SOURCE: “Love, Matrimony and Desire in the Theatre of Tirso de Molina,” in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Vol. 37, No. 1, Summer, 1985, pp. 83-99.

[In the following essay, Sullivan concludes that the totality of de Molina's true views on love cannot be determined from his plays.]

Tirso studies have been historically bedevilled by a range of problems so various and intransigent that scholars have been understandably reluctant to address large aspects of his drama (such as the theme of love) with any confidence. I am referring to the almost total absence of firm dates of composition for the comedias (despite Ruth Lee Kennedy's lifelong efforts) and the consequent lack of any reliable chronology. The authorship of a large number of his plays has also been challenged (most sweepingly by Margaret Wilson), including many major ones: El burlador de Sevilla; El condenado por desconfiado; El rey don Pedro en Madrid; Los amantes de Teruel among a dozen others.¹ The facts of Tirso's birth, parentage and early life have given rise to a controversy that has raged for almost a hundred years without achieving a resolution, and what is known of the rest of his life is sketchy. As new material comes to light, it tends to fill out our picture of the Mercedarian friar, but not the writer. Other critics such as Cotarelo y Mori and Da. Blanca de los Ríos have dismissed as a fiction the existence of the nephew, Francisco Lucas de Avila, who edited the Partes II-V of his comedias in the 1630's. If true, this skeptical claim would destroy the most obvious theory for the transmission of Tirso's texts from MS to print.

In order to come to grips with an issue as central as the love interest presented in the works of this major dramatist, I have decided to suspend temporarily the problems outlined above by privileging theory above neo-Positivistic archivalism and by looking at the systems of thought implicit in the texts themselves. There are some risks involved in this procedure. We know enough about the fashionable love theories of the day and the climate of theological opinion to set rough ideological parameters for the thought of Tirso de Molina. The next step is to decide how far his own ideas fit or do not fit into these conventional molds. The use of Lacan's theories on Desire, however, is another matter. In discussing the historically determined thought-systems to be presented in sections I and II, the basic interplay will be between Tirso's own ideas and those of his age. In section III, the basic interplay will be between those ideas present in Tirso's texts and our understanding of those texts here and now in the late twentieth century. As we shall see, however, Lacan claimed that his account of the structure of the human psyche was valid for all mankind-the-language-user. If we accept (at least provisionally) this concept of diachronic validity, then the behavior and motivation of Tirso's characters may be analyzed in terms of Lacanian Desire for the very considerable enlightenment that such analysis brings. The reader must be the judge of the results. These will be presented in book-length form in the near future under the title Love, Matrimony and Desire in the Theater of Tirso de Molina.

The Mercedarian priest and polygraph Fray Gabriel Téllez (1581?-1648) is best known to posterity as the creator of the defiant seducer Don Juan Tenorio or—in his Italian incarnation—Don Giovanni. Don Juan, however, is only the most celebrated example in the Mercedarian's theater of erotic love and sexual élan expressed in unusual, not to say deviant, form. More than any other Spanish playwright, Tirso felt drawn to the portrayal of pathological human desire and superhuman energy on the stage, and in so doing became the greatest dramatist of character in the Golden Age. The purpose of my 1976 study, Tirso de Molina & the Drama of the Counter Reformation, was to examine Tirso's special relationship to the philosophical and theological controversies of the late sixteenth century, linking these to his dramatic themes, as well as to his “Baroque” technique and language. There was little room in that treatment for a discussion of interpersonal relationships between characters. I wish now, however, to scrutinize more closely Tirso's attitude towards love and matrimony, and his portrayal of the broader human phenomenon of desire.

The objective of my projected study, then, is to set out in systematic fashion the theoretical bases of Tirso's views on love, matrimony and desire, in a way which will isolate and explain the idiosyncratic nature of these views. Love intrigue and the many faces of desire did, it is true, constitute a perennial and indispensable element of all Golden-Age drama. Tirso was no exception here, but it is the bizarre sexual behavior of his men and women protagonists which has struck successive observers and critics as unique.² Now if love and desire assume strange guises in Tirso, we may ask why this is so. What does it mean? How can it be analyzed? And in a broader sense, can perversity or pathology tell us something about normalcy?

