DECEPTIVE PERCEPTIONS:

Tirso de Molina’s Cautela contra cautela is an infrequently read drama that has inspired almost no critical attention.[1] It concerns itself with the deception and courtly intrigue that is inherent in privanza: its setting and action, therefore, serve very well to foreground a consistent contrast between the appearances and the reality of various given situations. This contrast or discrepancy—between appearance and reality, between ‘signs’ and their habitual meanings—is common to much seventeenth-century Spanish literature. In the language of structuralism, such a contrast constitutes an implicit disjunction between a signifier and a signified that, under normal circumstances, are bound together by convention. This undercutting of linguistic and other sign-systems is often exploited in the comedia for the purposes of deception and transgression. The following essay focuses on the manifestation of this ‘disjunction’ in the subordinated (or secondary) line of action.

As is the case with so many Golden Age dramas, Cautela’s two lines of action achieve unity in their parallel illustration of a common theme or motif. This unity is apparent in the following plot summaries: the primary (political) intrigue begins when King Alfonso of Naples receives an anonymous written warning of a conspiracy against his reign. He concocts a plan by which the warning may be verified: he and his privado, Enrique de Ávalos, publicly pretend that the latter has fallen from the King’s graces, in the hope that any potential conspirators will attempt to persuade him to join their cause. The ruse is successful, for the conspirators do just that. Through a series of misleading circumstances, however, the King is led to believe that his privado is actually behind the conspiracy. Tragedy is narrowly averted when Enrique manages, finally, to prove his innocence, and the conspirators are brought to justice.

The subordinated (love) intrigue is far simpler: Enrique is initially attracted to two countesses, one wealthy (Elena) and the other poor (Porcia). Through a series of misleading circumstances he becomes convinced that Elena loves him sincerely and that Porcia’s love is strictly mercenary. Ironically, Enrique has reversed the reality of the situation, for it is Porcia’s love, and not Elena’s, which is sincere. It is only in the drama’s final scene that the truth is revealed and he is betrothed to Porcia.

These very brief summaries reveal that the two lines of action are intimately related and mutually reinforcing: both deal with the nature of perception and with the notion that reality or ‘truth’ is often hidden by and opposed to deceptive appearances. The opposition between appearance and reality makes itself felt from the very start of the drama. In the opening scene, Enrique emphasizes the deceptive nature of appearances by pointing out the contrast between his institutional role as a public official and the amorous activities in which he secretly indulges as a private citizen:

Don Alfonso de Aragón,

Rey de Nápoles, confía

de la diligencia mía,

con una inmensa afición,

este reino: gran privado,

Ministro, por tales modos

he de dar ejemplo a todos.

¿Qué mucho que recatado

salga yo por la ciudad

de noche a barrios señores,

si aunque son todos amores,

mostrarlos es liviandad? (917a-b)

Enrique further emphasizes the opposition of appearance and reality with a related contrast between day and night: in order to keep certain acts secret, one should perform them under the cover of night’s obscurity.

Similarly, when the King reveals his scheme to safeguard the realm against the supposed conspiracy, he contrasts the secret realities of night with the apparent realities of daytime by declaring that, although he and Enrique will remain friends, from that point on they will see one another only by night:

Vendrásme de noche a ver:

seré tu amigo de noche;

y aunque siempre lo seré,

engañaremos de día

el humano parecer. (926a)

When the conspirators first approach Enrique, they do so at night, so as to avoid notice. Once they have concluded their business, one of them cautions against staying too long for fear that the light of day will reveal their plans:

. . . ya ha llorado

sus perlas el alba fría,

y importa que no nos vean

para que no se publique. (943b)

The opposition of light and darkness later reappears in a slightly different context when Alfonso begins to suspect Enrique of disloyalty: “¿Qué sombras / son éstas, que a la amistad / turban la luz generosa?” (952a-b). Shadows and darkness have much the same function in Cautela that they have in so many other comedias: they represent the limits of human perception, the inability to see hidden realities. Enrique’s servant Chirimía refers to these limits in the drama’s opening scene when he questions the relation that Enrique has with his two closest friends, Ludovico and César: “no sabe el poderoso / cuál es su amigo de veras; / qué amistad hay verdadera” (918a). Not even the most powerful, the servant claims, may assume that appearances are faithful indicators of the reality of a given situation.

