SOURCE: “The ‘Burlador’ and the ‘Burlados’: A Sinister Connection,” in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Vol. 42, No. 1, Summer, 1990, pp. 5-22.

[In the following essay, Conlon examines the role of Don Juan in de Molina's El burlador de Sevillasuggesting that Don Juan's lack of motive or purpose in his cruelty towards women indicates that he symbolizes all male characters.]

El burlador de Sevilla begins with an error or, more precisely, a misidentification. In a darkened passageway of the palace of the king of Naples, Lady Isabela, who has just become Don Juan's first conquest in the play addresses the Burlador as “Duque Octavio.” Isabela is not alone in identifying Don Juan as Octavio: Viewers seeing the play for the first time would make the same mistake. They would have no reason to doubt that the man on stage is Octavio, and would continue to believe him to be the Duque until Isabela recognizes her error and disabuses them. To viewers the confusion of identities of Don Juan and Octavio might well suggest some symbolic connection between the two figures. They could conclude that Don Juan and Octavio share some fundamental likeness, one which could only emerge in such a tenebrous setting, after the blackness of night had obscured the characters' obvious differences. Subsequent misidentifications between Don Juan and the other burlados Mota and Batricio, might bring this one to the minds of these spectators, who could conclude that the Burlador is linked in some subtle but basic way with all of the men he “victimizes,” and that confusions between the Burlador and the burlados symbolize that link between them. The repeated misidentifications might even lead viewers to believe that the tie between each victim and his victimizer is so strong that Don Juan functions as some sort of surrogate for each of these men.¹ Because of the conspicuous role misogyny plays in the behavior of the burlados and Don Juan,² viewers might reasonably infer that the Burlador's surrogacy in some fashion involves this sentiment, the specific surrogate acts being Don Juan's sexual humiliations of his “victims” women.

Apparently accepting the surface victimizer-victim connection between Don Juan and the burlados, critics of El burlador have said little about the existence of the more subtle, subterranean tie between them. This oversight may be traceable to an underestimation of the psychological dimension of the misogynic utterances of the burlados. Despite the particularly insistent and venomous character of these comments, scholars have paid insufficient attention to what they reveal about the men who make them, their psychology, which is the basis of the link between the burlados and Don Juan. Instead, these vituperations are sometimes accepted as authorial statements, the play's last word on the moral nature of women.

This is the case even in an essay by Ruth Lundelius described as the “best” discussion of the play's vision of women (Singer 67)³ and, in the closest thing we have to a study of the burlados and their bond with Don Juan, two essays (one an adaptation and expansion of the other) by Carlos Feal Deibe. Lundelius uses comments by two of the burlados, Batricio and Octavio (and other male figures) to support her assessment of El burlador de Sevilla as the work of a “serious misogynist” (13), which offers an “ignominious characterization” (6) of its female figures, whom it “radical[ly] censure[s]” (6).⁴ She appears to overlook entirely the psychological motives of Batricio and Octavio for their low opinion of women, without entertaining the notion that they—not the women whom they excoriate—are the focus of the playwright's attention and scorn. With little psychological analysis, Feal Deibe also records the sexually hostile observations of two of the burlados, Mota and Octavio, as evidence that the women in the play are “ser[es] luciferino[s], … proyeccion[es] amplificada[s] de la figura de Eva” (En nombre 10).⁵ Even when he does descry the pathological root of a figure's view of women, as in his discussion of Batricio, this critic fails to see how the character's psychology discredits the observations Batricio makes about his bride, Aminta, and women in general. Observing, for example, that Batricio's belief in the faithlessness of Aminta is really an expression of a deeprooted general fear of women (“El burlador …” 310), Feal Deibe nonetheless interprets Aminta's behavior more or less as Batricio does: Aminta is ready to submit to the first man she meets and has a buried sexual desire for Don Juan (“El burlador …” 311).

Just as Feal Deibe and Lundelius tend to ignore the psychological roots of the burlados' sexually malicious comments, they overlook the ways in which the play undercuts the specific misogynic criticisms these men make—that women are unfaithful and lascivious. This oversight is surprising, inasmuch as these charges are refuted by the behavior of the women closest to these men, their lovers. The first charge is contradicted by the loyalty of the women: None is naturally faithless; two sleep with Don Juan believing him to be their lovers, the third only after her lover has rejected her. Repudiating the second accusation is the fact that these women must be seduced in ways which, as we have just seen, make absolutely clear that each is at heart monogamous. To escape the conclusion that the circumstances surrounding the sexual surrender of these women mitigate their culpability Lundelius must resort to glibness: “Of course, for the sake of the play they [the three lovers of the burlados and Tisbea] must be susceptible and they must be tricked, for without ‘burlas’ there would be no ‘burlador’” (13).⁶

