SOURCE: Lundelius, Ruth. “Tirso's View of Women in El burlador de Sevilla.”Bulletin of the Comediantes 27, No. 1 (Spring 1975): 5-14.

[In the following essay, Lundelius views the moral weakness of the four women Don Juan seduces in El burlador de Sevilla as proof of Tirso's misogyny.]

That Tirso brought before his audiences a rich variety of feminine dramatis personae, whom he often drew with a certain rare verve and empathy, is now little more than a critical cliché. But a bolder view, first propounded around the turn of the century by that untiring enthusiast of Tirso, Blanca de los Ríos, would align Tirso with the more extravagant admirers and champions of womankind. For instance, she claimed that Tirso “realizó una verdadera glorificación de la mujer” and lamented that in the preceding century “a tal poeta le tuvieron los preceptistas y le tiene aun parte del vulgo por detractor y calumniador del sexo.”¹ More recently, a concurring estimate of Tirso's feminist propensities has come from Dr. Esmeralda Gijón, who sees in Tirso's portrayal of women “un gran conocimiento del alma femenina,” and considers him “el más decidido defensor de la mujer.”² In fact, “el respeto de Tirso a la mujer,” she affirms, “alcanza hasta a las más perdidas.”³ Dr. Gijón is, of course, well aware that throughout Tirso's comedias many hard words and harsh judgments are pronounced against women by many of his characters, but “tal misoginia,” she believes, “no es más que rutinaria concesión al gusto de la época, un recurso humorista más.”⁴ Now this is surely a too facile, even a question-begging assessment of many of Tirso's expressions of misogyny. A candid review of such derisory passages will instead show that Tirso's misogyny is deeper and more complex, his admiration of women more qualified, and his antifeminist diatribes too integral to his dramatic and didactic purposes to be dismissed as mere pandering to contemporary comic and rhetorical taste. To make my point both effective and manageable, I have concentrated on the portrayal of the four feminine victims of Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla, where Tirso, preoccupied with his greatest creation, Don Juan, and laconic concerning his dupes, is, I think, more likely to have deployed, not his most favorable, but rather his ingrained, everyday attitudes toward women. The ignominious characterization, the incontinence, and the consequent radical censure of these women serve as a telling counter-example against the view of Tirso's unqualified championing of women, and at the same time furnish a significant example of the dramatist's general outlook on the feminine sex, which, if profoundly pessimistic, was rather commonplace among the educated clerics of his time.

For Tirso, the reader will recall, was educated in the late Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition which rationally justified woman's subordinate life role on the grounds of her supposedly metaphysical-biological imperfection. According to this doctrine the declination of her mental and moral faculties from the male acme left her incapable of independent moral judgment or perseverance in resisting temptation, and thus required her close supervision by her natural superiors—that is, her male guardians. Her peculiar moral excellence was to be found in consummate obedience to such authority. That Tirso presupposed, as a bare minimum, a similar moderate view hardly qualifies him as an extravagant defender or admirer of women, even if there were other contemporary views considerably more extreme. For antifeminist Biblical dicta (especially Pauline), classical diatribes, oriental examples, the anathemas of the Church Fathers, and the execrations of anchorites of all ages were always close at hand to inspire almost any extreme of denigration of woman desired by the more rabid misogynists. Likewise, fiction was well stocked with satires deriding woman and with facetious aspersions on her abilities and probity, and not least, the antifeminist debates further flayed her with timeworn arguments. By the Renaissance, however, a more favorable view was emerging, for it had come to be grudgingly conceded that she was capable of virtue though it was generally agreed also that such was not the norm. And so, in time, the best view of woman represented her as a frail creature, easily swayed by her passions, and of dubious capacity for independent moral discernment, much less for steadiness in the path of rectitude. Typical, in sum, are the words of another ecclesiastic, Fray Luis de León: “La mujer de su cosecha dice flaqueza y mudanza y liviandad y vileza y poco ser.”⁵ And so the frailty and necessary subordination of women had long ago been expounded by the philosophers, sanctified by the Church, and hardened into common sense by immemorial custom.

