SOURCE: “Tirso de Molina's Idea of ‘Tragedia,’” in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Vol. 40, No. 1, Summer, 1988, pp. 41-52.

[In the following essay, Darst concludes that de Molina's use of the word tragedia is more in line with Medieval Latin tradition than Aristotelian precepts.]

Tirso de Molina's authorship of more than 80 extant dramas makes him the most prolific playwright of his time after Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Tirso's plays cover the entire spectrum of dramatic groups, which modern critics have labelled with generic names like comedias de costumbres, comedias de capa y espada, comedias de santos, comedias mitológicas, and comedias histórico-legendarias. His opinions about the theater of his time are well-known, because in his prose miscellany Cigarrales de Toledo (1624) he presented a brilliant defense of the comedia nueva and its privilege to imitate the contemporary mores and customs of the natural world rather than those of the ancient world described by Aristotle and Horace (Darst 83-106). Specifically, Tirso defended the right to ignore the previously venerated rules of length (both physical time and the unity of 24 hours), verisimilitude (mixture of noble and peasant characters, historicity, licentious portrayals of noble-born people), place (specifically, that the events in a play must transpire in one locale), and decorum (especially sexual deviations) by appealing to the ubiquitous “licencia de Apolo.”

It is clear, then, that Tirso rejected outright the bulk of received opinion about theater. Given this fact, one should be able to assume that the Mercedarian would also spurn the nomenclature associated with Aristotelian and Horatian criticism, especially words associated with the specific genres of tragedy and comedy. It is possible to determine in a general way Tirso's notion of what these expressions meant by examining the generic terms he used in the last lines of his plays to describe the events dramatized on stage. In effect, a study of the last several lines of the 82 plays in Blanca de los Ríos's Obras dramáticas completas reveals that Tirso preferred the designations comedia, which he appended to 15 plays, historia, used for 13 plays, and ejemplo, used for 11 plays. He also used rarely the terms tragedia, in four plays, parte, in three plays, and tradición, suceso, and novela, each in one play. Thirty three of the plays in question have no specific designation, although most of these do have the title of the work in the last lines. While the nimiety of comedia, historia, and ejemplo is of great significance in any development of an aesthetics of Tirsian dramaturgy, this present study will undertake solely the task of determining Tirso's meaning and use of the word tragedia. It will attempt to show that the Mercedarian's use of the designation was as opposed to Aristotelian-Horatian ideas on theater as was his prose defense of drama in general in the Cigarrales de Toledo. The results of this study will also hopefully defuse the polemic among present-day critics concerning the purported “problem” of Spanish tragedy (MacCurdy, ch. 1), since it will show that Classical precepts cannot properly be applied to the plays that Tirso and his fellow dramatists called tragedia.

The four plays under scrutiny are Los amantes de Teruel (c. 1615), Amazonas en las Indias (c. 1630), Escarmientos para el cuerdo (c. 1620), and La venganza de Tamar (c. 1620). Los amantes de Teruel develops the Romeo and Juliet theme. Marsilla and Isabel are secretly in love, but discover that Rufino, Isabel's father, is planning to marry his daughter to Don Gonzalo, the local millionaire. Marsilla exacts a promise from Rufino to delay the wedding for three years and three days so that Marsilla can become rich enough to marry Isabel. Rufino agrees and Marsilla departs to seek his fortune fighting against the Arabs. He succeeds, but arrives in Teruel a day late, although in time to see his beloved leave the church on the arm of Don Gonzalo. With nothing more to live for, Marsilla literally drops dead at the feet of Isabel. The next day, at his funeral, she throws herself on his body to die also from frustrated love.