Behind Lundelius' and Feal Deibe's belief that the author has placed his imprimatur on the accusations leveled at the women in this play—and indeed, all women—lies a methodological error: the tendency to equate the meaning of the play with the view held by the largest and most vocal bloc of its characters. Thus, since almost all of the male figures articulate a morally critical view of women so must the play. Such an assumption tends to transform characters into a chorus which informs the audience which theme the playwright is communicating. This interpretation of Tirso's artistry ignores two important points of drama: 1. A fiction central to most modern plays is that characters possess independent personalities, psychological autonomy—a fiction which crumbles when particular characters are obviously functioning as the poet's spokesmen. 2. A play's theme often emerges not so much from characters' actions or words directly but from the viewer's inferences about the characters' motives for those actions or words. Of course some characters in plays do directly communicate themes, like the shepherd/angel in Tirso's own El condenado por desconfiado,⁷ or Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, or indeed the chorus in Greek plays, but in such cases their words are not—as are those of the burlados here—undercut by psychological analysis or refuted by the behavior of other characters. Moreover, as the above examples show, when characters enjoy a special status which endows their speeches with explicit thematic significance there is often something in their role which alerts the audience to this fact—the shepherd/angel's irrelevance to the action of the play and the transparently allegorical character of his speech; the unusual social function of Tiresias; and the traditional narrative role of the chorus. Not only is there nothing about the burlados which grants their views particular authority, but, as we have seen, the play specifically undercuts their words.

Besides denying the burlados moral authority, the dramatic undermining of their misogynic observations raises an important question: Why do these men have such hostility to women? Here, just as in real life, a stubborn insistence on an attitude contradicted by reality, especially one hostile to a large sector of humanity, points to the presence of volcanic psychological forces lying beneath that attitude. The specifically sexual character of the burlados' misogyny (all their hostile remarks about women relate to female sexual duplicity or promiscuity) strongly suggests that they are dominated by a fear, conscious or unconscious, of the female in her sexual role. These characters are, then, like many others in Tirso's theatre sexually obsessed figures (Sullivan “Tirso …” 811). They are different, however, in that they are not driven by desire (Sullivan “Love, Matrimony …” 95), a need to consummate an erotic impulse, but taken over by a fear of the object of their sexual attachment (i.e., women). In each of the three male figures this sexual terror takes the form of sexual hostility and leads them away from the normal course of male-female sexual relations.

It is this unhealthy, sexually rooted misogyny which ties the burlados to the burlador. Don Juan's sexual humiliations of their women symbolically express the misogynic ire of the burlados, complementing their unrealized fear and hostility towards all women. His purposeless cruelty to women enacts the burlados' baseless distrust of them. Obviously the misogynic link between Burlador and burlados is not a causal one, nor of course are the participants aware of its existence; rather it is a symmetrical balance of impulse and expression, observed only by the viewer, which universalizes misogyny.

That Don Juan in his humiliations of the women in this play functions as an extension of Mota, Batricio, and Octavio is suggested by the unusual way he “seduces” their women—impersonating the nobles Octavio and Mota and replacing the peasant Batricio with his bride. Burlas involving impersonation occur in other Tirsian plays; often, as here, they employ some variation of a device called engañar con la verdad (Templin 193), which sometimes reveals hidden sexual predilections and unacknowledged sexual identities.⁸ In El burlador de Sevilla the “engaños” are the impersonations by Don Juan of the burlados with the women romantically connected to these men; the “verdad,” the fact that these impersonations symbolize the likeness in attitude of Burlador and burlados toward the women involved and possibly women in general. When, for example, Don Juan seduces Isabela by pretending to be her lover, Octavio, Don Juan expresses not only his own contempt for this woman but Octavio's. Octavio has the same dishonorable motives towards Isabela as the Burlador: He disdains any legitimate link with her, desiring her only to satisfy his passion. Don Juan's assumption of the roles and identities of the burlados points to a fundamental irony in the play: Don Juan's burlas serve the unconscious desires of the men he “humiliates.”

Perhaps the most complex misogynic surrogate relationship exists between Don Juan and the Marqués de Mota, the burlado whose hostility towards women is the most repressed and expressed the most obliquely. Mota's animus towards women is suggested in an unusual way: by his prurient interest in and encyclopedic knowledge of the misfortunes of Seville's prostitutes. He has an unnatural fascination in their ageing, their diseases, their loss of hair and teeth, and their professional afflictions generally. One can easily imagine how, with a cruel smile, a contemporary actor could have communicated the unhealthy passion which lay behind this figure's arcane knowledge, as he recounted how Inés “el tiempo la desterró” (II, 172); how Teodora, only “se escapó del mal francés / por un río de sudores” (II, 181-182); how Blanca is “sin blanca ninguna” (II, 199); and how Constanza “lampiña de frente y ceja” (II, 175). The pathetic vanity of this last trollop, who, hearing herself called “vieja” (II, 176) thought she had heard “bella” (II, 177), is the stuff of his anecdotes.