Whether Tirso considered his feminine characters capable of virtue or not appears to vary from play to play, but, clearly, all too often, they were presented as incapable of maintaining their honor. The social theme of honor and the contemporary view of the weakness of women, when combined, were an inexhaustable creative boon to the dramatists of the period. For rest the onerous mantle of honor on the shoulders of the brittle creature woman was pictured to be, and the resulting breakdowns and calamities furnished the theme for innumerable comedias and for endless streams of antifeminist invective. The dramatic possibilities inherent in the tension between the prickly punctilio of honor and the waywardness of its chief repository—woman—ensured the prominence of the theme of honor in the comedia for generations. In El burlador de Sevilla the dynamics of the honor theme is early on the lips of the King of Naples:

¡Ah, pobre honor! Si eres alma
del hombre, ¿por qué te dejan
en la mujer inconstante,
si es la misma ligereza?(6)

Shortly thereafter Octavio, too, reflects on this dialectic:

ya no hay cosa que me espante;
que la mujer más constante
es, en efecto, mujer.

(vv. 356-59)

And again in the following lines:

¡Ah, veleta! ¡Débil caña!

(v. 369)

¡Oh mujer! ¡Ley tan terrible de honor …

(vv. 339-40)

In Act III Batricio is prepared to believe ill of Aminta, for

Al fin, al fin es mujer.

(v. 1881)

The same tension is implicit in numerous other passages of the play, and everywhere throughout the comedia it is the inability or disinclination of women to satisfy the rigorous demands of the code of honor that sparks the action of the play.

In El burlador there is a symmetry of culpability. For if Don Juan is the epitome of lust,⁷ the women themselves (with the possible exception of Aminta) are motivated by concupiscence. Each of his conquests yields first to her own desires, and then, only secondarily, knowingly or not, to Don Juan. With their prudence overmastered by sexual desire, each of his victims contributes as much as Don Juan, skilled though he is in the art of burlar, to her own dishonor. Another symmetrical characterization reflects the class distinctions of these women, for Don Juan varies his technique of seduction to suit the social status of his victim. Against the two villanas, who, mindful of their honor but too credulous of the honesty of the libertine nobleman, he deploys a deceitful promise of marriage, whereas on the more sophisticated damas, Doña Isabel and Doña Ana, he resorts, not to vain promises, but to the strategem of mistaken identity, passing himself off as the chosen lover of each girl. Disinclined, apparently, to distract attention from the towering, evil presence of of his prime creation, Don Juan, Tirso volunteers little more about the character and motives of these women; nevertheless, he is careful that his audience understand that they, too, are culpable in intent and act, though they are not on the same plane of depravity as their seducer. Here the symmetry of guilt is broken, however, for if the women, though punished in the course of the play by their dishonor, are ultimately redeemed by marriage, Don Juan runs his incorrigible course until the end when he forfeits salvation and sinks into eternal damnation. It is the complicity of Tirso's feminine characters in their own downfall and dishonor that extends the unfavorable characterization of these women and hence the censorious comments echoed against them beyond the scope of mere rhetorical and comic entertainment. Their flaws of character become integral to the play's dramatic development and their downfall, punishment, and regeneration are the means of part of Tirso's didactic message. The measured distribution of punishment to all the transgressors—and nearly everyone in the play is such—is a further exemplification of the profoundly moral spirit which A. A. Parker has noted was so characteristic of the comedia in general.⁸ In default of a more rounded and complete presentation of the personalities of these women we must pay careful attention to the various brief clues thrown out in the course of the action, weighing both what they do as well as what they say or is said about them.⁹

The play opens in medias res with Don Juan preparing to leave his first victim, Doña Isabela, Duquesa de Nápoles, who has mistakenly received him for her beloved, the Duque Octavio, to whom she had expected to surrender, though only on condition of his “palabra de matrimonio.”¹⁰ Don Juan, masquerading as Octavio, had sustained his deception with a similar pledge of marriage:

Duquesa, de nuevo os juro
De cumplir el dulce sí.

(vv. 3-4)

Only when it is too late does Isabela discover the imposture and call for help. Betrayed by her own passions, cruelly tricked by Don Juan, and discovered openly delinquent before the moral and civil law, she unhesitatingly turns to deceit and deception, even jeopardizing Octavio to salvage the remnants of her honor when she remains mute before the King's error in thinking Octavio to be the fleeing lover. After all they are acknowledged sweethearts, and surely, she rationalizes, the court will regard that as mitigating the enormity of their indiscretion. Moreover, as she quickly realizes, if the King compels them to marry, it would restore her honor and merely publicly ratify their declared private intent. Thus, while not insensitive to her moral blunder, she still self-complacently comforts her expectations:

                                        (Mi culpa
No hay disculpa que la venza,
Mas no será el yerro tanto
Si el Duque Octavio lo enmienda.)

