Spanish Golden Age Playwrights: Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca
Lope de Vega, a prolific writer, is known for his contributions to both comedy and drama. While his lyrical production brought him fame, his dramatic works are perhaps his most celebrated.
Drama: Lope de Vega’s dramatic output is vast, with forty-two mystery plays and over three hundred comedies preserved.
Best-Known Works:
- Comedies with a national theme: Fuenteovejuna, The Knight of Olmedo
- Comedies with invented subjects: Lope de Vega excelled at comedies where love is the central theme. These include swashbuckling comedies like La dama boba and The Dog in the Manger.
Lope de Vega’s works cover a wide range of topics, including religious, mythological, pastoral, historical, and foreign themes.
Style:
- Lope de Vega’s style is characterized by naturalness and spontaneity. His verses are known for their dramatic emotion and simple lyricism.
- He skillfully manages formal procedures without resorting to unnecessary artifice.
- One of his greatest achievements is the integration of popular and high culture. He often uses popular songs and traditional verses within a formal framework, achieving a new and original aesthetic dimension.
- This style influenced numerous followers.
Fuenteovejuna:
Considered one of Lope de Vega’s best works, Fuenteovejuna is based on real events set during the time of the Catholic Kings. It depicts a conflict between the people of Fuenteovejuna, a town in Cordoba, and their tyrannical governor.
Tirso de Molina, a playwright embedded in Lope de Vega’s school, displayed greater originality and dramatic talent than other playwrights of his time.
Work: Tirso de Molina wrote approximately eighty plays, including The Pardoner of Seville and The Convicted Suspicious.
Style: While Tirso de Molina followed the Lopenesque model, his theater had distinct traits:
- Creation of Characters: His deep understanding of the human soul allowed him to create especially compelling female characters. His characters represent specific psychological types and become role models.
- Comedy: His humor is often acerbic and critical, giving his works a satirical tone. This is particularly striking in the secondary characters.
His style is also characterized by the contrast between the long poetic interventions of the protagonists and the jeers of the secondary characters.
One of Tirso de Molina’s merits is his ability to unite two independent traditions in a single play: the seducer of women and the macabre dinner.
The Pardoner of Seville is the first work to feature the legendary Don Juan, who, along with Don Quixote, is one of the most universal and popular heroes of Spanish classical literature.
Calderón de la Barca, a playwright who worked within the baroque school, brought the national comedy to its peak of perfection during the seventeenth century. Other notable playwrights of this period include Rojas Zorrilla and Agustín Moreto.
Work: Calderón de la Barca’s plays are typically divided into two stages:
- After 1621: Calderón de la Barca began writing comedies of courtiers and swashbucklers, excelling in works like La dama duende (The Ghostly Lady) and House with Two Doors, Is to Keep Bad.
- Between 1630 and 1640: Calderón de la Barca reached his maturity as a playwright. This decade saw the creation of great tragedies and biblical plays like Absalom’s Hair and The Honorary Doctor of the Honor.
The Mayor of Zalamea:
Calderón de la Barca also wrote what would become his greatest work: Life is a Dream, an exceptional drama about man’s freedom, the limits of social ethics, and the reason of state.
During this period of creative fulfillment, Calderón de la Barca faced a true crisis: social unrest coincided with the closing of theaters. Calderón de la Barca and other playwrights were left without spaces to perform their works. When the theaters reopened, Calderón de la Barca dedicated himself to improving his morality plays.
Style: Calderón de la Barca’s style embodies the dramatic system created by Lope de Vega. Its most characteristic features include:
- Order and Structure: A focus on the middle and end of the play. The unity of action is enhanced by eliminating minor characters and events, concentrating everything around the protagonist.
- Stylization of Speech: Calderón de la Barca also emphasized the stylization of his speech, translating into special care for formal aspects.
- Intensification of Linguistic and Scenic Resources: Calderón de la Barca is considered the quintessential Spanish baroque playwright.
Life is a Dream:
Life is a Dream is Calderón de la Barca’s most famous work and a pinnacle of universal drama.
The subject and development of the action are well-known. Prince Segismundo is imprisoned from birth in a remote location in Poland, unaware of who he is or why he is denied freedom. He is monitored and educated by Clotaldo, the father of Rosaura. While in prison, Rosaura and her servant Clarín arrive. Rosaura has been abandoned by Astolfo after a relationship with him and travels to Poland to regain her honor.
In a later scene, Basil, King Segismundo’s father, explains to his court the reasons for his son’s imprisonment. A horoscope predicted that the prince would be tyrannical, and Basil wanted to verify the prediction’s veracity. To do this, he brought his son to the palace while asleep, waking him into believing it was all a dream. Ultimately, Segismundo decides to do good. After being released by a rebellion, he embraces freedom and self-control, forgives his father, and is willing to be a righteous king. He demonstrates control over his own passions by resigning himself to the beautiful lady Rosa, with whom he had fallen in love.