La fingida arcadia: Tirso's Disenchantment with Pastoral

Tirso de Molina's play, La fingida Arcadia (1622), is a work which draws its inspiration from Lope de Vega's pastoral romance La Arcadia (1598). Yet, in his re-creation of the pastoral world, Tirso presents a highly self-conscious literary text in which he examines the impulses giving rise to bucolic literature and the artifice on which this world is constructed. His pastoral retreat is a complex fabrication based on rôle-playing, pseudoidentities and illusion, and the work itself is structured upon multiple layers of artifice. This study examines the essence of Tirso's pastoral world and its subtle ties to the literary and political satire evident in the work. The ultimate convergence of his fictive Arcadia with the political schemes and literary excesses he denounces reveals Tirso's attitudes toward the pastoral as well as his views on the nature of art and its articulation in dramatic form. (DC)