Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Henao

Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Henao (1600-81), Spanish dramatist and poet, the last prominent figure of the golden age of Spanish literature.

Calderón was born in Madrid, on January 7, 1600, and educated at the Jesuit college in Madrid and at the University of Salamanca. At the age of 23 he became a playwright and competed successfully in a poetry contest held in honor of St. Isidore, the patron saint of Madrid. His reputation as a playwright grew rapidly, and upon the death of the Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega in 1635, Calderón was recognized as the foremost dramatist of the period. In 1636 his brother José edited a volume of his plays that contained Life Is a Dream (1635; trans. 1925), generally regarded as his masterpiece and as one of the greatest of European dramas. The drama is outstanding for its high moral concepts and philosophic symbolism. The thesis expressed by the title is convincingly unfolded in religious terms.

In 1636 King Philip IV, who had commissioned Calderón to write a series of plays for the royal theater, made him a knight of the Order of Santiago. He joined (1640) in a military campaign to suppress the Catalan revolt against the Crown. During the following decade of his life, it is known only that he was ordained in 1651.

Calderón took up residence as a prebendary of Toledo Cathedral in 1653 and was appointed honorary chaplain to the king in 1666. Subsequently, he devoted himself chiefly to writing autos sacramentales, allegorical plays that emphasized the moral aspects of life and dramatized in an original way the mystery of the Holy Eucharist. He died in Madrid on May 25, 1681.

Calderón is considered one of the greatest of Spanish dramatists, equally distinguished for his religious and his secular plays. He gave artistic form to the traditional autos sacramentales and became the acknowledged master of this type of religious drama. In these plays Calderón vividly dramatized abstract concepts of Roman Catholic theology through personification, thus making them real to his audience. Two of his plays in this genre, El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World, 1649) and La cena de Baltasar (Belshazzar's Feast, c. 1634), are still performed in Spain. The chief themes of Calderón's secular plays are devotion to the church and exaltation of the Castilian code of honor requiring husband, father, or brother to punish the transgressions of an unfaithful woman. The ways in which he treats that code are the basis for the designation “Calderonian,” which in Europe is used to describe dramatic conflicts of honor arising from a wife's infidelity or the vaguest suspicion of it. Among the 140 plays and sketches Calderón wrote for the secular stage are dramas based on historical and legendary material, such as The Mayor of Zalamea (1642; trans. 1906) and La hija del aire (The Daughter of the Air, 1653); dramas of intrigue, such as La dama duende (The Phantom Lady, 1629) and Casa con dos puertas (House with Two Doors, 1629); dramas of jealousy and male honor, such as El médico de su honra (The Doctor of His Own Honor, c. 1629); the philosophical plays El magico prodigioso (The Prodigious Magician, 1637) and Life Is a Dream; and mythological dramas, including La estatua de Prometeo (The Statue of Prometheus, 1669).