Amazonas en las Indias dramatizes the controversial political fortunes of Gonzalo Pizarro in Peru. Pizarro returns from an expedition to the Amazon river to find his brother (the more famous Francisco) assassinated and Diego de Almagro in full rebellion against the Spanish Crown. Pizarro helps the royal chancellor Vaca de Castro in subduing Almagro, and then retires to his estate in the Peruvian mountains. Meanwhile, the viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela passes strict laws against slavery and imprisons many of Gonzalo's conquistador friends, causing the Lima hierarchy to arrest the viceroy and to ship him back to Spain. The rebels name Gonzalo Pizarro the governor of Lima, and attempt to make him king of the Incas. Gonzalo refuses to join the rebellion, but is nevertheless arrested and executed by the royal authorities.

Escarmientos para el cuerdo dramatizes the fortunes of Manuel de Sosa, who seduced Doña María de Silva in Portugal and then left with their son, Diaguito, for Goa, where he married Leonor de Sá and fathered another son. María arrives in Goa to claim her fiancé and discovers his double life. Manuel, forced to choose between the two women, again tricks María and sails with Leonor and both children for Portugal. The ship founders, however, and the family is forced to bargain for food and water with African savages, who nevertheless eventually slaughter them all.

La venganza de Tamar is the well-known Biblical story of Amón's infatuation for his half-sister Tamar. He brutally rapes her and then refuses to have anything more to do with her. David, suspecting that Tamar's brother Absalón will seek vengeance, tries to intercede on his son's behalf, but to no avail. Absalón and Tamar trick Amón into coming to a village feast and then murder him at the banquet table.

The final verses of these dramas display a style and vocabulary appropriate to the disastrous endings. In Los amantes de Teruel, Rufino observes, over the bodies of the star-crossed Marsilla and Isabel, that “esta tragedia que veis, / y yo lloro, causa amor” (1: 1397). In Escarmientos para el cuerdo, a mariner calls the deaths of Manuel de Sosa, his wife Leonor, and their two children at the hands of African cannibals “el más trágico suceso / que conservaron anales / que desdichas escribieron,” and exclaims at the sight of the bodies of Leonor and the young Diaguito:

Aquí si pueden los ojos
sufrir del scita fiero
espectáculo tan triste,
está el teatro funesto
(Descubre a doña Leonor, ya difunta,
y a Diaguito ensangrentado.)
en que la ciega fortuna
tragedia eterniza el tiempo
para escarmiento de amantes,
y éste es el acto postrero. (3: 259)

La venganza de Tamar ends with the Autor declaring: “Y de Tamar la historia prodigiosa / acaba aquí en tragedia lastimosa” (3: 404). Finally, Amazonas en las Indias closes with:

Este fue el fin lastimoso de don Gonzalo; la fama de lo contrario ha mentido. La malicia, ¿qué no engaña? Lea historias el discreto que ellas su inocencia amparan, y supla en esta tragedia, quien lo fuere, nuestras faltas. (3: 734)

