Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina , pseud. of Fray Gabriel Téllez , 1584?-1648, outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, b. Madrid. His fame rests on El burlador de Sevilla (1630; tr. The Love Rogue, 1924), the earliest known literary version of the Don Juan legend. Among the 300 or 400 plays by Tirso de Molina are El vergonzoso en palacio [the bashful man at the palace], La prudencia en la mujer [prudence in a woman], El condenado por desconfiado (tr. The Saint and the Sinner, 1954), Marta la piadosa [pious Martha], and El castigo del pensé que (tr. by James Shirley as The Opportunity, 1640). He also wrote short novels, included in his prose collection Los cigarrales de Toledo (1621). He joined the Mercedarian monks in 1601 and wrote a history of the order (1637-39). His dramas, influenced by Lope de Vega, excel in wit and sympathetic characterization.

Tirso de Molina [ Fray Gabriel Téllez] (c.1571–1648), Spanish ecclesiastic, whose secular works include a number of plays, of which more than 80 are extant, though he claimed to have written 400. Their technique derives from that of his near contemporary Lope de Vega Carpio, whom he much admired, but it is modified in his case by his greater interest in the psychology of his characters. He was particularly good at drawing women at their wittiest and most intelligent in such comedies as Don Gil de la calzas verdes (The Man in Green Breeches, c.1611), in which he employs his favourite comic device of women disguised as men, and El vergonzoso en palacio (The Bashful Man at Court, c.1612). Among his historical plays, the best is undoubtedly La prudencia en la mujer (Prudence in Woman, c.1622), in which he draws an excellent picture of the heroic Queen Maria and points a moral for the Spanish politicians of his own time. Tirso was also the author of four autos sacramentales, and of a number of religious plays of which an excellent example is El condenado por desconfiado (Damned for Lack of Faith, c.1624); but his masterpiece is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, c.1630), the first of many plays on the subject of Don Juan, which was staged by the RSC in 1990.