We have seen that Alarcón’s most persistent dramatic concern is with the moral implications of different forms of deceit, and that this is apparent in his comedias de carácter, in his magic plays and in his treatment of military virtue. Yet there remains a group of plays that demonstrate this concern in an even more significant context since they deal, not with private individuals, but with characters at the highest level of society: kings, princes, and their privados. Although there are several plays in this group, this chapter will focus on just two, La amistad castigada and Ganar amigos, considering Alarcón’s presentation of political deception in relation to the views expressed by the leading political philosophers of Habsburg Spain.

The writings of these theorists and commentators constitute the most notable body of writing on the subject of deception in Golden Age Spain and are therefore of particular interest here. I have singled out Ganar amigos and La amistad castigada for fuller consideration because they offer sharply contrasting presentations of the behaviour of rulers and their ministers or privados, which nevertheless indicate that Alarcón had arrived at specific conclusions with regard to the question of whether (and how) princes might legitimately employ strategies of deceit.

DECEIT IN POLITICAL THEORY

The theme of deceit in politics in the Golden Age is closely associated with two texts: Chapter 18 of Machiavelli’s Il principe, ‘In what way princes should keep faith’, and the Annals of Tacitus. The latter text had been made available by the influential Dutch scholar Justus Lipsius in his edition of 1574. Both Machiavelli and Tacitus present political life in pragmatic rather than idealised terms – as they in fact saw it rather than as it ought to have been – with the result that successful government is presented as inseparable from a degree of deceit.

Although, as Charles Davis points out ‘after 1583, when Machiavelli was placed on the Quiroga Index, it was dangerous, at least in theory for a Spanish political writer to advocate an explicitly Machiavellian proposition’, and although the stated aim of the majority of writers on political theory in Golden Age Spain was to refute such doctrines, whether derived from Machiavelli, Tacitus, or elsewhere, and to offer advice in accordance with Christian morality, the once apparently firm lines of their Christian moral principles become decidedly blurred when they get down to considering specific examples.