The Liar, or
The Truth Can't Be Trusted
by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón

Antaeus Study Guide

The Liar, or The Truth Can't Be Trusted is a 17th Century comedia written by the Mexican playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. It is generally considered to be the best comedy to come out of the Golden Age of Spanish Theatre and was very influential on all Western Theatre. In spite of that, it is very little known in English-speaking countries; so actor/scholar/playwright Dakin Matthews has undertaken to change that, by translating the play into contemporary rhyming English verse, and the Antaeus Company is giving his translation its world premiere.

The Golden Age of Spain

The Golden Age (el siglo de oro) is usually identified as the hundred years from 1560-1660 when Spanish literature and especially Spanish theatre flourished. Though roughly contemporary with a similarly rich period in English theatre (the Age of Shakespeare), it lasted longer and was far more productive-with the writing and staging of perhaps ten to twenty times as many plays. The brightest lights of the era were Cervantes, who wrote plays as well as his novel Don Quixote; Lope de Rueda, who was the first actor/manager/playwright; Lope de Vega, who perfected the form and was its greatest and most prolific proponent; Tirso de Molina, who wrote the first "Don Juan" play; Calderon, the greatest writer of the religious play; Moreto, who advanced and reformed the comic style; and Alarcón himself, who wrote the age's finest comedy.

The Comedia

Comedia, in Spanish, means simply "a play"; it is also the name of the most popular type of play written and produced in the Golden Age. (Two other popular forms were the entremés--a short farce--and the auto sacramental--an allegorical religious play).
The form of the comedia was perfected by Lope de Vega, and all but frozen thereafter. Its typical attributes were the three-act structure, rhyming verse forms, and standard characters.
Often, especially in city and courtship comedies (as opposed to the more wide-ranging tragedies or fantasies or histories), each of the three acts represents an action compatible with--though not slavishly, by any means--the events of a single day; the 'acts' of a siglo de oro comedia were actually called 'days' or 'daytrips' in Spanish, jornadas. (Going to the theatre in the 17th century could be an all-day affair, and entreméses were often performed between the acts.)
There are no further divisions into scenes; but each time the stage clears is almost always an indication of a shift in locale as well.

Rhyming Verse

Comedias were written entirely in verse, but not--like their English counterparts--in a single verse form. Instead, Golden Age playwrights, following Lope's example, wrote in a number of different stanzas, each with its own line length and rhyme scheme. (A rhyme scheme is the particular arrangement of rhymes in a cluster of lines, called a stanza. The length of each line in a Spanish stanza is determined by counting the syllables--rather than the accents as in most English poetry.)
The most popular form was a stanza called the redondilla, made up of four eight-syllable lines, of which the first rhymed with the fourth, and the second with the third. Here's an English version of a typical redondilla:

Although more than half the play may be written in redondillas, there are a number of other forms as well--each with its own particular effect; for example: the ballad or romance rhyme (for long stories), the five-line quintilla (for conversations among women), the ten-line décima (for wooing speeches), the three-line tercet (for serious conversations), the fourteen-line sonnet (for reflective or passionate soliloquies).

Characters

Since Lope de Vega, the typical cast (dramatis personae) of a Golden Age comedy was all but standardized into recognizable and repeating types: the young man (el galán) the old man (el viejo), the young lady (la dama), the comic male servant (el gracioso), the maid (la criada). In general, characterization was more rhetorical and theatrical than psychological; the cast was made up of character types, really, that could be sketched in with a few bold strokes: the young man, dashing, goodhumored, and with a high sense of honor, though sometimes insanely jealous and/or rakish; the old man, irascible and protective of his son's or daughter's reputation, yet often easy to fool; the young lady, usually chaste, but sometimes calculating and even flirtatious, at other times nearly unapproachable; the servant, sometimes witty (like a Shakespearean Fool), sometimes bumbling and crude (like a Shakespearean Clown); the maid, often talkative, and usually more corruptible than her mistress. Upon occasion, certain traits, either of psychology or manners, might be so exaggerated as to render characters stereotypical, resulting in what are known as comedias de figurón (plays of exaggerated character), roughly equivalent to the "humours" or 'manners" comedies of the English Stage.
While not abandoning these types, Alarcón adds his particular subtle strokes to them, rendering them more rounded and more recognizable as real people rather than as theatrical constructs. Even where he approaches a figurón type character in Don Garcia--the inveterate liar-he is careful to suppiy both motivation and complexity. And because he is writing-indeed because he all but invents--"manners" comedy for the siglo de oro, he also puts into this play, as he does into a few others, those contemporary, urban touches that allow the Madrileños to see themselves on the stage, and not some purely artificial creatures that live only in the theatre and nowhere else.

