We have seen that Alarcón is particularly sensitive to the issue of the relationship between honour-virtue and fiction or dissimulation, exploring it repeatedly throughout his works within a variety of different contexts. As regards honour, Alarcón’s plays present a society which offered its members a variety of means by which to enhance their reputations and publicly confirm the nobility of their nature: through the acquisition and practice of learning (La cueva de Salamanca); through courtship and marriage (Las paredes oyen, La prueba de las promesas); through submission to the protracted procedures by which membership of any of the three great military orders was conferred (La verdad sospechosa), and, as we shall see in the following chapter, through privanza and the service of princes. There is nevertheless at least one other major area in which honour might be won, and that is the profession of arms.

This chapter focuses on a play that alarconian criticism has previously ignored and reviled in equal measure, La manganilla de Melilla. I argue, firstly, that in the figure of the play’s protagonist, the Christian general Pedro Vanegas, Alarcón presents to his audience a figure who owes his fame and military success as much to his use of deception as to the nobility of his nature; secondly, that, within the context of military affairs, prudence and fortitude are virtues of equal value; and lastly, that these are seen in this comedia to play equally important rôles in preserving the integrity of both Spanish sovereignty and the Catholic Faith.

Although clearly subject to the processes of fiction and the interests of its author, La manganilla de Melilla is based upon actual historical events which took place between 21 April and 19 June in the year 1564 and for which there are a number of historical sources. While it is not possible to be sure which of them the playwright used, the similarities between Alarcón’s play and the account given by Luis Cabrera de Córdoba in his Historia de Felipe Segundo of 1619 make this the most likely source.

In 1564, the Governor of the garrison town of Melilla, Pedro Venegas de Córdoba, received word from his intelligence sources that a Moorish force was massing for an attack on the Spanish enclave.