The apparent pleasure Mota takes in discussing the degradation of the streetwalkers he presumably patronizes links him with men and women who, because of feelings of guilt for their sexual impulses, deflect their disgust at themselves onto their real or imagined sexual partners. Such “projection” defends them against their revulsion at their own physical desires (White and Gilliard 85). Since such hostility characteristically reflects the pressure moral censure exerts inwardly (A. Freud 119), it would seem from the perverse quality of the pleasure the misfortunes of these women obviously afford Mota that his attraction to them provokes intense psychological discomfort. The male's transference of his sexual disgust with himself to his female partner is a phenomenon which interests Tirso, as his psychologically piercing portrait of Amón in La venganza de Tamar powerfully demonstrates,⁹ and he depicts it here also. Mota makes prostitutes the symbol as well as the vessel of his own corruption, and then “punishes” them mentally by the pleasure which he apparently takes in their decay. Loathing them for their power to “make him” commit sin, he is driven to discuss them in such a way as to deny them any human feelings or human worth, and apparently takes comfort in the knowledge that they are rotting away.¹⁰

Mota's feelings towards prostitutes are complicated and contradictory. Although driven by his resentment of these women to punish them mentally, he is, obviously, also attracted to them. In addition to his display of intimate knowledge of the seven about whom Don Juan queries him, without prompting he expatiates a second time on Seville's women of the night (II, 462-65; 467-474). His ambivalence about prostitutes, loathing them and desiring them, links him with those men pathologically drawn to prostitutes whom Freud describes as “fixat[ed] on the phantasies formed by the boy in puberty” (172).¹¹ Such men exhibit the same contradictory reactions to prostitutes as those displayed by many adolescent males who visit these women: “a mixture of longing and horror” (S. Freud 171), desire and disgust. Like the youth awakened to the pleasures of the flesh by such women, Mota seems to have an insatiable appetite for their delicious but tainted fruit. For Mota, as for the boys, the passions these women stir up make them a grave menace.¹² He sees their activities as reenactments of the temptation and fall: They are Eves (II, 471) who offer a man a fatal “bocado” (II, 472) which turns him into an Adam (II, 468).

The specifically immature quality of Mota's sexual pathology is also communicated by his perros muertos,¹³burlas in which, Mota has a friend replace him in a mistress' bed without her knowledge. Their boyish quality alone points to his sexual immaturity: they reduce sexuality to a nasty game which pits a couple of males against an unsuspecting female. The sexual sharing of a woman also suggests emotional fixation. Its vaguely bisexual character particularly recalls the undefined sexual world, half-homosexual, half-heterosexual, common in male adolescence (S. Freud 44-45). The resentment of the female as sexual figure, which the pranks' malicious quality reveals, is an observable trait of adolescent boys who often disguise their sexual fear and desire of females by acts of hostility.

That Motas' perros muertos are adolescent and misogynic is perhaps apparent; less apparent is how they complement the Marqués' interest in prostitutes. Mota, to expunge his own guilt and express his resentment of women, punishes prostitutes by discoursing on the sufferings they incur in their profession. The “punishment” he metes out, however, being neither direct nor active, lacks a personal stamp; thus it can not purge him of his “sin.” The perros muertos are directly hostile acts towards women and, therefore, possess greater exculpatory powers.

The psychological function of these pranks, like the burlas of many characters in Tirso's theatre, is the release of repressed emotion, some basic insecurity or fear (Templin 195). The intensity of this insecurity is suggested by the frequency with which he engages in such pranks. He boasts that “dimos anoche un cruel” (II, 208) and he plans for “esta noche “ten[er] ciertos otros dos” (II, 209).

The two aspects of Mota's personality which we have established as misogynic—his interest in the decay of prostitutes and his joy in perros muertos—are the two which bind him to Don Juan. Mota's initial discourse on Seville's demimonde are in response to questions from the Burlador, questions which make clear that Don Juan is intimate with the same women as Mota. Their dialogue establishes that the two men have like reactions to these women. To the mockingly cruel description of the ageing of one prostitute by Mota, “A Vejel se va” (II, 169),¹⁴ Don Juan adds an equally cruel riposte: Vejel is “buen lugar para vivir [ella] (II, 170). If Mota is obsessed with the decay of Constanza, Don Juan goes a step further and queries if she “irá a morir” (II, 173). Finally, both men discuss women in the skin trade in literally non-human terms, with Mota and Don Juan speaking of “abadejo[s]” (II, 189) and “trucha[s] (II, 188), slang terms for prostitutes and courtesans (MacCurdy 115n), but which, of course, literally mean codfish and trout. Just as the subject of prostitutes and their conditions are first raised by Don Juan, so he also introduces the subject of perros muertos with the question: “Marqués, ¿qué hay de perros muertos?” (II, 206).