(vv. 187-90)

And she never jeopardizes these prospects by summoning the integrity and moral courage to reveal to the King the full magnitude of her shame, even though in keeping silent she endangers the life and reputation of Octavio. Furthermore, her reticence makes it appear that they are guilty of yet another offense—a flagrant breach of palace decorum, which is grave enough in itself, as the King's angry and threatening speech indicates:

                                        Di, mujer,
¿Qué rigor, qué airada estrella
te incitó, que en mi palacio
con hermosura y soberbia,
profanases sus umbrales?

(vv. 163-67)

Public ceremony and private conduct at court were subject to detailed and elaborate regulation, and nowhere more so than in the sensitive area concerning the propriety of relations between the sexes. For instance, in Madrid, though somewhat after El burlador first played, the amorous conduct of the court gallants had become so extraordinary and flagrant that to prohibit further “profanaciones del Palacio Real,” as the saying was, a pragmática of 1638 enjoined: “que ninguno de los señores galantease en Palacio a las damas, si no fuese en público, y totalmente se les prohibe el mudar de traje o hacer disfraz en orden a esto.”¹¹ Supervision and punishment seem to have fallen heaviest on the courtiers, and in this case, so long as Isabela remained silent, it would be the innocent Octavio who would bear the brunt of the King's wrath.

The second victim, Tisbea, the most completely characterized and hence the most interesting woman in the play, belongs to a large and popular group of comedia heroines who deviate from the conventional type of dama who dreams of romance and marriage, and who instead are vociferously averse to love and marriage, as well as scornful of men.¹² Their contempt and disdain of love may have any number of causes, ranging from the moral flaw of excessive pride and vanity, as in the case of Tisbea, to an unnatural inclination, trespassing on man's prerogatives, toward arms or letters. In rejecting love, marriage, and domestication—in short, the traditional sphere of woman—they are, according to the usual apologies made for them, rebelling against the injustices of a masculine-dominated society. But no doubt to Tirso's audiences this rebellion smacked more of the renunciation of woman's very nature, and would seem to them a brazen and senseless attempt to disrupt the whole hierarchy of nature and society. For, excepting those who took religious vows, the only vocation open to women was housewifery.

Tirso's fascination with this character type is evidenced by her repeated appearance in his theater, ranging from viragoes and very mannish women to those like Tisbea, who exult in their immunity to love:

                                        Yo …
sola de amor esenta
como en ventura sola,
tirana me reservo
de sus prisiones locas,
…
y cuando más perdidas
querellas de amor forman,
como de todos río,
envidia soy de todas.

(vv. 375-82, 411-14)

Though she is sought by all the fishermen, she treats them only with cold disdain and heartless indifference:

desprecio soy y encanto,
a sus suspiros, sorda,
a sus ruegos, terrible,
a sus promesas, roca.

(vv. 431-34)

Anfriso daily adorns her hut with flowers and leaves, and pays supplicating homage to her, while she, in turn, recognizes his many fine qualities and handsome appearance. Her disdain is no fault of his; rather it stems from her cold pride:

Todas por él se mueren,
y yo, todas las horas,
le mato con desdenes:
de amor condición propia,
querer donde aborrecen
despreciar donde adoran …

(vv. 459-64)

The wisdom of the foregoing passage is borne out in the action that immediately follows. Tisbea's offense is not one of innocent ignorance, but one of willful defiance of the natural order of things; thus, nature, ever jealous of her prerogatives which Tisbea has so contemptuously spurned, takes revenge. Having rebuffed love and its institutional sanctification—marriage—on her proper social level, she succumbs instead to lust for Don Juan. The weakness of the flesh, we are made to see, has its complement in a flaccid will, for she perceives the danger of trusting Don Juan (“Plega a Dios que no mintáis” and “Mas sois los hombres traidores”), but she lacks the strength of character to resist his charms. The irony of her fate is that she, who boasts:

Mi honor conservo en pajas
… vidrio guardado en ellas,
para que no se rompa …

(vv. 423-25)

is so easily conquered. Her deception and abandonment are the fitting sequel of the deformations of her character—arrogant pride before she meets Don Juan and headlong lust after encountering him. Tisbea, as is the case with these disdainful women, is brought to recognize clearly her error and the poetic justice of the deception or punishment meted out:

Yo soy la que hacía siempre
de los hombres burla tanta;
que siempre las que hacen burla
vienen a quedar burladas.

