Don
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
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Born | Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño (1600-01-17)17 January 1600 Madrid, Spain |
Died | 25 May 1681(1681-05-25) (aged 81) Madrid, Spain |
Occupation | Playwright, poet, writer |
Alma mater |
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Literary movement | Spanish Golden Age |
Children | Pedro José |
Relatives | Diego Calderón (father) Ana María de Henao (mother) |
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681) (UK: /ˌkældəˈrɒn ˌdeɪ læ ˈbɑːrkə/, US: /ˌkɑːldəˈroʊn ˌdeɪ lə -, - ˌdɛ lə -/; Spanish: [ˈpeðɾo kaldeˈɾon de la ˈβaɾka]; full name: Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño) was a Spanish dramatist, poet, and writer. He is known as one of the most distinguished poets and writers of the Spanish Golden Age, especially for the many verse dramas he wrote for the theatre.
Calderón de la Barca was born into the minor Spanish nobilityinMadrid, where he lived for most of his life. He served as soldier and a knight of the military and religious Order of Santiago, but later became a Roman Catholic priest. Born while the Spanish Golden Age theatre was being defined by Lope de Vega, he developed it further by introducing pioneering elements of what are now called metafiction and surrealism. His poetry and plays have since wielded an enormous global influence upon Romanticism, symbolism, literary modernism, expressionism, science fiction, and even postmodernism. Calderón is widely regarded as the perfecter of Spanish Baroque theatre and is regarded as Spain's greatest dramatist and one of the finest poets and playwrights of world literature.[a]
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Pedro Calderón de la Barca was born in Madrid on Friday 17 January 1600,[2] and was baptized in the parish of San Martín. His father, Diego Calderón, was a mpuntain hidalgo with family origins in Viveda, Cantabria and by paternal inheritance he had assumed the position of secretary of the Council and Chief Accounting Office of the Treasury, serving in it the kings Felipe II and Felipe III, died in 1615.[3] The playwright's mother, Ana Gonzalez de Henao (or Henaut,[4][5] Hainaut[6]), had family roots in the Spanish Netherlands and was of either Flemish[4][7][8][5]orWalloon descent.[9][10] According to James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, she claimed origin from the De Mons of Hainault.[11] His parents married in 1595.[3] Pedro was the third of the six children that the marriage produced (three boys and three girls), of whom only four survived childhood: Diego, the first-born;[note 1] Dorotea — nun in Toledo—;[note 2] Pedro and Jusepe or José.[note 3][note 4] These brothers were always welcome, as Diego Calderón stated in his will (1647):
All three of us have always conserved ourselves in love and friendship, and without dividing up assets... we have helped each other in the needs and jobs we have had.[12]
However, they also had a natural brother, Francisco, who hid under the surname of『González』and was expelled from the father's house by Don Diego, although he left written in 1615 that he be recognized as legitimate unless he had married "with that woman he tried to marry", in which case he would be disinherited.[13]
His mother died when Calderón was ten years old,[7] in 1610.[14] Calderón was then educated at the Jesuit College in Madrid, the Colegio Imperial,[2] with a view to taking orders; but instead, he studied law at Salamanca.
Between 1620 and 1622 Calderón won several poetry contests in honor of St. Isidore at Madrid. Calderón's debut as a playwright was Amor, honor y poder, performed at the Royal Palace on 29 June 1623. This was followed by two other plays that same year: La selva confusa and Los Macabeos. Over the next two decades, Calderón wrote more than 70 plays, the majority of which were secular dramas written for the commercial theatres.
Calderón served in the Spanish Royal Army in Italy and Flanders between 1625 and 1635. By the time Lope de Vega died in 1635, Calderón was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. Calderón had also gained considerable favour in the court, and in 1636–1637 he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago by Philip IV, who had already commissioned from him a series of spectacular plays for the royal theatre in the newly built Buen Retiro palace. On 28 May 1640 he joined a company of mounted cuirassiers recently raised by Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, took part in the Catalan campaign, and distinguished himself by his gallantry at Tarragona. His health failing, Calderón retired from the army in November 1642, and three years later was awarded a special military pension in recognition of his services in the field.
Calderón's biography during the next few years is obscure. His brother, Diego Calderón, died in 1647. A son, Pedro José, was born to Calderón and an unknown woman between 1647 and 1649; the mother died soon after. Calderón committed his son to the care of his nephew, José, son of Diego. Perhaps for reasons relating to these personal trials, Calderón became a tertiary of the order of St Francis in 1650, and then finally joined the priesthood. He was ordained in 1651 and served as a parish priest at San Salvador Church in Madrid, which was later demolished as part of the 19th-century Spanish confiscations. According to a statement Calderón made a year or two later, he decided to give up writing secular drama for the commercial theatres.
Though he did not adhere strictly to this resolution, he now wrote mostly mythological plays for the palace theatres, and autos sacramentales—one-act allegories illustrating the Real Presence in the Eucharist—for performance during the feast of Corpus Christi. In 1662, two of Calderón's autos, Las órdenes militares and Mística y real Babilonia, were the subjects of an investigation by the Spanish Inquisition; the former was censored, its manuscripts confiscated, and it remained banned until 1671.
