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Reviewed by:
  • Amar por arte mayor by Tirso de Molina
  • Dian Fox
Tirso de Molina. Amar por arte mayor. Enrique García Santo-Tomás. New York-Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Auriseculares (IGAS/IDEA); Madrid-Pamplona: Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos (IET), 2015. 176 pp.

In the introduction to his edition of Tirso de Molina’s Amar por arte mayor, Enrique García Santo-Tomás sets out to explain why the play has seldom been published, performed, or even noticed by many scholars. He gives their due to the small set of academics who have paid attention to Amar, among them Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Blanca de los Ríos, and Premraj Halkhoree. Hartzenbusch, as the first “modern” editor in 1841, was influential in his distaste for Amar’s anachronisms and inverisimilitude, his negative judgment essentially consigning it to obscurity for generations of academics and other aficionados of the Comedia. García Aango-Tomás suspects that Tirso’s subordination of nationalistic concerns to language and poetry may also have offended Hartzenbusch’s nineteenth-century sensibilities (33). The current editor’s compensatory focus on the ingenuity of the expression, along with his respect for cultural and political contexts, are a much-needed corrective to our neglect of the play.

Classic in Amar are a protagonist’s romantic rivalry with a king, an astute and funny gracioso, and an errant portrait. What is exceptional, even for this genre so attuned to the nuances and play of language, is its wittily self-conscious focus on versification. Amar por arte mayor is a Golden Age poetry-lover’s delight. Just as it has been said that the subject of Don Quijote in all its metafiction and self-referentiality is how to write a novel, one could say that a subject of this play is how to versify brilliantly in Spanish. Justifiably, Tirso’s characters boast about the virtuoso poetry. Moreover, Tirso employs historical context ingeniously in the service of the plot’s twists, turns, and linguistic acrobatics. Given the complex language and courtly environment, Halkorhee’s suggestion (cited by García 14) makes sense that the piece was probably written for a palace audience.

Amar por arte mayor, which takes place in tenth-century León, features two jealous kings, one jealous infanta, and one highborn couple secretly in [End Page 226] love. We watch as Don Lope and Doña Elvira cleverly pick their way through the minefield that is the passions of royalty. Before the beginning of the play, Don Lope, erstwhile favorite of King Sancho, fled Navarra because of fallout over both men’s love for Isabela. She escaped to France and was married to the French king. Now in León, Lope and Doña Elvira have fallen in love. King Sancho asks the Asturian-Leonese king, Ordoño, to arrest and return Lope to Navarra. Ordoño instead appoints the fugitive as his own mayordomo mayor. This king craves Doña Elvira, while his sister, the Infanta Doña Blanca (promised to an Asturian duke), develops a tendre for Lope out of excessive sympathy for his former love Isabela.

This work is a hothouse for deceit, rife with ambiguity; metatheater; soliloquies, double- and triple-speak, and sotto-voce plotting. Lope, Elvira, and Blanca all engage in complex deceptions of each other and of King Ordoño to further their amorous pursuits. The intrigue builds to Act 3’s exultant romantic and linguistic climax as love letters change hands and meanings. First, Doña Elvira writes a billet to King Ordoño in cuartetos to persuade him (falsely) that she loves him. However, the text is a Trojan Horse: subtracting three syllables from the beginning of each line makes a redondilla that expresses her love for Don Lope, who knows the key to the private reading. Impressive, but just the prelude to the protagonist’s own verbal coup. As his servant and go-between Bermudo remarks, Don Lope is well-known for his ingenio (l. 2732). Due to various machinations of interested parties, he must now address to Isabela a single love letter that secretly contains within a declaration of love for Blanca, and even more deeply hidden, a reassurance...

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