Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Portrait of Pedro Calderón de la Barca by Pedro de Villafranca, copperplate engraving, Madrid, 1676 (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid).
Born	(1600-01-17)January 17, 1600 Madrid
Died	May 25, 1681(1681-05-25) (aged 81) Madrid
Alma mater	Colegio Imperial (1608–1613), University of Alcalá, University of Salamanca (1615–1619)
Occupations	Playwright, writer, priest
Relatives	Diego Calderón (father) Ana María de Henao (mother)
Writing career
Language	Middle Spanish
Genres	Tragedy, comedy, auto sacramental, poetry
Notable awards	Knight of the Order of Santiago
Movement	Baroque

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Madrid, January 17, 1600 – May 25, 1681) was a Spanish writer, playwright and priest, a member of the Venerable Congregation of Secular Priests Natives of Madrid San Pedro Apóstol and a knight of the Order of Santiago, known above all as one of the most distinguished Baroque men of letters of the Golden Age, especially for his theater.

A court poet and a soldier, he was ordained a priest in 1651. His theater, based on that of Lope de Vega, introduces important modifications: it eliminates unnecessary scenes and reduces secondary ones; it subordinates the characters to a central one; it accentuates monarchical ideas and the theme of honor. The Baroque anguish of existence, together with theological problems, shapes his autos sacramentales, which require a great deal of stage machinery and in which Calderón reached his highest lyricism. His language is the culmination of culteranismo, and its expressive richness contains elements of intellectual conceptismo, as is evident in his work La vida es sueño (1635).

His works and creations have been divided thematically: religious comedies (La devoción de la cruz), historical-legendary (El sitio de Breda), of intrigue (Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar), of honor (El médico de su honra), philosophical (El gran teatro del mundo), mythological (Eco y Narciso) and autos sacramentales (A Dios por razón de estado).

Biography

Pedro Calderón de la Barca was born in Madrid on Monday, January 17, 1600, and was baptized in the parish of San Martín. His father, Diego Calderón, was a hidalgo of montañés origin (Viveda, Santillana del Mar, Cantabria) and, by paternal inheritance, had assumed the office of secretary of the Council and Contaduría Mayor de Hacienda (Chief Accounting Office of the Treasury), serving in it under Kings Philip II and Philip III. In 1595 Diego married Ana María de Henao, who also belonged to a family of noble origin. Pedro was the third of the six children the couple managed to have, three boys and three girls, of whom only four survived childhood: Diego, the firstborn; Dorotea, a nun in Toledo; Pedro; and Jusepe or José. These siblings always got along well, as Diego Calderón declared in his will (1647):

We have always kept, all three of us, in love and friendship, and without dividing our property... we have helped one another in the needs and hardships we have had.

However, they also had a natural brother, Francisco, whom they concealed under the surname "González" and who was expelled from the family home by Don Diego, although the latter left it in writing in 1615 that he should be recognized as legitimate unless he had married "that woman whom he tried to marry," in which case he would be disinherited.

The lineage of the Calderón de la Barca is very old and extensive. Friar Felipe de la Gándara wrote a book on this subject in 1661, whose chapter XII, "De los Calderones de Sotillo, en la jurisdicción de Reinosa", is devoted to the branch to which the playwright belonged. The family coat of arms consisted of five black cauldrons on a field of silver, with a bordure of eight golden saltires on a field of gules; it bore the motto "Por la fe moriré" ("For the faith I shall die"). The ancestral home of the lineage is in Viveda (Cantabria), and is known as the Tower house of the Calderón de La Barca.