Even so, Calderón was appointed honorary chaplain to Philip IV in 1663, and continued as chaplain to his successor. In his eighty-first year he wrote his last secular play, Hado y Divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, in honor of Charles II's marriage to Maria Luisa of Orléans.
Notwithstanding his position at court and his popularity throughout Spain, near the end of his life Calderón struggled with financial difficulties, but with the motivation of the Carnival of 1680 he wrote his last work of comedy, Hado y divisa de Leonido y de Marfisa. He died on 25 May 1681, leaving only partially complete the autos sacramentales that he had been working on for that year. His burial was austere and unembellished, as he desired in his will: "Uncovered, as if I deserved to satisfy in part the public vanities of my poorly spent life". In this manner he left the theatres orphaned in which he was considered one of the best dramatic writers of his time.[15]
Calderón initiated what has been called the second cycle of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Whereas his predecessor, Lope de Vega, pioneered the dramatic forms and genres of Spanish Golden Age theatre, Calderón polished and perfected them. Whereas Lope's strength lay in the spontaneity and naturalness of his work, Calderón's strength lay in his capacity for poetic beauty, dramatic structure and philosophical and theological depth. Calderón was a perfectionist who often revisited and reworked his plays, even long after they were first performed. This perfectionism was not just limited to his own work: several of his plays rework existing plays or scenes by other dramatists, improving their depth, complexity, and unity. Calderón excelled above all others in the genre of the "auto sacramental", in which he showed a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to giving new dramatic forms to a given set of theological and philosophical constructs. Calderón wrote 120 "comedias", 80 "autos sacramentales" and 20 short comedic works called entremeses.
AsGoethe notes, Calderón tended to write his plays by taking extra special care of their dramatic structure. He therefore usually reduced the number of scenes in his plays as compared to those of Lope de Vega, so as to avoid any superfluity and present only those scenes essential to the play, also reducing the number of different metres in his plays for the sake of gaining a greater stylistic uniformity. Although his poetry and plays leaned towards culteranismo, he usually reduced the level and obscurity of that style by avoiding metaphors and references away from those that uneducated viewers could understand. However, he had a great influence in later centuries upon Symbolism, for example by making a fall from a horse a metaphor for a fall into disgrace or dishonour; the use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of the play as a way of making false predictions about the following to occur, to defend the Catholic doctrine of free will against the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and to depict the unwritten nature of the future. In addition, Calderón realized that any play was a work of fiction, and that the structure of the baroque play was entirely artificial. He therefore, probably influenced by Cervantes, made regular use of metafictional techniques, such as making his characters joke about the clichés they are expected to slavishly follow. Some of the most common themes of his plays were heavily influenced by his Classical Christian education by the Jesuits. For example, as a reader and great admirer of Scholastic theologians Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, Calderón liked to confront reason against emotion, intellect against instinct, and understanding against the will.
In common with many writers from the Spanish Golden Age, his plays usually show his vital pessimism, that is only softened by his rationalism and his faith in the Christian God; the anguish and distress usually found his œuvre is better exemplified in one of his most famous plays, La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), in which Segismundo claims:
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. |
What is life? A frenzy. |
Indeed, his themes tended to be complex and philosophical, and express complicated states of mind in a manner that few playwrights have been able to manage. Like Baltasar Gracián, Calderón favoured only the deepest human feelings and moral dilemmas.
According to Russian Symbolist poet and dramatic theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov, "Let us take a look at drama, which in modern history has replaced the spectacles of universal and holy events as reflected in miniature and purely signifying forms on the stages of the mystery plays. We know that classical French tragedy is one of triumphs of the transformational , decisive idealistic principle. Calderón, however, is different. In him, everything is but a signification of the objective truth of Divine Providence, which governs human destiny. A pious son of the Spanish Church, he was able to combine all the daring of naive individualism with the most profound realism of the mystical contemplation of divine things."[16]
Since Calderón's plays were usually produced at the court of the King of Spain, he had access to the most modern techniques regarding scenography. He collaborated with Cosme Lotti in developing complex scenographies that were integrated in some of his plays, specially his most religious-themed ones such as the Autos Sacramentales, becoming extremely complex allegories of moral, philosophical and religious concepts.
Although his fame dwindled during the 18th-century due to the anti-religious currents of the Enlightenment in Spain, he was rediscovered by August Wilhelm Schlegel. Schlegel's translations and high critical praise rekindled interest in Calderón, who, along with Shakespeare, became a banner figure for the literary and cultural revival known as German Romanticism.[17] E. T. A. Hoffmann based his 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht on a stage play by Calderón, La banda y la flor (The Scarf and the Flower), as translated by Schlegel. In subsequent decades, Calderón was repeatedly translated into German, most notably by Johann Diederich Gries and Joseph von Eichendorff, and had an enthusiastic reception on the German and Austrian stages, particularly under the direction of Goethe, and Joseph Schreyvogel. Later significant German adaptations include highly influential Austrian Symbolist poet, playwright, and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal's versions of La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo.
