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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; Calderón,
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 La verdad sospechosa
(The Truth Can't Be Trusted).
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
entremeses 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:
Since I can see what's really true,
Since clearly Blanca despises me,
How can he give me a remedy
For my desire? What can he do?
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),
and the lyric strophe for romantic or poetic effusions.
Characterization
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, good-humored, 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 generally adds
his particular subtle strokes to them, rendering them more rounded
and more recognizable as real people rather than mere theatrical
constructs. Of all Golden Age playwrights--with the possible
exception of Moreto--Alarcón seems to be the most interested
in the psychology of his characters, especially of his female
protagonists.
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 poet" 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 plays--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.
The Importance of Alarcón
What is known of Alarcón outside the Spanish-speaking
world is based almost entirely on one play--The Truth Can't
Be Trusted (La verdad sospecha). 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 Corneille,
and through him, 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" and advancing theatrical
characterization into the realm of a more realistic psychology.
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 1626.
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 (The
Walls Have Ears) and Mudarse per mejorse
(Change for the Better). The second volume contains
twelve plays, including his masterpiece La verdad sospechosa
(The Truth Can't Be Trusted, or, The Liar),
Ganar amigos (Making Friends), and
La prueba de las promesas (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 (like this one), 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.
The Proof of the Promise (1618)
Don Illán, a magician of Toledo, has a marriageable
daughter, Blanca, whom he wishes to marry to Don Enrique de Vargas
in order to end the bloody rivalry which has been going on for
some time between the Toledos and the Vargas. But Blanca is
reluctant to go along with his plans because she is in love with
Don Juan de Ribera, a handsome, rich, and well connected noble
young man allied to the Marquis of Tarifa. So Don Illán
enlists Lucía, Doña Blanca's maid, in a plot to
change his daughter's mind by constantly suggesting to her mistress
the virtues of Don Enrique and the faults of Don Juan--even if
she has to make up faults to do it.
Don Juan, meanwhile, hearing from his servant Tristán
that Illán is a practitioner of magic, determines to gain
both the hand of his daughter and a share of his learning, by
apprenticing himself as a student to the master magician. And
Blanca, for all Lucía's slanders of Don Juan, cannot bring
herself to reject him, nor for all Enrique's persistence can
she bring herself to love him.
So Illán must hatch another plot. One day, while Enrique
and his servant Chacón are hiding in the study, hoping
to gain another audience with Blanca, and while Juan and his
servant Tristán have come to his house to learn magic,
Illán scrawls a few magic characters on a piece of paper,
and announces to the audience that he is going to test Juan's
promises--of love for his daughter and of favor for him --by
casting a spell.
At that moment, a messenger arrives with the news that Don Juan
has been chosen the new Marquis of Tarifa. Juan immediately
rewards the messenger with a stewardship and Tristán with
a post as private secretary; but when Illán asks for
a position for his son, Don Juan puts him off with the promise
that greater favors await all of them in Madrid, and he orders
Illán and his household to follow him there.}
To Madrid also flees Enrique, in hopes of changing Blanca's mind,
which had wavered momentarily at the thought of the hidden faults
Lucía made up for Don Juan, but has now become once again
firmly attached to the new Marquis' rising star. Illán
encourages Enrique to keep up the pursuit, which only confuses
the young man, who sees in Illán's move to Madrid with
his daughter the end of all his hopes.
Don Juan becomes more and more obnoxious, refusing again and
again to grant the father the favors he has promised him, and
even attempting to seduce, rather than marry, the daughter.
Meanwhile the two servingmen vie for Lucía's love; and
though she prefers Tristán, she is offended by his sudden
advancement and pretentions.
Don Juan continues to rise higher and higher in the court of
Spain, becoming the King's favorite and Regent of Seville. He
also grows more and more enraged as Blanca continues to reject
his amorous advances and to insist upon marriage, and finally
determines to take his revenge.
