Esther Fernández, ed. Tirso de Molina: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century

This collection of twenty essays, aimed at an English-speaking audience, sets out to examine Tirso de Molina’s “transcultural contemporaneity” (Introduction, pp. 1–5). It provides an overview of recent research that foregrounds the plays’ treatment of gender and non-conformity and makes a case for Tirso’s transhistorical (“visionary,” p. 3) imagination. Varied in outlook and method, the essays sometimes contradict each other, for example on Tirso’s authorship of El burlador de Sevilla, or his feminism; such disagreements are no drawback, and can indeed be instructive. Esther Fernández states (p. 2) that the modern canon is limited to El vergonzoso en palacio, Don Gil de las calzas verdes, La prudencia en la mujer, Marta la piadosa, and La venganza de Tamar; these all bear on feminism, and are discussed in fourteen of the essays. But there are also two chapters on El burlador de Sevilla, and treatments of eighteen other works, as well as brief references to seventeen more, a sum of forty-one. The total of surviving works is given variously as sixty or eighty, so the selection is ample.The two contributions by Spanish scholars, Alejandro García-Reidy’s “A Text with No Name? The Rise and Fall of Tirso’s Attribution of El burlador de Sevilla” (pp. 23–40) and Ignacio Arellano’s “Tirso de Molina’s Critical Panorama (2010–2021)” (pp. 300–320), are of scant interest, being sketches of work already published. The former questions Tirso’s authorship of El burlador de Sevilla using the ETSO digital stylometry program, but tabulations are inaccurate, the method unexplained, and its shortcomings well-known (see Jane W. Albrecht, “An Overview of Stylometry and its Application to the Comedia,” Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 74, no. 1–2, 2023, pp. 351–372). Arellano repeats an article of 2000 to dismiss all critical work on Tirso since 2010, rejecting attempts to trace feminist or dissident ideas as “anachronistic” and calling instead for more rigorous critical editions—an incongruous postscript to this book.The other essays, divided into four parts, are more compelling. Pt I “A Worldly Friar” provides a biographical introduction. Esther Fernández’s “Aligning Contradictions: Tirso de Molina’s Life and Works” (pp. 9–22) probes his “split personality” as the pious Mercedarian friar Gabriel Téllez and profane pseudonymous alter ego “Tirso,” the Dionysiac thyrsus of Bacchic revels. Christopher B. Weimer’s “Prose Fiction and Authorial Self-Fashioning: Los cigarrales de Toledo and Deleitar aprovechando” (pp. 41–54) shows how the latter work (1632) rewrote the former (1624) as a religious text in the wake of his condemnation by the Junta de Reformación in 1625. Alejandra Juno Rodríguez Villar, in “The Religious Theater of Fray Gabriel Téllez” (pp. 55–70), argues that his biblical-hagiographical plays embodied the official ideology of Catholicism, and so sees works like La mujer que manda en casa, the story of Jezebel, as portraying women as “canonical” shrews—lustful, adulterous, and power-mad.Pt II “Antinormative Identities” explores the plays’ fascination with aberrant love, gender, and cross-dressing. Emmy Herland’s “Melancholy Subjects: Pathological Love in the Plays of Tirso de Molina” (pp. 73–85) studies the role of early-modern theories of black bile as a “humor” that controls human temperament in the portrayal of lovesick protagonists in El melancólico and El amor médico. José R. Cartagena-Calderón’s excellent “‘Mozo soy y mozo fuiste’: Early Modern Conceptions of Age and Masculinity in El burlador de Sevilla” (pp. 86–99) discusses the play as an exploration of the Counter-Reformation “codification” of normative masculinity, which, while prescribing coercive regulation of women, for young men merely recommended self-control, an ideal regularly mocked as a form of emasculation, as evidenced in abundant documents of hyper-masculine sexual abuse; Don Juan’s impunity for his crimes against women was thus a social reality, and his condemnation to hell for the murder of a man a disturbing reflection on