"THE STUDENT OF SALAMANCA"
"El Estudiante de Salamanca" represents the synthesis of two well-known Spanish legends, the Don Juan Tenorio legend and the Miguel Mañara legend. The first of these may be briefly stated as follows: Don Juan Tenorio was a young aristocrat of Seville famous for his dissolute life, a gambler, blasphemer, duelist, and seducer of women. Among numerous other victims, he deceives Doña Ana de Ulloa, daughter of the Comendador de Ulloa. The latter challenges Don Juan to a duel, and falls. Later Don Juan enters the church where the Commander lies buried and insults his stone statue, after which he invites the statue to sup with him that night. At midnight Don Juan and his friends are making merry when a knock is heard at the door and the stone guest enters. Don Juan, who does not lose his bravery even in the presence of the supernatural, plays the host, maintaining his air of insulting banter. At the end of the evening the guest departs, offering to repay the hospitality the following night if Don Juan will visit his tomb at midnight. Though friends try to dissuade him, Don Juan fearlessly accepts the invitation. At the appointed hour he visits the tomb. Flames emerge from it, and Don Juan pays the penalty of his misdeeds, dying without confession.
This is the outline of the story as told by Tirso de Molina in "El Burlador de Sevilla o el Convidado de Piedra." The same theme has been treated by Molière, Goldoni, Mozart, Byron, and Zorrilla, to mention but a few of the hundreds of writers who have utilized it. In the hands of non-Spanish writers the character of Don Juan loses the greater part of its essential nobility. To them Don Juan is the type of libertine and little more. He was a prime favorite with those Romanticists who, like Gautier, felt "Il est indécent et mauvais ton d'être vertueux." But as conceived in Spain Don Juan's libertinage is wholly subsidiary and incidental. He is a superman whose soaring ambition mounts so high that earth cannot satisfy it. The bravest may be permitted to falter in the presence of the supernatural; but Don Juan fears neither heaven nor hell. His bravery transcends all known standards, and this one virtue, though it does not save him from hell, redeems him in popular esteem.
Don Félix de Montemar is the typical Don Juan type, a libertine, gambler, blasphemer, heartless seducer, but superhumanly brave. Yet the plot of Espronceda's poem bears closer resemblance to the story told of Miguel Mañara.
Miguel Mañara (often erroneously spelled Maraña) Vicentelo de Leca (1626-1679) was an alderman (veintecuatro) of Seville and a knight of Calatrava. As a youth his character resembled that of Don Juan. One day some hams sent to him from the country were intercepted by the customs. He started out to punish the offending officers, but on the way repented and thenceforth led a virtuous life. In 1661, after his wife's death, he entered the Hermandad de la Caridad, later becoming superior of that order. In his will he endowed the brotherhood with all his wealth and requested that he be buried under the threshold of the chapel of San Jorge. His sole epitaph was to be "Here repose the bones and ashes of the worst man who ever existed in the world." Don Miguel's biography was written by his friend the Jesuit Juan de Cardeñas and was added to by Diego López de Haro, "Breve relación de la muerte, de la vida y virtudes de Don Miguel de Mañara," Seville, 1680.
There soon sprang up a legend around the name of Mañara. He is said to have fallen in love with the statue on the Giralda tower. On one occasion the devil gave him a light for his cigar, reaching across the Guadalquivir to do so. Again, he pursued a woman into the very cathedral, forcibly pulled aside her mantilla and discovered a skeleton. Yet more surprising, he was present, when still alive, at his own funeral in the Church of Santiago. But these stories associated with the name of Mañara are much older than he. Antonio de Torquemada, "Jardín de Flores Curiosas," Salamanca, 1570, tells of an unnamed knight who fell in love with a nun. He enters her convent with false keys only to find a funeral in progress. On inquiring the name of the deceased, he is told that it is himself. He then runs home pursued by two devils in the form of dogs who tear him to pieces after he has made pious repentance. Cristóbal Bravo turned this story into verse, Toledo, 1572. One or other of these versions appears to have been the source of Zorrilla's "El Capitán Montoya." Gaspar Cristóbal Lozano, "Soledades de la Vida y Desengaños del Mundo" (Madrid, 1663), tells the same story, and is the first to name hero and heroine, Lisardo and Teodora. Lozano, too, is the first to make the male protagonist a Salamanca student. Lozano's version inspired two ballads entitled "Lisardo el Estudiante de Córdova." These were reprinted by Durán, Romancero general, Vol. I, pp. 264-268, where they are readily accessible.
This ballad of Lisardo the Student of Cordova was undoubtedly Espronceda's main source in writing "The Student of Salamanca," and to it he refers in line 2 with the words antiguas historias cuentan. Yet the indebtedness was small. Espronceda took from the ballad merely the idea of making the hero of the adventure a Salamanca student, and the episode of a man witnessing his own funeral. Needless to say Espronceda's finished versification owed nothing to the halting meter of the original. Lisardo, a Salamanca student, though a native of Cordova, falls in love with Teodora, sister of a friend, Claudio. Teodora is soon to become a nun. One night he makes love to her and is only mildly rebuked. But a ghostly swordsman warns him that he will be slain if he does not desist. Nevertheless he continues his wooing in spite of the fact that Teodora has become a nun. She agrees to elope. While on his way to the convent to carry out this design, his attention is attracted by a group of men attacking an individual. This individual proves to be himself, Lisardo. Lisardo, then, witnesses his own murder and subsequent funeral obsequies. This warning is too terrible not to heed. He gives over his attempt at seduction and leads an exemplary life.
There are many other examples in the literature of Spain of the man who sees his own funeral. Essentially the same story is told by Lope de Vega, "El Vaso de Elección. San Pablo." Bévotte thinks that Mérimée in "Les Ames du purgatoire" was the first to combine the Don Juan and the Miguel de Mañara legends, so closely alike in spirit, into a single work. But Said Armesto finds this fusion already accomplished in a seventeenth-century play, "El Niño Diablo." Dumas owed much to Mérimée in writing his allegorical play "Don Juan de Maraña," first acted April 30, 1836. This became immediately popular in Spain. A mutilated Spanish version appeared, Tarragona, 1838, Imprenta de Chuliá. It is doubtful whether Espronceda owes anything to either of these French works, although both works contain gambling scenes very similar to that in which Don Félix de Montemar intervened. In the Dumas play Don Juan stakes his mistress in a game, as Don Félix did his mistress's portrait. It seems likely that Espronceda derived his whole inspiration for this scene from Moreto's "San Franco de Sena," which he quotes.
The legend of the man who sees his own funeral belongs to the realm of folk-lore. Like superstitions are to be found wherever the Celtic race has settled. In Spain they are especially prevalent in Galicia and Asturias. There the estantigua or "ancient enemy" appears to those soon to die. These spirits, or almas en pena, appear wearing winding-sheets, bearing candles, a cross, and a bier on which a corpse is lying. Don Quijote in attacking the funeral procession probably thought he had to do with the estantigua. Furthermore, Said Armesto in his illuminating study "La Leyenda de Don Juan" proves that the custom of saying requiem masses for the living was very ancient in Spain. One recalls, too, how Charles V in his retirement at Yuste rehearsed his own funeral, actually entering the coffin while mass was being said.