CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA, PEDRO. - Playwright, b. in Madrid on 17 January 1600, d. there on 25 May 1681. He first knew the labors of study at the Madrid college of the Jesuits, then at the Universities of Alcalá and of Salamanca; military discipline in Flanders, in the Milanese and in Catalonia; the restlessness of youth, culminating in the irruption into the monastery of the Trinitarians to surprise there the killer of one of his brothers.
Literary success, achieved in the poetic competition for the canonization of Sts. Teresa, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier and Isidore (1522) and with the first drama of certain dating Amor, honor y poder (1623), obtained the recognition of Lope de Vega in his El Laurel de Apolo (1630) and of Philip IV, who for the mythological comedy El mayor encanto, Amor named him knight of Santiago (1635) and, in 1636, superintendent of court spectacles. At the age of 51 he decided to embrace the ecclesiastical state; he was chaplain of the Reyes-Nuevos in Toledo and then in Madrid honorary chaplain of the king and dean of the Congregation of St. Peter. His priestly and courtly duties did not interrupt his activity as a writer, sought after by all of Spain. After the accession to the throne of Charles II (1666), little inclined to patronage, he lived in poverty, devoted to prayer and to art. His death was a mourning for all Spanish-speaking countries. He wrote 73 autos, 108 comedies, intermezzi, lyrics, poems, panegyrics.
SPIRITUAL PROFILE
The singer of Catholicism carried out, in his absorbed life, a watchful interior concentration, in which the intelligence, illuminated by an ardent faith, silenced the passions of youth and was reflected, balancing it, in the structure of his literary works. C.'s biographical story, in fact, conforms to his activity as a writer, imprinting on it a tone of Christian sincerity that has made people think of Alighieri.
He embraced the priesthood in maturity, associating piety and poetry in the single mission of confirming and defending the Catholic faith of his countrymen. In his vision of life he overcame a fundamental Stoic pessimism with the comfort of Christian hopes; he saw in the world an itinerary toward death, and in death the beginning of true life, the awakening from dream to reality. Few writers have, like him, dramatized the sense of transience, the torment of existence: and solitary and almost dreamlike he lived, even in palace circles. In Toledo he spent his days in the sacred ministries, in meditation on eternal truths, in the contemplation of monuments of art; recalled to Madrid, he surrounded himself with devout and learned isolation in his house, among pious images and books of science and faith. In his will he directed that his corpse be clothed in the Franciscan habit, the belt of St. Augustine and the scapular of Carmel and buried in the manner of the poor.
Such superior detachment was not attained without struggles against a passionate and rebellious nature. Moral excesses of youth (he had an illegitimate son) and concessions to vengeance for honor in the dramas of jealousy found a corrective in the exemplariness of his mature life and in the dramas of Christian forgiveness. His piety rested on a solid rational basis, derived from Thomistic theology with Augustinian echoes, and was centered on the cult of the Eucharist and of the Immaculate Conception. And to the triumph of these two spiritual fires he consecrated, with hidalgo-like ardor, his pen in times when heresy blazed around Spain and the Church needed defenders. Thus arose the autos sacramentales, to which C. entrusted the best of his soul and of his creative energies.
THE « AUTOS SACRAMENTALES ». - They were one-act plays on religious subjects, performed by day, in the open air, for the feast of Corpus Christi. Valdivielso, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Mira de Amescua composed them; C. fixed their type.
In them he set forth the essence of the Catholic creed, with a preference for the themes most contested by Protestantism: Transubstantiation, the problem of Grace and free will, the Immaculate Conception of Mary. And since the Eucharist is the center of the Redemption, the autos proved to be, besides a Eucharistic apotheosis, a powerful foreshortening of the history of humanity, debased by original sin and rehabilitated by the sacrifice of Calvary. C. summoned all his capacities: intense faith, theological culture, theatrical experience, the tectonic skill of his spirit, mastery of literary technique, the tendency toward symbology and idealistic transposition. Everything was channeled into the regal torrent: mythology, medieval legend, sacred and profane history, dogmatic teaching, even the casuistic concerns of the age, in a synthesis that, though moving not infrequently among abstractions and allegories, avoids frigidity and conventionalism, and enlivens everything with a warm breath of humanity and religiosity, reaching unsuspected heights of faith and poetry.
