SOURCE: “Tirso de Molina and the Other Lopistas,” in Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 115-39.

[In the following excerpt, McKendrick overviews the plays of de Molina.]

Tirso de Molina's world, by contrast with Lope's, is a world peopled by the unusual and the extreme, even bizarre. Tirso de Molina was the pseudonym of a Mercedarian monk called Fray Gabriel Téllez (c. 1584-1648).¹ The greatest of Lope's disciples, although their personal relationship was neither close nor particularly good, he was writing plays by the mid-1600s and within a few years had become one of Spain's major dramatists. He more or less dominated the Spanish stage along with Lope in the early 1620s. This period of maximum productivity coincided with his transfer to the house of his order in Madrid at a time of great intellectual activity. Góngora, Quevedo, the ageing Lope and the young Calderón all lived and wrote there and other dramatists gathered from elsewhere—Guillén de Castro from Valencia, Luis Vélez de Guevara and Mira de Amescua from Andalusia, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón from Mexico. Tirso entered with gusto into this exciting literary world with its academies and controversies, its friendships and its animosities. For him, sadly, it was not to last. On 6 March 1625 the Council of Castile's Committee for Reform declared his dramatic activities scandalous in a man of his calling and recommended that he be exiled to a remote monastery. Why Tirso was singled out for this treatment is not clear—there were other men of God involved in the theatre, including Lope who even as a priest more or less openly kept a mistress—and his own order seems not to have taken exception to his activities. Tirso himself thought envious fellow writers were responsible—he even implied that Lope was involved.² Whoever his enemies were, he somehow through their intervention managed to attract the animosity of Philip IV's first minister, the powerful Count-Duke of Olivares, who directly influenced the findings that virtually ended Tirso's dramatic career. He wrote few plays after his departure from Madrid.

It is not surprising that Tirso made enemies who saw insults or supposed insults to themselves in his plays, for he is a hard-hitting dramatist who tackled the social and political questions that interested most dramatists at the time in an unusually direct way. Technically all his plays are cast in the mould established by Lope and in the literary and moral controversies that surrounded the comedia nueva he was resolute in its defence. In Los cigarrales de Toledo, a framed miscellany in prose in which a group of lords and ladies entertain one another with stories and plays, he states that times change and inevitably bring with them legitimate changes in the way drama is written. The new genre is quite as praiseworthy and respectable as the old classical forms of drama, he claims, especially now that it has matured and improved, and contains nothing corrupting. On the contrary it delights and instructs simultaneously.

Tirso brought to the Golden-Age stage an intellectual turn of mind and a psychological range and penetration absent in Lope. He was interested in the extraordinary and possessed a greater tolerance and understanding of human oddity and variety than the other dramatists. Owing perhaps to his observer status, he had a broadness of outlook with regard to women's role in the scheme of things which Lope, for all his passionate interest in women and his sympathy with their problems, lacked. His particular contribution to the Spanish theatre's often vaunted feminism was to allow women something which other playwrights tend to overlook—Lope's women have courage, passion, daring and determination but Tirso's have intelligence. If Lope's women rise to the occasion, Tirso's create it. Their intelligence, furthermore, is invariably greater than that of their men. The heroes of Golden-Age plays habitually pale in comparison with their female counterparts, but in Tirso the discrepancy is striking. In his comedies of intrigue the often mind-boggling complexities of plot are, typically, the way the ingenious heroine contrives to get herself out of trouble and on to the happy-ever-after path. Except that Tirso's comic vision is not that complacent. The selfishness and ruthlessness exhibited by seemingly nice people in pursuit of their own ends are embedded in the humour of the plays like a gently gnawing toothache, and their endings have an astringency which stays with us and subtly subverts the plot's conventional unravelling.