This second activity, the perros muertos, powerfully dramatizes the link between Mota and Don Juan. As envisioned by Mota, Don Juan is to impersonate him in one of these jests: “La mujer ha de pensar que soy él” (II, 507). To make the two men indistinguishable in the dark—the indispensable condition of the perro muerto being played on Mota's mistress, Beatriz—Mota lends Don Juan his red cape which identifies both men as the Marqués to Doña Ana.¹⁵ The two impersonations, the two acts of sexual malice, are connected: the impersonation with Ana fulfils the malicious spirit of the proposed impersonation with Beatriz, which was never carried out. The link between the perro muerto and the burla and the indistinguishability of Mota and Don Juan suggest that the Burlador is a surrogate for Mota with Ana, as he was supposed to have been with Beatriz, enacting the hostility that the Marqués feels toward female sexuality and thus, unconsciously, towards Ana, for sexually enticing him. Since, as Feal Deibe observes, the cape was not lent to seduce Doña Ana but Beatriz, the two women become linked (En nombre 16). Their mutual identity in these misogynic pranks symbolizes the similarity of attitude towards women generally of the two men. All women are to Don Juan what his prostitutes and his mistresses are to Mota, and Don Juan's burlas are the Marqués' perros muertos, with both men punishing their sexual partners for no apparent sin but their sexuality.

The misogyny in Mota which makes Don Juan an appropriate sexual replacement for the Marqués is present in the other two burlados as well. The feckless peasant Batricio communicates his responses towards women—distrust and fear—by the terror the notion of sexual dishonor strikes in him.¹⁶ That these feelings come to the surface as soon as Batricio learns of Don Juan's presence at his wedding, before the Burlador has said or done anything, points to their unconscious character: They are long festering infections buried in some deep and vital place in Batricio's spirit, brought to the surface by Don Juan (Conlon “Batricio …” 88). Learning that a nobleman has come to his wedding, Batricio immediately concludes that this is a “mal agüero” (II, 671), and that the stranger's presence “quita gusto y celos da” (II, 673). Batricio himself reveals an awareness of the irrational, unconscious character of his suspicions as his conscious mind struggles to put down this misogynic insurrection from some lower psychological depth asking “¿de qué me aflijo yo?” (II, 678). The protests of his rational, conscious mind cannot prevail against the dark misogyny unleashed by Don Juan's presence, and is silenced by the sixfold repetition of the cry, “mal agüero, mal agüero.” He is quickly consumed psychologically by his unconscious misogyny which, once ignited, burns out of control. Surface joy becomes apprehension, apprehension becomes fear, fear becomes doubt, and doubt conviction. At the arrival of Don Juan, Batricio is overcome by a vague foreboding and jealousy; the seating of the Burlador at the wedding table makes Batricio feel “conden[ado] a celos” (II, 702). After Don Juan takes Batricio's seat, the groom declares that his wedding is a “culebra” (III, 44) (Conlon “Batricio” 87).

The sense that some pre-existing terror has taken hold of Batricio is further suggested by the way he expresses his feelings about women and honor—frenetically, desperately, one clichéd platitude tumbling atop another: “que el honor y la mujer / son malos en opiniones” (III, 83-84); “mujer entre mala y buena, / que es moneda entre dos luces” (III, 95-96); “la mujer en opinión / siempre más pierde que gana, / que son como la campana, / que se estima por el son (III, 85-88).

Nothing Aminta says or does justifies such distrust. In fact, her behavior reveals deep love and desire for Batricio.¹⁷ Batricio's misgivings do not concern Aminta personally, but only as she is a member of the female sex. His is a deductive distrust—‘all women are perfidious, Aminta is a woman, therefore. …’ His thinking becomes explicit when Don Juan claims to be her lover. Batricio blames her treachery on the inherent moral frailty of her gender: “al fin es mujer” (III, 68) he sighs.