contemporary mores. Judith Caballero’s perspicuous reading of Escarmientos para el cuerdo in “All about the Mother in Lessons to the Wise” (pp. 100–114) likewise shows how the complex portrayal of the deaths of two heroic mothers in the true story of adulterous Manuel de Sousa’s shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope undermined the orthodox ideology of subservient motherhood. Robert L. Turner III’s well-argued “To Be and Not to Be: Iterations of Disguise in the Theater of Tirso de Molina” (pp. 115–130) analyzes Tirso’s obsession with the plot device of disguise and cross-dressing (over fifty plays) as satire of early-modern social strictures, a point developed by Emily C. Tobey’s “Dressing the Part: Costuming and Material Culture in Tirso de Molina” (pp. 131–144), which studies the rigid class structure of dress codes enforced by sumptuary laws and social imperatives.Pt III “Soundscapes and Landscapes” turns to staging. Ivy Howell Walters, in “Tirso de Molina: A Musical Meeting of the Minds” (pp. 147–159), surveys the use of songs, on- and offstage, to add atmosphere. Harrison Meadows, “The Figurative Geography of Natural Landscapes in Tirso de Molina” (pp. 160–171), lists the use of imaginary rural landscapes, such as drawing the backstage curtain to discover miracles in mountains. Gladys Robalino’s “Tirso de Molina, Encounters with the New World” (pp. 172–185), on the setting of the trilogy on the Pizarros’s exploits in South America, is more provocative; intended as an epic celebration of their heroism, the underlying brutality of the conquest, which Téllez witnessed for himself in Hispaniola in 1618–1620, results in a mixed message. Antonio Guijarro-Donadiós, “Tirso Goes Underground” (pp. 186–205), examines the social crisis produced by the vast urban expansion of Madrid in the early seventeenth century, which led to economic collapse, beggary, and a marginalized criminal underworld, while Noelia S. Cirnigliaro, in “The Impossible Lockdown: Tirso de Molina’s Lessons in Domesticity” (pp. 206–218), deals with plays that portray women confined within the prison of domesticity who gain freedom by cross-dressing, tunnels, connecting balconies, and other felonious stratagems afforded by the same urbanization.Finally, Pt IV “Unconventional Afterlives” considers the new perspectives offered by contemporary stage performances and translations. All agree that the keynote is to engage the audience, disregarding authorial intention. Susan L. Fischer, in “Staging Tirso de Molina in Spain and England (1986–): Ingenuity or Aberration?” (pp. 221–236), traces the path from the “Baroque” costume-drama of Marsillach’s 1989 El vergonzoso en palacio, with its scenery of folding panels, mirrors, neon lights, etc., to Aladro’s 2010 El condenado por desconfiado, a Goyesque “chiaroscuro” of curtains, candles, lanterns, smoke, harps, and angels, and finally the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 Damned by Despair, which updated the play with modern dress, pizzerias, and the devil as an actress. Kathleen Jeffs’s “Tirso de Molina in English: Translation for Performance” (pp. 237–254), Harley Erdman’s, “Tirso de Molina on Stage: Comedy, Costumes, Chameleons” (pp. 255–270), and Sarah Grunnah’s, “Performing Gender on the English-Language Stage: Tirso’s Queer Characters” (pp. 271–284) are personal recollections by theatre professionals of how they used staging and special effects to engage spectators’ notions of gender. Finally, Erin A. Cowling and Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, in “Dismantling Myths and Repositioning the Other: Tirso de Molina for the Twenty-First-Century Classroom” (pp. 285–299), propose a new canon of eight plays for students, designed to terminally disassociate Tirso’s oeuvre from the “problematic” (because masculine) stereotype of El burlador de Sevilla and all focused solely on the portrayal of strong women.These eighteen essays differ widely in approach and quality, but several are original and scholarly, and all stimulating. The book can be recommended to students of Golden Age theatre as a lively portrait of current trends in critique and performance.