The attempts to recover the classics made by the Generation of 1927 (we cannot forget the moving production of the auto La vida es sueno by the La Barraca theatre company, in which Federico Garc´ıa Lorca [1898-1936] himself played Death) were interrupted by the Civil War and Franco’s regime, which wretchedly used the imperialist and ultra-Catholic vision of Calderon in lavish performances at Eucharistic conferences or in official theatres. Having been eruditely rescued by Anglo-Saxon criticism (especially by Alexander A. Parker),4 Calderon has been revised and recovered by contemporary Hispanism only after the centennial of 1981. His difficulty, the excess of all aspects of his theatre, the contrast created by a tragic vision of life that is at the same time carnivalesque, the idea of the theatre as a metaphor for life, and his constant bordering on the world
4 See in particular, The Allegorical Drama of Calderon: An Introduction to the Autos Sacra-mentales (Oxford: Dolphin Books, 1943); and The Mind and Art of Calderon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Pedro Caldero´ndelaBarca 271
Of the unreal by looking at man as the matter of his own dreams (something typical of Shakespeare as well), have led post-modernity to approach him in a more interrogative manner, especially when the Caldero´n of the last twenty years has been revealed to the public in his natural habitat: the stage. Still, most biographical and critical summaries of the author reduce him to a kind of weird peculiarity. Nationalist Germans or Catholic Anglo-Saxons prescribed that, because of his race, faith, temperament, and historical context, Caldero´n was Spain’s best national poet, but one incapable of achieving universal transcendence. Even Harold Bloom, who includes Caldero´n among the indispensable authors in the Hispanic literary canon,5 describes him, suspiciously, as the only playwright of religious stock who has ever existed in the world, affirming that next to him Paul Claudel (1869–1955) is insignificant. It must be said that what has been interpreted in Caldero´n as a negative transcendental pessimism is an evident sign of the crisis of modernity, which consists, as Marshall Berman has said, of being “both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to. . . hold on to something real even as everything melts.”6
History and power: The heterodoxies of a conservative
Indeed, Caldero´n is not always a fundamentalist, resigned to Christian pessimism or submissive to power. Only recently has the difference between the author’s discourse and his characters’ discourse been accepted. This opening has permitted us to see the Caldero´n of the earlier plays, in which his individual passion opposes the iron law of destiny (or of injustice). From his discreet biography, some dissonant facts have been made to stand out. In 1621, for example, Caldero´n and his brothers were accused of murder. In 1629 he took part in a skirmish involving swords, after one of his brothers was injured by an actor, whom they chased to the Convent of the Trinitarians, where they broke into the nuns’ cloister. For that reason, it must not surprise us to find plays by Caldero´n that can easily qualify as “pre-Romantic,” such as La devocio´n de la cruz (“Devotion to the Cross,” c. 1623–1625) or Luis Pe´rez el gallego (“The Galician
´ Luis Pe´rez,” c. 1628), whose protagonists have, as Angel Valbuena Prat
Puts it, an “anarchic” profile comparable to the great passions presented
5 The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1994), p. 234.
6 All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), pp. 13–14.
272 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque
In Sophocles’ or Shakespeare’s plays.7 Eusebio and Julia in La devocion de la cruz rebel against the ill-fated authority represented by their father Curcio:
Que mal te puedo negar la vida que tu me diste. La libertad que me dio el cielo es la que te niego.
(because I can hardly deny you the life that you gave me. The freedom that the
Heavens gave me is what I deny you.) (Act ill)
Luis Perez unmasks the officials of the judicial system as corrupt and incompetent:
No quiero amigos letrados; que no obligan a los jueces las palabras; que ellos hacen a proposito las leyes.
(I do not want lawyer friends, because words do not oblige judges, since they
Make the laws on purpose.) (n)
Even in later plays such as Las tres justicias en una (“Threefold Justice in One Sentence,” c. 1635), the oedipal rebellion of young Lope de Urrea against his father (who denied him love and an education) bursts on stage as a violent slap in his progenitor’s face, a daring breach of decorum for which Calderon was criticized by his own admirers. In La cisma de Inglaterra (“The Rift of England,” 1627), young Henry VIII (a victim rather than an executioner of the Catholic cause) tries to put an end to the abuse and maliciousness of the court:
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