Calderón de la Barca, Pedro

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (pā`thrō käldārōn` dā lä bär`kä), 1600–1681, Spanish dramatist, last important figure of the Spanish Golden Age, b. Madrid. Educated at a Jesuit school and the Univ. of Salamanca, he turned from theology to poetry and became a court poet in 1622. His more than 100 plays were carefully contrived, subtle, and rhetorical. The earlier plays, of the cloak-and-dagger school, include La dama duende [the lady fairy] and Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar [the house with two doors is difficult to guard]. His finest work is in his more than 70 autos sacramentales (one-act religious plays), among them El divino Orfeo and A Dios por razón de estado [to God for reasons of state]. Of his philosophical dramas the best known are El mágico prodigioso [the wonderful magician] and La vida es sueño [life is a dream], which deals with the themes of fate, prognostication, and free will. Calderón took holy orders in 1651 and thereafter wrote few plays except the autos, of which he supplied two a year for the Corpus Christi festival.

Bibliography

See studies by S. Madariaga (1920, repr. 1965), J. H. Parker and A. M. Fox (1971), E. Honig (1972), and H. Gerstinger (tr. 1973).

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Calderón de la Barca, Pedro

(born Jan. 17, 1600, Madrid, Spain—died May 25, 1681, Madrid) Spanish playwright. He abandoned religious studies in 1623 to write plays for the court of Philip IV of Spain. His secular plays included The Surgeon of His Honour (1635), Life Is a Dream (1638), and his masterpiece, The Daughter of the Air (1653). His many plays on religious themes include The Constant Prince (1629) and The Wonder-Working Magician (1637). He also created 76 one-act religious dramas, notably The Great Theatre of the World (c. 1635) and The Faithful Shepherd (1678). Considered the successor to Lope de Vega as the greatest playwright of the Spanish Golden Age, he was noted for his well-constructed plots and his preoccupation with the vanity of human existence.