TIRSO DE MOLINA (1647)

One of the outstanding dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age.

He studied at the University of Alcalá and in 1601 was professed in the Mercenarian Order. As the order´s official historian he wrote Historia general de orden de la Merced.

He was also a theologian of repute.

Guided to drama by an inborn sense of the theatrical and inspired by the achievements of Lope de Vega (1562-1635), creator of the Spanish comedia, he built on the foundations that Lope had laid down for the Spanish theatre writing to the "free-and-easy" prescriptions that Lope had propounded for dramatic construction. Sometimes he accentuated the religious and philosophical aspects that attracted his theological interest. At other times he drew on his own topographical and historical knowlegde gained while travelling for his order through Spain, Portugal and the West Indies. Sometimes he borrowed from the vast common stock of Spanish stage material. At other times he relied on his fantastic imagination.

Three of his dramas appeared in his Cigarrales de Toledo (1621), a set of verses, tales, plays and critical observations that, arranged after the Italian fashion in a picturesque framework, affect to provide a series of summer recreations for a group of friends.

Otherwise his extant output of about 80 dramas -a fragment of the whole- was published chiefly in five Partes between 1627 and 1636. Of these, the second part, containing several of his famous pieces, presents apparently insoluble problems of authenticity. And the authorship of certain other of his plays outside this Parte has also been disputed.

The most powerful dramas associated with his name are two tragedies El burlador de Sevilla and El condenado por desconfiado (1635, The Doubted Dammed). The first, introducing into literature the hero-villain Don Juan, derived from popular legends but recreated with originality, rises to a majestic climax in which the libertine is confronted with the statue-ghost of the man he has killed and deliberately chooses to defy this emanation of his conscience. El condenado por desconfiado exteriorizes a theological paradox: Tirso contrasts the case of a notorius evildoer who has kept and developed the little faith he had and who is granted salvation by an act of divine grace with the example of a hitherto good-living hermit, eternally damned for allowing his one-time faith to shrivel.

Tirso was at his best when portraying the psychological conflicts and contradictions involved in his master characters. At times he reached Shakespeares standards of insight, tragic sublimity and irony. The same qualities are found in isolated scenes of his historical dramas: in Antona García (1635) notable for its objective analysis of mob emotion. In La prudencia en la mujer (1634) with its insights into ancient regional strife, and in the violently realistic scenes of the biblical La venganza de Tamar (1634).

On such occasions Tirso even against the background of Spain´s Golden Age stands out. When inspired he had the gift of dramatizing personality and his best characters are memorable as individuals. He was more stark and daring than Lope but less ingenious, more spiritually independent than Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81), one of the greatest Spanish dramatists of the age but less poetic. Where he approximated to the Golden Age norm, his plays of types and manners, such as El vergonzoso en palacio were animated, varied in mood and usually lyrical. But his style was erratic and sometimes trite. In pure comedy he excelled in cloak-and-sword situations, and in for example Don Gil de las calzas verdes (1635) he manipulated a complex, rapidly moving plot with vitality. He is famous, in both tragedy and comedy, for his clowns, whose wit had an air of spontaneity. Naturalness in diction suited his dramatic purpose better than the ornamental rhetoric that was then coming into vogue and generally he avoided affectations, remaining in this respect nearer to Lope than to Calderón.

He was not as consistently brilliant as some of his dramatic contemporaries, but at his greatest, even in comedy, the Spanish specialty, he could rival them, and in tragedy he towered above them all.