Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Henao was born in Madrid on 17 January 1600 and died on 25 May 1681. A Spanish dramatist, poet, and writer, he stands among the most distinguished literary figures of the Spanish Golden Age, especially for the many verse dramas he wrote for the theatre. He has been called “the Spanish Shakespeare,” the national poet of Spain, and one of the great poets and playwrights in world literature.

Calderón was born into the minor Spanish nobility and lived in Madrid for most of his life. His father, Diego Calderón, came from a mountain hidalgo family with roots in Viveda, Cantabria, and served the Spanish Habsburg kings Felipe II and Felipe III as secretary of the Council and Chief Accounting Office of the Treasury. His mother, Ana González de Henao, had family roots in the Spanish Netherlands and was of Flemish or Walloon descent. After his mother died in 1610, Calderón was educated at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial in Madrid with a view to taking orders, but he instead studied law at Salamanca.

His first known success came in poetry contests held between 1620 and 1622 in honor of St. Isidore, patron saint of Madrid. His theatrical debut followed on 29 June 1623, when Amor, honor y poder, a history play about King Edward III of England, was performed at the Royal Alcázar of Madrid during the visit of Charles, Prince of Wales. Two more plays, La selva confusa and Los Macabeos, appeared that same year. Over the next two decades, Calderón wrote more than 70 plays, most of them secular dramas for the commercial theatres.

Calderón also served beyond the stage. He was 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. In 1636 and 1637, Philip IV made him a knight of the Order of Santiago and commissioned spectacular plays for the royal theatre in the newly built Buen Retiro palace. In 1640 he joined mounted cuirassiers raised by Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, fought in the Catalan campaign, and distinguished himself at Tarragona. He retired from the army in November 1642 because of failing health and later received a special military pension.

His work joined courtly spectacle, religious thought, ethical conflict, and theatrical experiment. His favored forms included mystery plays on Transubstantiation and the Real Presence for Corpus Christi, comedy of intrigue, and tragic theatre rooted in the Spanish nobility’s code of honor. His masterpiece, La Vida es Sueño (“Life is a Dream”), brings together a beauty and the beast plotline, a disguised woman reminiscent of Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, surrealist concepts, romantic complications, and the threat of dynastic civil war, while asking whether fate is fixed or free will can alter the future.

Personal and religious changes marked his later life. His brother Diego died in 1647, and a son, Pedro José, was born to Calderón and an unknown woman between 1647 and 1649; the mother died soon after. Calderón became a tertiary of the order of St. Francis in 1650, was ordained in 1651, and served as a parish priest at San Salvador Church in Madrid. His plays and poems later influenced Romanticism, symbolism, literary modernism, expressionism, dystopian science fiction, and postmodernism, and drew admirers from Goethe and Byron to Borges and Pasternak. His words still matter because they ask, with dramatic force, how people live under honor, faith, power, uncertainty, and the possibility of choice.