The unwieldy mass of dramatic materials extant from the Spanish seventeenth century (80 plays by Tirso alone, for example; many thousands more by his contemporaries) makes comprehensive or singulatim treatment of love in the comedia a difficult, if not impossible, task. What is required is some theoretical key or framework which would bring this random mass of data under control. But qua Tirso de Molina, the literary artist who inherited the late-Renaissance love conventions of Spain; and qua Fray Gabriel Téllez, the Mercedarian churchman who inherited the late-Renaissance, neo-Scholastic theology of Spain, Tirso himself has provided us with this key. I have been able to discern at least five distinct theories (or subsystems) of love in his theater (courtly, neo-Platonic, mystic, atomistic, love in relation to the honor code); and his comments on the sacrament of marriage, on consanguinity, papal dispensation of impediments, clandestinity, and the canonical legitimacy of marital union, have left us a complex theological deposition on the theory of matrimony. Furthermore, almost all sexual variations with regard to the object of desire that have been documented in modern psychoanalytic literature are also to be found in his theater. Much the most fruitful theoretical approach to the analysis of these sexual aberrations, I believe, is suggested by the thought of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Tirso emerges from this Lacanian scrutiny as a brilliant pre-Freudian analyst, whose frankness, remarkable insight and love of the bizarre led him to an arresting picture of the movements of the psyche which was far ahead of its time.

A partial apology for this kind of hybrid methodology can be made on the basis of its theoretical newness. Though there has been a profound and far-reaching renewal of literary theory during the last decade or so in North America, its effect on Golden-Age theater studies has been limited. The dominant trends in our field are still: 1) neo-Positivistic (editing of texts, establishing facts of biography, bibliography and sources; studies on the physical realities of playhouse construction or staging); or 2) aesthetic-formalist (studies of imagery, verse-pattern frequency, analyses of rhetorical strategies and intertextual influences; semiotics and structuralism); or 3) neo-Aristotelian (thematico-structural analysis of plays in relationship to dramaturgical properties such as Unity of Action, poetic justice, the recognition of guilt by the guilty, etc.). My proposed theoretical approach is drawn straight out of the epoch in question (Renassiance theories of love; theology of matrimony), as well as from the insights of modern, post-Structuralist psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan). This “ancient and modern” theoretical confluence is, I hope to show, mutually self-corroborating, and no analysis of Spanish drama has yet been attempted along these lines.

I—THEORIES OF LOVE IN THE THEATER OF TIRSO DE MOLINA

Though in our modern day, few people subscribe consciously to a specific theory of love, the Renaissance was, so to say, “in love with love” itself. No epoch speculated more actively and abundantly on love's nature, its origins and its meaning. A variety of competing theoretical subsystems grew up therefore, especially in Spain. The first of these, chronologically speaking, was the Medieval courtly-love system (with its beginnings in twelfth-century France). In his celebrated Allegory of Love (1936), C.S. Lewis characterized this system by its pseudo-feudal worship of women (i.e., humility and courtesy), by its adultery, and the “religion of love.”³ To this list, I would add the conception of love as ever unsatiated, ever increasing desire.⁴ The tantalizing dimension of nonsatisfaction is achieved in courtly literature by the invention of divisive obstacles, leading to the lover's near-perpetual separation. The courtly-love theory produced a mannered stylization of amatory rhetoric in fifteenth-century Castilian poetry (the cancioneros). It made its appearance in the Spanish drama as an articulate system in the pioneer eclogues of Juan del Encina, as Antony van Beysterveldt has convincingly shown.⁵

Tirso's major play on the theme of courtly love is his poetic tragedy, Los amantes de Teruel, a Medieval love-legend conveniently updated by Tirso to the reign of Charles V (1520-1555). It displays all the psychological fingerprints of the courtly view of passion. Don Diego Marsilla and Isabel de Segura have been lovers since childhood. In the eyes of Isabel's father, however, Marsilla's lack of fortune makes him ineligible as a husband. The father therefore consents to a time limit or plazo of three years and three days before which Marsilla must make his fortune. Marsilla chooses a life of reckless, semi-suicidal soldiering in North Africa under Charles V. He distinguishes himself, but worldly profit and spoils of war seem to elude him. Rewarded finally by a grateful Emperor, Marsilla returns to Spain perilously close to the deadline, only to discover Isabel the bride of the scheming Don Gonzalo, who has convinced her through trickery that her soldier-lover is dead. Confronting Isabel at last in her bridal chamber and demanding a final kiss, Marsilla is rebuffed and falls dead at Isabel's feet. She, distracted with grief at his funeral in turn, throws herself upon Marsilla's corpse and dies.