Spanish Theatres

Spanish theatres of the Golden Age were outdoors. The first stages were put up in open spaces between three adjoining buildings that formed a reverse U. The lowest paying audience would stand on the ground in front of and around the stage (the pit), and richer patrons could sit in balconies or galleries or windows of the adjacent buildings. The stage was bare, and behind it was erected a facade, with two or three curtained openings and a simple balcony or window space above. This evolved into theatres built exclusively for plays and generally administered for charity by hospitals, but on the same physical model. Each major town would have at least one, and perhaps more of such theatres, or corrales, as they were called.
On the whole, the Spanish comedia is played very much as we imagine Shakespeare's plays to have been originally played (though with intermissions and/or diversions between acts)--on a bare stage, with one scene moving seamlessly into another, with only the barest change of actual stage scenery or properties (a chair, a curtain), and any necessary information about locale delivered in the lines themselves.

Ruiz de Alarcón

Juan Ruiz de Alarcón was born in Mexico City around 1581, to a father who worked--probably as an administrator--in the Taxco mines, and a mother descended from one of Spain's most illustrious families, the Mendozas. Juan studied law at the University of Mexico, but sailed to Spain in early 1600 in order to take his bachelor's degrees at the renowned University of Salamanca, which he did later in 1600 in Canon Law and then in 1602 in Civil Law.
He continued his studies towards a Licentiate in Law--roughly equivalent to our modern Master's degree--which he finished in 1605, without, however, taking the degree. Instead, he practiced law for a while in Seville, then returned to Mexico in 1608, and in 1609 received the licentiate from the University of Mexico. He completed his studies for his doctorate fairly soon thereafter, but never received the degree, in all likelihood because of the rather substantial costs attached to the ceremony.
He worked as a legal adviser for a while, as an advocate, and as an interim investigating judge, all the while trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to gain a teaching chair at the University. After five years, he returned to Spain, settling in Madrid and entering on a frustrating life of job-seeking at court. At the same time, purely as a way of making money apparently, he threw himself into the heady literary and theatrical life of the capital, eventually having a number of his plays performed.
For ten years, he pursued this double life, until he finally secured first an interim and then a permanent appointment to the Royal Council of the Indies--rather like an appeals court for Spanish colonies in the New World. Apparently, when political success came, he all but stopped his literary efforts--although he did have two volumes of his plays published (in 1628 and 1634), perhaps because some of them had been pirated and previously published with false attributions to his theatrical rival Lope de Vega. After thirteen years of legal service to the crown, he died in August, 1639.

His Reputation

In his own time, Alarcón seems almost to have been little more than a joke to many fellow members of the theatrical profession. Some of this, of course, may have been jealousy or rivalry, but the fact remains that he was not taken very seriously by the other playwrights, and roundly ridiculed every time they thought he was getting out of line.
Some of that ridicule, were it done today, would make us all cringe; for the fact is much of it was aimed at Alarcón's physical deformities and social over-compensations. He was a shaggy redhead, hump-backed, bulbous-chested, and of small stature, perhaps even dwarfish. In spite of all that, he had, apparently, pretensions to being both a nobleman and something of a ladies' man. His rivals wrote scurrilous verses at every opportunity, calling him "a sack of melons"; "chicken-breast on a stick"; "a two-bit peer or "poet lite"; "a man with cannonballs implanted front and back so he could wheel himself around Madrid."
Why all the ridicule? Well for one thing, Alarcón was not a professional; he had the audacity to write plays while he was actually waiting around for something else--like a court appointment. Then again, he wrote few play--compared to the others--and wrote slowly and carefully. He had strong and radical ideas that challenged Lope de Vega's pronouncements--about theatrical language, for example, which he thought should be spare and clear; about theatrical structure, which he thought should be logical and organized; about theatrical characterization, which he thought should display some psychological subtlety and consistency; and about theatrical themes, which he thought should have a closer connection to everyday life and exhibit something approaching an acceptable sense of morality.
And, of course, to make things worse, he was also a Mexican--though the term was not in use at the time; instead, they called him el indiano (the West Indian, or more properly, the American). To imagine what they must have felt towards this trans-Atlantic interloper, think of Shakespeare or Jonson being lectured by a 'colonial' on how to write plays--let alone how to live. So in a sense, Alarcón was caught, both as a person and as a writer, between two worlds --most of his friends in Madrid were those with close ties to the New World, while most of the literary and theatrical circle was made up of closely knit Old-Worlders. In Spain, he was widely mocked; and back in Mexico, no one knew of him. None of his plays was done in Mexico for almost two centuries after his heyday, and for most of the nineteenth century he was little known and less appreciated in his native land.

