Tirso de Molina, Priest-Playwright

Tirso de Molina wrote some of the most delightful comedies of the Golden Age. Most of them present a theme of universal and timeless appeal: the frantic efforts of young lovers to achieve union despite major hindrances of one sort or another. These erotic, and occasionally bawdy, comedies scandalized the moralists of Tirso's time and later. They found difficulty in understanding how a priest, a seeker after the mystical love of his God, could also find pleasure in the erotic. The purpose of this study is to attempt an explanation of this ambivalence. As an introduction there is offered a brief review of Tirso's activities as priest and as playwright that may aid in the pursuit of the matter at issue. it is recalled that in his composition of erotic materials he followed the lead of certain earlier churchmen who had no moral or religious scruples against composing naughty literature: Juan Ruiz and François Rabelais, the French cleric, come to mind. The mind-set of religious who found pleasure in the indecent is offered explanation by a recent commentator, Lucien Lefebvre. Tirso's definition of love is recalled as is also his statement of the intent of his writings: he affirmed that he wrote jestingly, in the mood of the burla so popular at that time. By treating the actions of his love-struck youngsters as play, as a game, he hoped to capture the attention of his audience so that he might interest them in more serious matters involving Christian doctrine. It is clear that he saw the mystical and the erotic as diametrically opposed in meaning; for the orthodox Christian the erotic, lust, is one of the seven deadly sins. There still remains, however, something further to be said about how a priest, sworn to continence, could enjoy the erotic so thoroughly as to compose dozens of plays about it, and one has recourse to the concept of «morose delectation» as offered by commentators, that kind of pleasure aroused by the erotic fantasies and dreams recalled in Augustine's Confesions. Certain thinkers have suggested that the mystical and the erotic are really not fundamentally different but are one and the same impulse. Interestingly enough this concept takes one back to the distant past when primitive believers saw their religions as partly sexual, requiring phallic worship as an element of ritual. No effort is made here to assess the validity of the concept of the oneness of the mystical and the erotic, but it is apparent that many will find the concept difficult of acceptance, just as it would have been for Tirso and especially so when it is expressed in the obscenities of the pornographic. Whatever one may conclude from the above about the psychological and theological complexities of Tirso's attitude toward his comedies, these will remain among the classics of their kind. (GEW)