During the 19th century, Calderón de la Barca was embraced by adherents of Carlism and other opponents of the 1798-1924 mass confiscation and sale of Church property by the State, the expulsion of the religious orders, the ban on Classical Christian education, and the many other anti-Catholic policies of Liberal Spanish monarchs and their ministers.[18] In 1881, during a controversial meeting at El Retiro for the commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of Calderón's death, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo drank a toast to the religious values of Calderón's Spain and the supremacy of the Latino race over "Germanic barbarity", by which Menéndez Pelayo meant Spanish Krausist and the Hegelianist intellectuals.[19]
Félix Sardà y Salvany and his fellow adherents of integrist Catholicism considered Calderón de la Barca to embody the most brilliant incarnation of the Spanish Catholic tradition.[19]
During the pre-1917 Silver Age of Russian Poetry, highly influential Russian Symbolist poet and dramatic theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov was also an enthusiast for Calderón. On 19 April 1910, Vsevolod Meyerhold even staged Konstantin Balmont's literary translation of Calderón's Adoration of the Holy Cross during the weekly literary salon held inside Ivanov's flat overlooking the Tauride PalaceinSt Petersburg. Many of the most important figures in Russian literature at the time were either present or acting in the play.[20]
Although he is best known abroad as the Nobel Prize-winning author of Doctor Zhivago, Soviet dissident intellectual and former Ivanov protege Boris Pasternak produced acclaimed Russian translations of Calderón's plays during the late 1950s. According to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya,
In working on Calderón he received help from Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubumov, a shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak. I took finished bits of the translation with me to Moscow, read them to Liubimov at Potapov Street, and then went back to Peredelkino, where I would tactfully ask [Boris Leonidovich] to change passages which, in Liubimov's view departed too far from the original. Very soon after the "scandal" was over, [Boris Leonidovich] received a first payment for the work on Calderón.[21]
Following the end of the Spanish Civil War, Calderón was embraced as a national poet by the Francoist government.[18] This, however, has not harmed his popularity in Spain in the years since the transition back to constitutional monarchy.
For example, the 1997 Alejandro Amenábar science fiction film Open Your Eyes, which was later remade in Hollywood as Vanilla Sky, has drawn many comparisons to Calderón's La vida es Sueño.[22][23][24]
The persistent influence of anti-Spanish sentiment rooted in the Black Legend still means that the literary and cultural contributions of the Spanish Golden Age are still widely unknown in the English-speaking world. Even so, both this attitude and it's cultural legacy were criticized even during the Elizabethan era by Sir Philip Sidney, whose An Apology for Poetry expressed very high praise the verse dramas he had attended during diplomatic missions in France, Spain, and Italy, which had revived the Aristotle's three Classical unities, and which Sidney for this and other reasons considered vastly superior to all the plays then being written and performed in England.
Furthermore, Calderón's plays were first translated and performed in English during his lifetime. For instance, the diary of Stuart Restoration courtier Samuel Pepys describes attending stage plays in London during 1667 which were free translations from Calderón. During the same era, Calderón's many emulators in writing for the English stage included Poet Laureate of England John Dryden.
Centuries later, like his German Romantic colleagues, English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had very high praise in his essays for Calderón and personally translated a substantial portion of El Mágico prodigioso.
Despite this, in his essay A Defence of Poetry, Shelley also expressed very harsh criticism for Calderón's religious beliefs and his regular decision to confront the human intellect successfully against the emotions, "Calderón, in his religious autos, has attempted to fulfill some of the high conditions of dramatic presentation neglected by Shakespeare; such as establishing a relation between drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he admits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealism of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion."[25]
Later in the same essay, however, Shelley concluded, "The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderón, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michaelangelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the studyofGreek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself."[26]
The poetic and accurate Victorian era translations of Irish Catholic poet Denis Florence MacCarthy were commenced because MacCarthy was a great admirer of Shelley and therefore took the latter's high critical praise of Calderón in multiple essays very seriously.
George Ticknor declared in his History of Spanish Literature that MacCarthy "has succeeded in giving a faithful idea of what is grandest and most effective in [Calderón's] genius... to a degree which I had previously thought impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, and of Spanish poetry generally."
Other translators of Calderón's works into English have included Edward FitzGerald, Roy Campbell, Edwin Honig, Kenneth Muir & Ann L. Mackenzie, Adrian Mitchell, and Gwynne Edwards.
A recent revival of interest in Calderón scholarship can be attributed to British reception, namely through the works of A. A. Parker (who considered La hija del aire to be his finest work),[27] A. E. Sloman and more recently Bruce Wardropper.
For a time the comedic works of Calderón were underestimated, but have since been reevaluated and have been considered as masterfully composed works as being classified in the genre of comedias de enredo, such as his works La dama duende (The Phantom Lady), Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar (A house with two doors is difficult to guard), or El galán fantasma (The Heroic Phantom).
Calderón de la Barca appears in the 1998 novel The Sun over Breda, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, which takes up the assumption that he served in the Spanish Army at Flanders and depicts him during the sack of Oudkerk by Spanish troops, helping the local librarian save books from the library in the burning town hall.
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