The controlled complexity and ingenuity, the wit and unique sparkle of his comedies of intrigue have rightly led to his acknowledgement as a master of this genre which was so popular in seventeenth-century Spain. In El vergonzoso en palacio (The Shy Man at Court) one of the three main characters, the wayward, narcissistic Serafina, falls in love with a picture of herself dressed as a man, not recognizing it as her own. Don Gil de las calzas verdes (Don Gil of the Green Breeches) is a hilarious romp so complex that in the final scene, in spite of the fact that no real don Gil exists, no fewer than four turn up, all in green breeches. In La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself), don Melchor falls so passionately in love with an unknown lady's hand at Mass that he refuses to go ahead with his arranged marriage to Magdalena, whose hand it is. Mysteriously depersonalized, the hand attracts him, openly attached to his betrothed's arm it loses its mystery and therefore its appeal: Tirso is almost certainly sending up the neo-platonic cult of an ideal love that leaves the body and reality behind in its pursuit of perfection. In Marta la piadosa (Pious Martha) the eponymous heroine pretends to have a religious vocation to avoid an unwelcome match and once out of the marriage stakes is allowed to roam around the streets at will—an ironic comment on contemporary attitudes to women. The quirkiness of Tirso's imagination, his fascination with role play and illusion, and his uncompromisingly realistic view of human nature will be immediately apparent. Human vanity and gullibility, the capacity of human beings to deceive themselves and others, the lack of honesty and realism in the way man and society conduct their affairs, are all strongly predicated in Tirso's comedies, but the attractive thing about them is that they never preach and rarely judge. Tirso manages to establish that perfect equilibrium between exposure and understanding which we expect of the best comedy, provoking an ambivalence of response that is entirely satisfying. We warm to Serafina's non-conformity but laugh at her self-preoccupation; the notion of falling in love with a hand appeals to our sense of the absurd, yet its attraction for a man faced with an arranged match strikes a chord with our belief in the legitimacy of romance; we can accept the logic of allowing a prospective nun to do as she likes, yet deplore the hypocrisy of the rationalizations used to prevent marriageable girls from doing the same.

The originality in these comedies lies in their ingenious or unusual treatment of themes and situations already introduced by Lope and this is true of much of Tirso's theatre. But he is not always successful in his use of established motifs, tending to pack too much too breathlessly into his plays which can then end up seeming rather hasty and predictable. His trump card was his ability to produce memorable characters. Thus his enthusiastic adoption of the type of the forceful woman produced heroines like La gallega Mari-Hernández (Mari-Hernández from Galicia) and Antona García. Mari-Hernandez is a fusion of two distinct comedia types: the rumbustious country wench and the quick-witted miss who for the sake of love poses as a dashing gallant (a particular favourite of Tirso's). Here is a double image: the hoyden looks into the mirror but it is the charming Galician aristocrat who gazes back and only Tirso could have successfully synthesized the two. Antona García, based on a woman who in 1476 conspired to oust the Portuguese from the Spanish city of Toro, is reminiscent of certain East European shot-putters with her herculean strength and fondness for horseplay. But in this dominating, idealistic peasant woman, compounded as she is of masculine and feminine qualities, Tirso almost succeeded in creating a masterpiece. He fails because, once again, he embarks on something more complex than he has time for—he allows his attention to be divided between historical theme and protagonist. Indeed Tirso often strikes one as a dramatist interested above all in characterization but trapped by historical accident within what was primarily a theatre of action.

