TIRSO DE MOLINA. – Poet, b. in Madrid in March 1584 (and not in 1570, as has erroneously been repeated), d. in the convent of Soria on 12 March 1648. T. de M. is the pseudonym of the friar Gabriel Téllez, the 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 may have written, eighty remain) and to follow him continually along the path of his imagination, equally rich and no less evident, if more certain, is the chronicle of his biography, now reconstructed on the basis of unimpeachable documents after the long oblivion that engulfed him. An exemplary friar in conduct, learning, and discipline, honored by a highly distinguished career in his Order, he accepts alongside the rule a poetic mission that he does not abandon, even in secret, when his activity as a theatrical poet is censured as unbecoming to the ecclesiastical habit; and, step by step, he finds at an ever deeper point, beyond every compromise, the reconciliation between the apostolate and the spiritual truth that poetry reveals to him. Very little is known of his family environment, and what can be deduced from the small amount of autobiographical material that he inserts into 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., was in all probability a fictitious person. He entered the Mercedarians at the age of sixteen, in the convent of Guadalajara, pronouncing the four solemn vows of his Order in 1601; he studied theology at Alcalá de Henares, lived 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 Salamanca in 1620, at the celebrations in honor of s. Pedro Nolasco, the founder of the Mercedarians; became general of the Order in 1640, and later a historian, continuing the Historia general de la Orden de la Merced begun by Alonso Ramón.
The parallel between his fervent and increasingly important activity as a religious and his uninterrupted work as a dramatist leads us to observe in the latter as well a progressive deepening of spiritual themes and moral commitment. Lope de Vega’s immense inventiveness is subjected by him to a more attentive effort of observation, indeed of meditation; it does not yet lose, as will sometimes happen in Calderón de la Barca, its native inspiration, while gaining in reflective vigor; but one perceives that, while preserving the enchantment of play and adventure, the increasingly carefully arranged perspective is that of a moral meditation. T. does not renounce the free play of comic invention; and his imagination blazes with inexhaustible fire; but neither does he neglect that expert and apparently concealed attentiveness characteristic of the theologian and moralist. In this respect, it is significant that of Lope de Vega’s two richest themes, the theme of love and the theme of royal justice, the most rigorous poetic definition was achieved by his two greatest continuators. T. precisely, with El burlador de Sevilla, and Calderón, with El Alcalde de Zalamea. But Calderón’s intellectualism sometimes restrains the impetus and obscures the colorful image of a world that remains fervent and native in the man who nevertheless initiates the work of ordering and classicizing Spanish dramaturgy.
In two hybrid works, I giardini di Toledo (1621) and Dilettare insegnando (1635), he both invents and reflects: he keeps his gaze directed toward Italian novella literature and Spanish comedy, but the intelligence’s reflection upon the material of the imagination is assiduous from the outset; in the second work, moreover, the opposition of the gnomic and paraenetic world to the world of invention is arranged frankly and openly. His commitment to reflexivity nevertheless allows him the freest play: he is the author of some of the most topical comedies in the Spanish repertory, such as Don Gil dalle calze verdi; he is the author of that legend of Don Giovanni (El burlador de Sevilla) which, while imposing a rigid moral defense to which the sarcastic Molière and the ingenuous Mozart submitted, immortalizes 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, within the verbal torrent that animates Spain’s Baroque dramaturgy: such is the comedy of Timido a corte, which, laughing, ensnares the Vegean inspiration of love; and, at the opposite extreme, marking the endpoint of his theological meditation within the sphere of comedy, Dannato per manco di fiducia, which, between the hedonistic carefreeness of some and the doubtful anguish of others, offers a word of stern wisdom.