This ambivalence of appearances throughout the drama inspires the need to ascertain truth. Enrique, for example, wishes to ‘test’ the two women to whom he is attracted. He therefore asks his two friends—Ludovico and César—to accompany him in order that they might listen to and pass judgment on the women’s responses, as he addresses them separately. By registering their reactions and by then asking his friends’ opinions, he hopes to learn which woman loves him more sincerely, Elena or Porcia. While speaking to Elena, however, Enrique accidentally calls her “Porcia”; she immediately dismisses him and indignantly retires (921a). Enrique then decides to test Porcia by calling her by a name other than her own; that is, he will do intentionally with her what was accidental in the case of Elena (921b). But Porcia’s love is unconditional—so sincere that she feels no need to verify Enrique’s feelings for her. Her words, although not directed at Enrique as a complaint, do constitute what is, in effect, an implicit chastising of his need to verify: “Amaros me toca a mí; / no me toca averiguar / si soy amada de vos” (923a).

The contrast between appearance and reality is also central to a disagreement that occurs in the opening scene between Enrique’s two servants, Julio and Chirimía. When Chirimía asks Enrique whether Ludovico or César is more loyal to him, Julio defends Ludovico:

Certifico

que pienso que Ludovico

ha hecho demostración

de amigo más verdadero:

lenguas se hace en alabarte. (918a)

The utter indirectness of Julio’s statement renders it somewhat dubious: rather than stating simply and directly that Ludovico is the truer friend, Julio “certifies that he thinks that Ludovico has made a demonstration of being the truer friend.” He defends Ludovico on the grounds that the latter has verbally praised Enrique at every opportunity. But it is on precisely the same grounds that Chirimía attacks both Ludovico and his defender Julio, that is, by claiming that Ludovico’s words constitute nothing more than an outward show:

siempre Ludovico alaba

lo que dices, lo que haces,

lo que comes, lo que bebes,

lo que calzas, lo que vistes,

lo que ríes; y son chistes,

motes y sentencias breves

cuanto arrojas por los labios,

aunque necedades sean.

Y amigos que lisonjean,

ni son amigos, ni sabios. (918a)[2]

Chirimía disparages the type of friendship that consists only in words of praise, prior to defending César: “sin duda te quiere más, / pues es quien te alaba menos” (9l8a). Chirimía is, in short, something of a cynic when it comes to language: he argues that César praises Enrique less and therefore must love him more. The implication is, of course, that words—as ostensible signs—prove nothing in and of themselves and, depending on the context, may actually denote the opposite of what they appear to mean; Ludovico’s overzealous praise of Enrique is, therefore, most suspect.

The contrast between sign and referent reappears in a slightly different context when Enrique describes to his friends the paradox of loving two women at the same time. Chririmía’s earlier criticism of Ludovico is confirmed when the latter responds by avoiding any commentary whatsoever about the substance of Enrique’s remarks while enthusiastically praising his elegantly poetic mode of expression: “¡Divinamente ha pintado / sus efectos Vuexcelencia! / ¡Qué discreción! ¡Qué elocuencia!” (919a). In contrast to Ludovico, César ignores the style of Enrique’s remarks, commenting instead on their substance. Like Enrique’s servant Chirimía, César is more interested in reality than in appearance, in signified than in signifier. He therefore contradicts Enrique by telling him that his feelings constitute a mere inclination, not true love (919a-b).

When Enrique and his two friends arrive at Elena’s house and hear her speak, Ludovico immediately praises her eloquent manner of expression: “Divinamente arguyó” (920a). These words echo his earlier praise of Enrique’s eloquence, and his second use here of the term divinamente to characterize Elena’s rhetoric serves to emphasize this parallel. He claims that Elena sincerely loves Enrique (920b); but when Enrique asks César’s opinion, the latter once again disagrees with Ludovico. As in the case of Enrique’s inclinación, César remains unconvinced that Elena is sincere. When Enrique asks him to justify his opinion, César responds by attacking precisely what Ludovico had praised, namely, Elena’s rhetorical manner of speaking: “En que lo dice muy bien. / Más tiene de vizcaíno / el amor que de elocuente” (920b). True love, he argues, does not necessarily express itself well.

