SOURCE: Resina, Joan Ramon. “What Sort of Wedding? The Orders of Discourse in El burlador de Sevilla.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, No. 4 (December 1996): 545-78.

In the following essay, Resina argues that El burlador de Sevilla reflects the growing social instability of early seventeenth-century Spain.

As an age of transition between social paradigms, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eminently characterized by destabilization and efforts at containment. At the beginning of the period early bourgeois individualism set off internal wars and revolts that shook all of European society. The growing emphasis on order and integration revealed the limitations of power and the contradictions between new social forces and inherited patterns of meaning. In Spain, however, the core of the absolutist state preserved the structures of a society based on privilege. The dominant class's attempt to suppress a radical transformation of society gave rise to the absolute monarchy, a protonational political...