This period of creative plenitude was followed by one of crisis: the reformist project fell apart, the Spanish monarchy was incapable of maintaining the country’s cohesion, and, after 1640, the rebellions in favor of the fueros (local customary statutes) in Catalonia, Portugal, Aragon, or Andalusia became unstoppable. In 1643 Olivares fell from power. The Peace of Westphalia and the Treaty of Mu¨nster (1648) marked the independence of Flanders and the beginning of a new European order from which Spain would be progressively marginalized. Caldero´n was a soldier in the war with Catalonia. His brothers died and (perhaps around 1646) his natural son, Pedro Jose´, was born. This crisis point, which is both external and internal, is also reflected as a break in his dramatic career. The deaths of Queen Isabel of Bourbon (1644) and the heir apparent, Baltasar Carlos (1646), along with the intolerance of moralists, brought about the closing down of public theatres, lasting several years. Caldero´n underwent a spiritual (and also professional) re-accommodation: his employment as secretary to the Duke of Alba for a few years and his decision to become a priest (1651) cannot be detached from his personal dejection and from the need to maintain an income. His plays became more and more allegorical and abstract, and almost all of them took place in the two theatrical and political spaces that the current circumstances allowed, the Coliseum of the Palace of El Buen Retiro and the stages for the feast of Corpus Christi. He thus entered his last and longest period of dramatic production. When Felipe IV died, the regent, Mariana of Austria, again ordered the theatres closed until 1670. The monarchy, saddened and perplexed by the succession problem, attempted a new reformism and interior cleansing, at the
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268 Early Modern Spain: Renaissance and Baroque
Cost of definitively renouncing Europe. Caldero´n, the last great intellectual of seventeenth-century Spain, had by then seen published almost all the volumes of his compiled works: he had been assembling these since 1636. Nevertheless, just because his plays tended toward allegory or emphasized the concerns of the court or the Church, this did not mean that they lost touch with reality; in his old age, Caldero´n closely watched the reforms undertaken by Carlos II (1661–1700) and the queen regent. During the carnival of the year 1680, his last play was staged at court: Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa (“The Fate, Emblem and Motto of Leonido and Marfisa”). Caldero´n died on 25 May 1681, before concluding his auto La divina Filotea (“Divine Philotea”).
Some critics consider such a long career as a prolonged imitation of others, as a synthesis of exhausted inheritances. Rather, Caldero´ n’s work can be defined as a “second vanguard” of Spanish classical theatre (after the first vanguard, Lope’s comedia nueva, which, reasonably, broke away from the Aristotelian norm). Caldero´n’s vanguard perfects the masterful rhythm of the plot and the complication of comedy and subjects them to a reflective maturity. It fills the empty space of the corrales with the dream of stage sets and changes of scenery. Moreover, as part of the show, it incorporates the prodigy of the poetic word, of a rhetoric that digs out subjectivity and a passionate debate between the “I” of the character and the world that surrounds him or her. Caldero´n transforms into theatre all the inventions of the new language created by Luis de Go´ngora (1561– 1627). Of course, there is also the creation of characters that are sometimes stylized in a reiterative manner and sometimes endowed with a powerful personality that brings them close to archetype. These are heroes who doubt and who witness how the initial order of their adventures is different from the order that presides over the end of their trajectories, heroes who get lost in a plot complicated by parallel actions (which complement or contradict one another), from whose labyrinth emerge the disillusionment and the instability that surround all things human.
Four centuries with Caldero´n: from casticismo to the difficult co-existence with post-modernity
In order to grasp the difficulties of received critical opinion concerning Caldero´n, it is important to review the history of his critical reception. He was a classic for his own contemporaries. In his Aprobacio´ n to the tome of Caldero´n’s works published in 1682, Manuel Guerra y Ribera (1638–?) stated that what he most admired “en este raro ingenio, fue que a ninguno imito´; nacio´ para maestro, y no disc´ıpulo. Rompio´ senda nueva al Parnaso, sin gu´ıa escalo´ su cumbre; e´sta es para m´ı la ma´s justa
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