Golden Age Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca
Lope de Vega
A prolific writer, Lope de Vega revolutionized Spanish literature with his new art of comedy. In addition to his lyrical production, his dramatic works brought him immense fame.
Drama
Lope de Vega’s stage production was enormous. Forty-two mystery plays and more than three hundred comedies are preserved.
Best-known Works:
- Comedies with a national theme: Fuenteovejuna, The Knight of Olmedo
- Comedies with invented subjects: Love is the most cultivated theme in these plays, often categorized as swashbuckling comedies. Works like La dama boba (The Stupid Lady) or El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger) belong to this type.
Lope’s production covers many other topics: religious, mythological, pastoral, historical, foreign, etc.
Style
- Lope is characterized by naturalness and spontaneity. His verses are noted for their dramatic emotion and lyrical simplicity.
- He skillfully handles formal procedures without falling into unnecessary artifice.
- One of his best achievements is the integration of popular and high culture. He often uses popular songs and traditional verses integrated into a formal scheme, achieving a successful, new, and original aesthetic dimension. This style had numerous followers.
Fuenteovejuna
Considered one of Lope’s best works, Fuenteovejuna is based on real events during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. The play depicts a conflict between the people of Fuenteovejuna, Cordova, and their tyrannical governor.
Tirso de Molina
Embedded in the school of Lope, Tirso de Molina possessed greater originality and dramatic talent than other playwrights of his time.
Work
He wrote some eighty plays, among which are El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) and El condenado por desconfiado (The Doubter Damned).
Style
Tirso follows the Lopensian model but writes theater with distinctive traits:
- Character Creation: His deep knowledge of the human soul allows him to draw characters, especially female characters, with psychological depth, making them role models.
- Comedy: His humor is often acerbic and critical, giving his works a satirical tone, particularly striking in the secondary characters.
His style is also characterized by the contrast between the long poetic interventions of the protagonists and the jeers of the secondary characters.
One of Tirso’s merits is knowing how to unite two independent traditions in a single play: the seducer of women and the macabre dinner. This is the first work in which the legendary Don Juan appears, who, along with Don Quixote, is the most universal and popular hero of Spanish classical literature.
Calderón de la Barca
During the seventeenth century, Spanish national comedy reached its peak of perfection with the Baroque school, to which Calderón de la Barca belonged, along with others like Rojas Zorrilla and Agustín Moreto.
Work
Calderón’s plays are usually divided into two stages:
- After 1621: This first period sees him writing courtly and swashbuckling comedies, such as La dama duende (The Phantom Lady) or Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar (A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard).
- Between 1630 and 1640: His second period marks his maturity as a playwright. This decade includes:
- Great tragedies and biblical plays: Los cabellos de Absalón (Absalom’s Hair) and El médico de su honra (The Surgeon of His Honour).
- El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea)
- His greatest work: La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), an exceptional drama about man’s freedom and the limits of social ethics or reason of state.
This stage of creative fulfillment coincided with a true crisis: social unrest led to the closing of theaters. Calderón and other playwrights lacked spaces to stage their works. When theaters reopened, Calderón dedicated himself to refining the morality of his plays.
Style
Calderón’s style embodies the dramatic system created by Lope. Its most characteristic features are:
- Structured Order: Emphasis on the middle and end. Unity of action is enhanced, eliminating minor characters and events, and everything is concentrated around the protagonist.
- Stylized Speech: Calderón is notable for his special care for formal aspects of language.
- Intensification of Linguistic and Scenic Resources: Calderón is the quintessential Spanish Baroque playwright.
Life is a Dream
Life is a Dream is Calderón’s most famous play and one of the pinnacles of universal drama.
The subject and development of the action are well-known. Prince Segismundo is imprisoned from birth in a tower somewhere in Poland, unaware of his identity or the reason for his confinement. He has been raised and educated by Clotaldo, father of Rosaura. Rosaura and her servant Clarín arrive at this prison. Rosaura has been abandoned by Astolfo after a relationship with him and goes to Poland to regain her honor.
In a later scene, King Basil, Segismundo’s father, explains to his court the reasons for his son’s imprisonment. An astrological prediction foretold that the prince was destined to be a tyrant, and Basil wanted to test the veracity of this prediction. To do so, he had Segismundo brought to the palace while asleep and then returned to the tower, making him believe it was all a dream. Ultimately, Segismundo chooses to do good, and after being freed by a rebellion, he embraces freedom and self-control. He forgives his father and is willing to be a just king. His control over his own passions is also demonstrated in his resignation to the beautiful Rosaura, with whom he had fallen in love.