Enrique’s mistakenly calling Elena “Porcia” is an explicit example of the lack of fit between words and the world. When Elena angrily dismisses him as a result of this error, César further denies the sincerity of her feelings by claiming that true love does not know how to complain. He emphasizes the hollow nature of Elena’s sentiments by noting that such shows of jealousy are merely the appearance (i.e., the outer signs) of love, and not its reality: “Celos te quiso ostentar / porque muestras de amor son” (921b). César’s concept of love is as an ideal and transcendent constant that is indifferent to eloquent modes of exterior expression.

This rather metaphysical concept of love reappears in the following scene when Enrique goes to visit Porcia and hyperbolically praises her beauty in a series of poetic conceits that are typical of the courtly love tradition. Porcia, however, claims to be insulted rather than complimented by such rhetoric, and proceeds to chastise him:

No me hagáis tales agravios:

en palabras más sencillas

se explica amor verdadero;

bien mi desengaño alcanza

que no tengo otra alabanza,

sino que por veros muero.

Alabadme de constante,

y no me alabéis de hermosa,

que es lisonja sospechosa. (922a)

Porcia clearly echoes César’s metaphysical tendencies in this opinion, for she explicitly valorizes interior, transcendent reality over exterior, physical appearance by requesting praise for the constancy of her love rather than for her beauty.

César expresses the opinion that Porcia’s love of Enrique is sincere. As might be expected, Ludovico disagrees, precisely on the basis of her lack of eloquence: “habla muy caseramente. / Pienso que es tibio su amor” (922b). In his argument against Porcia’s sincerity, Ludovico again appears to value style and to assume that there is a motivated relation between the ‘richness’ of the signifier and the signified it denotes: Porcia expresses herself commonly, and her love, therefore, must likewise be ‘lukewarm’. Because she is poor, Ludovico feels that her motives are selfishly material and gives voice to this sentiment by claiming that what she really wants from Enrique is a jewel (922b). His statement anticipates the jewel that Porcia does in fact receive from Elena after requesting money from her later on (935-36). Ironically, this jewel will prove—contrary to Ludovico’s claims—that Porcia’s love of Enrique is unconditional and altruistic, rather than selfish. The minute she receives the jewel from Elena, she sends it to Enrique, so as to help him in what she believes is his hour of need.

When Enrique proceeds deliberately to call Porcia by a name other than her own, she (in contrast to Elena) does not complain. Ludovico interprets this as a sign that she does not truly love: “No se quejó; no es amante” (923b). Enrique is convinced by this argument that Elena loves him more sincerely. The name that Enrique chooses to call Porcia ‘mistakenly’—Casandra—is significant in that it signals the inability of language to communicate her love to Enrique: similar to the mythological Cassandra’s unheeded prophecies, Porcia’s various expressions of love go unperceived or unbelieved by Enrique until the drama’s final scene.

Enrique’s incorrect conclusion that Elena loves him more sincerely than does Porcia leads him to other, equally incorrect ones. Soon after he feigns his fall from power, a messenger conveys to him that a certain countess wishes to see him, but leaves before he may be asked which. Enrique erroneously concludes that it must be Elena:

De Elena debe de ser,

que el enojo de los celos

serenó con mis desdichas.

Porcia, como pobre, entiendo

que mi estado pretendía,

y ya habrá dado a los vientos

su esperanza y su cuidado. (934a)

Enrique unknowingly and ironically reverses the truth of the matter by ascribing selfishly material motivations to Porcia and altruistic ones to Elena. The irony of Enrique’s mistaken sense of reality becomes explicit immediately when Elena reveals privately to a servant that her ‘love’ for the privado was, in fact, motivated by nothing other than personal ambition:

Nunca supe qué es amor:

y aquel fingido cuidado

era una razón de estado

y desinio superior.

Hablando afecto, no amaba;

mi aumento así pretendía,

porque ser mujer quería

del que este reino mandaba. (934b)

Elena’s “hablando afecto, no amaba” perfectly exemplifies a subversive ‘emptying out’ of language, a dangerous discrepancy between material signifiers (words) and the conceptual signifieds (meanings) to which they are conventionally assigned.

