Calderón de la Barca: Themes, Style, and Major Works
Calderón de la Barca
Topics: Calderón de la Barca’s Jesuit education greatly influenced his work. Recurring themes include freedom, moral conflict, the relationship of humans with power, the disconnect between reality and enthusiasm, and honor and destiny, always marked by the pessimism that accompanies the author.
Style: Calderón was almost exclusively a theatrical writer. His work did not represent a break with the model proposed by Lope de Vega, but perfected it and included ideological and doctrinal content.
Metric: Seeking unity of styles, Calderón employed eight-syllable and eleven-syllable verses, and occasionally heptasyllabic verses, instead of polymetry.
Culteranismo and conceptual language, along with rhetorical devices such as antithesis and oxymoron, abound.
Metaphor is a common resource in Calderón’s work. Though less complicated than that of Góngora, it is part of the Baroque style.
Paradigm of the Baroque Style: Calderón’s theater has been considered one of the paradigms of Baroque aesthetics. He conceived dramatic action as presented by the word of Lope, following the purpose of comedy as a mirror of life.
Strictly Logical Scheme: The dramas of Calderón de la Barca are made according to a strictly logical scheme, whose constitutive elements are clearly defined in the planning, development, and resolution of conflict. Calderón always tries to bring order to chaos.
Systematization: Through antithesis and parallelism of tragedy.
Hierarchical Clustering: The characters are grouped around a protagonist who is the core and the axis of the action. He subordinates the other characters.
That dominance makes the protagonist’s conflict internal, finding the best means of expression in the monologue, which condenses privacy and expresses doubts, feelings, and anxieties.
Works:
Dramas:
Within this category, we find the following types of dramas:
- Dramas of Honor: A Secret Vengeance for a Secret Affront. These tragic dramas represent the most extreme examples of Calderón’s treatment of conjugal honor. In honor of the audience, he develops to its logical limit three situations of social tyranny of honor.
- Tragic Dramas: The work Mayor of Zalamea is particularly relevant, telling how the daughter of Pedro Crespo, the Mayor of Zalamea, is raped by a captain, and the problem of honor is raised. The character traits are equilibrium, maturity, love for his own, and full compliance with their positions in the world. For him, honor is a virtue of the soul bound to the dignity of man.
- Catholic Dramas: Representative works include The Return of the Cross, The Wonderful Magician, and The Steadfast Prince. The first two address the problem of eternal salvation. The third shows the model of a Christian gentleman, moved by honor and loyalty to country and religion.
- Dramas of Free Will and Fate: The most representative is Life is a Dream, a work of profound ideological content that responds to the Baroque idea of disillusionment, that is, the inconsistency of life, the transience of the field, the influence of education on people’s behavior, and the strength of will against fate.
- Biblical Dramas: An example of such dramas is The Greatest Monster, Jealousy, a tragedy of love and passion.
Comedy:
These formed the largest group of Calderón’s dramatic production. The most notable are called cloak and sword comedies.
All these comedies, very varied in their plot, however, have an identical structure: love is the ruling passion, and the characters are a noble knight, brave, at the feet of a lady who loves. The lady is single, has lost her mother, and is under the tutelage of her father, brother, or guardian. Also displayed are a graceful lady and her maid.
Works displayed in this group are La dama duende, Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar, and Primero es la honra.
Auto Sacramental:
Calderón wrote about seventy mystery plays and brought this genre to its full potential. These allegorical plays transmit their message through abstract characters over an act, which ends with the exaltation of the Eucharist.
One of his masterpieces is The Great Theatre of the World, which distributes the roles of God and life to a series of characters who will be held accountable for them at the end of the representation.