(vv. 1014-17)

Tirso, perhaps, reflecting the deeper anxieties of a masculine society, reiterates this point when he has her say again:

Reparo que fue castigo
de amor, el que he hallado en ti.

(vv. 922-24)

Her sinful pride is humbled, her honor tarnished, and the hard lesson of her proper station and nature imparted before she is married to Anfriso, as one assumes, at the end of the play.

The personality of Doña Ana, daughter of Don Gonzalo de Ulloa, is the most perfunctorily delineated of Don Juan's conquests. She emerges from the barest sketch, and we can see her clearly only in two highly culpable actions. The first reveals great imprudence and carelessness. She has written a totally compromising note to her beloved, the Marqués de la Mota, arranging an assignation in her room for the coming evening, but in failing to instruct her maid explicitly to deliver the note only into the hands of its proper recipient she reveals reckless irresponsibility. The indiscreet and nonchalant maid, undoubtedly “la mujer que habla a la reja,” overhearing the street conversation of Don Juan and the Marqués, hands it to the former to deliver to his friend. The delicacy of the letter is clearly understood, for it reveals that “… consiste en él de una señora el sosiego.” Given the nature of the contents of the letter and the importance attached to honor, where even the slightest suspicion or doubt could bring disaster and even death, it was sheer folly to entrust so casually its safe delivery. A modicum of foresight and discretion would have delivered her safely into the arms of her chosen lover instead of into dishonor and disaster.

From the letter itself we learn of a second, and even graver, defect of her character—willful self-assertion and rebellion against her father's authority. Her self-willed defiance of her father involves the rejection of an unwelcome marriage arranged by him and the King. Overwhelmingly, no doubt, Tirso's audience would have assumed that the first duty of a daughter was submission and obedience to male or parental authority. And who would have ever questioned that every subject owed obedience to the King? Furthermore, the partner of the marriage would probably have been negotiable between a dutiful daughter and a loving father. Even the King, who had just offered to marry her to Don Juan, whom he still considered a very eligible young noble, in consideration for her feelings, had advised Don Gonzalo, “salid, y volveos con la respuesta.”

But Doña Ana has contumaciously sought to trick her father and to gain by deceit and illicit means what firmness and tact might still have achieved openly and honestly. In surrendering her honor to her chosen lover, she hopes to compel her father to marry her in accordance with her own choice. But her selfishness and rebellion are completely heedless of the shame and embarrassment she would bring to her father and family, for if her strategy of the illicit rendezvous had been successful, her father would have been obliged to refuse suddenly, without a creditable excuse, the marriage the King had arranged as a reward for his good services in Portugal. Furthermore, like the Duquesa Isabela, Doña Ana jeopardizes the very life of her innocent lover, the Marqués, who, as a result of her actions and deceit, is incarcerated, under sentence of execution, in the Triana prison. Thus, Doña Ana's willful sedition brings dishonor to herself, death to her father, shame to her family, and danger to her lover. She, who planned to deceive her father, is herself deceived and dishonored.

The picture of the foolishness and moral pliability of Don Juan's fourth victim, Aminta, who is more easily beguiled than most, approaches the traditional woman of comic satire. Don Juan first sees her on her wedding day, and, inflamed by her beauty, he forthwith sets about seducing her. First, he undermines the trust and pride of Batricio, her betrothed, claiming that he has already enjoyed her favors. Next, he allays any familial scruples by ingratiating himself with her father. She at first resists his siege, remaining constant, or at least overtly so, to Batricio, but soon, quite soon, in fact, after a little flattery and a few tactical lies, she begins to waver and give up token excuses:

Porque si estoy desposada
como es cosa conocida
con Batricio, el matrimonio
no se absuelve, aunque él desista.

(vv. 2072-75)

A final rush—a vain promise of marriage—sweeps away her last defenses, and she, too, succumbs to the burlador. In a rigid class society, as was the Spain of the time, she has surely fallen to one of the tritest ploys of seduction. Don Juan had dangled his rank and lineage before her:

Yo soy noble caballero,
cabeza de la familia
de los Tenorios, antiguos
ganadores de Sevilla.

(vv. 2048-51)

And then before her dazzled eyes he elaborates upon the luxury and social position that might be hers:

Mañana sobre virillas
de tersa plata estrellada
con clavos de oro de Tíbar
pondrás los hermosos pies,
y en prisión de gargantillas
la alabastrina garganta,
y los dedos en sortijas,
en cuyo engaste parezcan
transparentes perlas finas.