His most memorable heroine and without a doubt the noblest female figure on the Spanish stage is María de Molina in the historical play La prudencia en la mujer (Prudence in Woman). María was regent of Castile during the minority of her son and Tirso portrays her fighting to protect her son's interests from unruly nobles who, because she is a woman, think she is easy prey. Here the combined emphasis on character, historical events and moral idealism works because all three are inseparable. María proves to be a supremely able ruler and Tirso with the utmost care draws her in her threefold majesty as perfect wife, queen and mother in an age and society dominated by men. It is a characterization both grand and nuanced. Tirso shows the human doubts and misgivings beneath the Queen's surface control and at the same time reveals in her an astuteness, a realism, an intelligent sense of strategy which nicely leaven her sublime virtue and nobility. In spite of the disadvantages of having a model protagonist, therefore, the play is entirely gripping and believable. It is essentially a de regimine principum in dramatic form in that it has direct relevance to the situation created in Spain by the death of Philip III in 1621.³ The accession of a sixteen-year-old boy to the throne of the world's largest empire at a time when its future was seen by Spanish intellectuals to be in the balance undeerstandably intensified Spanish concern with the concept of kingship and delegated authority. It is a concern that informs many Spanish plays of the period. Tirso repeatedly chose to dramatize this preoccupation using woman rulers, though I doubt whether this has any particular significance in terms of sexual politics. The Empress Irene in La república al revés (The Republic Turned Upside Down) is a lesser María de Molina, the very model of the wise and just monarch by which her son Constantine is measured and found wanting; but in the character of the biblical Jezabel in La mujer que manda en casa (The Woman who Rules the Roost) he depicts a female tyrant. Tirso could readily conceive of woman as possessing the qualities necessary for leadership, but essentially he was tackling a contemporary preoccupation in a way which was congenial to him, which was theatrically attractive and which at the same time diplomatically deflected the plays' overt relevance to the Spanish king.

The importance of the seventeenth-century political background for our understanding of many Golden-Age plays is only gradually emerging, but it is already clear that Tirso was probably the most politicized of the Spanish dramatists of the age. In the years before his banishment he wrote a number of plays, La prudencia en la mujer and Privar contra su gusto (The Reluctant Favourite) amongst them, which are critical of government and corruption at court and which pointedly reflect contemporary misgivings about the new reign and its éminence grise, Olivares.⁴ It has recently been persuasively argued that even his Pizarro trilogy, apparently fairly run-of-the-mill plays written between 1626 and 1629 while Tirso was head of the Mercedarian convent in Trujillo founded by Francisco Pizarro's daughter, is an audacious indictment of the failings of centralized government and delegated power.⁵

Some of the most successful of Tirso's plays are those which dramatize biblical events. La mujer que manda en casa is one of the most memorable, in spite of its structural weaknesses, because of the explosive and beguiling presence of its protagonist, Jezabel, an incarnation of the medieval Vice figure. The sexual relish she exudes, her unexpected inhibitions, her rages, her unquenchable belief in her own attractions, give the play a sexual charge which threatens at times to swamp its exemplary aspects. The best of these plays, however, is La venganza de Tamar (Thamar's Vengeance) which is closely based on the account in Samuel II of Thamar's rape by her half-brother Amnon and the latter's murder by her full brother Absalom. No hasty craftsmanship here—the play is an extremely accomplished piece of writing. Structurally Tirso makes three memorable additions to the familiar story. First is the charade scene where Amón, feigning to be mourning a lost love, persuades his unsuspecting sister to ‘cure’ him by acting the part of his mistress in a courtship scene. The sinister discrepancy between Tamar's understanding of the situation and the obsessed Amón's intentions in this play within the play is dramatically very potent. The flower scene in Act III where the peasant girl Laurela presents the brothers Amón, Adonías, Salomón and Absalón with a lily, a larkspur, a saxifrage and a narcissus is rich in dramatic irony and prophetic symbolism. While the pathetic hallucination scene where old King David, fearing for his beloved first son Amón who is in fact already dead, goes to embrace him, is extremely moving. The outstanding feature of the play, however, is its characterization. The disintegration of Amón's self-control, his disgust for Tamar after the rape and his outrageous shrugging off of responsibility after he threatens to rape her a second time when she is disguised as a peasant girl—a betrayal of his vow to behave that is crucial to our judgement of him and his father—these are magnificently portrayed. Explained as melancholy in terms of the medical theory of humours of the age, his obsession is in fact presented as an integral part of a characterization which is convincingly all of a piece. Absalón too—narcissistic, urbane, plausible and self-justifying—is drawn with care and consistency, while Tamar is superb in her anger and her scorn. Through her verbal quickness and the consistently witty and metaphorical language she uses to convey her predicament she dominates the play intellectually.