Fearing that Enrique is his rival, he orders him away from Madrid;
and when he is approached for the last time by Illán and
Blanca, he insults the daughter and threatens the father. At
that that moment Illán breaks the spell and explains that
all has been an illusion. No one has gone to Madrid; they are
all still in his study. And Juan and his promises have been
put to the test and found wanting. Blanca accepts Enrique's
offer of marriage, and Tristán, chastened by the experience,
is given Lucía's hand as well.
The Ideas of the Play
The Spanish title of the play might be translated literally
as "The Test of the Promises"--for that is what a prueba
is--a test. (The English word 'proof' still has that meaning
in our proverb: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
This is why the translator has chosen to translate the title
as The Proof of the Promise, so that it echoes
the proverb.)
The play is, in one sense, a test of the worthiness of two suitors
and a dramatic working out of proverb with which the translator
ends the play: the proof of the promise is in the keeping. (This
proverb incidentally is not in the Spanish; it is an example
of the kind of liberty that translators sometimes take to make
the meaning more clear.
It structure, therefore, over the three acts is relatively simple.
There is a main plot and a subplot. In the mainplot two noble
men woo a noble lady and are subjected to a magician's test.
In the subplot, their servants woo her servant, mirroring and,
to some extent, satirizing their masters and her mistress.
As the spell takes hold, each gentleman finds himself advanced
to higher and higher positions. One of them becomes more arrogant
and untrustworthy, the other becomes more humble and faithful.
And through the spell, the magician's daughter finds herself
tested as well; will she recognize and reward virtue and true
love over rank and power?
The play is in this way typical of Alarcón's dramatic
moralizing. In two other great comedies he takes a common proverb
and extends it into a play . His masterpiece on the folly of
lying (The Truth Can't Be Trusted) flows from a
Spanish proverb equivalent to the English warning against "crying
wolf." And his urban comedy of manners about the dangers
of gossiping bears the proverbial title The Walls Have
Ears.
But this play, again like the other two, is not just moralistic
proverb in dramatic form. It is a complex and funny play, with
a special twist. The twist of The Proof of the Promise
is its clever manipulation of theatrical convention, which leads
to a humorously disorienting view of illusion versus reality.
and a defense of the art of playwrighting.
For this play, like Shakespeare's plays, was written to be performed
on a single set, with no change of scenery; audiences simply
accepted changes of locale when they were announced in the dialogue.
It is precisely because of this that Illán's illusions
work on the audience as well as on the characters. After a while,
even we viewers tend to forget that we are "under a spell";
when a character announces he is in Madrid, we may take it at
face value. And thus when the spell is suddenly broken at the
end of the play, we may feel momentarily as surprised and disoriented
as the characters in the play. And then we may come to realize
that Alarcón the playwright and Illán the magicians
share the skill of teaching morals and testing experience through
the power of illusion.
The Sources
Alarcón's primary source is clearly named in the last
four lines of the play. It is a book of tales by Don Juan Manuel
called Count Lucanor (El Conde Lucanor).
In this collection of anecdotes, the fictional counsellor Patronio
tells his master (the Count) the original story, which appears
as the tenth tale in the collection. In Patronio's version,
the magician of Toledo is named Illán, but the nobleman
tested is instead a cleric (a dean of Santiago) who promises
the magician great favors if he will teach him magic and help
him advance. As the cleric rises to become archbishop, cardinal,
and finally pope--as he thinks--he forgets his promises to Illán,
until finally he is exposed as a villain. Alarcón retained
the name Illán for his Toledo magician, and the setting
in the magician's study, but added the other characters to the
play.
The story of the daughter whose suitors must pass a test of their
virtue or nobility or both is a commonplace in all Western cultures.
Shakespeare, for example, used it in The Merchant of Venice
and in his play about a magician with a marriageable daughter,
The Tempest.
The Characters
The characters of La prueba are among the least
three-dimensional of any of Alarcón's creations, perhaps
because the moralistic and "exemplaristic" structure
of the piece is so dominant.