Valbuena has attempted a classification of the autos, distinguishing them into: philosophical-theological (e.g., El gran teatro del mundo; El veneno y la triaca); biblical (e.g., La cena de Baltasar); evangelical (e.g., La Siembra del Señor); Marian (e.g., La hidalga del valle); historical-legendary (e.g., El santo rey don Fernando); occasional (e.g., La segunda esposa y triunfar muriendo); mythological (e.g., El divino Orfeo).
A grouping into cycles is also possible. One is constituted by: La vida es sueño, La nave del marcador, La viña del Señor, Lo que va del hombre a Dios, La divina Filotea. The five dramas outline the spiritual dialectic of humanity, from the earthly paradise to the Tabernacle, from the fall to sanctification through union in Christ. Another five autos constitute a Marian cycle, which develops the entire theological system relating to the Virgin.
In all of them, moreover, the Eucharist, while remaining the inspiring center, is indirectly alluded to, and the symbolic figures play a large part: Love, Humanity, the Earth, Paganism, the Synagogue, Faith, Grace, Free Will, etc. But the whole is as it were immersed in a flow of intense lyricism, which so fuses with the action as to constitute one of the most original fruits of European theater, a suggestive world that expresses Spain and the drama of humanity. For their artistic and devotional merits some autos have been performed at Eucharistic Congresses, for example, at Einsiedeln (1924) and at Godesberg (1926).
THE «DEVOTAS» COMEDIES. - Related to the autos, from which they differ in technique and structure, are the comedias devotas or de santos. They too, in fact, have clearly apologetic aims, standing out as a beginning toward religious truth, attained through study and meditation, in a surprising dramatization.
El mágico prodigioso narrates the story of the student Cipriano, who, in order to obtain the love of Justina, yields his soul to the devil; but when he goes to embrace his beloved, he sees before him a skeleton; therefore he converts to Christianity and faces martyrdom. With the content of Goethe's Faust it presents more differences than analogies. In El purgatorio de san Patricio, Ludovico Enio, struck by the sight of his own skeleton, thinks of saving himself by visiting the Saint's well and on his return describes the infernal torments with touches that Menéndez y Pelayo likens to Dante's. In La devoción de la Cruz the bandit Eusebio converts at the sight of the Cross and dies confessing his sins.
Other comedies derive their subject directly from the Bible, such as Los cabellos de Absalón and Judas Macabeo. Even in the comedies mythology is, for C., a pretext for religious allegories; not for nothing is the same subject found, at times, in both the comedies and the autos. Thus El mayor encanto, Amor, which deals with the loves of Ulysses and Circe, is related to the auto Los encantos de la culpa. The symbolism of La estatua de Prometeo is undeniable, in which the figure of the rebellious protagonist is almost haloed with Christian redemption in the final pardon granted by the gods.
OTHER WORKS OF C. AND CHARACTERISTICS OF HIS THEATER
But even in C.'s other works it is almost always possible to isolate religious motifs and interests. His historical plays (e.g., El príncipe constante; El alcalde de Zalamea), plays of manners (e.g., La dama duende), plays of jealousy (e.g., El médico de su honra), etc., carry into effect, together with the autos, the author's dramatic principles, which, while taking up the threads of his predecessors, especially Lope, introduce reflection, structural balance, a fusion of the lyrical with the dramatic, and greater characterization of the characters.
Nevertheless his art moves within the baroque syntax, whose metaphorical and decorative tension, its search for contrast and for the boundless, it preserves.
In his best-known drama, La vida es sueño, the Polish prince Sigismund, secluded because of his foretold predestination to evil, arrives, through successive psychic phases, from demonic brutality to an active purification. Between these phases there interposes the screen of sleep, which equates dream with reality and instills the conviction of the illusoriness of human vicissitudes and of the concreteness of awakening in God. Menéndez y Pelayo saw in it a theological debate on original sin and redemption; Alfonso Reyes, the struggle between free will and fatalism. It is a Christian focusing of earthly values, to be surpassed in the vision of the afterlife. Rarely has art been able, as in this characteristic work, to animate abstractions and to infuse into them so high a sense of human pensiveness.
Bibliography20 works
Enzo Navarra