This play, often reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet in its story and intense poetry, shows the hero as the perfect courtly lover by his absolute service of Isabel, his reckless deeds performed in her name, and the heretical elevation of his passion over the injunctions of Christian morality. In a characteristically Tirsian twist, the courtly themes of adultery and separation are fused in his version of the tale. The Mercedarian pushes the motif of separation to such an extreme that the lovers never actually meet onstage at all until the end of the last act. This is arguably a partial dramatic weakness in terms of character-drawing, but it preserves faithfully the courtly tradition of keeping the lovers divided and in a state of ever unsatiated desire. But the one, long-postponed moment of the lovers' reunion also permits Tirso paradoxically to introduce the companion motif of adultery. When Marsilla finally enters Isabel's bridal chambers, she is, of course, now a married woman, not his paramour. Hence, to ask for a passionate kiss from the erstwhile betrothed is an adulterous request, and she refuses not out of a lack of compassion but out of her sense of duty as a newlywed wife. An underlying irony of the play, therefore, is that, as long as the lovers' passion is licit, they are never together to enjoy it, and, when they are reunited, circumstances have rendered this same passion adulterous.

Much is made in the play of ill omens and a sense of star-crossed doom. Since this atmosphere is established early on, it suggests at first an element of predeterminism in the play's action. On the other hand, the characters do not themselves seem convinced that the stars are entirely to blame, and, as usual in Tirso, we should seek the true elements of causality in their personalities. The thrust of the play seems far more to suggest that the sources of doom are to be found in the lovers' common death-wish and their exorbitant attitudes to life and passion. Indeed, the minor characters express surprise at their extravagance. Thus Tirso distances himself from the theory of love dramatized in Los amantes de Teruel and, in his stress on external Fate as the displacement of unconsciously willed self-destruction, he implicitly chides the absurdity and extremism of courtly love's emotional surrender.

The neo-Platonic love system came to Renassiance Spain from indigenous Judaic sources and from fifteenth-century Italy, notably Ficino, and was diffused in popularising works such as Castiglione's Il Cortegiano (1528) and León Hebreo's Dialoghi di Amore (1535). Most educated Spaniards of the sixteenth century read Italian, but for those who did not Il Cortegiano was accessible in Boscán's translation (1534) and the Dialoghi di Amore in the translations of Micer Carlos Montesa (1582) or the Inca Garcilaso (1590). Plato's teachings concerned eros, or desirous love, as a process of stepwise contemplation that could aspire, at the lowest level, to immortality through offspring; on a higher plane to the ethical life and sound public institutions; to the enrichment of philosophy and science, or, finally, to a supreme beatific vision of eternal and supercosmic beauty as the “Form of Good” which stands at the head of all other Forms. In its neo-Platonic popularisations, love was held to be desire for a beautiful person; thence a contemplation of the beauty per se in this beloved and, finally, a contemplation of the Idea or divine essence of Beauty itself. These ideas lent themselves easily to elaboration in the Spanish pastoral novel, in the sonnets of Herrera or in the popular theater (Lope's Fuenteovejuna, for example).

For Tirso, however, who stood back in sardonic distance from the Idealisms of the Renaissance, the notion that physical desire or eros sought its consummation in the mystic contemplation of unalloyed, or even divine Beauty was an absurd affectation. This is clear in his superb comedy La celosa de sí misma, where the veiled Magdalena coquettishly bares and then conceals her gloved hand in a Madrid church to the gaze of Melchor, unaware that he is her newly arrived fiancée. Melchor conceives an aberrant, fetishistic passion for this hand, a fact which exasperates his maneservant and provides much of the play's humor. In particular, when Magdalena is later presented to him as his fiancée, he finds her beauty inferior to that of the veiled woman in the church, the bogusly named Condesa de Chirinola; so that Magdalena is paradoxically her own rival, or “the woman jealous of herself” of the title.