As the play proceeds, however, it is the old King who emerges as the tragic figure, torn between his love for his children and dismay at their behaviour, incapable any more of exercising either his judgement or his authority. We are left at the end with the poignant image of the once great and powerful king lamenting the murder of his beloved first son, a murder precipitated by his own partisan compulsion to put mercy before justice. The last line of his speech, invoking as it does the murderer Absalón, reminds the audience that the full course of this tragedy is not yet run.

It has been suggested that the action of La venganza de Tamar unfolds against a contemporary political background characterized by the upheavals that surrounded the succession of Philip IV to the throne of Spain in 1621; Tirso undoubtedly saw the death of Philip III as marking the end of stability and prosperity for Spain.⁶ But a contemporary audience's interest would have been captured mainly by its powerful handling of a particularly gripping, familiar biblical story. The full-length plays on biblical and doctrinal themes by seventeenth-century Spanish dramatists constitute a significant proportion of the theatre's total output. Lope proved their popularity and other dramatists followed his example in providing the corrales with plays which could unequivocally boast of providing instruction along with entertainment. The theatre as a result became in a way a self-appointed instrument of the faith, providing an extra dimension to the religious life of Spain that at once reflected and stimulated popular devotion and afforded the theatre some protection from the attacks of ecclesiastical and moral reformers. This allowed churchmen to become enthusiastic patrons of the corrales and of course a significant number of dramatists were themselves men of God: of the three major playwrights both Lope and Calderón became playwright-priests, while Tirso was from the start of his career a friar. Technically the religious plays they wrote do not constitute a category apart. They were performed in the corrales before the usual audiences and were written to the familiar comedia pattern. They speak the standard language of love and honour, they are full of action, excitement and passion, with graciosos who provide touches of comedy, and they employ all the conventions and devices of the secular plays. They even use sexual excitement as a legitimate channel of moral instruction, as can be seen in Tirso's La mujer que manda en casa and Calderón's La devoción de la cruz (Devotion to the Cross). To all intents and purposes they take place in a world whose ethos is recognizably that of seventeenth-century Spain. The liberties they took with their material often attracted the opprobrium of the theatre's critics but their audiences, of course, loved them.

The comedias de santos, saints' plays, form a coherent group within this larger body. These normally portray, with considerable artistic licence, the conversion or martyrdom of famous figures from hagiographic history and legend, but the special dramatic potential inherent in the theme of conversion inspired bolder, freer creations as well. There are as a result a number of very striking plays which depict not only the conversion and salvation of criminals but conversely the descent into crime of men and women who have been travelling the road to sainthood. This chiastic movement between the two poles of criminality and sanctity baffled, even shocked commentators until A. A. Parker convincingly argued that the plays present problems which are in fact psychological and social (in the widest sense) rather than religious, and therefore essentially moral not dogmatic.⁷ Banditry in the Golden-Age drama is unquestionably a means of personal self-assertion and not of sociopolitical reform as it tends to be in other literatures. The psychological and philosophical justification of the apparently melodramatic plots, Parker claimed, is to be found in the proverb ‘The greatest sinners make the greatest saints’, which implies that temperamental energy is a prerequisite both of great good and great evil, and in the aphorism ‘Corruptio optimi pessima’ which encapsulates the Thomist principle that evil follows from the inversion or distortion of good.

The most famous and the finest of these plays is Tirso's magnificently grim El condenado por desconfiado (Damned for Despair),⁸ a complex play which seems to confirm Parker's interpretation of the psychology of the saints and bandits plays but which has in addition an important contemporary theological dimension. Tirso uses the psychology of sin and repentance to confront in an unusually direct way for the theatre two of the dominant religious problems of the age—the question of justification by faith or good works and the related question of free will and divine grace. Even within Catholicism there was such fierce disagreement between Jesuits and Dominicans over the relationship between free will and divine grace that in 1611 the exasperated Inquisition forbade the publication of any more works on the subject of grace. In 1607 the Pope's pronouncement that both sides were free to defend their opinions had been jubilantly greeted in Madrid with fireworks and bull-fights. When Tirso dramatized these problems some years later he was dealing not with some technical squabble over abstractions but with a topic of still passionate concern.

