In two prominent prose works of early modern Spain, the state of desengaño (disillusion) is explicitly idealized, but its mental consequences profoundly questioned. On his death bed, that knight of the triste figura, who had been engañado for so many pages, wishes only that desengaño had arrived earlier: “Y no me pesa sino que este desengaño ha llegado tan tarde” (Cervantes, 2004: 1100). Did imminent death bring about this desirable event of disillusion? Or, in the reversed order, did the growing disillusionment of the knight remove his will to live? In similar fashion, Baltasar Gracián lets his Critilo ponder the odd metaphysical constitution of the universe in relation to the concept of desengaño. Late in El Criticón, Critilo observes that “varias y grandes son las monstruosidades que se van descubriendo de nuevo cada día en la arriesgada peregrinación de la vida humana. Entre todas, la más portentosa es el estar el Engaño en la entrada del mundo y el Desengaño en la salida” (Gracián, 2020: 634). In these two conspicuous examples, there is no doubt that desengaño is desirable and that one could only wish that it would arrive early on in life. But the challenge of desengaño is also one of ontological proportions in the literary worlds of these two works: “Pues ¿quién los ha baraxado deste modo? ¿Quién fue aquel tan atrevido hijo de Jafet que assí los ha trastrocado?”, El Criticón proceeds to ask (ibid.: 635). It seems that the emotional forces attached to desengaño vary greatly, stretching the emotive spectrum from bitterness to bliss. Desengaño might be beneficial in the awareness of not fooling oneself; but it is mentally challenging if it implies discontent with the sober and somber realities of the human condition. You might, after all, not find what you were looking for, behind that door.

The present article sets out to deepen our understanding of the ambiguity inherent in various mental responses to events of becoming disillusioned, especially relating to the understudied sub-topic of stage desengaño. The study is divided into two parts. The first part comprises a semantical analysis of the word and a diachronistic interpretation of dominating historical dictionaries from 1611 to 1732 along with the literary examples they apply in relation to their treatments of the word. The second part offers a critical comparison of two early modern plays which stage paradigmatically ambiguous responses to states of desengaño. This will concern Tirso de Molina’s hagiographical comedia of El mayor desengaño (c. 1623, printed 1627), and Juan Bautista Diamante’s mythological zarzuela entitled Alfeo y Aretusa (c. 1672, printed 1674). Both plays dramatize the challenge of desengaño in early modern Spain due to the equivocal mental consequences of achieving disillusion. In dividing the article into these two parts, the goal is to study the phenomenon of desengaño comparatively, letting the traditional prose examples of the historical dictionaries compare to the still unexplored area of stage desengaño.

Desengaño is widely acknowledged as a fundamental concept of early modern Spanish literature and has been lauded “a hallmark of the baroque age” (Kallendorf, 2013: 46). Further recent emphasis on the term’s centrality can be found in Robbins (2007: 1) and Küpper (2017: 19f). Considering the proportions of the word’s popularity in seventeenth-century literature, a classification of the type of word to which desengaño aspires, is in itself challenging. In his monograph on lyrical desengaño, Luis Rosales designates it as a “sentimiento” (1966). José Carlos Presa Díaz has attempted to develop the popularity of this feeling into an argument for desengaño as a “género” (2006: 72–80) of Spanish literature. In the seemingly most quoted study of the term, Otis Green described the term as a “state of mind” (Green 1965: 44).

These descriptions are not necessarily contradictory, but they are perhaps somewhat narrow. A broader tentative definition to be applied below is this: The term either (1) designates an epistemological state of mind or (2) the transition to such a state of mind, motivated by changes in a triangular relation between (a) the individual mind, (b) the phenomenal world, and (c) the (possible) eternity beyond that world. In most cases, a (3) further mental implication will follow, reflecting benevolent or malevolent psychological consequences of this epistemological change. Understood as such a state of mind, constituted by specific displacements in the relation between mind, world, and eternity, desengaño will naturally produce varying psychological effects. Owing to the comprehensive propagation of the term, these effects are supremely deviant. In fact, emotional and philosophical responses to desengaño can be seen in the commentary literature to reach from benign religious and stoic responses of the term to deeply pessimistic political accounts of the time.

