Gerald E. Wade

Tirso de Molina, Priest-Playwright

Tirso de Molina wrote some of the most delightful comedies of the Golden Age. Most of them present a theme of universal and timeless appeal: the frantic efforts of young lovers to achieve union despite major hindrances of one sort or another. These erotic, and occasionally bawdy, comedies scandalized the moralists of Tirsos time and later. They found difficulty in understanding how a priest, a seeker after the mystical love of his God, could also find pleasure in the erotic. The purpose of this study is to attempt an explanation of this ambivalence. As an introduction there is offered a brief review of Tirsos activities as priest and as playwright that may aid in the pursuit of the matter at issue. it is recalled that in his composition of erotic materials he followed the lead of certain earlier churchmen who had no moral or religious scruples against composing naughty literature: Juan Ruiz and François Rabelais, the French cleric, come to mind. The mind-set of religious who found pleasure in the indecent is offered explanation by a recent commentator, Lucien Lefebvre. Tirsos definition of love is recalled as is also his statement of the intent of his writings: he affirmed that he wrote jestingly, in the mood of the burla so popular at that time. By treating the actions of his love-struck youngsters as play, as a game, he hoped to capture the attention of his audience so that he might interest them in more serious matters involving Christian doctrine. It is clear that he saw the mystical and the erotic as diametrically opposed in meaning; for the orthodox Christian the erotic, lust, is one of the seven deadly sins. There still remains, however, something further to be said about how a priest, sworn to continence, could enjoy the erotic so thoroughly as to compose dozens of plays about it, and one has recourse to the concept of «morose delectation» as offered by commentators, that kind of pleasure aroused by the erotic fantasies and dreams recalled in Augustines Confesions. Certain thinkers have suggested that the mystical and the erotic are really not fundamentally different but are one and the same impulse. Interestingly enough this concept takes one back to the distant past when primitive believers saw their religions as partly sexual, requiring phallic worship as an element of ritual. No effort is made here to assess the validity of the concept of the oneness of the mystical and the erotic, but it is apparent that many will find the concept difficult of acceptance, just as it would have been for Tirso and especially so when it is expressed in the obscenities of the pornographic. Whatever one may conclude from the above about the psychological and theological complexities of Tirsos attitude toward his comedies, these will remain among the classics of their kind. (GEW)

Concerning a Recent Interpretation of Calderonian Comedy

This letter will be concerned with the meaning of comedy, a matter to which theorists have for a long time given much thought. There has been no agreement on what comedy is, nor is there likely to be one soon. Unfortunately, although the Comedia is mostly of comic texture, Hispanists have not had much to say on what its basic meaning (or function) is. There is no space here to review the efforts of the few Hispanists of our time who have written on the subject. There is, however, a quite recent expression that is greatly deserving of comment. This is Robert ter Horsts «The Origin and Meaning of Calderonian Comedy,» in Studies in Honor ofEverett W. Hesse, published in 1981 by the Society of Spanish and Spanish American Studies at the University of Nebraska (Lincoln). Although the title of the article implies that only Calderonian comedy is to be defined, it will be seen that the comedy of all times and places is under interpretation. Ter Horst refuses to accept «comic» and «comedy» as synonymous. For him the comic requires a degree of merriment, while comedy, although it may use elements of the comic as a part of its total picture, has a broader meaning. He names a number of the most famous writers of comedy from Aristophnes to Molière and insists that if the reader examines carefully any one of their most admired plays, he must conclude that the resultant effect is one of deep seriousness. When the author uses comic devices to amuse his audience, it is only so as to induce them to give thought to the un-

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ter: peripecia, or unexpected outcome, and reconocimiento, or unsuspected personality) ; even the element of spectacle, which was developed by Calderón, had its place in the Aristotelian formula. Professor MacCurdy began by recalling Rojas Zorrillas predilection for tragedy but cautioned that quantity is no measure of quality. He referred to the dramatists personal misfortunes and observed that for

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indicate the stressed weak vowel. In cases four and five, a diéresis could be used to indicate a two-syllable use of the vowel combination, weak-stressed strong and weak-weak (the writer believes that diéresis almost never occurs in the combination, stressed strong-weak). There is a considerable group of words of the criar and huir types, in which the combination is almost invariably of two syllables, but the total number of appearances of this type of word is considerably less than of those in which the respective combinations are of one syllable. As a result words similar to the following would appear with diéresis: cruel, criar, graduar, huir.