He began to attend school in 1605 in Valladolid, because the Court was there, but his father, an authoritarian man, decided to destine him to occupy the chaplaincy of San José in the parish of San Salvador, which his grandmother Inés de Riaño y Peralta had reserved for the eldest son of the family who became a priest. Back in Madrid, in 1607 the family settled in some houses on the calle de las Fuentes, on the corner of the descent to the Caños del Peral. Pedro Calderón entered the Colegio Imperial of the Jesuits of Madrid in 1608, located where the Instituto San Isidro now stands, and remained there until 1613 studying grammar, Latin, Greek and theology. The broad education he received there expanded his knowledge and reading, and decisively shaped his literary production and his life. When he had been at the Colegio for two years, his mother died from complications after childbirth, as did the baby girl she gave birth to (October 22, 1610). In 1613 his grandmother Inés de Riaño also died and her will was opened, in which she declared her wish that the eldest of her grandsons occupy the aforementioned chaplaincy. Don Diego ended his widowhood by marrying for a second time, in 1614, the lady Juana Freyle Caldera, of a good but impoverished family; but the father also died suddenly and unexpectedly the following year, on November 21, 1615.

For this reason Pedro, who had entered the University of Alcalá the year before, had to interrupt his studies for the reading of the abusive clauses of the will, which set the brothers against their stepmother, with whom they entered into litigation even though they were minors (the eldest, Diego, was nineteen, but the age of majority was then granted at twenty-five), settled by an agreement dated in Valladolid in 1618. Doña Juana remarried, and from 1616 the brothers were placed under the guardianship, education and support of their maternal uncle Andrés Jerónimo González de Henao. In the meantime, the future poet went to the University of Salamanca (1615), where in October 1617 he rented a house from the College of San Millán together with other students, one of them his cousin Francisco de Montalvo. In June 1618 they still had not paid and were excommunicated.

D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Knight of the Order of Santiago, Chaplain of Honor of His Majesty and of the Reyes Nuevos in Toledo, Comic Poet in whom ingenious invention competed with the urbanity and beauty of Language. He was born in Madrid in the year 1601, and died there at the age of 81. Engraving by Mariano Brandi after a drawing by Rafael Ximeno y Planes for the series Retratos de los españoles ilustres published by the Calcografía Nacional between 1791 and 1819.

In 1619 he graduated as bachelor in utroque, that is, in both laws, canon and civil, without being ordained as his father had wished. In 1621 he took part in the poetry contest held on the occasion of the beatification of Saint Isidore and later in that of his canonization, in 1622, and won a third prize.

He decided to abandon religious studies for a military career and led a somewhat turbulent life of quarrels and gambling. There were also problems within the family, since in 1621 the brothers made an official declaration of their state of penury and had to sell a censo, or income from inherited property, in order to subsist. In addition, in the summer of that same year he and his brothers Diego and José became entangled in the homicide of Nicolás Velasco, son of Diego de Velasco, a servant of the Constable of Castile, and they had to take refuge in the house of the Austrian ambassador until they reached an agreement with the plaintiffs, which required the payment of a hefty compensation of six hundred ducats.

Perhaps because of these financial straits Pedro had to enter the service of Bernardino Fernández de Velasco y Tovar, 6th Duke of Frías and 11th Constable of Castile, with whom he traveled through Flanders and northern Italy between 1623 and 1625, taking part in several military campaigns, according to his biographer Juan de Vera Tassis, although documentation to confirm this is lacking, and in 1625 he went as a soldier in the service of the aforementioned Constable. His first known comedy, Amor, honor y poder, premiered successfully at the Palace on the occasion of the visit of Charles, Prince of Wales, on June 29, 1623, by the company of Juan Acacio Bernal; it was followed that same year by Judas Macabeo, performed by the company of Felipe Sánchez de Echeverría, as well as many others; in 1626 the firstborn Diego Calderón, now of age, was able to sell his father's office of Secretary of the Council of the Treasury to Duarte Coronel in exchange for 15,500 ducats; with this the family managed to get out of its financial difficulties.