Enrique’s mistaken judgment (that the unnamed countess who wishes to see him is Elena) is reinforced by yet another, when a messenger arrives bearing a note and a package for him from an unnamed countess (939a). By analogy, Enrique concludes that Elena is once again the sender. In this case, however, Enrique is not totally to blame, for the package’s contents—Porcia’s gift of jewels—and their accompanying letter constitute visible objective signs that powerfully reinforce his mistaken assumption. The unsigned letter contains an explicit declaration of constant love and describes the nature of the contents of the package. When Enrique reads it, he immediately recognizes Elena’s handwriting: he does not know that, because Porcia had injured her hand, she had asked Elena to write out the words that she (Porcia) would dictate and that comprise the accompanying note. Similarly, when Enrique opens the package and sees several jewels, he recognizes one of them as belonging to Elena. The letter and the jewels together constitute the most explicit example in Cautela of the contrast between ostensible signs and their expected, conventional meanings, for they appear to point to Elena, but are, in fact, expressions of Porcia’s love.

Strictly material signifiers, associated with Elena, contrast with their more conceptual and transcendent signifieds, consistently associated with Porcia. This pattern first manifests itself by way of the two women’s relative economic (‘material’) status: Elena’s wealth and Porcia’s poverty. The graphic marks that Elena has put on the page in performing the physical act of inscription are contrasted with the spoken razones dictated to her by Porcia, whose thoughts and feelings they represent. Enrique himself declares that the true value of the jewels he has received lies not in their material worth, but rather in “la fineza / de la mujer que las da” (940a). He praises the constancy of true love while deprecating its merely material manifestations, but ironically ascribes that constancy to Elena, the woman for whom material and social gain are the only motivations.

Enrique remains deceived by appearances until the drama’s final scene, when Alfonso reveals to him Elena’s desire to marry the newly-advanced Ludovico (959a). He indignantly confronts Elena by asking about the jewel and the letter:

ENRIQUE: ¿Este papel no es de Elena?

ELENA: La letra sí, las razones

de Porcia son.

ENRIQUE: ¿Pues no era

esta joya tuya?

ELENA: Sí,

mas dísela a Porcia. (959a)

Once the truth of the matter is revealed, Chirimía advises Enrique to marry Porcia (959b).

To summarize: the love intrigue of Cautela contra cautela is wholly generated by a contrast between appearance and reality, between material signifiers and their signifieds. Enrique is confronted by a series of signs that are misleading, for they represent a state of affairs that is directly opposed to the reality of the situation, i.e., parecer is radically opposed to ser. As has often been observed, this opposition is very typical of Baroque sensibility: “el abismo, en suma, entre el ser y el parecer así como la obsesión por el engaño y desengaño, son la clave de una lectura significativa del Barroco” (Blanco Aguinaga I, 289). The opposition between Elena and Porcia in their relation to Enrique is paralleled, as we have seen, by that of two other contrasting pairs of characters: his servants (Julio and Chirimía) and his friends (Ludovico and César). These character oppositions manifest themselves in much the same terms, i.e., material versus transcendent value, ornate versus plain speaking, exteriority versus interiority, selfishness versus altruism, form versus content, signifier versus signified.

By exhibiting the deceptive and arbitrary relation of physical signs to ‘reality’, Cautela’s two lines of action constitute a consistent valorization of the signified and an equivalent devaluation of the signifier. This ‘metaphysics’ is explicit in the verses quoted above, which reveal to Enrique that the written letra (an exterior, explicitly physical sign) is Elena’s, but that the spoken razones (the ‘interior’ constancy of true love) are Porcia’s. This metaphysical devaluation of the written word is apparent in many Golden Age dramas. As the signifier of a signified that is itself a signifier (the spoken word), writing is—as it were—doubly removed from the reality that it ostensibly represents. As Derrida has so often emphasized, inscription is most suspect to the Western metaphysical tradition, precisely because it is a sign that is twice-removed from reality (Of Grammatology 29). The discrepancy between sign and conventional meaning generates much of the action of Cautela’s secondary plot, which consists largely of various forms of deception and self-deception. The same may be said of the primary plot involving the conspiracy, with the difference that this discrepancy is manifested specifically in terms of writing, both literal and figurative.