Because Batricio “knows” that he will be betrayed by Aminta, his relationship with Don Juan takes on an almost explicitly surrogate character. Batricio is so clearly relieved to be rid of Aminta, to learn that she is to join Don Juan in what was supposed to have been his, Batricio's, marriage bed (Feal Deibe “El burlador” 310) that he tells Don Juan: “Si tú en mi eleción lo pones, / tu gusto pretendo hacer” (III, 81-82) and wishes that the nobleman: “Gózala, señor, mil años” (III, 97). These bizarre expressions of well wishing (especially the first with its explicit linking of Don Juan's pleasure with Aminta to Batricio's desires, and balance of the first and second person pronouns and conjugations), suggest strongly that Don Juan and Batricio have a tacit accord. Batricio's part in the agreement is a simple one: he must be a gracious loser. His graciousness comes naturally to him, as Batricio is genuinely beholden to Don Juan for providing him the excuse to shun the roles of lover and of husband. The surrogate role of Don Juan is symbolized on stage when, immediately after this exchange, Belisa, Aminta's maid, hears Don Juan and thinks he is Batricio: “… pienso que viene, / que nadie en la casa pisa / de un desposado, tan recio” (III, 137-39).¹⁸ Shortly after, Aminta, hearing the Burlador, asks: “¿Quién llama a Aminta? / Es mi Batricio?” (III, 201-02). Batricio's displacement by Don Juan bears striking resemblances to Mota's. Like that one, it not only expresses the burlado's feelings about women and the sexual threat they pose but shields him from this menace: Because of Don Juan's “graciosa burla” (III, 441) of Aminta, over which she will cry forever (“siempre la llorará”: III, 443), Batricio will be free of any fear for his honor.

As we have seen, misogyny is so powerful and profound a psychological force in El burlador de Sevilla that it obscures differences in characters as unlike as Mota and Don Juan and Batricio and Don Juan. Beneath the skin of Octavio, a noble, courses the blood of the peasant Batricio (Martin 277). Like Batricio, Octavio, in John Varey's words, is “willing to believe the worst of womankind” (214). When he discovers that Isabela has given herself to another man, he, like Batricio, attributes his beloved's actions not to an individual deficiency on her part but to woman's endemic moral frailty: “la mujer más constante / es, en efeto, mujer” (I, 357-358). His exclamations moments before, “¡Oh, mujer! Ley tan terrible / de honor” (I, 339-40) establish that the fear of woman's perfidy makes the weight of honor as insupportable to him as it is to Batricio. Like Batricio, finally, his distrust of his mistress precedes any grounds she may provide for his distrust. In his first appearance on stage (before he learns of Isabela's liaison with Don Juan), he speaks of his jealous condition. Its intensity is such that to describe it he resorts to phrases used to depict the sufferings of mariners desperate for lack of a sailing wind, “en calma” (Castro 155), and souls in purgatory, “siempre en pena” (MacCurdy 99). His “pensamientos de Isabela” (I, 203), his desire to “guarda[r] ausente y presente / el castillo del honor” (I, 207-208) [lo] tienen … en calma” (I, 204), and “siempre en pena” (206).

Octavio and Batricio share an abhorrence of marriage (Feal Deibe, En nombre 24). Batricio flees this union with Aminta because it seems to promise inevitable sexual humiliation. Octavio is equally hostile to the idea of marrying Isabela. He desires only, in his servant Ripio's phrase, “amor[es] impertinente[s]” (I, 210). With Isabela, he seeks, “… porfialla, / regalalla y adoralla, / y aguardar que se rindiera” (I, 224-26). He becomes enraged when Ripio suggests that he marry Isabela, denouncing his man as “necio” (I, 231), and deriding marriage as fit only for “lacayo[s] o lavandera[s]” (I, 232).¹⁹

Octavio's hostility to the notion of marrying her, articulated in this exchange, makes explicit the illicit character of his passion for Isabela. This quality is connected in a significant way to Don Juan's seduction of Isabela, as her dialogue with the Burlador immediately after the seduction establishes. It makes clear that she surrendered herself to him because the man she took to be Octavio promised to marry her. Don Juan's pledge to wed her (“Duquesa, de nuevo os juro / de cumplir el dulce sí” (I, 3-4)) and her response “¿Mis glorias serán verdades, / promesas y ofrecimientos … ?” (I, 5-6) indicate that the Burlador used the promise of marriage to persuade Isabela to sleep with him. This is underscored by his phrase “de nuevo,” a reference to a pledge of marriage which could only have taken place earlier in the seduction. Seeing and hearing this, viewers would conclude that, as Don Juan pleaded and cajoled, he became aware of Isabela's wish to wed Octavio and exploited that desire. Realizing this, the audience would then see a connection between the refusal of Octavio to wed Isabela and Don Juan's impersonation of him. Don Juan is successful with Isabela because he seems to offer her what Octavio denies her—a legitimate union.²⁰ This connection means that the Burlador's deceitful vow not only manifests his own cynicism towards the feelings of women but mirrors and is contingent upon the Count's for its expression.