The benign religiously connotated understanding of the term considers desengaño a prerequisite for seeing through the malevolent deceits of the world and achieving the wisdom to hold the vanity of the world for passing and the reality of God for true. Interpreting a quote by Francisco Palanco, Green notes that “desengaño is related to the sort of awakening to the nature of reality that the Prodigal Son must have experienced: ‘I will arise and go to my father.’ This waking to true awareness is called caer en la cuenta: to have the scales fall from your eyes, to see things as they are” (1966: 44). This is the religious sense of desengaño as a level-headed experience of Baroque reality beyond its many trappings, doors, and mirrors. Jeremy Robbins develops this religious understanding of the term linking it with an early modern penchant for Neostoicist thought (2007: 62). Robbins expounds a plethora of examples of early modern skepticism leading towards a state of mind called desengaño: “Skepticism is clearly conceived of as the direct way of obtaining the Neostoic goals of desengaño, tranquility, and detachment” (ibid.: 186).

A quite different emphasis concerns the term’s pessimistic tenet, suggesting that desengaño designates the futility of human endeavor and the vanity of earthly creation but without the necessary implication that there is anything behind or beyond that reality. This understanding does not preclude religious consequences, desengaño simply cannot be said to automatically lead to a religious state of mind. At times, this is known as a philosophical pessimism. Emilio Carilla identifies “la visión pesimista del desengaño” in a history of Baroque literature (1969: 144); Kallendorf provides a specific example through studies of the staging of the vice of envy, observing “a supreme gesture of Baroque desengaño which approaches nihilism” (2013: 168). Schulte’s monograph on prose desengaño asserts that “der affektive Grundton, der bei allen Bedeutungsvarianten des Wortes mitschwingt, enthält fast immer etwas Negatives” (1969: 20). This “negative” understanding of the word is complicated because such pessimism or even nihilism can still be a stepping-stone towards religious truth. Pessimism then relates to the appalling attributes of empirical reality, which might contribute to the scales falling from one’s eyes to realize the value of the beyond.

This division between religious truth and pessimist outlooks on human life ensures a theoretical framework to appreciate the fact that desengaño is not exclusively a benevolent state of mind but often a cause of frustration or even despair. This pessimistically connotated understanding also covers political understandings of the term relating to experiences of the decline of empire and static absolutism as the seventeenth century develops (Elliott, 1964: 294; Maravall, 1972: 109; Cañadas, 2008: 213).

These two ends of the spectrum between religion and pessimism do not necessarily represent a disagreement or contradiction. On the contrary, they can just as well exemplify the power of the expression to convey a broad horizon of human experiences in the period. They will serve as a backdrop for the following investigation into the deeply challenging ambiguity involved in various mental responses to states of desengaño and follow a recent observation by Fernández Mosquera, namely that “el desengaño conjuga tantas perspectivas como temas y géneros en la cultura del xvii” (2023: 133).^Footnote1

To explore these ambiguous mental challenges of desengaño, the two most popular etymological dictionaries from early modern Spain are of immediate interest. This concerns an analysis of their semantical content as well as a scrutiny of the literary examples these early dictionaries themselves apply. Sebastián de Covarrubias’ Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española from 1611 begins by emphasizing the beneficial epistemological effects of disillusioning oneself or others:

DESENGAÑAR, sacar de engaño al que está en él. Hablar claro, porque no conciban una cosa por otra. Desengañarse, caer en la cuenta, de que era engaño lo que tenía por cierto. (Cobarruvias Orozco, 1611: fol. 309^r)^Footnote2

Especially the second phrase of “hablar claro” indicates a state of perspicacity, a desirable mode of perceiving the world in a level-headed manner. Considering the publication date of the Tesoro, Don Quijote’s way of understanding the world comes to mind as the heaped measure of lacking the ability to desengañar(se), whether that be himself or others. If desengaño is a mode of benevolent epistemological sobriety, the Tesoro still does not imply that it is a comforting or even blessed state of mind. The Tesoro leaves it entirely open whether this “falling” into awareness of the true ways of the world will lead to discontent with life or whether it would build up the ability to cope with the possible terrors of external reality. The Tesoro supports an interpretation of desengaño as a state of mind related to nostalgia or melancholy. This subtle duality plays along in the addition to the entry of the noun of desengaño proper: “Desengaño, el trato llano y claro, con que desengañamos, o la mesma verdad que nos desengaña” (ibid.). Emphasising the predicates of “llano y claro,” Covarrubias would once more seem to begin by alluding to the gratifying epistemological consequences. But the entry on the noun of engaño contains further enlightening traits and a surprising example: “ENGAÑO, Lat. fraus dolus, dixo se de la palabra ganeum, que vale el bodegón, o taberna secreta, donde se vende el gato por liebre” (ibid.: fol. 352^r). The entry continues with more similar examples, for instance that it is a place where foreigners are made to pay too much and where prostitutes can easily fake that they are “mugeres honestas” (ibid.: fol. 353^v). This immediately brings Don Quijote’s first inn visit to mind when he mistakes the two public women for honourable and where the inn keeper is later revealed to having spent his youth as a pícaro.^Footnote3 The fact that the Tesoro relates engaño to such a topology is of imminent interest; the inn is clearly a place of riddle and adventure.^Footnote4 True to its previous logic, the Tesoro once more moves in another direction than that of deceit, consciously or not, when continuing to claim that