And yet the ideological assumptions behind Melchor's behavior derive from an extravagant neo-Platonism. Though Magdalena never removes her veil, Melchor imagines that her hand is the paradigm of her unseen face; that the whole of the mystery woman's body must be as beautiful as the single part. The Platonic imagery pervades the play and is clear in Melchor's words in Act II:

D. Melchor: Por la luz pura
y divina
que amante adoro y no veo,
que os juzgo por maravilla
de la belleza …
                                        (II, v, 1464b)(6)

But we cannot be in much doubt about Tirso's attitude towards this view of love. As Dr. Premraj Halkhoree has written: “The structure of the play exposes the limitations and ultimate absurdity of the literary neo-Platonic view. It is because the Condesa is the ideal woman that Melchor loves her, and this, in turn, is why Magdalena wants to be the Condesa and is angry in III, xvii when Melchor agrees to marry Magdalena. But Magdalena's identification with the Condesa is only possible for so long as the latter remains the abstract Platonic ideal, without an identity. A man cannot marry an abstract concept of beauty, however, and that is why Melchor's marriage to the Condesa is an impossibility.”⁷

The mystic-love system flowered suddenly in Spain in the sixteenth century, two centuries after its apogee in the rest of Europe. A number of Tirso's plays take this system as the basis for portraying the relationship of men and women to God. St. Thomas Aquinas had argued that man's highest purpose on earth was to know God through reason. Duns Scotus, on the other hand, argued that man's purpose was to love God through the will. In dramas such as Quien no cae, no se levanta and La ninfa del cielo, Tirso followed the noetic-ecstatic writings of St. John of the Cross and other Spanish divines and—in a remarkable fusion of Thomist and Scotistic traditions—demonstrated that mystic love was a medium of actual knowledge of God.

Now while the doctrinal nuances of this view are novel, a play such as La ninfa del cielo shows Tirso's limited ability to convey the supernatural convincingly in stage terms. His great insight into humanness is here actually at odds with his capacities for abstraction and theological demonstration. The heroine, doomed by her erratic sexual conduct, can retrieve her honor only in a providential death and mystic marriage with Christ. True to himself and to the prevailing Baroque sensibility of the day, Tirso also injected a lurid vein of material sensuality into the religious ecstasy of these plays. But his finest mystical achievement is probably his trilogy on the career of Santa Juana: a regenerative woman, who moves society towards her without force, intrigue, or even self-awareness.⁸

A fourth subsystem was the neo-Scholastic or “atomistic” theory of love. In El amor médico and other comedies, Tirso applied the Scholastic tradition of “faculty” psychology and the topology of the soul to love. This was an attempt to analyse the separate faculties of the rational soul as conceived of by theologians—memory, understanding, will, imagination and the rest—as an account of sensation and cognition in general. According to the atomistic theory, love was an emotion stimulated by solid particles or an influx absorbed through the eyes. Sancho de San Ramón, Yvonne David-Peyre and others have shown that Tirso displayed a more than common understanding of medicine, pathology and psychosomatic illness.⁹ Since Spanish physicians of the sixteenth century such as Gómez Pereira, Huarte de San Juan and Miguel Sabuco combined their medical observations with naturalistic philosophy, it is not surprising to see materialist touches in Tirso's atomistic account of the sensation of love. The notion of love as a stream of contiguous solid bodies, optically absorbed, is both materialist and implicitly anti-Idealist.

Of all the subsystems of love so far discussed, this seems to be the only one which Tirso took seriously. Extra evidence for this statement is provided by an excellent article of F.G. Halstead published in 1943.¹⁰ In that article, Halstead argues that Tirso linked his optical love-system with belief in astrology or supernatural forces. According to Halstead, Tirso questioned whether the subject's free-will had the power to resist the influx of love. Tirso elsewhere states that, when the normal social conventions or bonds of friendship are broken, this can only be legitimized by the plea of love or the will to power.¹¹ Thus, this favored system, though it took its remote origins in Medieval spiritualism, acquired for Tirso strong materialist, naturalist, and even determinist implications.

Fifth and last, Tirso constantly brought love up against the obligations of the notorious honor code. This burdensome system not only fused the idea of woman as a proprietary love-object with sexual jealousy in general, but also extended the field of concern to include the male's preoccupation with social appearances in the eyes of other men, specifically his reputation, and even his identity. Duelling, and blood vengeance for real or imagined slights, inevitably accompanied this view of sexual relations. Again, while Tirso paid lip-service to this honor code, he also obliquely undermined it, mocking the rigidity and absurdity of its conventions.

