The Bonds of Interest
by Jacinto Benavente
Summary
Two travelers arrive penniless in an unnamed city that answers to nobody but money: crafty, worldly Crispin and his young master Leandro, who has nothing to recommend him but decent manners and an empty purse. Crispin sizes up the town in an afternoon and starts running a confidence game on nerve alone, letting merchants believe Leandro is a nobleman of secret wealth so they will extend him credit, letting an innkeeper believe he will be paid tomorrow so he keeps serving dinner tonight, and letting a foolish captain and a vain doctor believe that backing Leandro will raise their own standing. The scheme works because everyone in the city is playing some version of the same game, protecting an investment of reputation or money once they have made it, so the whole town ends up propping up a fraud rather than admit it was fooled. Leandro, more honest than his accomplice, actually falls in love with Silvia, the daughter of the rich and grasping merchant Polichinelle, and when Polichinelle discovers the truth and arrives with officers and a stack of documented debts to have them both arrested, it looks as though the game is finally over.
Crispin talks his way out of the trap in the play's best scene, convincing the assembled creditors that ruining Leandro in court will cost them every penny they are owed, while marrying him to Silvia will let them all collect. Polichinelle, cornered by his own creditors' arithmetic, consents. Leandro tries more than once to confess the fraud to Silvia directly, and she tells him she loves him more for the honesty, not less; the marriage goes ahead with everyone in the city better paid, better married or better connected than before, and Crispin walks off without a coin for himself, done with the master he built out of nothing.
Reading it means enjoying a fast, talky comedy built out of masks borrowed from the commedia dell'arte, Crispin descended straight from the wily servant of Italian farce, and it works best read aloud for its rapid exchanges rather than pored over quietly on the page.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Jacinto Benavente the 1922 Nobel Prize in Literature for the happy manner in which he continued the illustrious traditions of Spanish drama, an honor recognizing a career of more than one hundred and seventy plays rather than a single title. The Bonds of Interest, first performed in Madrid on December 9, 1907, as Los intereses creados, is the one that still stands for him, and it announced the change he brought to the Spanish stage: away from declamatory verse and toward ordinary prose, away from grand formula and toward the give and take of real conversation, even while borrowing its masked stock characters from centuries old Italian comedy.
The play remains Benavente's most famous and most often performed work. His wider reputation faded outside Spain after his death in 1954, as the experimental theater of the generation that followed him came to define Spanish drama abroad, while this one play kept its place in the Spanish repertoire.