In 1625 his tragedy La gran Zenobia premiered, performed by the company of Andrés de la Vega, which one critic calls "the Hispanic Macbeth", In this great piece about power and truth two great characters confront each other, the Emperor of Rome Aurelian and the Queen of Palmyra, Zenobia. Calderón supplied the Court with an extensive dramatic repertoire: El sitio de Bredá (1626), El alcalde de sí mismo (1627), La cisma de Ingalaterra (1627), and, in 1628, Saber del mal y el bien, Hombre pobre todo es trazas, Luis Pérez, el gallego and El Purgatorio de san Patricio; but in 1629, his bursting with his brothers into sacred ground in pursuit of an actor, specifically into the Convent of the Trinitarians of Madrid, where Lope's daughter lived, earned him the enmity of the Monarch of the comic stage, Lope de Vega, and of the famous Gongorist preacher Friar Hortensio Félix Paravicino. Calderón answered the latter's attacks by mocking him in a passage of his comedy El príncipe constante, written that year, as was La dama duende, his first great success. Likewise, in that same year of 1629 he premiered Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar and, at the Royal Site of La Zarzuela, El jardín de Falerina. By 1630 he was already famous enough for Lope de Vega to praise his poetic talent in El laurel de Apolo, and in 1632 he also won the praise of Juan Pérez de Montalbán in his Para todos. Ejemplos morales. In 1633 he wrote Amar después de la muerte o El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra, according to José Alcalá-Zamora "the most thrilling tragedy of war and love in our literature".

With these and other comedies he came to win the esteem even of King Philip IV himself, who began to commission works from him for the Court theaters, whether the gilded hall of the now-vanished Alcázar or the newly inaugurated Real Coliseo del Buen Retiro, for whose first performance he wrote El nuevo Palacio del Retiro in 1634. Likewise, with Lope's star already eclipsed in the theaters, he won the esteem of the general public in the 1630s with his pieces for the Madrid corrales de comedias of the Cruz and the Príncipe. In 1635 he was appointed director of the Coliseo del Buen Retiro and wrote El mayor encanto, Amor, La vida es sueño and El médico de su honra, among many other very refined dramatic spectacles, for which he had the collaboration of skilled Italian stage designers such as Cosme Lotti or Baccio del Bianco, and of expert musicians for the first zarzuelas ever written, such as Juan Hidalgo. In these palace commissions he took care of every aspect and detail of the performance and also attended the rehearsals. In 1635 El mayor encanto amor, on the theme of Ulysses and Circe, premiered on a floating stage on the pond of the Retiro, with effects by Lotti, whose Memoria for this piece has been preserved. And on June 24, 1636, for example, another even more spectacular and complicated comedy was performed in the great courtyard of the Royal Palace on three aligned stages that developed three actions on three separate continents, Asia, Europe and Africa: Los tres mayores prodigios, also assisted by Cosme Lotti. What is more, Calderón was the one who signed the founding act of Spanish musical theater on January 17, 1657, when he staged the first "zarzuela", El golfo de las sirenas, which was then called a piscatory eclogue, at a place called La Zarzuela to which the theater companies used to travel to entertain the King and Queen. It was a one-act piece with song and music, and after the place this genre of works would henceforth be called zarzuelas. Of these he also wrote El laurel de Apolo and La púrpura de la rosa, the latter, also in one act, already a true opera, though still very brief. Its author called it a "musical representation".

In 1636 he requested and obtained from the King the habit of knight of the Order of Santiago, for the enjoyment of which it was necessary to request a dispensation from Pope Urban VIII, since his father had held the manual office of notary; and, once the ban on publishing plays in Castile was lifted, his friend and disciple Vera Tassis published the Primera parte of his comedies and the following year the second, up to the nine that he managed to print, although three others printed by less careful editors survive. In 1677 there also appeared the first part of his Autos sacramentales, the only one he printed.

