Tirso de Molina, the Arias Davila Family and Other Curiosities

TIRSO DE MOLINA, THE ARIAS DAVILA FAMILY AND OTHER CURIOSITIES Henry W. Sullivan, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle In the absence of clinching and incontrovertible evidence that might have determined those matters satisfactorily, undeterred students of Tirso de Molina 's biography, birth and parentage, and his alleged affiliation to the Téllez Girón family have been driven into the realm of genealogical theorizing. Such theorizing has departed from the famous San Ginés certificate of 1584 and from possible hints about his origins left by the playwright in his dramas and prose fiction themselves. This genealogical approach was used by Doña Blanca de los Ríos;1 it has been employed with some concrete success by Gerald E. Wade,2 André Nougué3 and others. The purpose of the present article is to extend the genealogical method in some new directions, to discuss the possible significance for Tirso's background of the relationship of the Téllez Girón family to both the Arias Dávila and the Pizarros, and to present some dozen new coincidences arising from these family groupings and the documented life and writings of Tirso; by way of conclusion, some items of fresh information will be added that would appear to bear further on these and previous speculations of tirsistas. This kind of intelligent guesswork cannot by its very nature hope to prove anything. What is achieved is an aggregation of sifted facts that build up an ever stronger circumstantial case for accepting as probably true the basic assertion of Blanca de los Ríos that Gabriel Téllez was the illegitimate son of Juan Téllez Girón, second Duke of Osuna, and one Gracia Juliana. The name De Avila (Dávila) is of prima facie importance for the biography of Tirso. It was the name of the nephew, Francisco Luca de Avila, who brought out the Partes H-V of his uncle's comedias;4 it was the name of Tirso's lawyer, Diego de Avila, in the Salmerón affair (1640); it was also the name of the sea-captain, Cristóbal de Avila, with whom Tirso sailed to Santo Domingo in 1616, and it was the name of the fellow dramatist, Gasper de Avila, with whom the Mercedarian was acquainted at the tertulias of the Academy of Madrid that met at the house of Dr. Sebastián de Medrano during the early 1620's.5 We know, furthermore, that when Tirso died around the middle of February in 1648, the only extant record of any mass said for his soul was in the Segovian convent of the Order of Mercy on February 24th, a foundation patronized by the Arias Dávila family in the seventeenth century.6 The Arias Dávila family sepulchre, surmounted by the Virgin clothed in Mercedarian insignia, can still be seen nowadays in the cloister of Segovia cathedral.7 The question then arises: 'Is there, on the strength of the reappearance of the name De Avila coupled with the apellido Arias, any particular significance for genealogy in this tenuous but factual connection between the Arias Dávila family and the life of Tirso de Molina?* What follows here is an attempt to answer that question positively and reveal what must strike any reader as an overwhelming plethora of new coincidences reinforcing the plausibility of Doña Blanca's long-contended theses. I The Arias Dávila Family Despite the brave denials of Alvarez Rubiano, the roots of the Arias Dávila family that acquired such wealth, power and notoriety from the days of Henry IV of Castile onward, incontestably go back to Jewish beginnings.8 The founder of the family, Diegarias Dávila, bore the name Isaque Abenaçar before his conversion and was married to one Elvira González de Avila, a tavern wench from Madrid according to Cardinal Don Francisco Mendoza y Bobadilla in his Tizón de la Nobleza española o máculas y sambenitos de sus linajes (c. 1560) (Rubiano, p. 28, n.). Indeed, their second son, Juan Arias Dávila who became Bishop of Segovia ( the scene of much building by the Arias Dávila in the fifteenth century...