Calderon de la Barca, PEDRO, Spain's greatest dramatist, was born of a good old family at Madrid, 17th January 1600, and, after four years' schooling under the Jesuits, from 1613 to 1619 studied law and philosophy at Salamanca. Already in 1614 he had written his first play, and at the poetical contests of 1620 and 1622 had won Lope de Vega's praises, when in 1625 he chose the profession of arms, and, during ten years' service in the Milanese and in Flanders, saw much of men and manners that he afterwards utilised. Nor meanwhile did he neglect the muse, but wrote many dramas which were acted with great applause; so that, on Lope's death in 1635, he was summoned by Philip IV. to Madrid, appointed a sort of master of the revels, and made, two years later, a knight of the order of Santiago. In 1640 the rebellion in Catalonia roused him once more to take the field; but in 1651 he entered, like Lope, the priesthood, and in 1653 withdrew to the 'chantry of the new kings' at Toledo. Ten years went by, and he was recalled to court, to the resumption of his dramatic labours, receiving, with other preferments, the post of chaplain of honour to Philip, whose death, in 1665, deprived him of a generous Mæcenas. Yet still he continued to write for the court, the church, and the public theatres, till, on 25th May 1681, in the words of his friend, De Solís, 'he died, as they say the swan dies, singing.' His remains, already translated from their first resting-place in 1841, in 1869 were finally laid in Spain's new pantheon, the former convent of St Francis in Madrid. A bronze statue of him was unveiled in 1880; and his bicentenary was celebrated with great splendour in the May of the following year.
Castilian and Catholic to the backbone, Calderon wrote for his contemporaries, his fellow-countrymen, his co-religionists, not for posterity or the outer world. Hence, though his plays still hold their own in Spain, to that outer world he must ever be caviare. It cannot rightly appreciate his perfect fidelity to the Spanish thought and manners of his age; his passion seems to it bombast, his nice points of honour fantastic, and his plots, with their matchless coups de théâtre, a very labyrinth for intricacy. This, though Schlegel pronounced him 'the fourth in a mighty quaternion, with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.' This, too, in spite of the many fine English versions of his masterpieces; and in spite of the verdict of a great English critic, that, 'though inferior to Shakespeare in knowledge of humanity and in power of developing his characters from within, to Æschylus in solemn passion, to Sophocles in the structure of his plays and in statuesque power of grouping, to Goethe in metaphysical subtlety—yet in pure poetry Calderon is the equal of them all, and second to none of them as a master of stage effect.' His autos sacramentales, outdoor plays for the festival of Corpus Christi, number 72, and have been divided into seven classes—biblical, classical, ethical, and so forth; the finest of them is El Divino Orfeo. Of his regular dramas 118 are extant. There are the religious plays (such as the Faust-like Magico Prodigioso and El Purgatorio de San Patricio); the historical (El Príncipe Constante—Prince Ferdinand of Portugal); and the philosophic (La Vida es Sueño). There are the 'cloak and sword' plays (La Dama Duende, 'The Fairy Lady'), and the dramas of passion (El Medico de su Honra, El Pintor de su Deshonra, and El Mayor Mostruo los Zelos, 'No monster like jealousy'). There are many others; but classification becomes tedious and difficult; and it is these eight plays, with a dozen more, that are best known to English readers through the renderings of one or more of the following translators: Shelley (a fine fragment from The Magician); Denis McCarthy (10 plays, 4 vols. 1853-73); Edward FitzGerald (8 plays, 3 vols. 1853, et seq.); Archbishop Trench (2 plays, with essay on 'Life and Genius,' 1856; 2d ed. 1880); and N. Maccoll (4 plays, 1888).
The best edition of the autos is that of Apontes (6 vols. Madrid, 1759-60), and there is a good German translation of them by Lorinser (18 vols. 2d ed. 1882); the best editions of the plays are by Hartzenbusch (4 vols. Madrid, 1848-50), and García Ramón (Madrid, 1882). See the German works of Schack (1846), Fr. Schmidt (1857), and Fastenrath (1881-82); vol. ii. of Ticknor's Spanish Literature (1849); Lasso de la Vega's Estudio de las Obras de Calderon (1881); and Miss Hasell's Calderon ('Foreign Classics Series,' 1879).