Juan is not actually silent it is quite clear that what he does say, however brief, is skilfully aimed at his interlocutors' most vulnerable emotional targets. In fact a nobleman's simple marriage proposal to a peasant girl of the seventeenth century (the actual historical context of the play is, of course, set back in time) would seriously have tempted thoughts of a life of luxury to swamp all other considerations and sensible objections to the folly of a union contracted on the basis of a rash promise. To such a peasant girl the gravity of these spare words, the “palabras de marido” (p.650b), as Tisbea puts it, might have exceeded by far damage to psychological resistance inflicted by the most highly-wrought baroque conceits of love. Like Isabela, who mistook Don Juan for her own lover Octavio, Tisbea and Aminta are blinded by what they see, perceiving only the hallucinatory shape of their own dreams of status and wealth, suddenly embodied in the living form of Don Juan. Like Isabela's confusion—to the point where she remains, even when they are in bed together we must presume, ignorant of Don Juan's true identity—the mistaken view taken by Tisbea and Aminta of Don Juan is a symbol of their limited moral and psychological perception. The incident involving Isabela and Don Juan belongs to a long line of literary “bed tricks”, that goes at least as far back as Genesis 19:33. In Tirso's work, related tricks of perception—where characters fail to recognise friends or relations, or are persuaded to accept strangers as acquaintances—are also very common (El celoso prudente and El castigo del penséque contain interesting examples). One should resist the temptation to regard these as instances of Tirso's far-fetched and unrealistic notions of human behaviour, and instead be prepared to view them as dramatic conventions used as a way of underlining failures in perception, devices for drawing the attention of the audience to the all too human contexts of illusion. They give yet more proof, if any were needed, of the comedia's transgression of realism, and in the particular case of Tirso's dramatic art, they reveal an endless fascination with the processes through which we make sense of reality, as knowledge, anxiety, or prejudice construct the distorting lenses of our inner vision. Isabela's image of Don Juan, like Tisbea's and Aminta's, is in some senses the equivalent in this play of Don Quijote's view of the barber's basin on that rainy day in La Mancha.

In all three cases in this play the women's responses are largely conditioned by their repressive social contexts. Moreover, as he is society's agent of desire, Don Juan not only excites the erotic—as well as the more materialistic—urges of his victims, he also acts as the implacable scourge of love, the cruel judge who punishes the very women whom he has deliberately set out not only to stimulate but also, through encouragement of sexual indulgence, in some respects to liberate. Both Catalinón and Tisbea draw attention to his punitive role:

Catalinón: Ya sé
que eres
castigo de las mujeres …
Tisbea: … Reparo
en que fue castigo
de amor el que he hallado en ti. (p.648b, p.649a)

There are psycho-social elements in Don Juan's treatment of women. Broadly speaking, his psychological drive seems to originate in a pre-Sadean, conviction that sexual pleasure is inseparable from tyranny; the social origins of this attitude are the well-known Judaeo-Christian strictures. Of the latter we are offered more than a glimpse, but what is particularly revealing is the way in which at the slightest excuse men trot out all the usual misogynistic abuse. The anger displayed by Octavio, one of Don Juan's most successful impersonations, suggests that an unconscious rage, nurtured by centuries of irrational vilification of women, society's scapegoats for a wider malaise, may well be an important component of Don Juan's motivation in victimising women. The easy rage and misogyny of Octavio and Batricio are well captured by Tirso in the following speeches:

Octavio: Marqués,
yo os quiero creer.
Ya no hay cosa que me espante;
que la mujer más constante
es, en efeto, mujer …
¡Ah, veleta! ¡Débil caña!
A más furor me provoco,
y extrañas provincias toco
huyendo desta cautela … (p.640b)
Batricio: Al fin, al fin
es mujer …
que el honor y la mujer
son malos en opiniones … (p.667a)

As “Don Juan”—as opposed to when he is masquerading as Don Octavio or the Marqués de la Mota—Don Juan victimises women in four easy stages: he first woos and excites them beyond resistance through his “lisonjeras palabras”; he then fetishises them, so as to maintain his emotional distance; he then seduces them; and he finally punishes them through desertion. The third crucial stage of fetishisation, the stage that ensures his unthreatened superiority, his wilful commitment to sexual conquest without real personal involvement, is unwittingly highlighted by Tisbea. While commenting, on first setting eyes on him, on his status, prowess and assumed moral qualities (“excelente, gallardo, noble y galán caballero” [p.643b]), she primarily draws attention to herself, conditioned of course into doing so by the tradition of centuries, as a pleasurable object of gaze: “ya podéis ver, en brazos de una mujer” (p.643b). Tisbea is victim to the prejudices of a theory of expression and kinetics that goes back as far as Aristotle (compare, for instance, Gracián's remarks in Cris; IV of El Criticón), though Tirso might have been more familiar with Quintilian: “por el semblante y modo de andar se conoce el estado de ánimo …” When Don Juan describes a woman he seems to echo Tisbea's own view of how a man should look at a woman: he comments on “buenos ojos” and “blancas manos” (the comedia galán's staple mode of response), and the imagery of sight, in so far as it is applied to women, is recurrent throughout the play (particularly p.666a). But the whole issue of the way in which he and through him we ourselves habitually look at women—male or female spectators—is brought directly to our attention through a crucial remark made in Act III by Catalinón:

… De los que privan
suele Dios tomar venganza
si delitos no castigan,
y se suelen en el juego
perder también los que miran.
Yo he sido mirón del tuyo,
y por mirón no querría
que me cogiese algún rayo
y me trocase en ceniza. (p.668b)

While Don Juan is at once a narcissist and a fetishist (a narcissist because he is preoccupied with his reputation which will grow in proportion to the number of women he seduces, and a fetishist because he reduces women to the status of desirable objects, Catalinón, as a gracioso, the conventional alter ego of the audience, is also a voyeur. While Don Juan's characterisation is an elaborate conceit for the intermingling of energy and devilry, a disturbing dramatic device designed to plunge the audience into the realms of the primitive, to make one tremble at the prospect of the unknown and, on these grounds, an embodiment of the reappearance of repressed instinct, a symbol, in short of hyperactivity, Catalinón is a reluctant man of action, a symbol of perception. When he defines himself as not just a spectator at Don Juan's burlas but as a mirón as well, the real spectators in the theatre reflect on the circumstances which make them, too, even if only temporarily, mirones.

The concept of voyeurism is related to the notion of impertinencia which, Cervantes, for one, analysed so brilliantly in El curioso impertinente. In El burlador de Sevilla Don Juan describes Catalinón as an impertinente (p.657a), though we might feel that it is a case of the pot calling the the kettle black. Ripio also defines Octavio as an impertinente (p.638a). If Catalinon is a mirón at Don Juan's burlas against women, to what extent are we, whom he represents, not also in some ways mirones, in the pejorative sense, as well? Are we perhaps mirones taking pleasure from looking at the spectacle of the castigo of women who have dared exercise their sexuality and eroticism? The brilliance of the play is not that Tirso is crudely joining in the misogynistic outcry against women, seeking to make them pay for man's expulsion from paradise, but that through this highly self-conscious method of Catalinón's mise-en-abyme we are made to reflect even more deeply on the play's issues, and to catch ourselves applauding perhaps with unconscious and unrecognised sado-masochistic tendencies those who punish our own repressed, formerly unconscious but now recognised desires. Through Catalinón, too, we are forced to look at what we have created: on the one hand, subjugated, socially and ideologically confused women, and, on the other, demonic men intoxicated and demented by forbidden yet condoned desires.