One can make a number of deductions from the use of words like these at the end of the four plays in question. All four dramas present rigorously historical facts taken from bonafide sources. La venganza de Tamar has Biblical sources (2 sam.) and owes much to Flavius Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews. Los amantes de Teruel was a popular legend at the time previously dramatized by Rey de Artieda, from whom Tirso borrowed entire speeches and scenes. Escarmientos para el cuerdo follows a verse chronicle in Portuguese by Jerónimo Corte Real. Amazonas en las Indias, although laced with mythic lore concerning Amazons, traces faithfully the rise and fall of Gonzalo Pizarro during the Spanish conquest of Peru. The plays are more than mere history, however, because they end with what are essentially very pathetic events, and they are usually sad from at least the middle of the play to the close. All the works also end in the death of the protagonist, which is not true for any of the plays Tirso designated solely historia except for Tan largo me lo fiáis (whose “esta verdadera historia” line [2:633] is replaced in the printed version by the title “El convidado de piedra”; [2:686]). The manner of death is unimportant, so it is not a factor in the denomination of the dramas as tragedies. Likewise, there does not appear to be any cause and effect relationship between the moral character of the protagonist and his demise. Nobility of spirit coupled with a self-blinding tragic flaw, as prescribed by traditional Aristotelian criticism, does not justify the deaths of Marsilla, Manuel, or Gonzalo Pizarro. It may be possible to show that their actions in some way may have contributed to their bad luck; but one cannot say that because Manuel tricked his first fiancée he died with his sons and second wife in the desert, or that Marsilla committed any particular sin that caused him to arrive a day late, or that Gonzalo Pizarro should not have been so loyal to his king. Marsilla dies mysteriously of love, as does Isabel. Gonzalo goes willingly to be decapitated for crimes against the State he did not commit. He, like Marsilla, is totally innocent. Manuel and Leonor die at the hands of savages in Africa. She is certainly not guilty of any specific misdeed, and he repents convincingly of his selfish acts with María. Amón, on the other hand, does rape his sister; and the manner of his death, with knife and fork in his hands at a banquet table, reflects, through the technique of contrapassio, his sin of the appetites. Nonetheless, the last lines give the emphasis to David's grief that Absalón should have murdered his brother thusly out of vengeance: “Llorará David / como Jacob, en sabiendo / si a Josef mató la envidia, / que a Amón la venganza ha muerto” (3:404). In all but this last play, the author makes it quite clear that the deaths are due more to bad luck than to a sinful act or some subtle hamartia on the part of the protagonist. Throughout Escarmientos para el cuerdo, Manuel experiences presages of his ill fortune (like the fall he takes in the middle of the second Act) and declaims his “desventura,” “fortuna,” “desdicha,” and “hado.” Gonzalo Pizarro's impending death is a leitmotif in Amazonas en las Indias because the Amazon, Menalipe, is a pythoness who constantly foretells what another character in the play will eventually call “la muerte desdichada / del español más valiente” (3:734). Marsilla is beset continually by bad timing, since he always arrives too late to receive the boons he feels should be his; and he repeatedly complains against Fortune and Luck. Amón is in a different category, since he is the only one of the four who is brutally and suddenly murdered. Marsilla, Manuel, and Gonzalo all accept death as the result of their presaged fate. The deaths of the first two, in fact, almost could be considered suicides; and Gonzalo willingly decided to die rather than to have himself crowned king of Peru.

In terms of Aristotelian tragedy, the four plays lack all the critical precepts. The Greek lexicon simply does not apply to the plays Tirso called tragedia. Clearly, then, for Tirso the term tragedia is not of Aristotelian-Horatian lineage; yet the four plays do have much in common, and their author at the least put them together in a genre he considered to justify the use of the word tragedia. Indeed, Tirso's utilization of the term is of an ancestry as pure and noble as that associated with the Aristotelian usage; for by the time the Mercedarian began to write the plays in question, two very different meanings for tragedia, as it applies to drama, had become popular. One was the recently discovered Aristotelian meaning with its three unities, its insistence on cause and effect, and its unique nomenclature of spoudaios, hamartia, and catharsis that was introduced into Spain by Alonso López Pinciano and continued by Francisco Cascales and Jusepe Antonio González de Salas. Most modern scholars, whose names and works are legion, have used the Aristotelian notions of these Spanish thinkers when they applied the term tragedia to plays by Golden Age dramatists (Moir). Yet there was another, better-known, meaning at the time for tragedia which has received very little attention. It is the popular sense of the word that evolved from the Latin grammarians through the Medieval thinkers to the Golden Age writers, these latter using it to present a “modern” idea of serious drama opposed to the “ancient” one based on Aristotle and the Classical unities.