The links between the actions of Don Juan and the hostility to women of Octavio and the other burlados remind us that the shadowy figure Don Juan is as much a function as a character.²¹ His function, as several readings of the play have demonstrated, is to punish women (Feal Deibe “El burlador …”; 301; Wardropper 69; Valbuena Prat 110-11). And the crime for which women must suffer is their sexuality. This sin demands humiliation because, in one way or another, male humiliation is what uncontrolled female sexual expression threatens. Before the perfunctory mass betrothals at the end of the play, each of the offending females undergoes a particular abasement. With Isabela the sinner is made to hate the sin and herself. She “es de llorar mientras tuviere vida” (III, 336) because “en la esparcida voz [está su] agravio” (III, 334). Ana is banished to the convent de las Descalzas (III, 692) where, surrounded by virgins of marble and those of flesh and blood, she may contemplate her descent into depravity. A particularly demeaning humiliation is apportioned to Aminta. This victim continues to believe Don Juan's promise of marriage: “estas dos semanas, / no ha de caer en el chiste” (III, 437-438).

In addition to punishing women, Don Juan's seduction-impersonations serve yet another more subtle role: they vitalize the preconceptions of the burlados concerning female lasciviousness and treachery.²² By making or appearing to make these women sleep with him and betray their lovers. Don Juan bolsters the burlados' convictions about women. Because of Don Juan each of these men can confidently say to himself, “la mujer más constante / es, en efeto, mujer” (I, 357-58).

The breakdown in the conventional opposition between victim and victimizer, which we have just seen, along with the realization of Don Juan's functional quality, helps explain an important mystery surrounding El burlador de Sevilla and its protagonist—the motiveless quality of Don Juan's actions, the fact that he is not driven by any articulated passion, anger, hatred, or sexual need to humiliate women. His actions seem unmotivated precisely because they are not so much personally his but symbolic expressions of the poison infecting the burlados (and perhaps the other misogynists in the play as well) with whom he is unwittingly involved in a complicitous union. These men are the spirit of misogyny in the culture, and he is their agent.²³ Through his actions, Don Juan of course also symbolizes misogyny; in fact, precisely because of the purposelessness and motivelessness of his cruelty towards women, he is the supreme example of this impulse.²⁴

Notes

1. The presence and function of other “secret sharer” relationships have been observed in Tirsian drama. For a discussion of the links between Don Juan and Catalinón in El burlador de Sevilla, see Hesse; between a noble and a peasant in El vergonzoso en palacio, see Conlon “Sexual Passion and Marriage …” (9).

2. Bruce Wardropper observes, “A completely pessimistic view of woman is taken by all of the male characters” (69). See also Ayala (8).

3. Singer claims that Lundelius' analysis of the women in the play is “so essentially correct [as to be] difficult to argue against” (67).

4. Comments by other figures critical of women also accepted by Lundelius as the equivalent of thematic statements include Catalinón's reference to his master as “el castigo de las mujeres.” She maintains that this line “implies the … guilt” (12) of the women Don Juan seduces. Her conclusions made a few sentences later, that, in the moral vision of this play their humiliations are “richly merited punishments” (12), in part builds on that quotation. Just as the psychology of the burlados was sacrificed to make them into spokesmen for the author, a critical element of Catalinón's dramatic characters, his role as gracioso, is ignored here. Overlooked is the fact that since the gracioso figure characteristically employs comic hyperbole, castigo does not necessarily suggest moral censure in this context; it perhaps merely signifies punishment in a vague and jocular sense, as in, “This job is the punishment for my sins.” There is no obvious reason why it should be taken more literally than the gracioso's description of Don Juan as the “langosta de mujeres” (II, 436), or more seriously than his suggestion that a public pronouncement should warn the women of Spain of the danger Don Juan represents (II, 435-444).

5. The doubtful logic and unsubstantiated assertions Feal Deibe employs to maintain the position that women in El burlador de Sevilla are sexually corrupt point to the tenuousness of the misogynic interpretation of this play. In his discussion of Ana, for example, he connects two facts: that Ana has returned from Lisbon and that “Lisboa” ‘Lisbon’ is the name of the red light district of Seville. He concludes that since “ha pasado precisamente a Sevilla desde Lisboa [Ana]” (En nombre 14), it follows that she “se confunde con ‘lo peor de Portugal’” (En nombre 15). He attempts to turn Aminta into an Eve figure by connecting the name of the town, Dos Hermanas, where the peasant woman lives, with a reference made in a discussion between Mota and Don Juan to two sisters who are prostitutes. He concludes: “la novia de Dos Hermanas debe, de algún modo, asociarse con esas dos pecadoras” (En nombre 17). His argument for the corruption of Isabela—that she unconsciously wishes to be seduced by Don Juan (En nombre 10) is not supported by textual evidence. It ignores, moreover, the conspicuous fact that she does not know that she is sleeping with Don Juan, as her address to “Duque Octavio” makes clear.

