Inconstancia amorosa

Inconstancia amorosa names the volatility of love in Los siete libros de la Diana: affection may fade during an absence, shift in response to neglect, or persist even when it brings no reward. The novel makes the change between Diana and Sireno its central pattern, then complicates it through stories in which desire moves among several people, promises fail, and the abandoned answer differently. Because the book combines prose and verse, these changes are not only recounted as plot; they are also remembered, argued over, and sung in a pastoral world where time and fortune continually unsettle attachment.

Meaning and Narrative Pattern

The book’s opening account establishes the defining sequence. Diana and Sireno love one another with exceptional devotion, while Silvano loves Diana without being loved in return. Sireno is compelled to leave the Kingdom, and Diana remains saddened by his absence; nevertheless, time passes, her heart changes, and she marries Delio. When Sireno returns after a year, he learns of the marriage before he can see her. The reversal makes absence consequential: separation does not merely prolong longing but alters the relationship and leaves the returning lover outside the life he expected to resume.

The novel presents this change against the remembered constancy of the lovers’ earlier vows. At the clear spring where Sireno first saw Diana, he recalls her assurances that neither parental will nor the persuasion of relatives could separate her from him. Silvano later recounts seeing Diana weep for Sireno and wish for his return before winter stripped the meadows and trees. Sireno’s disbelief that a heart capable of such feeling could change gives the theme its painful contradiction: the recollection of past fidelity survives precisely when present circumstances have disproved it.

The opening also frames love’s mutability alongside fortune and time. Before love takes possession of his freedom, Sireno’s thoughts remain within the countryside: he tends his flock, enjoys the flowers, and plays his rabel and zampoña. His return to the Ezla River brings that pastoral contentment back as memory, now set against the grief of being forgotten. The landscape is therefore both a place of former happiness and the setting in which its loss becomes legible. The contrast does not explain Diana’s change as a simple moral failing; it gives the lovers’ altered circumstances a temporal and emotional shape.

Debate over Blame and Change

The shepherds turn the experience into an argument about women, men, and the causes of forgetting. Silvano generalizes from Diana’s treatment of him and Sireno, claiming that women readily forget those they have loved. Sireno, wounded by Diana’s change, likewise asks why women can cast a shepherd from the heights of happiness into misery. These complaints express the injured lovers’ interpretations, not a settled account of the novel’s view.

Selvagia challenges both the accusation and its assumption that women lack understanding. She points out the contradiction in Silvano’s defense of his own enduring love alongside his condemnation of women, and argues that forgetting may arise from the same causes by which men forget women: love is affected by changing times and places. Her response turns inconstancy from a fixed gender trait into a relational process, shaped by presence, absence, and what lovers do to one another. The dialogue matters because it places rival explanations beside the story of Diana and Sireno rather than allowing their pain to stand as proof of a universal rule.

Selvagia’s Story of Shifting Affections

Selvagia’s history gives the theme a more intricate form. Ismenia, who has long been pursued by Montano, initially pretends to love him in order to make Alanio return to her. Montano responds with joy, service, and effort; Ismenia’s feigned attachment becomes genuine, and she comes to love him while withdrawing from Alanio. The attempt to manipulate another person’s feelings thus produces a change its author did not at first intend.

Alanio’s response further rearranges the attachments. Jealous that Montano is favored by Ismenia, and angry that his own conduct has helped bring this about, Alanio renews his attention to Ismenia and stops visiting Selvagia as openly. Selvagia says that her love for Alanio remains firm, even as his attention turns elsewhere. Later, when Montano sees her bringing her sheep to the fold, his affection shifts toward Selvagia. The resulting chain—Selvagia loves Alanio, Alanio loves Ismenia, Ismenia loves Montano, and Montano loves Selvagia—makes desire a moving circuit rather than a stable pair of reciprocated lovers.

The outcomes are not a simple restoration of the original pairings. After Selvagia’s lament, her father removes her from their village without telling her why and takes her to the home of her aunt Albania. She later learns that Montano has married Ismenia and that Alanio intends to marry Ismenia’s sister Silvia. Selvagia nevertheless wishes happiness for Alanio. Her story distinguishes constancy of feeling from possession or requital: she can remain attached while recognizing that the beloved’s life has moved elsewhere.

Songs, Memory, and Later Recurrences

Verse gives the theme a form in which present uncertainty repeatedly meets remembered happiness. Selvagia arrives singing a sonnet whose opening contrasts former contentment with present distress; its close imagines trusting hope only once fortune has been subdued, figured as a wheel secured at its axle. The image makes love’s instability part of a wider uncertainty about what can be controlled. A song can voice the desire to arrest change, but it cannot itself reverse the lovers’ altered choices.

Diana’s later song brings the opening loss back into the company of the shepherds. As she sings a romance beside the spring, she looks toward the ground and water and wipes away occasional tears. Sireno, Silvano, and Selvagia listen from among the myrtles; Sireno remarks that Diana’s music and presence once would have given him greater pleasure than they do now. The moment reverses the earlier arrangement: Diana is visibly sorrowful, while Sireno’s response has changed. Her grief does not undo the marriage, and his reduced pleasure does not erase their history; the scene holds past attachment and present distance together.

A later episode involving Duarda and Danteo extends the pattern beyond the central pastoral love triangle. Duarda recalls that Danteo had promised to marry her, then asked to be released because his father wanted him to marry, and married within three days. After his wife dies, he begins turning his attention back to Duarda. Duarda refuses to treat his renewed desire as restoring their former bond: she declares herself her own rather than Danteo’s. The accompanying Portuguese song sets changing times and the brevity of life against enduring faith, sharpening the distinction between love that changes its object and fidelity that a speaker claims to retain. Across these episodes, the novel treats inconstancy not as one uniform act of betrayal but as a recurring pressure on promises, memory, and the right to choose a new course.