Love's Fidelity in "Diana"

Constancy in love in Diana is not a simple promise of happy reunion: it is a measure of character tested by absence, changing fortune, broken expectations, and unequal affection. The novel places enduring devotion in pastoral song and remembered tokens, in lovers’ vows under threat of separation, and in acts of service that persist even when love is not returned. Its examples distinguish fidelity from possession: steadfast love may survive disappointment, but it does not always restore the relationship it preserves.

Pastoral Memory and the Cost of Change

The story begins with Sireno returning to the green meadows watered by the Ezla River, where the landscape revives memories of his earlier happiness with Diana. His former life had followed the rhythms of tending sheep, enjoying the flowers of spring, and composing songs on his rabel or shepherd’s pipe. Love has transformed that remembered pastoral ease into grief. At the beech tree, he recalls the spring by which Diana once swore that neither parental will nor the persuasion of relatives could turn her from him. The intensity of that old assurance sharpens the contrast with his present abandonment: memory preserves the vow, but cannot make it true again.

Sireno’s keepsakes give this conflict a physical form. He takes from his clothing a paper that holds green silk cords and strands of Diana’s hair, and later finds the letter she had sent him in their happier time. In it, Diana had insisted that she loved him more than herself, affirmed her concern for her honor, and urged him not to surrender to jealousy and suspicion. Read after her change of heart, the letter becomes both evidence of former intimacy and an instrument of pain. Sireno cannot reconcile its confidence with the present, and his repeated return to these tokens shows how constancy can persist as recollection even when the beloved no longer reciprocates it.

The pastoral setting is therefore more than a peaceful background. Meadows, riverbank, fountain, and shade trees hold the traces of past encounters, while songs allow private suffering to become a shared expression. The novel’s shepherds inhabit an idealized countryside, yet their emotions are disrupted by the same forces of absence, reputation, marriage, and fortune that govern courtly love. The contrast between the landscape’s apparent continuity and the lovers’ changing circumstances makes fidelity visible as something strained by time rather than sheltered from it.

Fidelity Without Reciprocity

Silvano offers a pointed contrast to Sireno’s distress. Though he loves Diana without hope of reward, he does not turn his rejection into hostility toward Sireno, whom Diana had favored. When the two shepherds meet again by the fountain, Silvano embraces him and grieves for his pain. He explains that his devotion to Diana includes goodwill toward the man she loved; his own constancy does not require rivalry to become hatred. Sireno, surprised by this generosity, recognizes in Silvano a capacity to bear adversity that he himself has not managed.

Silvano’s fidelity is not presented as an easy or painless virtue. He has neglected his flock while absorbed in love, and he knows his service has no prospect of recompense. Yet even among reasons to forget a woman who does not remember him, his attachment remains intact. His case separates constancy from success: he can remain faithful without receiving affection, while compassion for Sireno prevents his unreturned love from becoming vindictive. In this way, the novel treats constancy as an ethical practice as well as an emotion.

Duarda’s account of Danteo gives the theme a less forgiving edge. She recalls that Danteo had pledged himself to her and asked her to marry him secretly, but she refused to act against what seemed proper while they could wait. He then sought her permission to marry and, within three days, did so. After his wife died, less than a month before the conversation, he began returning to Duarda with new attentions. Duarda rejects the notion that an old promise entitles him to her now: since he made himself another woman’s husband, she considers herself her own and no longer his. The Portuguese song she sings with Armia declares that life and hope may end while faith remains. Her conduct complicates that declaration: fidelity to a principle does not mean renewed submission to a man whose actions contradicted his promise.

Vows Tested by Separation and Service

The story of Abindarráez and Jarifa presents constancy through mutual commitment. Jarifa tells Abindarráez that, once she has understood his feelings, her love is not something that will end with life. She also proposes marriage as the bond that will answer their fears of separation and preserve her honor. Their relationship is soon threatened by an order from the king of Granada: Jarifa’s father must leave the stronghold at Cártama for Coín, while she is to remain behind. The lovers meet secretly to mourn the coming separation, and Abindarráez asks whether she will remember him when her beauty is removed from his sight.

Their attachment then takes practical form in a risky reunion. After Rodrigo de Narváez allows Abindarráez to depart on his promise to return as a prisoner within three days, Abindarráez travels to Coín and enters Jarifa’s quarters by a concealed door. Jarifa explains that she summoned him so that he could become her prisoner as she is his: she offers herself and her father’s wealth to him as a husband, despite expecting her father to prefer a richer match. Abindarráez accepts her as his wife. Their language of captivity turns separation and constraint into a mutual bond, while Jarifa’s choice makes constancy an active decision, not merely a feeling sustained in absence.

Felismena’s devotion to Don Félix shows the same endurance in a markedly unequal relationship. When she finds him beset by three knights, she intervenes with her bow, killing two attackers and enabling him to survive. In the recognition that follows, she recalls the cost of her attachment: she left her homeland, served him for a year as a page at Princess Cesarina’s court, and even helped him obtain Celia’s favor at the cost of her own tears. Don Félix had loved Celia and failed to recognize Felismena’s sacrifice. The fact that Felismena has also served him in shepherd’s dress makes her successive identities evidence of persistent service, while her rescue converts that long-hidden devotion into an undeniable act.

Change, Recognition, and the Limits of Constancy

Dorida treats Don Félix’s wounds with water from a golden vessel, and the remedy also removes the pain associated with his love for Celia, renewing his love for Felismena. His return to her is accompanied by recognition of the wrongs he has done: he admits that he loved Celia and forgot Felismena, and he names absence and changing times as inadequate excuses. Felismena forgives him because her love has endured, and the two travel to the temple of Diana, where they are married with the other couples. Their reunion offers a resolution that Sireno’s remembered love does not receive in the same form; the contrast prevents constancy from being treated as a guarantee that every faithful lover will be rewarded.

Across these episodes, fidelity is measured not only by the duration of affection but by what characters do with it. Silvano’s loyalty produces compassion rather than revenge; Duarda’s independence refuses to let an old promise excuse a later betrayal; Jarifa and Abindarráez turn mutual vows into a marriage despite threatened separation; and Felismena’s service survives neglect until Don Félix finally recognizes it. Sireno, meanwhile, keeps the memory of Diana’s assurances even as experience has made them painful. Together, these strands make constancy a demanding and varied ideal: it may sustain a bond, reveal a character’s generosity, or preserve a claim to self-respect, but it cannot by itself undo change or compel reciprocal love.