6. Explicitly in the case of Lundelius' study, and perhaps implicitly in the work of other critics who insist that the view of the burlados and the play's other misogynists represents that of the burlador's creator, is the desire to counter the notion that Tirso is one of “the more extravagant admirers and champions of womankind” (Lundelius 5) common in earlier scholars, notably Blanca de los Ríos. The need to right a distortion, an overemphasis on but one tendency in Tirsian drama, is well taken, but does not justify a Newtonian counter—distortion which interprets Tirso's women as Eve-like, or morally spineless, or lascivious. The women Don Juan deceives are not spotless paragons of feminine virtue, but none is sluttish or promiscuous, and each wishes to be faithful to one man. True, as some critics are quick to point out, the women in the play are willing to surrender themselves sexually to the men they hope to marry, but this would hardly make them despicable to a contemporary audience. Many admirable unmarried women in Spanish literature of this period give themselves to men, including such agreeable Tirsian heroines as Madalena in El vergonzoso en palacio, Doña Juana in Don Gil de las calzas verdes, and Doña Violante in La villana de Vallecas.

   Those who see Tirso's women either as expressions of a rosy benevolence to or a blind resentment of females on their creator's part do a disservice to the most astute and sensitive student of the female psyche in Golden Age drama. He invests the female characters in El burlador with faults—Isabela is calculating, Ana headstrong, Tisbea self-satisfied and Aminta credulous, but these faults do not make them damnable to their creator, guilty of the suspicions of the burlados or deserving of the humiliations by Don Juan.

7. The authorship of both El condenado por desconfiado and El burlador de Sevilla, though traditionally accepted as Tirso's, is controversial. A detailed defense of Tirso's paternity of either play is quite beyond the scope of this essay, but a major reason for including both works in the Mercedarian's canon is the extraordinary psychological perspicacity they demonstrate. No dramatist of the Golden Age reveals such insight into the human mind as Tirso, and no playwright is so capable of so subtly implying the existence of a functioning unconscious mind from individual, sometimes, seemingly unrelated traits of a character's behavior and speech as he does with the burlados here and with Paulo and Enrico in El condenado por desconfiado.

   A motif of El burlador de Sevilla which, as will be discussed in the text, links it with other plays by Tirso is sexual deviancy—Mota's prurient obsession with prostitutes, Octavio's indignant rejection of licit sexuality, Batricio's eager acceptance of the role of cuckold, and Don Juan's gratuitous cruelty to women. Among Golden Age dramatists this interest in the sexually aberrant is singularly conspicuous in Tirso (Sullivan “Tirso …” 811). In particular, the indirect manifestation of sexually aberrant attitudes and behavior, sexual deviancy as expressions of some unconscious impulse or dread, such as we see here, points to the pen of Tirso as to no other dramatist of the Siglo de Oro.

   For a discussion of the controversy over the authorship of El burlador de Sevilla, see the bibliography on the subject in Claramonte 67-68.

   For a discussion of the psychology of the characters in El condenado por desconfiado, see Conlon “Enrico …,” Darst, and Pérez.

8. An example of this is in El vergonzoso en palacio. There Madalena, pretending to slumber, communicates her sexual desire for her tutor by feigned sleep talking. In another variation of “engañar con la verdad” in the same play, Madalena's sister, Serafina, exposes a heretofore unacknowledged aspect of herself, when, rehearsing for a holiday play the role of a jealous man, she loses control of herself and passionately kisses her lady-in-waiting, Juana.

9. Amón, immediately after he has raped his sister Tamar, excoriates her in the most vile terms calling her “arpia” (III, 4), “ponzoña” (III, 7), monstruo” (III, 9), and “veneno” (III, 2). He then asks these rhetorical questions: “¿Qué yo te quise es posible?” (III, 11); and “¡Quién por no verte ni oirte / sordo naciera y sin ojos!” (III, 39-40). This diatribe ends with this order to his servants: “Echadme de aquí / esta víbora, esta peste” (III, 79-80).

10. In Gerald Wade's psychoanalytical study of Don Juan, he observes that a “preference for prostitutes,” according to the psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, is a “cryptoperversion.” In many cases the “perverse person sees … [these] creature[s as being] without humanity[.]” and he “delight[s]” in “humiliat[ing]” (35) them. While Wade does not mention Mota specifically, the application of this description to this character is obvious.

11. Mota's characteristic use of projection is itself a form of fixation. In this respect, according to Anna Freud, he is like “a number of people [who] remain arrested in the development of the superego and never quite complete the internalization of the critical process” (119). Whereas in normal people “vehement indignation at someone else's wrongdoing is the precursor” of self-criticism, in the fixated individual it is a “substitute for guilty feelings on its own account” (119).

12. The reactions which Mota displays occur in adolescents who consort with prostitutes because their sexual contacts provoke insupportable psychological tensions from barely repressed unconscious associations and impulses (S. Freud 171). A major tension arises because youths begin to see their mothers as prostitutes of sorts, concluding that “the difference between [their] mother[s] and whore[s] is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing” (S. Freud 171). Freud perceives that the adolescents' “unconscious relation” between their response to prostitutes and their feelings for their mothers produces in them (and, presumably, in fixated adult men) the sort of intense ambivalence we see in Mota (170).