The two young men are unremarkable, really. Juan has the dash
and shallowness typical of Alarcón's villainous suitors,
but he has far less personality and menace than Don Mendo, for
example, of The Walls Have Ears. He seems to have
little or no conscience, and just the barest hint of self-consciousness
in his speech to Tristán, explaining his rekindled emotions
toward Blanca. Don Enrique hardly seems the general of an army
recently locked in a bloody war; he is mostly all mooning and
complaining, earnestness itself a-wooing. He does seem a little
more self-aware--as in his soliloquy in Act Two; but his earnestness,
like his poetry, tumbles more often than not into the slightly
ridiculous, in which he resembles the over-earnest Don Juan de
Mendoza of The Walls Have Ears. In short, the
two young men have been barely sketched in as human beings, and
are more like icons of their respective attitudes--Enrique of
generous fidelity, Juan of hypocritical presumptuousness.
Illán is hardly more rounded. He makes no emotional journey
for himself over the course of the play--as, say, Prospero does
in The Tempest. He does not even register the
least surprise at the outcome. He seems to enjoy, in addition
to his magical powers, a kind of omniscience that keeps his character
from real discovery. What he does have--and it perhaps makes
him a little more human--is a kind of playfulness, and an enjoyment
of the game--most obvious perhaps in his constant teasing of
Enrique.
Chacón, the minor clown, is pretty much of a cipher, while
Lucía and Tristán seem to have the most personality--as
we might expect from the traditional comic servants. Tristán,
in particular, has at times a wit droll enough to mock his master
to his face without being caught, and just enough pretension
of his own to be an irresistible target for Lucía's gibes.
He is improvisational, quite clever at times, engaging with
the audience, and annoyingly charming in his anecdotal style.
And, by being faithful to his master, keeping his secrets even
when they cry out to be divulged, he earns, suprisingly, Illán's
praise and the reward of Lucía and her hundred doubloons
in marriage. For her part, Lucía is equally clever,
inventive, and very human in her feistiness with Tristán
and her wavering over what might be best for her mistress.
It is finally her sympathy for Enrique that wins her over, and
she is only as mercenary as she needs to be.
Blanca is perhaps the most fully explored character, as one might
expect in a play whose action is essentially constructed to change
her mind. She is stubborn, proud, moody, even cruel when she
is crossed. Yet she is also lovely--and presumably lovable.
She is clearly a victim of her own weakness, which she confesses
herself; and unlike most of the other characters--but like her
eventual husband Enrique--she seems to dwell in a constant state
of both confusion and self-examination. Her progress towards
the truth of her emotions is perhaps not as meticulously traced
as that of Doña Ana in The Walls Have Ears,
nor is her courtship dilemma as carefully dissected as that of
Jacinta in The Truth Can't Be Trusted; but she
is clearly fascinating to Alarcón, who seems to take--like
Moreto after him--a particular interest in what it is that makes
the female heart tick.
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 of Other Plays
The Truth Can't Be Trusted. Translated by Dakin
Matthews. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998.
The Walls Have Ears. Translated by Dakin Matthews.
New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998.
Criticism and Biography
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.
Study Questions
1. Did the central trick of the play fool you? Did you forget,
even for a moment, that there was a spell?
2. Who do you think is the second smartest character in the
play--assuming that Illán is the smartest?
3. Why do you think Tristán is rewarded at the end
of the play with a marriage and a hundred doubloons?
4. Does Don Enrique seem "wimpy" to you? If so,
do you think it is because of our modern perspective or because
Alarcón meant him to be?
5. Magic is central to the play. Do you believe in magic?
Do you think the magic in the play is symbolic of something
else?
__________
This "Antaeus Study Guide"
is published by
The Antaeus Company
@ New Place
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N. Hollywood, CA 91601
(818) 506-5436
www.Antaeus.org
© Richard Matthews 2001
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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(504) 866-2791 www.unprsouth.com
The printing and distribution of this "Study Guide"
is part of "The First Playwright of the Americas" project
funded in part by The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, The
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Region), and The Association for Hispanic Classical Theatre. |