The major Latin source on tragedy is the De Fabula by a fourth-century grammarian named Evanthius which was always included with the De Comedia of Donatus in the commentaries on Terence. The pertinent section of what Evanthius wrote is as follows:

Of the many differences between tragedy and comedy, the foremost are these: In comedy the fortunes of men are middle-class, the dangers are slight, and the ends of the actions are happy; but in tragedy everything is the opposite—the characters are great men, the fears are intense, and the ends disastrous. In comedy the beginning is troubled, the end tranquil; in tragedy events follow the reverse order. And in tragedy the kind of life is shown that is to be shunned; while in comedy the kind is shown that is to be sought after. Finally, in comedy the story is always fictitious; while tragedy often has a basis in historical truth.¹ (43)

The second most important source is the late fourth-century grammarian Diomedes, who had written in his Artis Grammaticae the famous dictum that “tragedy concerns heroes embracing adverse fortune:” tragoedia est heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio, which he credited to one Theophrastus (487). Diomedes also gave the etymology for the word tragedy, “which back then authors of tragedy called TRAGOS, that is ‘goat,’ the reward which was offered for the song”² (487), which Diomedes substantiated by citing from Horace's Ars Poetica the verses that begin “the poet who first competed in tragic song for a paltry goat” (carmine quo tragico vilem certavit ob hircum, v. 220).

The most popular purveyor of these notions to the Renaissance was Dante Alighieri, who included an amalgam of the Latin definitions in his letter to Can Grande:

Now comedy is a certain kind of poetical narration which differs from all others. It differs, then, from tragedy in its subject-matter, in that tragedy at the beginning is admirable and placid, but at the end or issue is foul and horrible. And tragedy is so called from tragos, a goat, and oda; as it were a “goat-song,” that is to say foul like a goat, as appears from the tragedies of Seneca. Whereas comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily, as appears from the comedies of Terence. And for this reason it is the custom of some writers in their salutation to say by way of greeting: “a tragic beginning and a comic ending to you!” Tragedy and comedy differ likewise in their style of language; for that of tragedy is high-flown and sublime, while that of comedy is unstudied and lowly.³ (200-01)

In Spain the first commentators of Tragedy all use the words from this Medieval Latin tradition. Juan de Mena followed Dante closely when he wrote in the mid-fifteenth century: “Tragédico es dicha la escritura que habla de altos hechos y por bravo y soberbio y alto estilo, la cual manera siguieron Homero, Virgilio, Lucano y Estacio; por la escritura tragédica, puesto que comienza en altos principios, su manera es acabar en tristes y desastrados fines” (Preceptiva 53). Hernán Núñez later in the century used the same materials and incorporated the words of Diomedes: “La definición de la tragedia según Diomedes gramático es ésta: tragedia est heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio, que quiere decir: la tragedia es materia de los casos adversos y caídas de grandes príncipes, por lo cual siempre los fines tiene lúgubres y tristes” (Preceptiva 56).

Throughout the sixteenth century these definitions of Evanthius and Diomedes continued to be the sources for the declarations on tragedy by Bartolomé de Torres Naharro (Preceptiva 61), Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola (Preceptiva 63, 65, 67) and Juan de la Cueva (Preceptiva 70-71). If these men were aware of an Aristotelian definition of tragedy based on other principles, they did not inform their readers of it. The literary scholars were also evidently unimpressed by Aristotle, if Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco can be accepted as a representative figure. When he penned his definition of tragedia for his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), he used exclusively the words of Evanthius (973), as he used solely those of Donatus for his definition of comedia (341-42). Nevertheless, Alfredo Hermenegildo, a leading scholar on sixteenth-century tragedy, seems oblivious to the origins for these writers' remarks (although he does acknowledge the imitation of Senecan drama). Hermenegildo illogically uses the later Aristotelian critics to explain Renaissance tragedy, despite the fact that these early tragedians never mentioned Aristotle and the seventeenth-century Aristotelians never mentioned the early tragedians.