This Primera parte includes La vida es sueño and eleven other pieces, with their corresponding loas, which could be dated before 1630, in the opinion of Don Cruickshank. In 1637 he wrote El galán fantasma and entered the service of the Duke of the Infantado, and although it is often said that he distinguished himself as a soldier in the service of the Admiral of Castile Juan Alonso Enríquez de Cabrera during the fight against the siege of Fuenterrabía (1638), which had been laid by the Duke of Enghien, future Prince of Condé, this has not been documented according to Ángel Valbuena Briones; what is certain is that his brother José took part, and was wounded in the right leg; it is true that Pedro Calderón then composed a Panegírico dedicated to the aforementioned leader of the Spanish troops. On the other hand, he did take part in the war of secession of Catalonia (1640) in the company of cuirassier cavalry under the command of Álvaro de Quiñones. He was present at the taking of Cambrils and was wounded in one hand in a skirmish near Vilaseca, although war was no more dangerous than life in the theatrical world of the Court: shortly before, in that same year of 1640, while one of his comedies for the carnival was being rehearsed at the Palace of Buen Retiro, a dispute arose, there were knife wounds, and Calderón was wounded too, something noted by José Pellicer de Ossau in one of his Avisos, specifically that of February 20. He entered Tarragona victorious and behaved with courage in the assault on Martorell; after trying to besiege Barcelona, they had to fall back again on Tarragona, where Calderón endured with fortitude the siege by the French and Catalans, suffering hunger and seeing several companions die of it. At last, on August 20, 1641, the siege was repelled and Pedro Calderón returned to the Court to report to the Count-Duke of Olivares as a courier of His Majesty. He then took part in the failed attempt to take Lérida (autumn of 1642) as a corporal in the company of royal guards, in the vanguard of the cavalry led by Rodrigo de Herrera. He always kept a fond memory of his military vocation, as he expressed in some famous verses:

This army that you see, / wandering in ice and in heat, / is the best republic / and the most civil / in the world, in which no one should expect / that he can be preferred / for the nobility he inherits, / but for that which he acquires; / for here blood is surpassed / by the place a man makes for himself, / and, without looking at how he was born, / one looks at how he proceeds. / Here necessity / is no disgrace; and if a soldier is honorable, / though poor and ragged, / he has a better quality / than the most gallant and splendid; / for here, as I suspect, / the clothes do not adorn the breast, / but the breast adorns the clothes. / And thus, full of modesty, / you will see the oldest / trying to be the most / and to seem the least. / Here the most principal / feat is to obey; / and the way it must be done / is neither to ask nor to refuse. / Here, in short, courtesy, / good manners, truth, / steadfastness, loyalty, / honor, gallantry, / credit, reputation, / constancy, patience, / humility and obedience, / are fame, honor and life: / the wealth of poor soldiers; / for, in good or bad fortune, / soldiering is nothing but / a religion of honorable men.

— P. Calderón, Comedia famosa. Para vencer a amor, querer vencerle, Valencia, 1689, but written in 1650

At that time the Retiro palace was enlarged and a great pond was built, on whose central island he would premiere Certamen de amor y celos in 1640. But, wounded during the aforementioned siege of Lérida, he obtained his absolute discharge or retirement in 1642 and in 1645 a life pension of thirty escudos a month as a reward not only for his services but for those of his late brother José in Catalonia, although it was paid poorly and only after repeated claims by the poet. He premiered his most ambitious works, those that require music (zarzuelas) and more scenography. Calderón was by then a discreet but active courtier and came to be a highly respected and influential figure, a model for an entire generation of new playwrights and even for talents as great as Agustín Moreto and Francisco Rojas Zorrilla, his most important disciples. What is more, from 1642 onward an important series of French and English authors began to imitate his dramas and comedies unabashedly, standing out especially for their persistence Antoine Le Métel d'Ouville, Thomas Corneille and François Le Métel de Boisrobert, while others imitated only individual pieces. Among the English, William Wycherley stands out; Calderón may have met him in person in Madrid in 1664, when the Tercera parte de sus comedias was being published and Wycherley had come as a member of an embassy. That volume includes El maestro de danzar, from which he took the plot of his The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672), and he had also adapted Mañanas de abril y mayo in his Love in a Wood (1671). John Dryden and Aphra Behn were also inspired by works of his premiered during Calderón's lifetime.

In the mid-1640s, he became for a few years (from 1646 to 1649) secretary to the 6th Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Mendoza, for which he moved to the Duke's castle-palace at Alba de Tormes. Successive closures of the corrales de comedias were decreed because of the deaths of Queen Isabel de Borbón (between 1644 and 1645) and of Prince Baltasar Carlos (between 1646 and 1649), and also because of pressure from moralist clergy opposed to the theater, so that from 1644 there were no stage performances. After the deaths of his brothers José (1645) and Diego (1647), to whom he was so close, the playwright sank into a crisis that coincided with that of Spain, between the fall of the Count-Duke of Olivares (1643) and the signing in 1648 of the Peace of Westphalia. What is more, around 1646 his natural son, Pedro José, was born, and Calderón had to rethink his life.

