Tirso and the Drama of Sexuality and Imagination

Abstract

To the Distinguished Tirsista, Ruth Lee Kennedy Uno de los aspectos poco estudiados del arte de la comedia es el comportamiento humano referente a la sexualidad. Este ensayo examina las tecnicas que utiliza Tirso para indicar como un personaje emplea la imaginacion para influir en las acciones sexuales de otros personajes. La imaginacion puede urdir tretas para que un personaje alcance su meta inventando historias y estrategias, cambiandose de identidad y traje y participando en un drama dentro de un drama. Sirviondose de la memoria, la voluntad y el entendimiento, la imaginacion funciona con las emociones para alcanzar un meta sexual.One of the least explored aspects of the comedia's art is its focus on human behavior especially in reference to sex. We do not mean to minimize the effect of physical action upon the mental and emotional states of the characters. In fact, there will be found a close correlation between the physical and mental. We are, however, more interested in this essay in Tirso's use of those mental and emotional factors which exert an influence on human sexual conduct. We will examine those techniques Tirso employs to indicate how a character uses the mind to devise schemes to sway the behavior of others especially regarding sexuality. The plays chosen for study are, La venganza de Tamar, Don Gil de las colzas verdes, and El vergonzoso en palacio.Like other great writers of the past, Tirso knew by observation and intuition what modern psychologists have established clinically, viz., that two of the most powerful human drives are those of the hunger for food and for sex. Tirso has achieved a remarkable blending of these two forces that determine human behavior by uniting food imagery with the sexual drive in an important play, La venganza de Tamar 1 . Hunger is thus something other than a longing for food; it is also a yearning for sexual relationship which has been frustrated by circumstances beyond an individual's control. The individual then seeks See my article, "The Incest Motif in Tirso's La venganza de Tamar", Hisp., 47 (1964), 268-276.

Intellectual history and cultural history: the inside and the outside

“…Externalism has returned with a nominalist and localist vengeance in recent works, expressed most strikingly, perhaps, in those of Shapin and Andrew Pickering, the first investigating not just the history of truth but The Social History of Truth and the second not just contingency but 'messy contingencies.' 39 As in literary history one crucial question is the role of individual genius, and here a methodological consensus can never be reached. The 'c'est la faute de Voltaire' theory of the origins of the French Revolution may be discredited, but analogous views of the Scientific Revolution are still accepted, especially by philosophers.…”