This comes through, for example, in his famous comedia de enredo, Don Gil de las calzas verdes. Don Martín, the hero, and the irascible Don Juan are rivals for the love of Doña Inés. In a remarkable scene in the middle of the play (II, viii), Don Juan confronts Don Martín and demands satisfaction in a duel. The torpid and duplicitous Martín, however, responds with a string of casuistical arguments instead of drawing his sword: that Inés must choose the lucky man and, if it be Juan, there is no cause for a fight; that if she wishes to obey her father and marry Martín, then why should Martín risk a sure thing and leave her prematurely widowed, etc.? If he should succeed in winning Inés, suggests the phlegmatic Martín finally to an astounded Juan, then they can fix an appointment for a duel one month hence. It is very hard to imagine a Calderonian gallant reacting in this way to a situation where his reputation and valor were obviously at stake.

II—NEO SCHOLASTIC DOCTRINES ON MATRIMONY IN TIRSO'S THEATER

The theology of matrimony became a burning issue in Spain after the final sessions of the Council of Trent (1563). While Catholics argued that marriage was a sacrament that conferred grace, Luther and later Protestant theologians rejected this. A second major problem was the prevalence of secret or clandestine marriages. Though these were severely and repeatedly prohibited in the West by conciliar law and pontifical decrees throughout the Middle Ages, there was no law requiring the presence of a priest for a valid marriage. The prohibition thus became ineffective. Secretly but validly married couples were able to separate and successfully enter new unions in the presence of a priest. Others lived in concubinage while pretending to be secretly married.¹²

In an effort to put an end to such abuses, the Council of Trent enacted its revolutionary Tametsi decree in 1563. It declared marriages invalid unless contracted in the presence of the bishop or the parish priest (usually the pastor of the domicile of one of the spouses), or another priest authorized by either of them, and in the presence of at least two other witnesses.

Yet, as with so many of the Tridentine decrees, Tametsi did not bring controversy on marriage to an end. There ensued, inspired by the inner impulses of the minoritarian Catholic reform and the goadings of the iconoclastic Protestant Reformers, a veritable Golden Age of literature on the theory of matrimony (1585-1635). The three masterpieces of this literature were, significantly, all composed by Spaniards: Pedro de Ledesma, De magno matrimonii sacramento (1592); Thomás Sánchez S.J., De sancto matrimonii sacramento (1602); and Basilio Ponce, De sacramento matrimonii (1624).

In the years of Tirso's artistic maturity as a playwright, that is, from about 1605 to 1625, the issues of marriage as sacrament and the validity of clandestine union were vigorously debated. Across the sweep of his dramas, Tirso re-examined the canonical niceties of the whole matter (betrothal, wedding, consummation; consanguinity, impediments, dispensation, etc.) and tended to adopt positions minimizing the legal obstacles. Matrimony in Fray Gabriel Téllez's dramatic world is usually preceded by sexual relations, not a Christian sacrament as it is in Lope. Some 20-odd Tirsian comedias take as their starting-point the consummation of a union contracted under promise of marriage, but without either betrothal or nuptials. The comic action then shows how the abandoned woman (always dressed as a man) pursues and wins back her fickle lover. The plays' endings imply, by the final sanction of official recognition, that the original promise of the parties, the matter (i.e., the bodies of the spouses), and the ministers (i.e., the contracting parties) contained all elements necessary to the sacrament. Indeed, this very argument was made at Trent by Antonio di Gragnano (Sullivan, Tirso, p. 26).

In such plays as El pretendiente al revés, Tirso investigates the legality of clandestine marriage; here Carlos and Sirena have met secretly at night for over a year (I, vi) and regard their union as licit. In many plays, Tirso takes on the delicate issues of incest and consanguinity (La venganza de Tamar, Averígüelo Vargas, El castigo del penséque). In his Pizarro trilogy, for instance, he seems to admit consanguinity in the second degree. In La huerta de Juan Fenández, prospective cross-cousin and uncle-niece marriages are favorably reviewed.