The inner and outer crises ended with the reopening of the theaters in 1649, the year in which he premiered El gran teatro del mundo; moreover, he joined the tertiaries (Third Order of Saint Francis) on October 11, 1650, and was ordained a priest on September 18, 1651. Precisely that year El alcalde de Zalamea was published with the title El garrote más bien dado, and in 1652 La fiera, el rayo y la piedra was performed in the Coliseo del Buen Retiro, in which the strange madness of Pygmalion is satisfied by sculpting in his garden a fantastic world of a thousand statues of gold and bronze / to attend the cult of the one representing Anajarte, which she detests as a fetish. Shortly afterward (1653) he obtained the chaplaincy his father had so longed for for the family, that of the Reyes Nuevos of Toledo, and, although he continued writing comedies (for example, that same year he premiered La hija del aire at the palace) and entremeses, from then on he gave priority to the composition of autos sacramentales, a theatrical genre he perfected and brought to its fullness, since it suited very well his natural talent, a lover of painting and of theological subtleties and complexities. As soon as he arrived in Toledo he joined the Brotherhood of the Refugio, an institution that took in the poor and the sick, and where years later his disciple Agustín Moreto would follow him. In addition, Cardinal Baltasar Moscoso y Sandoval commissioned him to compose some songs glossing the inscription Psale et sile, or Sing and be silent, which can be read above the doors of the choir of Toledo Cathedral.

Gregorio Fosman, Portrait of Pedro Calderón de la Barca at the age of 81. Madrid, 1682. Copperplate engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de España

He continued composing spectacles for the King and Queen at the Palace of Buen Retiro and for the theological feast of Corpus, but now he leaned toward mythological themes, his imagination thus fleeing from a reality as harsh as that shown by the death of his natural son Pedro José in 1657 and the signing of the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. By then he was already the most celebrated playwright of the court. In 1660 he wrote Celos aun del aire matan, Céfalo y Pocris and La púrpura de la rosa, and in 1661 he composed the mythological dramas Eco y Narciso and El hijo del Sol, Faetón. Still in 1663 the King continued to distinguish him by appointing him his chaplain of honor, which obliged him to move his residence permanently to Madrid; in 1664 the Tercera parte of his comedies was published, which included another masterpiece, En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira. The death of the Monarch in 1665 marked a certain decline in the pace of his dramatic production. He was appointed chief chaplain of the new King Charles II in 1666. In 1672 the Cuarta parte of his comedies was published, and in 1677 the Quinta.

Throughout his theatrical career he was sometimes harassed by moralists who frowned on theatrical spectacles, and especially on their being produced by a priest like him. He answered them haughtily in this way:

«I, sir, always judged, letting myself be guided by human and divine letters, that the making of verses was an adornment of the soul or an agility of the understanding that neither raised nor lowered its subjects, leaving each one in the standing in which it found him... And, although it is true that, as an idle courtier, I treated it with the fondness one has for an ability found by chance, I did not fail to disdain it on the day I took the undeserved state in which I see myself today, for, in order to return to it, it was necessary for Lord Don Luis de Haro to order me to do so on behalf of His Majesty... without having taken up the pen for anything other than a festivity of His Majesty, or a festivity of the Most Holy Sacrament... a favor [which] has removed from me the objection of I know not whom, who judges the priesthood and poetry incompatible... [If] it is just... let it not be held against me; and if it is bad, let it not be commanded». (1651)