The play tells the story of two young men. Paulo is a hermit who to save his soul has spent ten years of penance and prayer in the wilderness. One night he has a terrifying nightmare of Hell which impels him to beg God to reveal his spiritual fate. Seeing his chance, the Devil appears in the guise of an angel to tell him that his fate will be that of a certain Enrico. Paulo complacently assumes that Enrico must be a saintly man and is horrified to discover that he is a dyed-in-the-wool villain. Overwhelmed by bitterness and despair he avenges himself on God by becoming a murderous bandit himself. Unable to believe that either Enrico or he himself can now be saved he meets a violent death at the hands of the law and goes unrepentant to Hell. What he did not know was that Enrico himself has never lost faith in the possibility of redemption; just before Enrico's execution his ailing father, whom he loves, respects and supports, prevails upon him to repent and he is saved. The Devil's ambiguous prophecy has proved both true and untrue; whether or not the Devil himself knew that Enrico would in fact escape his clutches remains an intriguing question mark.

The play's theological position vis-à-vis the De auxiliis controversy is elusive, perhaps intentionally so; in a way it compromises by emphasizing both faith and responsibility. Its practical message of faith, hope and charity, however, is clearly spelt out. So, too, are Paulo's sins: doubt in the efficacy of repentance, arrogance in trying to preempt his own fate and lack of charity in his judgement of Enrico. The power of the play comes from Tirso's masterly ability to give dramatic life to these ideas by showing us two men gambling for the highest stakes of all—eternity. Even for us now the play succeeds in making this issue as dramatically real and immediate as any threat of physical death; its impact on an audience of seventeenth-century believers is not difficult to imagine. The work's fascination lies partly in the startling outcome,⁹ partly in the understandable uncertainty and confusion generated in Paulo, and in Act III in Enrico as well, by the difficulty of telling the real from the counterfeit, of distinguishing between false voices and true. There is fascination too in the contrary characters of Paulo and Enrico, both psychological adolescents, the one rebelling against an apparently unjust God, the other against all restraints upon his own will. Our reactions to each are complicated. In Paulo we recognize the rational intellectual, eager to know, incapable of blind faith and irrational hope, believing in fair and logical connections between crime and punishment, effort and reward. We understand the insecurity, self-doubt and almost pathological fear which lead to his calculating attempt to buy himself salvation and then erupt into the fateful nightmare. At the same time we lose patience with his meanness of spirit, his wilful over-interpretation of the Devil's prophecy,¹⁰ his obdurate rejection of hope in the face of all encouragement and, above all, his refusal throughout to accept responsibility for himself and his fate. As for the presumptuous Enrico, we detest his mindless violence and bully-boy ways, but we respect his spiritual courage and are moved by his tenderness towards his father and most of all we admire his complete acceptance of responsibility for what happens to him. He recognizes that forgiveness is there, that it is up to him ask for it or not. Paulo, on the contrary, is guilty even at the end of a crucial failure of understanding: when assured that Enrico has been saved he sees no need to repent, confident that he will automatically share the same fate.

The abdication of control over his own destiny, together with his incapacity for love—love of God, his neighbour or himself—makes of Paulo the lesser man, for all Enrico's wickedness. Not only theologically but psychologically and dramatically as well, the play's outcome is entirely convincing and consistent. The fact that it leaves us harbouring more sympathy than we probably ought to feel for the pessimist, the man temperamentally incapable of faith, is a reflection of Tirso's tendency to create characters which overflow the containing ideas of the age. It is certainly the inadequate, anguished Paulo, unable to the last to see that the salvation he hungers for lies all along within his own grasp, who remains most vividly with us; the scene in Act III in which he dons his hermit's garb once more and desperately tries to persuade an impatient Enrico to repent has a quite extraordinary intensity.