13. The precise definition of “dar perro muerto,” according to the Diccionario de Autoridades, is as follows: “Se toma también por el engaño ú daño que se padece en algun ajuste ò contrato, ò por la incomodidád u desconveniencia que se tiene, esperando por mucho tiempo a alguno, o para que execute alguna … cosa” (232). In this play, the term is specifically used in terms of cheating prostitutes, according to some editors of El burlador like MacCurdy (116n) and Oliver Cabañes (161n). However, two points suggest that the woman involved here, Beatriz, is a mistress, not a prostitute. First, there is no mention of cheating her out of money; second, if she were merely involved with Mota on a financial basis, it would not be important—and thus a burla—that she believe Don Juan to be Mota. The psychological dimension of the bed trick here is emphasized by its lack of any utilitarian purpose. Unlike the use of this device in other plays of this period (such as Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well, where Helena employs it to reclaim her husband, Bertram), there is no practical need being served here.

14. According to Castro, Vejel refers to the village Vejer de la Frontera in Cádiz, and is a play on the word for aged “vejez” (l94n).

15. That the dramatic function of the cape is, by identifying its wearer as Mota, to link Don Juan and Mota seems obvious. This is underscored by Don Juan himself when, seeing Mota, he observes: “Luego que la capa vi, / que érades vos conocí” (II, 453-54). It is definitely not a “phallic symbol,” as Feal Deibe asserts (“El burlador …” 307), because in shape and function it clearly bears no resemblance or analogical connection to the male organ.

16. For a detailed discussion of Batricio's behavior from a psychoanalytical point of view, see Conlon “Batricio. …”

17. To interpret Aminta, as Lundelius does, as a “giddy, silly girl” who succumbs to Don Juan “after a little flattery and a few tactical lies” (11) ignores the central irony of the whole episode in Dos Hermanas: It is not Aminta who has been seduced by Don Juan's lies but Batricio. She capitulates to Don Juan only after he brings home to her the awful truth that “que [la] olvida” Batricio (III, 226).

    In his discussion of Aminta, Serge Maurel points out how the circumstances of her seduction lessen her responsibility morally and indict those around her. He observes that Aminta's surrender to Don Juan is ultimately the consequence of her abandonment by her father and Batricio, “par ceux qui auraient mission de la protéger” (570), who “ne s’ opposent aux prétentions du seigneur” (571). Maurel's conclusion about the seduction of Aminta by Don Juan, that “les démissions des autres font sa victoire facile” (571) is difficult to dispute.

18. Feal Deibe asserts that the confusion of Don Juan and Batricio here “revela, al menos inconscientemente, su deseo [de Aminta] de acoger a don Juan” (En nombre 19). His reasoning—that a grammatical ambiguity in the speech of Belisa confusing Don Juan with Batricio—symbolizes not an important likeness the two men share but the perfidy of Aminta is illogical on its face. The fact that Don Juan does not disguise himself with Aminta bolsters this position, this critic asserts, because it indicates her desire for Don Juan (En nombre 19). This whole argument ignores the obvious facts that the peasant woman seeks to be faithful to Batricio, repeatedly expresses her feeling for him, and apparently has a deep desire to be married to him, but in the end comes to the painful conclusion that he has abandoned her.

19. Given Octavio's feelings, his betrothal to Isabela (like the other betrothals) at the end of the play seems to be one more example of a theme common in Tirso's drama—the cynicism of marriage as a social institution. For a discussion of marriage in Tirso, see Ruiz Ramón 211.

20. Since she offers no textual substantiation, Lundelius' assertion that Doña Isabela “had expected to surrender [to Duque Octavio on this occasion], though only on condition of his ‘palabra de matrimonio’” (8) is presumably based on the fact that she meets Don Juan in the dark and would not have done so except for a planned sexual assignation. This is mere dramatic backtracking to action which took place before the play began, without anything actually said during the play to justify it. Moreover, this thesis raises three questions: How did Don Juan know about the tryst? How did he arrange to replace Octavio? And finally, why does Octavio make no mention of this assignation after he learns of Isabela's “betrayal”?

21. Ayala suggests something like this when he observes: “‘carece’ de una psicología [Don Juan], en contraste con los que lo rodean … dentro de la misma obra” (9).

22. Feal Deibe seems to be making a similar point when he observes that a function of Don Juan is to be “la medida en que la culpa se proyecta totalmente en la mujer” (“El burlador …” 301).

23. Peter Evans in an undeveloped observation hints at this idea, but limits its application to one character: “The anger [towards women] 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 victimizing women” (243-44).

24. The author wishes to thank his brother Thomas Conlon for his generous editorial assistance and suggestions in this essay.

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