The arguments concerning the Aristotelian notions of spoudaios, decorum, peripeteia, anagnorisis, catharsis, hamartia, and the Classical unities that López Pinciano, Cascales, and González de Salas present in their books are well known (Darst 83-106) and need no review here. Suffice it to say that these three critics toe the line on Aristotelian tragedy, offering very little new material not already discussed by the Italian theorists of the previous century. One could, nevertheless, logically expect their ideas to influence heavily the words and terminology of the Golden Age writers; but such is not the case. In fact, the seventeenth-century commentators of Tirso's generation seem to be as unaware of Aristotle's thoughts on the matter as were their sixteenth-century counterparts. Luis Alfonso de Carballo (Preceptiva 93), Juan de la Cueva (Preceptiva 121), Cristóbal de Virués (Preceptiva 122), Carlos Boyl (Preceptiva 154), and Lope de Vega (Preceptiva 127-28) all utilize exclusively the Latin definitions of tragedy. Lope, for example, who knew Aristotle and cited Robortello's commentaries, referred to the word tragedia only to make fun of it, and this in spite of attaching to 42 of his extant dramas the words tragedia or tragicomedia (Morby). In his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, he used tragedia three times; and in all cases it was in the term's Latin sense. Comedy, said Lope, ‘’trata / las acciones humildes y plebeyas, / y la tragedia las reales y altas” (vv. 58-60). “La Ilíada / de la tragedia fue famoso ejemplo, / a cuya imitación llamé epopeya / a mi Jerusalem y añadí ‘trágica’” (vv. 89-92). “Por argumento la tragedia tiene / la historia, y la comedia el fingimiento” (vv. 111-12). In his introduction to Las Almenas de Toro, dedicated to Guillén de Castro, the Fénix commented that “la comedia imita las humildes acciones de los hombres, como siente Aristóteles, y Robertollo Utinense comentándole: at vero tragedia praestantiores imitatur; de donde se sigue la clara grandeza y superioridad del estilo” (3: 766). Yet Lope followed this statement with the observation that the present drama was not one: “Pero como en esta historia del Rey don Sancho, entre su persona y las demás que son dignas de la tragedia, por la costumbre de España, que tiene ya mezcladas, contra el arte, las personas y los estilos, no está lejos el que tiene, por algunas partes, de la grandeza referida, de cuya variedad tomó principio la tragicomedia” (3: 767). Finally, in the prologue to his El castigo sin venganza, Lope called the play a tragedia, “advirtiendo que está escrita al estilo Español, no por la antiguedad Griega, y seueridad Latina, huyendo de las sombras, Nuncios, y Coros; porque el gusto puede mudar los preceptos, como el vso los trages, y el tiempo las costumbres” (121). None of these references have anything to do with Aristotle's definition of tragedy, nor do they even take seriously the idea of tragedy. On the contrary, they tend to negate the genre's very existence by proposing a mixture of forms (epic and tragedy in the Arte nuevo, comedy and tragedy in the two prologues).

Tirso, for his part, never made any statements at all about tragedia other than those that surround the use of the word in his plays. There he wrote “rigor de los hados inconstantes” (1: 1397), “el más trágico suceso / que conservaron anales / que desdichas escribieron,” “espectáculo tan triste,” “teatro funesto,” “espectáculo tan triste” (3: 259-60), “historia prodigiosa … / … lastimosa” (3: 404), “muerte desdichada,” “desgracias,” “fin lastimoso” (3: 734). All of these phrases document that the Mercedarian was using the notion in the Medieval Latin tradition rather than the Classical Greek one. Diomedes, Evanthius, and Dante couch the tragic action in terms opposite from the comic action and stress the unhappy ending of a true historical event: exitus funesti, heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio, in fine sive exitu est foetida et horribilis, de historia fide. Tirso follows their example and even their language when he describes these plays he designated tragedia.

If there is any relation at all between Aristotelian ideas—including those about tragedy—and Tirso's dramaturgy, it is probably in the plays in which the Mercedarian placed the word ejemplo: Como han de ser los amigos, La ninfa del cielo, El celoso prudente, Ventura te dé Dios, hijo, La adversa fortuna de don Alvaro de Luna, Quien da luego da dos veces. El condenado por desconfiado, Celos con celos se curan, Quien no cae no se levanta, La firmeza en la hermosura, and La mujer que manda en casa (a play in which Abdías predicts a “trágico fin a tu casa” [1: 623] for Jezabel, and Raquel calls the murder of Nabot “la impiedad más lasciva, / la más bárbara tragedia / la crueldad más inaudita” [1: 624]). These are for the most part serious works, and many fit within the use of the key term ejemplo by Jusepe Antonio González de Salas who, when defining it, wrote: “La semejanza en los trabajos y la comparación siempre los hizo leves. Doctrina que ninguno ignora, experimentada en el propio desconsuelo; así está expuesta nuestra vida triste a desventuras. Templarán pues los humanos las pasiones suyas con aquellos Ejemplos pintados en la tragedia, que comparados a sus desdichas, podrán ellas parecer menores” (1: 27).