What is the relation between writing and the blatantly metatheatrical aspect of Cautela contra cautela? The play-within-the-play is certainly essential to Cautela’s primary line of action: King Alfonso’s fictional cautela (the public pretense that Enrique has fallen from power) and the chain of actions that it engenders actually constitute the drama’s main action, as announced by the title.[3] As Elias Rivers has made clear, all forms of theatricality (and metatheatricality) are inherently dependent upon inscription:

The Spanish language makes us aware of the hybrid nature of dramatic literature when it speaks of actors performing a “paper” or role, “los actores que desempeñan su papel, el papel escrito por el poeta, el papel que define en términos de actos verbales al carácter del personaje evocado por el actor.” (271)

Near the beginning of Cautela contra cautela, King Alfonso receives an anonymous written warning about a possible conspiracy against his reign. In order to verify or disprove it, he himself becomes a writer of sorts, a ‘playwright’ who proceeds to write roles (papeles) for himself and Enrique. Alfonso’s ‘script’ duplicates the essential action of nearly every drama de privanza of seventeenth-century Spain, that is, a minister’s or favorite’s fall from the graces of his king. But because Enrique’s fall is artificially created by one of the drama’s characters, because it is a self-consciously fictional part of the ‘true’ action of Cautela, it is ironically contextualized by the drama as a whole. For this reason, Tirso’s Cautela contra cautela is a unique entity in Golden Age drama: not a drama de privanza, but a metadrama de privanza. It is an examination, not only of the psychology and status of the privado, but also—self-referentially—of the theatrical (and implicitly metatheatrical) mode by which this institution finds expression.

Another important function of Cautela’s metatheater is to foreground the motif that unites the two lines of action: the ubiquitous contrast between appearances and reality. The backdrop to the entire drama and, most obviously, to its final scenes is Carnival, which is, of course, yet another form of theater (and, therefore, of metatheater). Carnival is inevitably associated with carnality: sexuality, ritualized violence, and the conspicuous consumption of food, particularly meat, from which the name derives. It occurs just prior to that 40-day period to which it is opposed, Lent, a time of spirituality, during which the consumption of meat is prohibited (Burke 185-91). In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode utilizes the opposition of carnality and spirituality to distinguish between two forms of interpretation. A ‘carnal’ reading of a text, he tells us, denotes an immediate, superficial, sensorial comprehension, while a ‘spiritual’ reading suggests a deeper, more profound one: “There is seeing and hearing, which are what naive listeners and readers do; and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved to an elect” (3).

Kermode’s differentiation illustrates the potential dangers of all acts of perception and interpretation, as well as the opposition of exterior appearance and interior reality that is Cautela’s unifying motif: apparent signifiers (carne) are deceptive and confusing to those who do not know how to perceive the reality (espíritu) that they simultaneously hide and disclose. Carnival therefore serves a symbolic function in Cautela contra cautela; both lines of action—the political and the amorous—are extended tropes, ritualized and carnivalesque masquerades by which society is prepared for its ‘Lent’: presumably, a more peaceful and ‘spiritual’ reign, in which transcendent, absolute values may hold sway, regardless of the necessarily corrupting influence of their worldly expression. Cautela’s metaphysics, as we have seen, constitutes a consistent devaluation of the material signifier. Cautela contra cautela revolves metadramatically around the opposition of appearance and reality, of disguise and disclosure. At its heart is that metaphysical tension to which I referred earlier and which is so central to Baroque sensibility: that between transcendent, spiritual values and their necessary and often distorting earthly expression.

Works Cited

Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, and Iris M. Zavala. Historia social de la literatura española. Madrid: Castalia, 1978.

Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

Kennedy, Ruth L. “Tirso’s Cautela contra cautela: Its Authenticity in His Theatre and Its Importance.” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos 75 (1968-72): 325-53.

Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.

Molina, Tirso de. Obras dramáticas completas. Ed. Blanca de los Ríos. Madrid: Aguilar, 1962.

Rivers, Elias L. “Written Poetry and Oral Speech Acts in Calderón’s Plays.” Aureum Saeculum Hispanum: Beiträge zu Texten des Siglo de Oro. Ed. Karl-Hermann Korner and Dietrich Briesermeister. Weisbaden: Steiner, 1983. 271-84.

Sullivan, Henry W. Tirso de Molina and the Drama of the Counter Reformation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1976.

[1]The only study devoted to it of which I am aware is Ruth L. Kennedy’s “Tirso’s Cautela contra cautela: Its Authenticity in His Theatre and Its Importance.” As indicated by its title, Kennedy’s essay convincingly establishes the drama’s authorship and its thematic relation to other dramas by Tirso but is by no means a thorough analysis of the work itself.

[2]My emphasis here and in all other quotations.

[3]Sullivan 101-13. Sullivan’s study remains the clearest analysis of Tirso’s dramatic technique, an important aspect of which is his consistent use of metatheater.