TIRO DE MOLINA. - Poet, born in Madrid in March 1584 (not 1570, as has been erroneously repeated), died in the convent of Soria on 12 March 1648. T. de M. is the pseudonym of the friar Gabriel Téllez, natural son of a Grazia Giuliana and, certainly, of a Duke of Osuna.
If it is possible to gather into a historical synthesis his vast dramatic production (of the four hundred plays he is said to have written, eighty remain), and to follow them continuously along the path of a fantasy as rich and no less evident—if more certain—is the chronicle of his biography, now reconstructed on unimpeachable documents after the long oblivion that had overwhelmed him. A friar of exemplary conduct, learning, and discipline, honored by a most distinguished career within his Order, he accepted alongside his rule a poetic mission which he never abandoned, even in secret, when he deemed it advisable to conceal his activity as a playwright under his ecclesiastical habit; and gradually, in a point ever more profound, beyond every compromise, he found the reconciliation between apostolate and spiritual truth which poetry placed before him. Very little is known of his family background, and what can be deduced comes from the autobiographical elements he inserted in some works, such as *Los cigarrales de Toledo*, where he speaks of a sister “parecida a sé en ingenio y desdichas”; and it is highly probable that that nephew, Don Francisco Lucas de Avila, who published the 3rd, 2nd, 4th, and 5th parts of the *Comedias* of the master de M., was a fictional character. At the age of sixteen he entered the Mercedarian Order in the convent of Guadalajara, taking solemn vows in 1601, studied theology at Alcalá de Henares, resided in Guadalajara and Toledo, where he met Lope de Vega, began his dramatic activity around 1606, went to the Indies, to Santo Domingo, in 1616, was in Salamanca in 1629 for the festivities in honor of St. Peter Nolasco, founder of the Mercedarians; in 1640 he became general of the Order, and later its historian, continuing the *Historia general de la Orden de la Merced* begun by Alonso Ramón.
The parallelism of his fervent and ever more important activity as a religious with his uninterrupted work as a playwright leads us to observe in the latter a progressive deepening of spiritual themes and moral commitment. The immense invention of Lope de Vega is by his hand subjected to a more attentive engagement of observation, indeed of meditation; he does not yet lose, as will sometimes happen in Calderón de la Barca, his native inspiration, while gaining in reflective vigor; but he perceived that, even while preserving the enchantment of play and adventure, the perspective ever more carefully arranged is that of a moral meditation. T. does not renounce the free play of comic invention; and his imagination burns with inexhaustible fire; yet he does not neglect that expert attention, seemingly hidden, which is the mark of the theologian and moralist. In this regard, it is significant that of the two richest themes of Lope de Vega—the theme of love and the theme of regal justice—it fell to his greatest successors, T. himself and Calderón, each with *El burlador de Sevilla* and *El Alcalde de Zalamea* respectively, to give them their most rigorously poetic definition. But Calderón’s intellectualism sometimes restrains the impetus and obscures the colorful image of a world that is still fervid and native in him who yet begins the work of organizing and classifying Spanish dramaturgy.
In two mixed works, *I giardini di Toledo* (1621) and *Dilettare insegnando* (1635), he both invents and reflects: his gaze is directed toward Italian novellas and Spanish comedy, but the reflection of the intelligence upon the data of fantasy is a constant principle; in the latter work, moreover, the opposition between the gnomic and kinship world and the world of invention is frankly and openly arranged. The commitment to reflection nonetheless permits him the freest play: it is one of his comedies most current in the Spanish repertoire, such as *Don Gil dalle calze verdi*; it is his that legend of Don Juan (*El burlador de Sevilla*), which, while imposing upon itself a strict moral defense—one to which both the sarcastic Molière and the ingenuous Mozart submit—immortally defines the type of the voluptuous and demonic subverter of every human and divine fidelity. A veil of restraint, a word that now murmurs secretly, now smiles, now speaks alone, in the verbal torrent that animates the Baroque dramaturgy of Spain: here is the comedy of *Il timido a corte*, which, laughing, entraps the aging ardor of love; and here, at the opposite extreme, marking the end of his theological meditation within the sphere of comedy, *Il Dannato per manco di fiducia*, which, between the carefree hedonism of some and the anxious doubt of others, proposes a word of stern wisdom.