TIRSO AND PUNDONOR: A NOTE ON EL CELOSO PRUDENTE

Abstract

It is well known that Tirso de Molina made little dramatic use of the code of honour, but there is one of his works in which pundonor plays an essential part. This is El celoso prudente, a play which has hitherto chiefly interested critics (e.g. Hartzenbusch, in Comedias escogidas de Tirso de Molina, Madrid 1857, BAE, V, xxxvii, and Cotarelo, in Comedias de Tirso de Molina, II, Madrid 1907, NBAE, IX, xiii) as being an obvious model for Calderón's A secreto agravio secreta venganza. The borrowing is unmistakable: Tirso's hero, when confronted with his wife's supposed infidelity, remembers hearing of a man who staged two apparent accidents in order to dispose, by drowning and fire respectively, of his adulterous wife and her lover; and this is the exact method of vengeance employed by Don Lope de Almeida in Calderón's play.

BSS Subject Index:

• SPAIN — LITERATURE/HISTORY OF LITERATURE — GENERAL — ALL PERIODS & GENRES
• REES, JOSEPH WATKIN (1894–1976)
• SPAIN — LANGUAGES — SPANISH LANGUAGE & ITS HISTORY — GENERAL
• CELOSO PRUDENTE, EL [TIRSO DE MOLINA]
• HONOUR [AS SOCIAL CODE & LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]
• MOLINA, TIRSO DE [GABRIEL TÉLLEZ] (1584?–1648)
• SPAIN — LITERATURE — MEDIEVAL PERIOD — GENERAL

Notes

¹First published in Los Cigarrales de Toledo (Madrid 1624, but with preliminaries dated 1621). Blanca de los Ríos suggests 1614–15 as the date of El celoso prudente, but all that can be stated with certainty is that it is before 1621. References are to the edition by Hartzenbusch in Comedias escogidas de Tirso de Molina (Madrid 1857), BAE, V.

² Obras de Lope de Vega, Nueva edición, II (Madrid 1916). Cotarelo's comments are on pp. xiv and xv. Morley and Bruerton (The Chronology of Lope de Vega's “Comedias”. New York 1940) think that the play was written by Lope, probably between 1596 and 1604, but that the surviving text is much mutilated.

¹ Comedias de Calderón de la Barca, I, ed. Hartzenbusch (Madrid 1872), BAE, VII, 357 c.

¹The attitude to honour in El castigo sin venganza is of course more complex; but this play, as well as standing out from Lope's production as a whole, is also later in date than El celoso prudente.

²“La discreción de Don Lope de Almeida”, Cla, II, No. 19 (1951), 1–10, and “Gerald Brenan's Calderón”, BC, IV (1952).

¹It is worth noting that in the discussion which follows the performance of El celoso prudente in the Cigarrales, Tirso claims emphatically that this time the moralists can have nothing to complain of, and offers the play as a lesson in behaviour to husbands and wives, parents and children, kings and servants. This being so, it is all the more difficult to agree with Guido Mancini (“Caratteri e problemi del teatro di Tirso”, in Studi tirsiani, Milan 1958, 39–42) that the play is a simple comedia de enredo, presenting no serious treatment of pundonor. I fully agree with Professor Mancini that Tirso's great contribution to the drama of honour is to have given it a more human treatment, and one more in keeping with a religious attitude to life; but I would not draw quite such a sharp distinction as he does between plays like La romera de Santiago and La Dama del Olivar, which offer a Christian solution, and El celoso prudente.