As becomes its subject the play is sparely written. Dramatically and theatrically it operates entirely through the stark power of its parallel enactment of two conflicting ideologies and two opposed temperaments in a situation where Hell's flames await the one who has misunderstood the nature of redemption. There are virtually no concessions to public taste. Both men are in their different ways insufferable and apart from the stricken Anareto, Enrico's father and for him a sort of God-figure, the play is full of objectionable individuals. There is no real love interest—Enrico has a sharp but unsavoury moll who plays a minor role. Apart from a few intense speeches of Paulo's, more elaborate as becomes his intellectual and contemplative nature, the play's language is correspondingly pared down and direct. The work has as its structural basis an elegant symmetry, the symmetry of its protagonists, each with his servant, the symmetry of its supernatural adversaries—the Devil and the Good Shepherd—or inner voices, and the criss-cross symmetry of the saints and bandits theme. Its final theatrical effects are appropriately awe-inspiring and balanced: Enrico's soul soars heavenward supported by angels, Paulo disappears in flames through a trapdoor in the stage. The popularity of doctrinal drama in Spain was due in no small measure to such spectacular climaxes.¹¹

The play that makes truly magnificent drama out of Christian ideas and reveals the eternal human preoccupations they contain was Spain's distinctive contribution to European drama. Tirso's most famous play El burlador de Sevilla o El convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville or The Stone Guest) is another masterly example.¹² Less openly dogmatic than El condenado por desconfiado, it is, for all that it gave Europe one of its legendary lovers, don Juan, another eschatological work. Here, however, presumption, bombast, and over-confidence end up not in Heaven but in Hell. The don Juan of popular imagination—compulsive, irresistible lover, intellectual and social rebel—is a composite figure, the result of many subsequent versions and variations. Tirso's original is very different—a brothel-creeper, a trickster, a predator, a betrayer of promises, friends and hospitality, a murderer even—who delights not in seducing women but, more sinisterly, in dishonouring and humiliating them. He wins their favours either by bribery or outright deception. He is not a rebel but a criminal within the system, exploiting his social privileges to further his own ends, believing in divine retribution but foolhardy enough to think that youth is an insurance against it. He prates about his honour when in fact he is everything that is dishonourable; he believes in the rules but regards himself as above them.

As the alternative titles of the play indicate, the work has two main strands which converge in don Juan's consignment to Hell: that of the trickster and that of the stone guest. We are shown four of don Juan's sexual japes. He makes love to the Duchess Isabela in the King's palace by pretending to be her fiancé; he seduces a fishergirl, Tisbea, under solemn promise of marriage (regarded as binding by the conventions of the theatre); he tries to take his best friend's place in his mistress doña Ana's bed when the lovers arrange a tryst to consummate their passion, and finally he desecrates a sacrament by seducing the bride, Aminta, on her wedding night under promise of marriage to himself—‘the choicest trick of all’. This essentially episodic plot is given cohesion and sustained tension by don Juan's obliviousness to the gravity of his actions. His catchphrase whenever he is warned that he will one day be called to account for his crimes, ‘Tan largo me lo fiáis’ (‘You certainly allow me extended credit’—fianza being a financial and legal term meaning credit or bailbond) becomes the play's leitmotif, reminding us that while don Juan thinks time is on his side (penance, he thinks, is for the infirm and the aged) it is in fact rushing him onwards towards his doom. The time bomb is triggered when don Juan scornfully invites to dinner the sepulchral statue of doña Ana's father, don Gonzalo, killed while defending his daughter from don Juan's predations. That night a thundering on the door announces the arrival of the terrifying guest, who sits at the table but remains silent in the face of don Juan's flippant bravado and his servant Catalinón's hysterical attempts at conversation. Only when he and don Juan are left alone does he speak, to invite don Juan to dine with him in return the following night in his chapel and only after the statue has left does don Juan collapse into terror. Persuading himself that it was all a figment of his imagination and that not to turn up the following night would be a sign of cowardice, don Juan decides to go. After a meal of vipers and scorpions, vinegar and gall, during which don Juan remains defiant to the end, the statue offers don Juan his outstretched hand. He takes it, only to be fatally overpowered by its burning, crushing grip, refused the absolution he begs for and swallowed up into the tomb, never to re-emerge. As he disappears, the statue booms out, ‘This is God's justice: as man sows therefore shall he reap.’