A good case to show how closely tied the notions of ejemplo and tragedia must have been at the time is the peroration in La adversa fortuna de don Alvaro de Luna. In a manuscript written and signed by Antonio Mira de Amescua, the lines read “y acaba aquí la tragedia / de la embidia y la fortuna” (Sánchez-Arce 151); but in a contemporary player's copy (MS 16546 BN) the lines read “y acaba aquí el gran exemplo / de la embidia y la fortuna” (Sánchez-Arce 204). Tirso de Molina's edition of the play, published in his Segunda parte (1635), reads “y con este triste ejemplo / de la envidia y la fortuna” (1: 2039). Whatever the circumstances were between the composition of the two early texts, Tirso evidently did not consider the Don Alvaro play a tragedia when he published it but rather one that would present a moral example to the spectators.

In conclusion, Tirso de Molina's use of the word tragedia is not in line with the Aristotelian precepts of tragedy as they have been known since the Renaissance; rather it follows the popular Medieval Latin tradition embodied in the famous lines tragedia est heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio. While Aristotle's ideas about tragedy can certainly apply to Tirso's serious works in a universal, critical way, since the tragedy of man described by Aristotle is universal, it would be fallacious to use them ad litteram because Tirso never recognized Aristotle's authority on the matter; nor do the words of Alonso López Pinciano, Francisco Cascales, and Jusepe Antonio González de Salas serve much good when examining the plays Tirso named tragedies, since at least he and Lope de Vega never cited these authors nor showed any influence from them. Tirso and Lope utilize words and impressions that developed from the “modern” tradition of Donatus, Evanthius, Diomedes, and Dante; so it is to them that scholars can go to ascertain the historical basis for the idea of tragedy held by Tirso de Molina and his contemporaries.

Notes

1. Inter tragoediam autem et comoediam cum multa tum imprimis hoc distat, quod in comoedia mediocres fortunae hominum, parui impetus periculorum laetique sunt exitus actionum, at in tragoedia omnia contra, ingentes personae, magni timores, exitus funesti habentur; et illic prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario ordine res aguntur; tum quod in tragoedia fugienda uita, in comoedia capessenda exprimitur; postremo quod omnis comoedia de fictis est argumentis, tragoedia saepe de historia fide petitur (1: 21).

2. Tragoedia est heroicae fortunae in adversis comprehensio. A Theophrasto ita definita est. … Quonaim olim actoribus tragicis TRAGOS, ita esta hircus, praemium cantus proponebatur (487).

3. Et est comoedia genus quoddam poëticae narrationis, ab omnibus aliis differens. Differt ergo a tragoedia in materia per hoc, quod tragoedia in principio est admirabilis et quieta, in fine sive exitu est foetida et horribilis; et dicitur propter hoc a “tragos” quod est hircus, et “oda” quasi cantus hircinus, id est foetidus ad modum hirci, ut patet per Senecam in suis tragoediis. Comoedia vero inchoat asperitatem alicuius rei, sed eius materia prospere terminatur, ut patet per Terentium in suis comoediis. Et hinc consueverunt dictatores quidam in suis salutationiibus dicere loco salutis, “tragicum principium, et comicum finem.” Similiter differunt in modo loquendi: elate et sublime tragoedia; comoedia vero remisse et humiliter, sicut vult Oratius in sua Poetica … (200-01).

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