(vv. 2101-9)

Aminta shows herself to be credulous, gullible, and, worse yet, unduly ambitious to rise above her station in life. The motive was always suspect, and the means so narrowly circumscribed as to be licitly almost impossible for a woman. But Aminta, in order to reach above her class, trades her ultimate honor and her surest protector, Batricio, for the lies and enjoyment of Don Juan. While she is not unmindful of her honor, even recalling comedia prototypes of virtue, such as

… romanas Emilias
en Dos Hermanas …
y hay Lucrecias vengativas …

(vv. 2025-27)

and while she also extracts a vow of marriage, she, nevertheless, reveals that she is a giddy, silly girl, easily turned by the prospects of luxury and social status. The thought of ease, fine clothes, jewels, and so on quickly erode what little caution and judgment she has, and she impetuously capitulates to Don Juan. Later he and Catalinón laugh at her gullibility. Don Juan mockingly says,

Aminta, estas dos semanas
no ha de caer en el chiste.

(vv. 2238-40)

And Catalinón replies,

Tan bien engañada está
que se llama Doña Aminta.

(vv. 2240-42)

Indeed, when the characters all congregate in Seville near the end of Act III, Aminta has still not caught on to the deception. Although love in the comedia could occasionally equate seda with sayal, Tirso chooses to make another point here, and he clearly considers her punishment just also. All the major institutions of seventeenth century Spain—Church, state, and law—as well as social custom and the Scholastic-Aristotelian tradition came together to justify the hierarchical order of nature and society in which everything had its proper place and function, and their custodians, naturally, regarded with the greatest suspicion and repugnance any deviation of anything from its proper and natural sphere. Something of the strength of this antagonism is brought home in the severe treatment of Aminta's attempt at social advancement.

Of course, the range of feminine characters in Tirso's comedias enormously exceeds the modest sample of the four wayward women in El burlador de Sevilla. But even here, for the sake of dramatic interest as well as for his didactic purposes, Tirso has considerably diversified the weaknesses and moral blemishes of his feminine characters. In the process he is able to exhibit and castigate a number of traditional exemplars of errant women: the inordinately proud and disdainful, the irresponsible rebel against paternal authority, the incontinent flouter of the precepts of church and state, and the foolish social climber. And yet for each of his feminine characters Tirso made it clear that it was her own weaknesses and failings that smoothed the way to, or even made possible, her seduction and dishonor. The description of Don Juan as “el castigo de las mujeres” implies their guilt.¹³ By explicitly involving each of them in responsibility for her own fate and hence rendering each of them integral to the dramatic development of the play, Tirso developed the foundation of an aspect of his didactic message and extended the function of his serious and complex misogyny beyond rhetorical or comic fireworks. The tricks that are played on them are the richly merited punishments of their prior failings and weaknesses, although they are also a prime element of comedy for the audience. But by the end of the play, any comic or satiric elements in the portrayal of these women have given way to the didactic admonitions that Tirso wishes to convey through them. That the dramatist's portrayal of these women is primarily didactic in nature may be seen from the great care he gives to the tightly fused pattern of weakness—turpitude—retribution—restitution that marks the course of each woman through the dramatic development of the play as well as in the bluntly pointed homily of the dénouement. The earlier comic and satiric moments are then seen as very minor aspects of a serious moral-theological play. Perhaps one measure of Tirso's dramatic skill is his contriving to fuse a happy ending for his feminine characters with a pointed, though very traditional, moral. It is not, however, any extravagant admiration of advocacy of woman, but justice, with perhaps a dash of compassion, that dictates this happy conclusion.

For the portrait of woman that emerges in El burlador is, as we have seen, one of profound cynicism and pessimism. Unlike the utterly depraved prostitutes of Seville, these characters are “virtuous” women, yet, regardless of social status, they are uniformly portrayed as weak, frail, and literally helpless in resisting their desires, even for what they know is sinful and dangerous. As they are portrayed, I must reiterate, they are as much the victims of their own moral deficiencies as of the seductive skill of Don Juan. Of course, for the sake of the play they must be susceptible and they must be tricked, for without “burlas” there would be no “burlador.” But Tirso could have ennobled their character and raised them to a higher moral plane by intensifying their struggle with their respective weaknesses. But significantly he did not; rather he has deliberately drawn them as all too easily corruptible. Nor does he just tax them with a few major faults; instead the list of their failings reads like a summation of the charges familiar with the traditional anti-feminist literature. A by-no-means exhaustive list from El burlador shows that while they are not intrinsically evil, they are easily swayed by passion, lacking in moral courage, imprudent, foolish, irresponsible, devious, disobedient, incontinent, proud, rebellious toward their proper sphere in life, lascivious, frail, weak, and vain. This is surely the list of a serious misogynist.