o se dixo engaño de gana, y el en, acreciente la sinificaciõ, porque facilmente se engaña él que tiene codicia de una cosa, y da por ella más de lo que vale: y él que engaña, muestra volu͂tad y gana de una cosa, y haze otra, o de en, que niega, y ganar, porque el engañado siempre queda perdidoso. (ibid.: fol. 353^v)

This is another nuance in the general meaning of desengaño by way of its antonym. Here, the very word field of (des)engaño is related to the ambivalent and ambiguous typology of the pícaro between amorality and a talent for adaptability.^Footnote5 The state of engaño does not only contain the prodigal son’s lack of ability to hold his own in foreign and far countries: it just as well refers to the opposite. The Tesoro entry begins with the sense of Gnostic or nihilistic deceit but continues with the loveable and lonely picaro’s ability to come to terms with a foreign and potentially hostile world.

The development from the Tesoro to the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739) would seem to constitute a shift towards a clearer division between the epistemologically desirable effects of desengaño and the problematic states of its opposite. Autoridades offers three meanings of desengaño whereof the first two are relevant in the present context:

DESENGAÑO. s. m. Luz de la verdad, conocimiento del error con que se sale del engaño. Lat. Erroris cognitio, notio. Documentum. SOLÍS, Hist. De Nuev. Esp. lib. 4. cap. 7. Los Soldados… empezaron a desanimarse con este desengaño de sus esperanzas. CORN. Chron. tom. 4. lib. 1 cap. 2. Viendo en edad tan tierna tan innocentes desengaños, hallaba en su trato incentivos para las Divinas alabanzas.

DESENGAÑO. Se llama también el objeto que excita al desengaño. Lat. Quod erroris cognitionem excitat, vel gignit. CIENF. Vid. de S. Borj. lib. 2. cap. 6. §. 1. Viose en su mismo original la cara del desengaño, tan terrible que bastaba a introducir susto hasta en los mármoles del Templo. (Real Academia Española, 1732: 162).^Footnote6

The first definition’s application of the metaphor of the light of truth openly establishes desengaño as a desirable state of mind. The meaning of the second definition supports this as it is related to how one is aided – or aids others – in achieving this state of mind. In such shifts from the Tesoro of 1611 to the eighteenth-century style of the Autoridades, the air of enlightenment is palpable in the sense that calm reasoning is the over-arching goal and desengaño a part of that objective (Schulte, 1969: 16–20). However, the literary examples, which Autoridades provides for exemplification, reveal a dissonant emphasis on the horrifying nature of true knowledge of the world. The two references offered to the first meaning are conspicuous. The first concerns Antonio de Solís’s Historia de la conquista de Mexico (1684). This example does not support the idea of desengaño in the philosophic-religious understanding of entering “the light of truth.”^Footnote7 In the quoted lines, Solís uses the word in the disappointing sense that the adventures in Mexico did not live up to the expectations of the Spanish soldiers, thus prefigurating Elliott’s and Maravall’s politico-pessimistic category of desengaño. The second example explicating “the light of truth” refers to Damián Cornejo’s life of Francis of Assisi, Chronica seraphica del glorioso patriarca S. Francisco de Assis published in seven volumes 1682–1729.^Footnote8 The Autoridades quote stems from the fourth volume’s first book, Chap. 2. The passage offers a description of the purity of youth which adds the interesting layer of innocence and the bliss of childhood (Cornejo, 1698: 5).

Under the second meaning, objects which excite disillusion, Autoridades also suggests quite a different example, the archbishop Álvaro Cienfuegos and his La heroyca vida, virtudes y milagros del grande S. Francisco de Borja, antes Duque quarto de Gandia, y despues Tercero General de la Compañia de Jesus (1702). This is a life of Francis Borgia, the fourth duke of Gandía and third General of the Jesuits. The tome tells the story of how it fell upon Francis to accompany the remains of Isabella of Portugal to the burial site of the Catholic monarchs in Granada at the event of her death in 1539. She was the wife of Charles V and the mother of Phillip II. Francis had to witness and swear that it was in fact the royal cadaver of Isabella contained in the casket. What he saw there was the abyss itself and in no capacity an occasion for benevolent epistemological clarity. The underlined part are the lines which Autoridades uses as a literary example of this second meaning of desengaño, taken from the second book’s sixth chapter, paragraph I:

¡O Dios, y qué objeto tan espantoso! ¡Qué monstruo digno de ser cuydadosamente atendido! Se dexó ver el espectáculo mas horroroso de quantos por ventura se han representado en las tragedias deste gran Mundo: viose en su mismo original la cara del desengaño, tan terrible que bastaba à introducir susto hasta en los mármoles del Templo. (Cienfuegos, 1702: 71)^Footnote9

Legend has it that this experience of the physically decomposed body of the beloved empress led Francis to become a monk. The question would then be: Are these inordinate experiences of desengaño necessary or even sufficient to live a true life? Or is religion (and/or art) an answer to the experience of desengaño? As mentioned, this example is supplied under the second meaning of “objects which excite disillusion,” which finds a rather extreme token in the body of Isabella of Portugal. The adjectives are of importance to the dramatic examples studied below: espantoso, horroroso, terrible. In this case, the event of desengaño has horrifying consequences, it is a sublimated experience of wonder and terror.

The examples of these two historical dictionaries provide a preliminary conclusion: Achieving desengaño will often entail an ambiguous dialectic, either the epistemological dizziness of the Tesoro or the blend of horror and truth in Autoridades. The popularity of the state of desengaño should therefore not be seen exclusively in senses of pessimism, decay, or crisis of the Baroque, nor in strictly benevolent states of religious wisdom. Desengaño is preconditioned in the possible experiences of the terrors of life in the various “tragedies of this great world,” as Cienfuegos imagines, especially its vanitas, but it also holds the promise of a consolation in the face of these challenges. To explore the depth of these challenges of desengaño, we now turn to two exemplary comedias which can be taken to be representative of the period’s deeply ambiguous staging of various emotional responses to events of desengaño.

Tirso de Molina’s hagiographical comedia entitled El mayor desengaño stages the medieval legend of the unnamed “Doctor of Paris” and the foundation of the Order of the Carthusians by Saint Bruno of Cologne. Seeing as this doctor was as wise as he was kind, people flocked to his funeral in 1082, including a cleric from the city of Reims named Bruno. In a shocking turn of events, the corpse sat up thrice and finally declared that it had been condemned. Horrified by these events, Bruno and six friends abandoned worldly possessions in favor of a life in the woods. The play styles this shock as the event of the “greatest” desengaño and in doing so establishes (at least) three fundamental modes of paradigmatically challenging desengaño.

On a first level, desengaño works as a plot-structuring principle. Each of the three acts lead to a disillusion, preparing the greatest of desengaños via the condemnation of the mentor and Bruno’s founding of the order. Act I comprises the disillusion of or by love. Bruno is infatuated with the beautiful, but poor Evandra. For this reason, his father disowns him, and Evandra chooses an older suitor instead. Via these failings, Bruno is left desengañado at the end of the first act, leaving home without love or money:

Adiós patria, adiós amores,

[…]

hoy tengo de aventurarme

y dejar ejemplo en mí

del desengaño más grande. (Tirso de Molina, 2004: vv. 1075–1081)^Footnote10

A certain ambiguity is tangible. Is Bruno wrong to think that this disillusion is the greatest, seeing as worse is to come? Or is he aware that this minor disillusion is part of the preparation for a greater desengaño? And, perhaps, more importantly: Does it not sound as if Bruno’s first experience of desengaño is rather ambivalent, conveying a sense of hurt feelings, the melancholy of departure, but also of a certain energetic Wanderlust and the titillating expectations of adventure? Act II investigates the disillusion of or by political power. Bruno has enlisted in the forces of the German emperor Henry IV and has become some version of a warrior-prince. After great success on the battlefield, he is named esteemed advisor to the rulers of Germany. However, following court schemes and a duel, Bruno is exiled, and his rival Milardo lectures him that “presto subisteis, / no es mucho que caigáis presto” (vv. 2176–2177). Seeing this defeat as well as the disloyalty of the emperor, Bruno attests to a new disillusion. He also expresses an uncertainty to question whereof the greatest disillusion will consist:

Conmigo el ejemplo llevo,

quien desengaños buscare,

mercader soy que los vendo,

pues el mayor desengaño

puede en mí servir de ejemplo. (vv. 2237–2241)

