Juan Ruiz de Alarcón

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Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza (1581? - August 4, 1639), was a dramatist born in the New Spain.

He was born about 1581 at Real de Taxco, Guerrero, where his father was superintendent of mines; his mother was descended from one of Spain’s most illustrious families, the Mendozas. He went to Spain in 1600, studied law at the University of Salamanca. He continued his studies towards a Licentiate in Law--roughly equivalent to a modern Master’s degree--which he finished in 1605, without, however, taking the degree. Instead, he practiced law for a while in Seville, then in 1608 went back to Mexico, and in 1609 received the licentiate from the University of Mexico. He completed his studies for his doctorate fairly soon thereafter, but never received the degree, in all likelihood because of the rather substantial costs attached to the ceremony. He worked as a legal adviser for a while, as an advocate, and as an interim investigating judge, all the while trying repeatedly and unsuccessfully to gain a teaching chair at the University. Returning to Spain in 1611, he entered the household of the marquis de Salinas, and began a frustrating life of job-seeking at court. At the same time, purely as a way of making money apparently, he threw himself into the heady literary and theatrical life of the capital, eventually having a number of his plays performed. For ten years, he pursued this double life, until he finally secured first an interim and then a permanent appointment to the Royal Council of the Indies--rather like an appeals court for Spanish colonies in the New World. Apparently, when political success came, he all but stopped his literary efforts--although he did have two volumes of his plays published (in 1628 and 1634), perhaps because some of them had been pirated and previously published with false attributions to his theatrical rival Lope de Vega. After thirteen years of legal service to the crown, he died at Madrid in 1639.

He wrote at least twenty dramas, the most famous of which is La Verdad sospechosa, which was adapted by Pierre Corneille as Le Menteur (The Liar). Alarcón was a hunchback. Embittered by his deformity, he was constantly engaged in personal quarrels with his rivals; but his attitude in these polemics is always dignified, and his crushing retort to Félix Lope de Vega in Los pechos privilegiados is an unsurpassable example of cold, scornful invective.

More than any other Spanish dramatist, Alarcón was preoccupied with ethical aims, and his gift of dramatic presentation is as brilliant as his dialogue is natural and vivacious. It has been alleged that his non-Spanish origin is noticeable in his plays, and there is some foundation for the criticism; but his workmanship is exceptionally conscientious, and in El Tejedor de Segovia he had produced a masterpiece of national art, national sentiment and national expression.