Doubling Down on Stupid: Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque

Abstract

Doubling Down on Stupid:Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque Robert L. Turner III (bio) Although Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), pseudonym for the Mercedarian priest Gabriel Téllez, is best known as the author of El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) and El condenado por desconfiado (Damned by Despair), his corpus includes dozens of plays spanning multiple subgenres.1 Tirso is one of three key playwrights who dominated Spanish theater in the early modern period. Together with Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the creator of the comedia nueva ("new theater"), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the master of baroque language and palace theater, Tirso de Molina helped to elevate an immensely popular public entertainment to a deeply philosophical commentary on society, identity, power relationships, and justice. For early modern Spain, the corral ("theater") was an extremely popular destination with a higher per capita attendance than that at North American movie theaters in the early twenty-first century.2 The comedia, as the dominant theatrical form of the period came to be known, took form in the late sixteenth century as Lope de Vega created a winning formula based on domestic and Italian sources. As he explains in his El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo [End Page 33] (The New Art of Writing Plays in Our Time), his vision includes a break with the classic tradition in favor of a more popular set of themes, all set within a three-act structure that runs for roughly three thousand lines of verse. The comedia is characterized by the use of multiple verse forms and a plot that almost always ends in either marriage or murder. Parallel or doubled plots, with the nobles' efforts frequently being echoed by a coarser or more satirical version involving the servants, is a common element as well. The genre is also full—especially in the urban and cloak-and-sword subgenres—of derring-do, battles, duels, disguises, secret marriages, betrayals, mistaken identities, and similar attention-grabbing plot devices. At the same time, the comedia includes a focus on character development and a psychological depth that was lacking in earlier Spanish theater. Born Gabriel Josepe López Téllez to humble parents in the San Sebastian parish of Madrid (Vázquez, "Gabriel Téllez" 22), Tirso joined the Mercedarians as a young man and served within the order until his death. This religious involvement formed a core part of his literary identity and may also explain his use of a pseudonym since some religious leaders strongly opposed the ribald nature of these secular plays (Vázquez, "Tirso de Molina" 358). While both Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca were also ordained to the priesthood, each entered into formal religious orders in their fifties, and writing was always their paramount focus. In contrast, Tirso took on several important roles within his order, including writing its history as the order's chronicler. At the time of his death he was the comendador ("interim abbot") for the Mercedarian monastery in Soria. Tirso's plays are often structured around the overarching concept of justice, where divine and social justice excuse actions that violate contemporary mores.3 His criticism of societal corruption, including that of King Philip IV's favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, is likely the reason that the Junta de Reformación ordered him, in 1625, to cease his writing and leave Madrid, calling his works "scandalous."4 Tirso's work consistently tilts toward psychological conflicts and shows an obsession with the use of disguise, a love of mistaken identities, a tendency to write sympathetic and norm-breaking female characters, and a fascination with multiplications of the self—all of which further his exploration of issues surrounding power and justice. These themes are [End Page 34] frequently expressed through various forms of doubling. This doubling includes the creation of doppelgangers (as is the case in this play); the creation of multiple identities, such as in La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself), where the protagonist has to win against an idealized version of herself; layered identities, as in El amor m...