Tirso de Molina

TIRSO DE MOLINA. - Poet, b. in Madrid in March 1584 (and not 1570, as has been erroneously repeated), d. 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, it seems certain, of a duke of Osuna.

If it is possible to gather into a historical synthesis his great dramatic production (of the four hundred comedies he was able to write, eighty remain) and continually to follow him along the path of fantasy, equally rich and no less evident, if more certain, is the chronicle of his biography, by now reconstructed on impeccable documents after the long oblivion that engulfed him. An exemplary friar in morals, learning and discipline, honored by a quite distinguished career in his Order, he accepts alongside the rule a poetic mission that he does not abandon, in secret, even when he censures as unbecoming to the ecclesiastical habit his activity as a playwright; and gradually he finds at an ever deeper point, beyond every compromise, the reconciliation between the apostolate and the spiritual truth that poetry discloses to him. Very little is known of his family circle, and what can be deduced comes from the autobiographical material he inserts in certain works, such as Los cigarrales de Toledo, where he speaks of a sister "parecida a él en ingenio y desdichas"; and that nephew don Francisco Lucas de Avila, who published on his behalf the 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 5th parts of the Comedias del maestro T. de M., is in all probability a fictitious person. He entered the Mercedarians at the age of sixteen, in the convent of Guadalajara, pronouncing in 1601 the four solemn vows of his Order, 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 S. Domingo, in 1616, was in 1620 at Salamanca, at the festivities in honor of St. Peter Nolasco, the founder of the Mercedarians; in 1640 he became general of the Order, and then 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 unintermitted work as a dramatist leads us to follow in this too a progressive deepening of spiritual themes and moral commitment. The immense invention of Lope de Vega is through his work subjected to a more attentive commitment of observation, indeed of meditation; he does not yet lose, as will sometimes happen in Calderón de la Barca, his native inspiration, while he gains in reflective vigor; but one perceives that, though preserving the enchantment of play and adventure, the perspective, ever more attentively arranged, is that of a moral meditation. T. does not renounce the free play of comic invention; and his fantasy kindles with inexhaustible fire; but neither does he neglect that expert and seemingly concealed attentiveness that belongs to the theologian and the 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 royal justice, it fell to his two greatest continuators, T. precisely and Calderón, the one with El burlador de Sevilla, the other with El Alcalde de Zalamea, to give the poetically most rigorous definition. But the intellectualism of Calderón sometimes restrains the impetus and obscures the colorful image of a world that is still fervent and native in the man who nonetheless begins the work of ordering and classicizing Spanish dramaturgy.

In two mixed works, I giardini di Toledo (1621) and Dilettare insegnando (1635), he at once invents and reflects: he keeps his gaze oriented toward Italian novella-writing and Spanish comedy, but the reflection of the intelligence on the data of fantasy is assiduous from the very beginning: in the second work, moreover, the contraposition of the gnomic and parenetic world to the world of invention is frankly and openly set forth. The commitment of reflectiveness nonetheless allows him a very free play: some of the most topical comedies of the Spanish repertoire are his, such as Don Gil dalle calze verdi; his is that legend of Don Juan (El burlador de Sevilla), which, while imposing on itself a rigid moral defense, to which the sarcastic Molière and the ingenuous Mozart bowed, immortally defines the type of the voluptuary 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: such is the comedy of Timido a corte, which laughing traps the veghian ardor of love; and such, at the opposite extreme, marking the term of his theologizing within the circle of comedy, is Dannato per manco di fiducia, which between the hedonistic carelessness of some and the doubting anguish of others proposes a word of severe wisdom.

Mario Apollonio