While Tirso took don Juan's catchphrase and the idea of the stone guest from oral tradition (the exchange of invitations between a living man and a corpse belongs to European folklore),¹³ don Juan was his own creation. Tirso's conception of the character has a moral and ethical emphasis absent from don Juan the myth figure, symbol of sexual energy and individualistic self-assertion. There is undoubtedly an incontrovertible fascination in don Juan's brazen recklessness in the play, in his refusal of fear in the face of the supernatural, in his sense of himself as archetypal man; when he refuses to let Isabela light a lamp to see his face and she cries out in alarm ‘¿Quién eres, hombre?’ (‘Who are you, man?’), his answer is ‘Un hombre sin nombre’ ‘(A man without a name’). And herein the seeds of the myth lie. Tirso's don Juan, however, as bringer of chaos and confusion, with his sinister arrogance, his delight in power and control, his cynicism and slippery duplicity, assumes an aura that is more than human. When he appears in Aminta's bedroom and she remonstrates ‘¿En mi cuarto a estas horas?’ (‘In my bedroom at this hour?’), he replies ‘Éstas son las horas mías’ (‘These hours are mine’). Night is his element; it is no coincidence that the play opens in the dark and that, like some earlier Count Dracula, don Juan resists the light. It is not only we who catch a whiff of the Devil: described by his uncle as a snake—the Devil's symbol—he is explicitly called Lucifer by that man of judgement and conscience, his servant Catalinón, when he commiserates with the wretched Aminta. Defiant to the end, he is greater in death than in life; it is in defeat that he commands our admiration. He is one of the few Golden-Age characters who swamp the action that contains them. He is too big for the play and hence has had to leave it behind.

His ultimate sin is Lucifer's own—he challenges God himself, unaware that he is playing with hell-fire. Fire consequently provides the play's dominant imagery, linking as it does the ideas of sexual lust and destruction. Don Juan uses vocabulary of fire to describe not only his passions but his contempt for the world—‘que el mundo se abrase y queme’ (‘Let the world burn and go up in flames’)—and significantly he uses the same words in reverse when he is crushed by the statue—‘¡Que me quemo! ¡Que me abraso!’ (‘I am in flames! I burn!’). When he disappears the whole chapel goes up in flames; the destroyer is destroyed, the consumer consumed; Hell has claimed its own. It is a cataclysmic ending to a cataclysmic struggle. Don Juan has defied God's law as well as man's, pitting the power of youth and noble birth against the power of time and divine retribution. He has scoffed at death and it is therefore a dead man who calls in the debts he thought he could pay at his own convenience. The relationships he has violated are, with a little manoueuvring and papering over the cracks, re-established in a socially acceptable way. But there is no complacency in this ending. Few characters emerge with honour from the events the play portrays, and peasantry and aristocracy alike are depicted with a pervasive irony.

This gives the play a unity of tone and vision which, together with the themes of deception and deferred payment, and the metaphors of the bailbond, fire and personified death, knits the four episodes into a dramatic whole. The work has not the structural perfection of El condenado por desconfiado. Of the women, the proud self-assertive Tisbea is the only one in whom any dramatic conflict takes place, and even so the thematic parallelism between her character and don Juan's—she delights in making men suffer as he does women—is never developed. Once more we see Tirso's imagination straining against the discipline of the comedia form. For all this, the work is a magnificent achievement, thematically and poetically tightly coherent, theatrically stunning, with a larger than life protagonist of extraordinary potency who was to step out of the work and capture the imagination of the world in a way unrivalled by any other dramatic creation. In consigning don Juan to Hell, Tirso ironically gave him the gift of immortality: the theologian in Tirso would have disapproved but the artist would certainly have rejoiced.

