María de Zayas’s Good Friends

María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad stands out for its representation of female friendship and for its development of a new archetype within the tradition of writing friendship: the figure of the “bad” friend. Through an innovative use of theatrical hybridity, María de Zayas contrasts the false hyperbole of Fenisa, the bad friend, with the quiet intimacy that grows up around her rivals, Laura and Marcia. Through an inversion of traditional gender roles, the figure of Fenisa emerges as a female heir to Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan who is finally condemned less for her irrepressible desire than for her failure as a friend. Her lack of solidarity with the other women in the play functions as a point of contrast to a clearly gendered representation of good female friendship that is closely associated with the rhetoric of verisimilitude and intimacy.

Boccaccio’s Tale of Two Friends

Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century tale of perfect friendship from Day Ten of the Decameron is paradigmatic in its plotting of the Aristotelian ideal as narrative and thus serves as an important touchstone for later friendship literature. In Boccaccio, the requirements of storytelling and, in particular, narrative conflict transform the test of friendship between Tito and Gisippo into the archetypal plot device for all later instantiations of the tale of two friends tradition. At the same time, the story also exposes some of the limitations of translating static Aristotelian categories into narrative form. In the case of Boccaccio, these limitations find expression in a pervasive ironic undercurrent that cuts against the universalist pretentions of the main storyline, leading to an internal tension that is reproduced, as Robert Hollander notes, in long-standing critical debates over the tale’s ultimate meaning.

The Errantry of Friendship in Don Quixote

In an essential rejection of the Aristotelian model for perfect friendship, the intensely detailed account of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza inaugurates a radically new approach to writing narrative friendship. Freed from the determinism of the traditional tale of two friends, the introduction of Sancho Panza into the narrative drives a new poetics of friendship in which hyperbolic genuflecting before the Aristotelian ideal gives way to an interest in verisimilitude now understood as the act of representing the world beyond the text. More specifically, Cervantes’s novel proposes a vision of narrative friendship that is radically anti-exemplary, serving not as the model for some universal ideal, but rather as an expression of the idiosyncratic inimitability—both practical and theoretical—of human relationships in the world.

Plotting Imperfections in La Galatea

As with Boccaccio’s tale in the previous chapter, the story of Silerio and Timbrio from Cervantes’s pastoral novel, La Galatea, circulates around the notion of the test of friendship. In contrast to Boccaccio, however, Cervantes revels in upending the formal pretentions of the conventional paradigm for writing perfect friendship. Hinting at the enhanced subjective complexity of modern novelistic discourse, the narrative repeatedly disrupts the determinism of the traditional tale of two friends, the scripting of narrative outcomes in the interest of preserving the conceptual purity of the Aristotelian ideal. Thus, while the narrative superficially complies with the basic structural requirements of the tale of two friends tradition, there persists a powerful awareness of the contrived basis of that tradition that undermines the credibility of the narrative’s plotting.

Staging Intimacy in Guillén de Castro

Guillén de Castro’s dramatic rewriting of “El curioso impertinente” provides a unique window onto the formal differences between prose narrative and theatrical approaches to the representation of perfect friendship. Key to the analysis of this chapter is the inherent hybridity of the Spanish early modern comedia, the tendency within one and the same work to engage in hyperbolic displays of emotional excess alongside more muted representations of feeling that feed an emerging interest in verisimilitude, especially as the basis for a new kind of audience identification within the theater. In practice, Castro´s play dramatizes the stark contrast between the exaggerated discourse of perfect friendship and other modes of personal intimacy not so much as a mode of critique of the Aristotelian ideal, but rather as two strategies that function simultaneously within the same work of dramatic literature.

The End of an Ideal: Cervantes’s “El curioso impertinente”

Avalle-Arce argues that the interpolated story from Don Quixote, “El curioso impertinente,” marks “the final step in the development of the tale of two friends and, at the same time, its destruction.” Here the test of perfect friendship, rather than affirm the Aristotelian ideal, exposes its insufficiency through a series of betrayals that leads to the final deaths of both friends and their contested lover. Not satisfied with merely critiquing the tradition of writing perfect friendship, Cervantes reveals the essential vacuity of the Aristotelian ideal, the fact, indeed, of its utter incompatibility with life in the world beyond the text. That this final destruction occurs in the midst of a radical reconceptualization of narrative friendship—the novel Don Quixote, the subject of the last chapter of this book—underscores the formal significance of Cervantes’s powerful repudiation of the traditional tale of two friends.

Guzmán de Alfarache’s “Otro yo”1

A version of this chapter has appeared previously in print (“Guzmán de Alfarache’s ‘Other Self’: The Limits of Friendship in Spanish Picaresque Fiction” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700). In a brief episode from the longer fictional autobiographical narrative of Guzmán de Alfarache, Mateo Alemán explores the isolation of his picaresque protagonist through the device of friendship. Echoing concerns that go back as far as Cicero’s De amicitia, Guzmán’s formulation of the problem of finding friends highlights the social isolation of urban picaresque existence, that is, of life in a world in which deception and misrepresentation serve as the currency for almost all human interactions. After several chapters in which Guzmán only partially succeeds in finding friendship, the episode ends with the suicide of the protagonist’s only friend. Despite its ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recalibrate the expectations of Aristotelian perfect friendship to the demands of the picaresque world, the novel nevertheless anticipates aspects of Cervantes’s more ambitious literary experiment with the representation of friendship in Don Quixote.

Toward a Poetics of Friendship

This introductory chapter traces the origin of the poetics of friendship to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and, by extension, Cicero’s De amicitia. Aristotle’s definition of the perfect friend in static categorical terms presents significant challenges to narrativization, that is, to a mode of literary expression based in conflict and change. Following Ullrich Langer, the chapter explores how Aristotle’s largely static categorical framework is filtered through the discourse of spiritual friendship in the Middle Ages, exposing the key problem of the perfect friend’s ultimate unknowability. Alternatively, following Cicero’s more fluid dialogical exploration of the problem of friendship, the chapter traces a second trajectory for a poetics of friendship that draws on Kathy Eden and Nancy Struever’s work on the more recognizably modern notion of intimacy. Taken together, these two genealogies provide the foundation for an evolving poetics of friendship in the narrative prose and dramatic works of early modern Spain.