Human Rights and Spain’s Golden Age Theatre: National History, Empire, and Global Trade in Tirso De Molina's El Burlador De Sevilla

this essay argues one fundamental point: namely, that to understand our current globalized condition, one must first recall and rethink the first globalization of markets, exchanges of ideas, and the migration of peoples across the world’s oceans in the sixteenth century under the flags of Spanish and Portuguese galleons. From this argument the critical task turns to the analysis of Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville, 1620), a play that represents Spain’s Golden Age in its artistic as well as political and religious dimensions, specifically in its representation of Islamic and Christian conflicts that contain in embryo form questions of religious tolerance and human rights across the globe from the Age of Discovery to the present. This study proposes that Tirso de Molina’s comedias open paths of reflection on sixteenth century forms of European nationalism that coincided with the rise of other imperial nations— English, French, Dutch—and resulted in caste-like hierarchies and religious conflicts in colonial settings, problems that continue to divide peoples across the world. Overshadowed in his time by Spanish playwrights like Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1601-1681), Tirso de Molina was all but forgotten by the end of the eighteenth century. His international impact on drama, music, poetry, film, and in daily discourse has been immense, and yet his creation—Don Juan, the archetypal libertine and seducer—is often assumed to be the leading man in the work of some other playwright, poet, or composer. Mostly known in Spain and in Latin America for his play El Burlador de Sevilla,o el convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville, or the Stone Guest), Tirso fathered a wide-ranging artistic progeny: Moliére’s play Don Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1787), Byron’s Don Juan (1821), and José de Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio (1844), to name a few. The profile of Don Juan the seducer became a joke in modern Latin American fiction, above all in Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), where a man’s quest for knowledge and self-mastery in life stand in direct contrast to Tirso de Molina’s “brainless” man who stops at a bridge only to smoke and gaze at women adjusting their stockings. 1 Hollywood has contributed to the amusement in the film Don Juan DeMarco (Jeremy Leven, 1994), a romantic comedy that confuses the roles of Don Juan and Don Quixote de la Mancha with humorous results. Although he wrote more than 400 plays in his lifetime—including some that are considered masterpieces in the history of Spanish drama—Tirso de Molina Dr. ROBERTO CANTÚ, Professor of Chicano Studies and English, California State University, Los Angeles. Email: [email protected] See Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon Books, 1966): 495.