One of the most interesting of Tirso's lucubrations on the validity of matrimony is La república al revés, a turbulent drama set in the reign of the eighth-century Byzantine Empress Irene.¹³ Early on in the play, her restless son Constantino takes over the reins of power. Irene has prearranged a dynastic marriage for him with Carola, the daughter of the King of Cyprus. On greeting her at the betrothal ceremony, however, Constantino is smitten by the beauty of her lady-in-waiting Lidora, and, against his mother's wishes and all political discretion, insists on making Lidora his Imperial consort. All parties, however, including the Senate (II, ii, 398-99), consider the betrothal ceremony legally binding. But when the young Emperor instructs his henchman Leoncio to make sure it is Lidora who occupies the bridal-chamber that night instead of Carola, a further complication arises. Himself besotted with Lidora, Leoncio proposes to usurp the Emperor's place; he engineers events so that Constantino unknowingly consummates his relationship with Carola in the darkness of night. Leoncio spends the night with Lidora.

Depending on one's legal point of view, Constantino is now a bigamist inasmuch as he has a legal wife, Carola (whom he spurns), and a common-law wife, Lidora (with whom he cohabits). When Carola informs the stunned Constantino that she is pregnant with his child (II, viii, 402-03), he refuses to believe it, and Carola considers herself the victim of a plot to convict her of adultery. This would permit Constantino grounds for a divorce. Meanwhile, depending on one's point of view, Lidora is now committing adultery with Clodio, her lover, who is posing as her brother. Finally, when a son is born to Carola, Irene takes possession of the Empire in the name of this grandson. This act tends to reinforce the legitimacy of the parents' union, since the latter materially affects the Imperial succession. Throughout the play, therefore, although there is no marriage ceremony and Constantino explicitly and sincerely rejects the union from the start, Tirso upholds the legality of the bride's intention and the inadvertent consummation as sufficient grounds for a canonically valid marriage.

Notes

1. See Margaret Wilson, Tirso de Molina (Boston: Twayne, 1977), and my review in Journal of Hispanic Philology, 3, no. 1 (1978), 97-99.

2. Cf. Mario Penna, Don Giovanni e il mistero di Tirso (Turin: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1958); the remarks of Mario Méndez Bejarano reproduced in J. Sanz y Díaz, Tirso de Molina (Madrid: C.B.E., 1964), pp. 213-14; and Henry W. Sullivan, “Tirso de Molina: dramaturgo andrógino,” in Maxime Chevalier, ed., Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, 2 vols. (Brodeaux: Institut des Etudes Ibériques et Iberoaméricaines, 1977), 811-18.

3. Cf. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953 ed.), pp. 2; 12-123.

4. Cf. A.J. Denomy, The Heresy of Courtly Love (New York: Declan X McMullen, 1947), p. 20. See also T.A. Kirby, “Courtly Love,” in Alex Preminger ed., Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 157b.

5. This is the general thesis of Antony van Beysterveldt, La poesía amatoria del siglo XV y el teatro profano de Juan del Encina (Madrid: Insula, 1972).

6. All citations are from the standard edition of Da. Blanca de los Ríos Lampérez, Tirso de Molina: Obras dramáticas completas, 3 vols. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946-58), and are quoted by act, scene, page and column numbers.

7. See the unpublished doctoral thesis of Dr. Premraj Halkhoree, “Social and Literary Satire in the Comedies of Tirso de Molina,” Edinburgh, 1969, at p. 103.

8. See Nazario Ruano, “Tirso de Molina el último gran fraile,” in Desnudez: Lo místico y lo literario en San Juan de la Cruz (Mexico City: Polis, 1962), pp. 293-309.

9. Cf. Rafael Sancho de San Román, “La medicina y los médicos en la obra de Tirso de Molina,” Estudios de Historia de la Medicina Española, 2, no. 1 (1960), 1-71, and his “El quéhacer médico en la obra de Tirso de Molina,” Boletín de la Medicina de la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina, 2, no. 4 (1962). See also Yvonne David-Peyre, “Un Cas d’observation clinique chez Tirso de Molina,” Les Langues Néo-Latines, 4 (1971), 2-22, also translated as “Un caso de observación clínica en Tirso de Molina,” Asclepio, 20 (1968), 221-23.

10. See Frank G. Halstead, “The Optics of Love: Notes on a Concept of Atomistic Philosophy in the Theatre of Tirso de Molina,” PMLA, 58 (1943), 108-21.

11. This sentiment is expressed in Cómo han de ser los amigos (II, ii, 287). See my Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi N.V., 1976; 2nd ed. 1981), p. 110, note 11.

12. Cf. “Marriage, Canon Law of” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York etc.: McGraw-Hill, 1967), IX, 277a.