Tirso is the only seventeenth-century dramatist who compares with Lope and Calderón in terms both of sustained achievement and outstandingly memorable individual plays. Distinctive as their typical creations are, they habitually combine theatrical impact, thematic weight and mastery of language in a way not matched consistently by any other dramatist. Nonetheless, Lope's lessons were successfully applied and developed by a number of other gifted dramatists capable of producing plays of the first order. It must be emphasized that the drama during Lope's theatrical hegemony did not stand still. Not only was there a general move, led by Lope himself, towards greater artistic control, but there were as the years went by certain developments from which Lope remained aloof: a marked growth in the satirical content of plays, and the visible influence on some dramatists (not Tirso) of the complex, Latinate language of Góngora's major poetic works, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (1613) and the Soledades (1614). There was a certain tendency, too, to sensationalism, exaggeration and stylization, a move away from realism into the fantastic and mannered. Satire apart, Lope's followers were walking the path that would lead to Calderón.

Notes

1. See David H. Darst, The Comic Art of Tirso de Molina (Chapel Hill, 1974); I. T. Agheana, The Situational Drama of Tirso de Molina (New York, 1972); Ruth L. Kennedy, Studies in Tirso de Molina, I: The Dramatist and his Competitors, 1620-26 (Chapel Hill, 1974); I. L. McClelland, Tirso de Molina: Studies in Dramatic Realism (Liverpool, 1948); S. Maurel, L’univers dramatique de Tirso de Molina (Poitiers, 1971); Henry W. Sullivan, Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation (Amsterdam, 1976); and Margaret Wilson, Tirso de Molina (Boston, 1977).

2. In his Los cigarrales de Toledo and in a scene interpolated for the purpose in his play Antona García.

3. See Ruth L. Kennedy, ‘La prudencia en la mujer and the Ambient that Brought it Forth’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association, 63 (1948), 1131-90.

4. J. C. J. Metford, ‘Tirso de Molina and the Conde-Duque de Olivares’, BHS, 36 (1959), 15-27; and Ruth L. Kennedy, ‘La perspectiva política de Tirso en Privar contra su gusto, y la de sus comedias posteriores’, Homenaje a Tirso de Molina (Revista Estudios, Madrid, 1981), 199-238.

5. Marie Gleeson Ó Tuathaigh, ‘Tirso's Pizarro Trilogy: A Case of Sycophancy or Lèse-Majesty?’, BCom, 38 (1986), 63-82.

6. See A. K. G. Paterson (ed.), La venganza de Tamar (Cambridge, 1969), 28.

7. In an essay first published in Spain in 1949, republished as ‘Bandits and Saints in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age’, Critical Studies of Calderón's Comedias, ed. J. E. Varey, vol. 19 of The Comedias of Calderón, ed. D. W. Cruickshank and J. E. Varey (London, 1973), 151-68. See also Melveena McKendrick, ‘The bandolera of Golden-Age drama: a symbol of feminist revolt’, Critical Studies of Calderón's Comedias, 169-90.

8. Authorship has been disputed but the play is now generally accepted as Tirso's. For the background to the play, see Daniel Rogers' introduction to his edition (Oxford, 1974).

9. Tirso anticipates the audience's surprise, referring them at the end to two theological sources for the events he describes.

10. Paulo consistently holds that what the ‘angel’ said was that if Enrico were damned he would also be damned, whereas if Enrico were saved then that would be his fate too. This is in fact his own reading of the Devil's words, born, like the Devil's appearance itself, of his own obsession.

11. In addition to Parker's article, among the many studies of the play are I. L. McClelland, Tirso de Molina: Studies in Dramatic Realism; C. V. Aubrun, ‘La comédie doctrinale et ses histoires de brigands. El condenado por desconfiado’, BHisp, 59 (1957), 137-51; T. E. May, El condenado por desconfiado. I. The enigmas. II. Anareto’, BHS, 35 (1958), 138-56; C. A. Pérez, ‘Verosimilitud psicológica de El condenado por desconfiado’, Hispanófila, 27 (1969), 1-21.

12. The play has a complicated textual history and may not in fact be Tirso's although it is generally accepted as his. For a discussion of the play and bibliography see Daniel Rogers, Tirso de Molina: El burlador de Sevilla, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts (London, 1977).

13. See Dorothy McKay, The Double Invitation and the Legend of Don Juan (Stanford and London, 1943).