Act III takes place at the Parisian court and university and deals with the disillusion of or by learning. Bruno has ventured to become the second most learned man in Europe, bested only by his mentor Dión, Tirso’s name for the medieval unnamed Doctor of Paris. In the manner of Aquinas, Bruno demonstrates his theological skills in a masterful lecture on the topic of human participation in divine grace. The king and queen of France witness this disputatio, and Bruno gains their favor, enabling him to rise once more and to live out diverse worldly adventures whilst forgetting his past disillusions. These, however, lead him to the greatest one when Dión dies. A funeral procession including the royalty enters the stage, and – diverging somewhat from the sources – Tirso has the corpse do its exclamations on the same day: “A juicio voy” (v. 2814); “en juicio estoy” (v. 2922); “salgo condenado” (v. 2945). Horrified and helpless in the face of these events, Bruno and his friends debate what to do, as an angel as well as Hugo of Grenoble (in this play a pope rather than a bishop) reveal themselves to claim that the disillusioned Bruno and his friends are to found “una nueva religion” (v. 3142). Bruno’s friend Roberto concludes the comedia, claiming that “si escarmienta el cuerdo y sabio / en desengaños, aqueste / es el mayor desengaño” (vv. 3165–3167). An important feature of this specific plot-structuring desengaño is its cross-play between stage and world, also apparent in this typical ending in an address directed at the audience. This particular play seems to use its plot desengaño to exploit this mode further. In a long monologue towards the end, Bruno admonishes: “Amigos, desengañaos, / pues el que presente vemos / es el mayor desengaño” (vv. 3045–3047). Seeing as Bruno’s role refers to the very title of the play in which they are currently acting, the “amigos” addressed become an unstable reference. Is Bruno talking to his friends or is the actor turning to the audience? This is a phenomenon that requires more in-depth studies, but it suggests that on stage, the concept of desengaño is especially suited to metaleptically transgress the boundary between fiction and reality, stage and world.

On a second level, the play operates in a mode which might be called “ascetic desengaño” thriving in a liminal space between dramatic plot and theological dispute. This mode is a way for the play to stage – and problematize – issues of worldly renunciation. It is the question of whether the drive of desengaño is, by definition, one towards “rejection of the world” (Best, 1990: 67). This is obviously a theological question, but it would also influence the structure of plots profoundly if the answer were to be a categorical yes. The play displays attention to this fact when Bruno states his desire – after the greatest disillusion – to found The Order of the Carthusians:

Una Orden de vivir

muriendo quiero enseñaros,

donde aprisionéis sentidos,

enemigos no excusados. (vv. 3096–3099)

Following Bruno’s last words, this play’s “ascetic” desengaño debates the relation between the philosophical event of becoming desengañado and the religious event of conversion. Bruno’s first two desengaños of love and politics do not imply a conversion. He simply leaves the place of desengaño (first his native Cologne at the end of act I, then the imperial German court at the end of act II) and immediately forgets his prior disappointments as he gives himself over to new worldly adventure. It is not until he experiences the mayor desengaño that worldly disappointment corresponds to a permanent religious change of ways. This is where Tirso’s play becomes particularly instructive of the general challenge of desengaño: In the English language, two translations of the word are common in most dictionaries: “disappointment” and “disillusion”. As evident from the above, desengaño without religious implications is entirely feasible. In such cases, it should be taken to mean “disappointment”. It does not necessarily lead to worldly rejection, nor does it automatically inspire conversion. When the event of desengaño also implies religious conversion, “disillusion” might be preferred, such as the case of Bruno’s final shock, and of Cienfuegos’s trembling marble.

On a third level, the play offers theological variation over the idea of desengaño as a deistic entity to which one can pray. Bruno’s friend Ataúlfo prepares this form of “vocative desengaño” already in the first act, noting that the heavens will decide if Bruno should win Evandra:

 Los desengaños

juzguen si es mejor un conde

de quien Evandra sea esposa,

que no un pobre caballero. (vv. 880–883)

This is an indirect invocation and apparently a way to see desengaño as a fatalistic force. Bruno complies with this notion in the first act, turning this fate-related idea into direct prayer: “¡Oh desengaños del mundo¡, / Curénme vuestras verdades” (vv. 1058–1059). This mode is maintained throughout. In the second act, we hear the cry of

¡Oh sagrados desengaños!,

pues no me curáis el seso,

curad mi ciega inquietud,

alumbrad mi entendimiento. (vv. 2202–2205)

And in the third as well: “¡Oh mil veces venturosos / desengaños!” (vv. 3064–3065). The disillusions (in plural) of the world have now become sacred and something to which one can pray. After the disappointment of power at the end of the second act, it remains a secular matter: that the disappointments of the world, in this case love and politics, ease one’s restlessness to live a wise life in the world, not abandoning it for another. The play lets the king of France develop this deistic connotation into a consummate Christian notion just before Bruno’s conversion. This is conspicuous because the king is able to express the ambiguous experience of the event of desengaño, oscillating between terror and wonder after witnessing Dión’s condemnation:

