Matthew Wyszynski

Friendship is one of the most basic of all social interactions. Classical theorists, especially Aristotle and Cicero, wrote treatises praising true friendship, enumerating the qualities of a friend, and describing the obligations friends have toward one another. Renaissance theorists carried on this tradition, echoing the sentiments found in the works of antiquity. Friendship was also an important theme for the creative process, and nearly every playwright of the Spanish Golden Age wrote at least one play that portrayed friendship. Tirso de Molina was no exception; in fact, he wrote several such works. One of his most interesting is Cómo han de ser los amigos, a play set in the time of Alfonso VIII (1155-1214). Don Manrique and Don Gastón are portrayed as friends in the classical mold, but their friendship faces destruction because of the deception of a woman. In this work, Tirso pits love, kingship, and honor against friendship. In the end friendship triumphs over every other social bond, and Tirso demonstrates the radical importance of friends and friendship to every other human relationship.

Bartolomé de Torres Naharro’s (1485–1530) most well known comedy to the modern reader is his Himenea (1516?). There are outstanding similarities between this work and works that would be written by the later dramaturges, especially Lope de Vega. In Torres Naharro’s plays, a wide range of characters appear, each generally speaking in a register appropriate to his or her station. Another notable use of language is Torres Naharro’s deployment of formal rhetoric in the work. I demonstrate that throughout the play, characters often use the precepts expounded in classical rhetoric in an attempt to persuade or convince other characters of their guilt or innocence (the judicial genre) or to convince others to follow a course of action (the deliberative genre). I conclude that far from being a casual or accidental characteristic of the work, these highly stylized rhetorical passages, the context in which they are delivered and the effect that they have lead the spectator to consider the very nature of rhetoric. Torres Naharro consciously exposes the seamy underside of rhetoric and exposes its weaknesses—the inherent corruptibility of the art by the unscrupulous, and rhetoric’s ultimate failure even when expertly deployed.