tirso de molina el burlador de sevilla english

He has generally been classified with Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón as a member of the triumvirate of foremost 17th-century Spanish dramatists. Conjugal honor preoccupied him less than it did his contemporaries. Tirso's work encompasses most of the subjects prevalent in the 17th-century Spanish theater: Spanish and Portuguese history and tradition, biblical material, contemporary customs, and palace intrigues-as well as one-act religious plays called autos sacramentales. Some 28 other plays he probably wrote in collaboration. Although his self-styled nephew, Francisco Lucas de Ávila, claimed that Tirso wrote more than 400 plays, only 55 authentically assigned to him are extant. In his writings Tirso portrayed human foibles and vices with such scatological humor that in 1625 he was ordered silenced by the Council of Castile-an order he disobeyed-and was exiled to remote rural monasteries. Tirso was chronicler of the Order of the Merced in 1637 and prior of a monastery in Soria in 1645. After representing his order in Santo Domingo in the West Indies from 1616 to 1618, he returned to Madrid, where in 1621 he published his first book, Los cigarrales de Toledo (The Orchards of Toledo), a miscellany.

He probably initiated his career as a dramatist about 1605 with El vergonzoso en palacio (The Bashful Man at Court). Born Gabriel Téllez in Madrid, he studied at the University of Alcalá and in 1601 entered the Order of the Merced as a monk.

The identity of the family of Tirso de Molina and most of the facts of his life remain obscure.

Tirso de molina el burlador de sevilla english