His Plays

It seems likely that Alarcón's plays were written in that period while he was office-seeking in Madrid; that he began them no earlier than 1613, and stopped writing for the theatre upon his reception of a government post in 1624.
After 1626, he did take care, as noted earlier, to publish two volumes of his plays, one in 1628 (Primera Parte) and the other in 1634 (Segunda Parte). The first volume contains eight plays, including Las paredes oyen ("Ihe Walls Have Ears") and Mudarse per mejorse ("Change for the Better"). The second volume contains twelve plays, including La verdad sospechosa ("The Truth Can't Be Trusted"), Ganar amigos ("Making Friends"), and La prueba de las promeses ("The Proof of the Promise"). Outside these two volumes there are as many as four more plays of probable authenticity, including No hay mal que por bien no venga ("Nothing's So Bad That It Can't Turn To Good") and possibly Quién engaña más a quién ("Who's Fooling Who?"). Twenty-three or twenty-four plays is the usual size of the canon.
Twenty-four is not a large number by any means, not when we recall that the works of the other great Spanish playwrights could run well into the hundreds. Nor is Alarcón's range particularly wide. He tried his hand at intrigue and honor plays, at a few plays on magical themes, at histories, and at least one religious play (during whose opening Lope de Vega unleashed a stinkbomb in the audience), but it was in the Madrid plays of manners that he excelled and for which he is most remembered and celebrated. La verdad sospechosa is his undeniable masterwork in that form.

The Truth Can't Be Trusted

Don Garcia, a young law student, returns to Madrid at his father's request to assume his position in society. The young man, however, has one glaring fault--he is an impulsive and compulsive liar. The father Don Beltrán) is horrified, and immediately undertakes to get his son married before knowledge of the fault gets out. The son, meanwhile, has ideas of his own; and in spite of the warnings of his wise servant Tristán, sets about courting one of the beautiful young ladies of the city.
But, first of all, he fails to get the lady's name right; he thinks it's Lucrecia, when it's really Jacinta. Next, he tells her huge lies. And finally, she's already engaged to one of his friends (Don Juan). All this makes for terrible complications.
For example, his father has arranged a marriage with Jacinta, but because Garcia has the name wrong, he tries to prevent the marriage by telling his father he's already married. And when Don Juan thinks Garcia has been flirting with his fiancee, he challenges him to a duel.
Meanwhile Garcia keeps wooing his "Lucrecia"--who is really Jacinta--while the real Lucrecia looks on and falls in love with him. The lies continue to pile up; and even when Garcia tries to tell the truth, no one believes him.
The story moves headlong towards the inevitable conclusion. Juan claims Jacinta as his bride. Beltrán and his son finalize arrangements for Garcia's marriage to "Lucrecia." Of course, both suitors want to marry the same woman, and for the first time Garcia realizes that he has been courting the right woman under the wrong name. And with a surprise ending, the play is over.

The Importance of the Play

What is known of Alarcón outside the Spanish-speaking world is based almost entirely on one play-this play, La verdad sospechosa, literally The Truth Suspected. And ironically, he is not even known primarily for the play itself, but for the effect it had on Continental theatre; for the piece influenced many of Europe's greatest playwrights, including Molière, of whom Voltaire said that without the tradition established by this play, there would simply have been no Molière.
What this means is not just that La verdad is Alarcón's masterwork--which it undoubtedly is--but that it was crucial in the development of western theatre, establishing once and for all the dominance of the "comedy of character" over the "comedy of plot."

