Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina (born March 9?, 1584, Madrid, Spain—died March 12, 1648, Soria) was one of the outstanding dramatists of the Golden Age of Spanish literature.

Tirso studied at the University of Alcalá and in 1601 was professed in the Mercedarian Order. As the order’s official historian he wrote Historia general de la orden de la Merced in 1637. 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, creator of the Spanish comedia, Tirso built on the “free-and-easy” prescriptions that Lope had propounded for dramatic construction. In his plays he sometimes accentuated the religious and philosophical aspects that attracted his theological interest; at other times he drew on his own topographical and historical knowledge, gained while traveling for his order through Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies. Sometimes he borrowed from the vast common stock of Spanish stage material, and at other times he relied on his own powerful imagination.

Three of his dramas appeared in his Cigarrales de Toledo (1621; “Weekend Retreats of Toledo”), 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. The second part presents apparently insoluble problems of authenticity, and the authorship of certain other of his plays outside this part has also been disputed.

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The most powerful dramas associated with his name are two tragedies, El burlador de Sevilla (“The Seducer of Seville”) and El condenado por desconfiado (1635; The Doubted Damned). The first introduced into literature the hero-villain Don Juan, a libertine whom Tirso derived from popular legends but recreated with originality. The figure of Don Juan subsequently became one of the most famous in all literature through Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787). El burlador rises to a majestic climax of nervous tension when Don Juan is confronted with the statue-ghost of the man he has killed, and deliberately chooses to defy this emanation of his diseased conscience. El condenado por desconfiado dramatizes a theological paradox: the case of a notorious evildoer who has kept and developed the little faith he had, and who is granted salvation by an act of divine grace, contrasted 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 these master characters. At times he reaches Shakespearean standards of insight, tragic sublimity, and irony. The same qualities are found in isolated scenes of his historical dramas, for example in Antona García (1635), which is notable for its objective analysis of mob emotion; in La prudencia en la mujer (1634; “Prudence in Woman”), with its modern interpretation of ancient regional strife; and in the biblical La venganza de Tamar (1634), with its violently realistic scenes.

When inspired, Tirso could dramatize personality and make his best characters memorable as individuals. He is more stark and daring than Lope but less ingenious, more spiritually independent than Pedro Calderón de la Barca but less poetic. His plays of social types and manners, such as El vergonzoso en palacio (written 1611, published 1621; “The Bashful Man in the Palace”), are animated, varied in mood, and usually lyrical. At the same time, however, Tirso’s style is erratic and sometimes trite. In pure comedy he excels in cloak-and-sword situations; and in, for example, Don Gil de las calzas verdes (1635; “Don Gil of the Green Stockings”), he manipulates a complex, rapidly moving plot with exhilarating vitality. His tragedies and comedies are both famous for their clowns, whose wit has a tonic air of spontaneity. Naturalness in diction suited his dramatic purpose better than the ornamental rhetoric then coming into vogue, and generally he avoided affectations, remaining in this respect nearer to Lope than to Calderón. Tirso was not as consistently brilliant as these great contemporaries, but his finest comedies rival theirs, and his best tragedies surpass them.