Roy Norton & Jonathan W Thacker 
A Companion to Calderón de la Barca 

The first comprehensive study of Calderón in English


Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists — many would say the single most important dramatist — of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain’s dominant and most prestigious playwright for much of the seventeenth century, his work is still regularly staged and translated, influential in more recent times on writers as diverse as Schiller, Shelley and Lorca. The author of around 120 plays (not counting his numerous Corpus Christi
autos) in a variety of styles, Calderón is most famous for his stirring
dramas, characterized by rhetorically powerful poetry, dramatic structures carefully calibrated to produce poignant echoes, and the fizzing intellectual energy they apply to the age’s ontological, eschatological and political preoccupations. His plays succeed in combining these perennial concerns with compelling plots subtle enough to defy definitive interpretation. As this volume seeks to show, however, Calderón’s comedies deserve equal recognition. Too long stereotyped as a dour, cerebral conservative, this playwright’s comic works are as amusing as they are clever.


This
Companion is the first comprehensive study of Calderón in English. It provides a rigorous but readable introduction to the man, his work and its legacy. Its chapters — written by leading international
comedia specialists — provide an overview of his life, explain his intellectual, social, moral, and literary contexts, and examine his stagecraft, his corpus, and his reception both within and without the Hispanic world up to the twenty-first century. Specific chapters are devoted to
La vida es sueño, his most famous work, which appears on many a university syllabus, and to his infamous wife-murder plays.

Содержание

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Foreword / Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations


Introduction,
Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker

1 Biography and Context,
Don Cruickshank

2 The Calderonian World,
Jeremy Robbins

3 The Playwright’s Craft: Calderón and the Great Theatrical World of Early-Modern Spain,
Alejandro García-Reidy

4
La vida es sueño, Jeremy Lawrance

5 The Honour Plays of Calderón,
Colin Thompson

6 Calderón, the Comedian,
Jonathan Thacker

7 Mythological Court Spectacle Plays,
Margaret R. Greer

8 Religious
comedias, Isabel Hernando Morata

9 Calderón’s ‘Sacramental, Allegorical and Historical’
autos,
Ignacio Arellano

10 Calderón’s
graciosos, Roy Norton

11 Calderón and Visual Art,
Oliver Noble Wood

12 The Staging of Calderón’s Theatre,
Santiago Fernández Mosquera

13 Calderón’s European Reception from Romanticism to the Twentieth Century,
Ritchie Robertson

14 The Reception of Calderón in the Hispanic World,
Duncan Wheeler


Appendices

I. Key Digital and Print Sources and Works by Calderón Mentioned

II. Versification in Calderón


Consolidated Bibliography

Index

Об авторе

MARGARET R. GREER is Emeritus Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University.