But it is not the women alone who are castigated by Tirso. There is hardly an admirable character in the entire play, except perhaps Don Gonzalo. Against the frequent tirades on the frailty of women delivered by the male characters, Tisbea and Isabela retort accusing the men of duplicity and faithlessness: “May haya la mujer que en hombres fía.” Tirso, with unflinching severity, has presented “the [soiled] fabric of society,”¹⁴ a blunt indictment of sinning humanity, with the degree of retribution matching the magnitude of the transgression. Accordingly, at the end of the play, Don Juan, incorrigibly defiant of the divine order and mocking God until too late, sinks into everlasting hellfire, whereas his victims, who have sinned only against the natural or social order, are punished in the course of the play by their dishonor, and at the end they are pointedly introduced to their proper sphere in the scheme of things—marriage. So Isabela, who intended to deceive the court, and Ana, who intended to deceive her father, are themselves deceived and disgraced. Aminta, who is guilty of misdirected ambition, is likewise dishonored and is ultimately obliged to return to her rustic suitor. Only the fate of Tisbea is left in some doubt, for she is not specifically mentioned in the multiple marriages that conclude the play. Yet if it is not explicitly stated that she is united to Anfriso, that her perverse pride is so mortified may be inferred from the presence in Sevilla of Anfriso and also of her father and from the King's declaration:

y agora es bien que se casen
todos …

(vv. 2862-63)

The moral could not be more pointed. In one way or another these women had flouted the established precepts of nature or society, and nemesis had come surely and swiftly. Yet never so sunk in sin as Don Juan, they escaped his fate. Any other outcome would have dissipated the dramatic focus on the play's principal character, Don Juan, and so it seems more probable that dramatic necessities, rather than Tirso's supposed compassion toward women dictated this outcome. In the dénouement, the dramatist-theologian, without glossing over the sins and weaknesses of these women, and, in fact, only after satisfying the demands of a strict justice, provides for their harmonious integration, now humbled and presumably wiser, into their proper function in nature and society—marriage. Tirso has championed, not woman, but the contemporary understanding of the social order and the natural scheme of things.

Notes

1. Las mujeres de Tirso. Conferencia leída en el Ateneo de Madrid (Madrid: Impr. de B. Rodríguez, 1910), p. 26.

2. “Concepto del honor y de la mujer en Tirso de Molina,” in Revista Estudios (Madrid, 1949), p. 655.

3. Ibid., p. 595.

4. Ibid., p. 594.

5. Exposición del libro de Job, BAE, XXXVII, ch. xiv, p. 359.

6. Ed. Gerald E. Wade (New York: Scribners, 1969), vv. 153-56. All subsequent references are to this edition.

7. Treachery, or tricking his victims, is perhaps an even stronger drive in Don Juan. Cf. the recurrence of burla, burlar, and burlador.

8. “The Spanish Drama of the Golden Age,” in The Great Playwrights, ed. E. Bentley (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 681-82.

9. Ibid., pp. 42-43.

10. Secret betrothal had been frequent throughout the earlier period and, though illicit, was considered legal and binding by both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Only recently declared invalid by the Council of Trent, it still survived as a literary convention, and it seems that Tirso's heroines in particular surrender their virtue on a promise of marriage. See Justina Ruiz de Conde, El amor y el matrimonio secreto en los libros de caballerías (Madrid: Aguilar, 1948).

11. Pedro Pérez de la Sala, “Costumbres españolas en el siglo XVII,” Revista de España, Vol. 135 (1891), p. 208.

12. See Melveena McKendrick, “The mujer esquiva—A Measure of the Feminist Sympathies of Seventeenth-century Spanish Dramatists,” Hispanic Review, 40 (1972), 177-78; and my unpublished dissertation, “The mujer varonil in the Theater of the Siglo de Oro” (University of Pennsylvania, 1969).

13. See Bruce W. Wardropper, “El Burlador de Sevilla: A Tragedy of Errors,” Philological Quarterly, 36 (1957), p. 69, n. 13.

14. Edward Wilson and Duncan Moir, The Golden Age: Drama 1492-1700 (London, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), p. 91.