Yo voy tan lleno de asombros,

como bien desengañado

de que mientras uno vive,

hasta en el último paso,

no puede fiar de sí,

pues como avisa San Pablo,

quien esté en pie tenga cuenta

no caiga, que es todo engaños. (Vase.) (vv. 2980–2987)

The application of 1 Cor 10:12 is an easy way to baptize the play’s previous general-religious notion of the powers of desengaño. But the term of asombros is enticing. The Real Academia’s entry suggests “1. m. Gran admiración o extrañeza. 2. m. Susto. Espanto” (2014). This emphasizes a very deep ambiguity, reaching from astonishment or wonder all the way to dread and terror. It is also conspicuous because the intellectual construction of this form of equivocal desengaño is very similar, structurally, to the Autoridades’ quite complicated literary references where Cornejo, Solís, and Cienfuegos can all be seen to foreshadow this fully fledged dialectic of terror and wonder in the early modern functions of desengaño.

Juan Bautista Diamante’s mythological zarzuela by the name of Alfeo y Aretusa (1674) integrates two different Ovidian myths into a love story ending in rejoice.^Footnote11 The play features a personified allegory of desengaño and involves a visit to the Casa del Desengaño constructed as a literal hall of mirrors. The reasons for its prominence in the present context do not so much concern the mythological content as its philosophical investigation of an epistemology of desengaño. If Tirso’s comedia exemplifies and deepens Autoridades’ suggestions of metaphysical dialectics of wonder and terror, Diamante’s zarzuela presents a highly compelling examples of the Tesoro’s intricate blend of seeing and blindness, insight and obscurity.

In this Spanish adaption of the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa, Alfeo emerges from a cave in the forest where he has been hidden to avoid his destiny. The theme of desengaño is prepared by an epistemological symbolism of darkness and light when Alfeo first enters the stage through a trap door in the ceiling, finding himself lost in those deep dark woods. On a literal level, epistemological engaño relates to the unreliable nature of the senses. Such a lack of orientation, along with Alfeo’s childhood years within the confines of a cave, immediately supply the play with a philosophical-allegorical aura even if it has been presented as a merry zarzuela. The philosophically interesting parts of Diamante’s play relate to Alfeo, his father Occeano and Momo the gracioso all agreeing that one must seek the counsel of desengaño in matters of heart and fate. The first explicit mention of the question of desengaño is made by Alfeo’s father. Alfeo has seen Aretusa in those woods and fallen in love with her. The stage changes from the woods to the sea, and the father, Occeano, enters to tell Alfeo of his worry for the fate of his son and to warn him of the deceiving nature of the senses. Occeano explains that his wife had learned of a serious threat to her son’s ways. In order to avoid the fulfillment of such bad omens, the parents had hidden their son in the cave. Occeano acknowledges the freedom of the will and the ability to defy parents as well as destiny, so he tells Alfeo to go see a character named Desengaño because this wise person will be able to offer insights about the risks of Alfeo’s fate (Diamante, 1674: 10–12).

After various developments in the love story between the title-bearing couple as well as the introduction of a subplot after the myth of Jupiter and Callisto, Alfeo joins Momo in the woods. Although obsessed with Aretusa, Alfeo has not forgotten his father’s advice, so he tells Momo that he seeks Desengaño. Momo embarks on a monologue, claiming that “en todo hay mil desengaños” (ibid.: 18).^Footnote12 He elaborates that “que todos dizen que buscan; / y nadie encontrarle quiere” (ibid.: 18). Momo also doubts Alfeo’s courage. One thing is to battle a lion, as Alfeo has done to gain Aretusa’s favour, it is quite another to seek out the lodgings of Desengaño himself. In other words, desengaño might be the ultimate truth but it is a truth or a state of mind more challenging than the threat of empirical death.

Momo goes on to enhance the play’s philosophical vibrations in his answer to the question of how to find the house of Desengaño. Momo does not think he has any reason to go see Desengaño himself because he is already level-headed, and he who knows what he does not know is already plenty disillusioned: “Porque sabe que no sabe, / harto desengaño tiene” (ibid.: 19) – but agrees to help Alfeo. On their way, the two wanderers are interrupted by the voices of Iupiter and Calixto offstage. Iupiter desires Callixto but is denied. Theirs is “el camino del engaño” (ibid.: 19), Momo warns: Alfeo should not go astray but continue his own path to the house of Desengaño. This is also now the specific question Alfeo wishes to know from Desengaño: If those bad omens, which made his parents hide him in the cave, were warnings against his love for Aretusa.