The Ideas of the Play

Like many plays of the period, La verdad is a dramatization of a moralistic proverb--"In a lying mouth, even the truth is suspect." The title of the play in Spanish automatically evokes the moral, as would--in English, for example--a title like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." Alarcón's literary style adds to this sense of "moralism." Within the play, Beltrán's, Tristán's, and Jacinta's disapproving speeches--to and about Garcia--expand and confirm the moral; and the entire action of the play illustrates it--right up to the surprise unhappy ending, which evokes the ultimate 'I told you so.'
But them are at least some things about the piece that make a strictly moralistic analysis far too simple.
The first is the readiness of many other characters in the play to deceive when it suits them--especially those who speak most harshly against decption--Beltán, Jacinta, Lucrecia. The second is that the central complication of the play, as we have already noted, springs not from Garcia's lying but from mistaken identity. The third is that for all his faults, Garcia remains, not so much the negative villain of the play, but its admirable and even positive hero. We take an enormous enpyment from Garcia's antics--at times perhaps a guilty enjoyment; but our final experience of the play is not as a moral lesson but as an entertainment.
This kind of play uses the traditional devices of comedy or romance--mistaken identity, error, deception, disguise--as lenses to focus on a deeper level of reality--or unreality--by suggesting the gulf between fact and fiction is not so great or fixed as is commonly supposed. And the fact that we--and others-find Garcia's fabrications so believable--not to say enjoyable--leads directy to the question of the possible primacy of art over reality. Not only is reality not quite as real as it seems, but art is not quite as "unreal" as it professes. Truth, in this tradition, is indeed suspect. And Garcia becomes a stand-in for the artist, whose fictions, though they may not function quite as we might wish in the real world, are yet somehow to be valued at least as highly as the truth of the 'real" world. La verdad salutes, though it may not reward, the triumph of imagination over reality.

Bibliography

GOLDEN AGE THEATRE

Hesse, Everett W., ed. Approaches to Teaching Spanish Golden Age Drama. York, SC: Spanish Literature Publishing Company, 1989.

McKendrick, Melveena. Women and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

Rennert, Hugo Albert. The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega. New York: Hispanic Society, 1909. Reprinted (without the appendix) New York: Dover, 1963.

Wilson, Margaret. Spanish Drama of the Golden Age. Oxford: Pergamon, 1969.

Ziomek, Henryk. A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

ALARCÓN

Translations

The Truth Can't Be Trusted. Translated by Dakin Matthews. New Orleans:
University Press of the South, 1998.

The Truth Can't Be Trusted. Acting Edition. Translated by Dakin Matthews. Los Angeles: Andak, 1999.

The Truth Suspected. Translated by Robert C. Ryan. In Spanish Drama, ed. Angel Flores. New York: Bantam, 1968. Reprinted by Dover in 1991 as Great Spanish Plays in English Translation.

Criticism

Gaylord, Mary Malcolm "The Telling Lies in La veerdad sospechosa." MLN, 103, 2 (March 1988), 223-238.

Larson, Catherine. "Labels and Lies: Names and Don Garcia's World in La verdad sospechosa." REH, 20, 20 (May 1980), 95-112.

Melvin, Miriam Virginia. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: Classical and Spanish Influences. Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1942.

Poesse, Walter. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. New York: Twayne, 1972.

Copies of The Thruth Can't Be Trusted: The Acting Edition are available from The Antaeus Company (818) 506-5436.

Study Questions

1. Why do you think Garcia lies so much? Why does he say he lies so much? Is he the only liar in the play?

2. Why do you think people are so quick to believe him? Does anybody in the play say why his lies are so believable?

3. Does this play remind you of any other plays you have seen? Or any movies or television shows?

4. Did you notice that it was spoken in rhyme? Were you aware of the rhyming all the way through or only part of the time?

5. What role do the servants play? How are the male servants different from the female servants?

6. Is the ending unhappy? Of the two marriages that end the play, which one do you think has the better chance of success?

7. Did all the mistaken identity confuse you as much as it did Garcia, or could you follow the story pretty clearly?

8. Did you identify with any of the characters? Which ones? Which characters seemed the most real to you?

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The "Antaeus Study Guide" to
The Truth Can't Be Trusted
is published by The Antaeus Company
@ New Place
4916 Vineland Ave.
N. Hollywood, CA 91601
(818) 506-5936
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© Richard Matthews 1998,1999

Prepared for the Antaeus Company by Andak Theatrical Services

Selections from this study guide are adapted and reprinted with permission from the Critical Edition of The Truth Can't Be Trusted, published by
University Press of the South, Inc
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New Orleans, LA 70115
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The printing and distribution of this "Study Guide" is part of "The First Playwright of the Americas" project funded in part py The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The California Council for the Humanities, and The Association for Hispanic Classical Theatre.