At the start of the second act, the two arrive at a gateway. True to the play’s attention to the deceptive nature of the senses, Momo says that this ought to be “la puerta del desengaño / si no me mienten las señas” (ibid.: 25). This is somehow already a riddled first note: If this is the path to disillusion, why does it radiate confusion? This ambiguous epistemology is enhanced as the scenery changes to the house itself, and the stage directions state that the place should be a closet of fake or real mirrors: “Vase, y descúbrese la casa del Desengaño, que serà un retrete de espejos fingidos o naturales” (ibid.: 25). True to his nature of a gracioso, but also related to the play’s theme of desengaño, Momo’s first claim that he does not “need” desengaño is destabilized by his last words before leaving Alfeo on his own:

MOMO

Y no le cause estrañeza

verme ir, que como mezclar

suelo burlas entre veras,

el desengaño que aguardo

en abriendose essa puerta

es que me llamen bufón;

y ninguno hay que no sienta

que se lo llamen, aunque

de serlo se honre cualquiera. (ibid.: 25)

Given Momo’s serious mood, it is worth pondering if a conscious example of theatrological doubling is at play: Momo is careful to underscore that he needs to leave right before Alfeo enters the actual house, and seeing as Momo is in fact Alfeo’s guide towards desengaño, the same actor might have been intended to act the role of Desengaño as well. It would have serious effects on an audience’s perception of the nature of desengaño if this pessimistic buffoon was identical to the wise and old personified allegory.^Footnote13 If Momo is already a persona desengañada, we might also take note of the fact that such a person’s mode of speaking is one to mix jokes and truths, once more enhancing the constructive epistemological confusion. Alfeo’s first experience of the inside of the house is, on the contrary, unambiguous, and the state of desengaño – surely at its epitome in its own very house – a blessing undisguised:

ALFEO

¡Qué quietud tan misteriosa!

¡Toda la humana tarea

es primoroso descanso!

¿A quién el ocio no afrenta?

¡Nada aquí congoja, todo

natural descuydo acuerda!

Sin duda es esta la patria

donde el espíritu anhela,

pues hasta aquí deseaba,

y puesto aquí no desea. (ibid.: 25–26)

In the literal sense of the mirrors and perhaps also the figurative one of calmness, Alfeo continues to describe the place as one of “condesados cristales” and moves on to a formulation which itself almost crystallizes an ontology of the concept: “Y es / a un tiempo aliño y emblema / del desengaño” (ibid.: 26). The personified allegory of desengaño appears bearded, ostensibly visualizing a connection between old age, wisdom and desengaño. The allegorical figure emphasizes the notion that humankind does not really wish for disillusion: “¿Qué / me quieres con tal pereza, / que en el modo de buscarme, / veo que no me deseas?” (ibid.: 26). This might be a truth especially suited for Alfeo, as Desengaño can confirm that Alfeo’s continued infatuation with Aretusa would be the cause of the downfall of both:

¡Oh, tú, joven engañado,

que ciego a mi albergue llegas

a que el aviso te alumbre

de lo que el amor te ciega!

[…]

Tu amenaza es Aretusa,

porque ella es la causa, y ella

ha de padecer, Alfeo,

por ti la desgracia mesma.

En tu arbitrio está escusar

su tragedia, y tu tragedia,

pues no ignoras que los astros

inclinan, pero no fuerçan.

A tus deseos amantes

opón toda tu fineza,

sabiendo que si la sigues

has de perderte, y perderla. (ibid.: 26–27)

The first consideration is to be expected, namely that love is what blinds, but desengaño what illuminates. Additionally, desengaño is explicitly related to the possibility of action rather than to any sense of fatalistic disposition. Desengaño emphasizes that it is up to Alfeo’s will (his arbitrio) to save himself as well as Aretusa from demise as he should not ignore that the stars can only incline a person but never force, echoing a negotiation of deistic desengaño. This leads Alfeo to the cry of “¡Ah desengaño cruel! Que me has muerto” (ibid.: 27). Desengaño, even in affairs of the heart, involves suffering; it generates paradox rather than unambiguity, and Alfeo knows how to express that: “¿Perderla por quererla, puede ser?” (ibid.: 27). This also leads to the claim that “mucho deben / al desengaño mis penas” (ibid.). The idea that desengaño could feel cruel, even when constituting the truth, is not necessarily problematic. No one promised that the truth would be comfortable, a position akin to that of the protagonists of El Criticón.

The two plots combine when Alfeo is left back in the woods with Momo. The gracioso tells his new friend that today is a good day for a stroll in the forest as the nymphs of Diana are celebrating a fiesta. Iupiter, Cupido, Calixto, Aretusa, and a band of nymphs appear, and Momo and Alfeo blend in with them. Aretusa begs for Diana’s help to hide from Alfeo, and Diana wraps her beauty in a cloud to make her invisible. This event generates ambiguity, as Aretusa does not know whether her transformation is a blessing or a curse: “Toda tiemblo, / toda soy pasmo […]; los acentos / se congelan en los labios,/ ¡ay de mi! infelice, Alfeo” (ibid.: 37). It also generates more epistemological confusion as Alfeo answers: “Te oygo, y no te veo” (ibid.: 37). The stage directions subsequently state that an ocean must appear between the two but that there must flow a river from Aretusa’s bowl or receptacle to said ocean. Alfeo proceeds to establish a connection between their present state and his visit to the lodgings of Desengaño. He appeals to the gods that they turn him into a river, not the least because “río me vi / en el paboroso espejo / del desengaño” (ibid.: 38). He wishes for nothing but to rest in the shade of those “tersos cristales” (ibid.: 38). The wish is granted as Occeano enters from below to say that even though he could not save his son from his fate, he can at least facilitate Alfeo’s free flow towards that spring. The last lines are Alfeo’s and Aretusa’s in joint song:

Y aquí venturoso fin

tenga el variado argumento

de la cruel Aretusa

y el enamorado Alfeo. (ibid.: 39)

A clear main theme is the conflict of blind passion and clear reasoning. Seeing as the personified allegory of desengaño appears on stage as a wise old man, one should think that the play stages the goal of personal development as one of desengaño. This would mean that Alfeo discovers how to overcome himself – the play is fond of variations of the expression of “vencerse a sí mismo”^Footnote14 – by transcending the various engaños of youth and love. But the play’s plot and main symbols are rather equivocal on these matters. It is perplexing that the house of Desengaño is made up of a mirror cabinet. As Sabik puts it, this seems anything but unambiguous: “Estos aparecen como emblemas de este sentimiento [de desengaño] y presentan una visión deformante, dual, de la realidad vista en un plano simbólico-psicológico de opuestos” (1998: 207). Such a conflicting and split view of reality muddles the question of the role of desengaño in this otherwise straight-forward conception of blindness and seeing. Tirso’s play could be said to work in three fundamental modes of desengaño, ultimately generating a powerful ontological dialectic of wonder and terror as well as an intricate discussion of the relation between a psychological event and a religious conversion. Diamante’s play deepens the challenges of desengaño in another direction by playfully exploring epistemological uncertainty, prefigurated in the Tesoro examples of literary desengaño. The house of Desengaño establishes this form of ambiguous iconology, and the visit is mirrored several times in the play’s unclear ending between a happy love story and a punishment for the attempt at the avoidance of one’s faith. The play is certainly less grave than Tirso’s story of condemnation, but the merry tonality does not present a less equivocal engagement with the concept of desengaño.

Tirso’s play offers the possibility of seeing desengaño as a plot-structuring feature, similar to some of Aristotle’s suggested components of tragedy (hamartia, peripeteia, pathos, anagnorisis, catharsis) along with two reactions in the audience (eleos, phobos). In this way, the present study’s first observations of various psychological responses to the force of desengaño are converted into the classical vocabulary of dramatic responses in the audience as a specific way for theatrical desengaño to be expressed and staged. At its most ambiguous, and in several of the examples studied, desengaño stimulates eleos and phobos simultaneously. Diamante’s zarzuela merges the merriments of the genre with profoundly confusing epistemological layers of desengaño and the philosophical topos of life in the cave. These works are illustrative examples of the pervasive nature of early modern desengaño. It is, of course, limited to what extent these two plays can be used to say something about the period in general. The point, however, is that the perspectives of these two rather peripheral plays from each part of the seventeenth century resemble ideas in several canonical texts and are therefore of aid in deepening our theoretical grasp on the effects of desengaño in the period. These two non-canonical texts do also nuance if not contradict certain famous invocations of the term, and the challenge of ambiguity does not necessarily constitute a problem in the negative sense. Don Quijote wished that this blessed state of mind would come about earlier,^Footnote15 and Critilo that they would just put desengaño at the entrance of the world. Clearly, not everyone agreed. Francis’s (or Cienfuegos’s) trembling marble, the king of France’s (or Tirso’s) asombro at the shock of desengaño, and Alfeo’s confusion in that hall of mirrors are examples of deeply ambiguous desengaño. They pose a constructive challenge to a fundamental concept of early modern Spanish literature.