Despite so many honors, at the end of his life he suffered some financial hardship, to the point that in 1679 he was granted by royal decree a chamber ration in kind so that he could supply himself from the palace pantry "in consideration of his services of so many years to this day and of his finding himself at such an advanced age and with very scant means"; but on the occasion of the first marriage of Charles II, and for Carnival Sunday of March 3, 1680, he would compose his last comedy, Hado y divisa de Leonido y de Marfisa, inspired by the books of chivalry. It premiered at the Buen Retiro theater, with music by Juan Hidalgo, and the stage machinery was directed by the celebrated painter Dionisio Mantuano, with the scenery built by José Caudí, a Valencian artist. That same year he sent a list of his works to the Duke of Veragua, who had requested it, and the following year he wrote his last auto sacramental, El cordero de Isaías. After dictating his will on May 20, he died at half past twelve in the morning on Sunday, May 25, 1681, leaving half-finished the auto sacramental commissioned for that year, La divina Filotea. His burial was austere and unostentatious, as he wished in his will: «Uncovered, in case it might deserve to atone in part for the public vanities of my ill-spent life». His body was buried in the chapel of San José of the church of San Salvador, where it remained for one hundred and fifty-nine years. Thus the man who was considered one of the best dramatic writers of his age left the theaters orphaned.

He bequeathed his property to the Congregation of priests natives of Madrid, to which he belonged, and his manuscripts to his faithful friend the parish priest of San Miguel, Juan Mateo y Lozano. In 1682, the vicar of Madrid commissioned a friend of Calderón, the Trinitarian Friar Manuel de Guerra y Ribera, to write an "Aprobación" (approval) for the Verdadera quinta parte de comedias de don Pedro Calderón, and his enthusiasm made him go so far that, instead of the usual few lines, he wrote a genuine 47-folio apologia for the theater of his time and especially for that of his friend, which provoked some responses from the enemies of the theater. The House of Calderón de la Barca in which he lived and died in Madrid had two stories and was already in ruins in 1859; the writer Ramón Mesonero Romanos prevented its demolition, but two more stories and a commemorative plaque were added to it. It had a small balcony and stood on the old calle de las Platerías, today number 61 calle Mayor. The people of Madrid dedicated to his memory a beautiful marble sculpture by Juan Figueras y Vila, which was placed in the Plaza de Santa Ana in 1880, in front of the traditional Teatro Español.

Work

Performance of Calderón de la Barca's auto La Divina Filotea before the Town Hall of Madrid in 1681, work by Joaquín Muñoz Morillejo (1918).

The theatrical work of Calderón de la Barca represents the Baroque culmination of the theatrical model created at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century by Lope de Vega.

According to the count he himself made in the year of his death, his dramatic output consists of one hundred and ten comedies and eighty autos sacramentales, loas, entremeses and other minor works, such as the poem Psale et sile (Sing and be silent) and more occasional pieces. Although less prolific than his model, the brilliant Lope de Vega, he is technically better than him in the theater and in fact brings the Lopean dramatic formula to perfection, reducing its number of scenes and purging it of lyrical and scarcely functional elements, turning it into a full Baroque spectacle to which he also adds a special sensitivity for scenography and music, elements that were of lesser importance for Lope de Vega.

Autograph of El mágico prodigioso, 1637

He frequently uses earlier pieces, which he reworks by eliminating useless scenes; he reduces the number of characters and the polymetric richness of Lopean theater. Likewise, he systematizes the creative exuberance of his model and builds the work around a single protagonist. In a certain way, he purges Lope's theater of its most lyrical elements and always seeks the most theatrical ones. Ángel Valbuena Briones has pointed out that two registers can be distinguished in his style:

• In a first group of works Calderón reorders, condenses and reworks what appears in Lope in a diffuse and chaotic way, stylizing his realism of manners and making it more courtly. In them there appears a rich gallery of characters representative of their time and their social condition, all of whom have in common the three themes of Spanish Baroque theater: love, religion and honor.

In the treatment of this last theme Calderón stands out in works such as El alcalde de Zalamea, in which the individual honor (or, what is the same, human dignity, not a social or external custom) of a rich farmer, Pedro Crespo, whose daughter has been raped by an aristocratic Captain of the tercios of the famous general Don Lope de Figueroa, confronts the corporate honor or esprit de corps of the latter. In this drama, one of Calderón's masterpieces, the human truth of the characters shines, as do the wisdom and experience of the hero, Pedro Crespo, who thus advises his son Juan before he leaves for the army, in some justly celebrated verses:

By the grace of God, Juan, / you are of pure lineage, / purer than the sun, but a commoner. / I tell you both things; / the first, so that you do not humble / your pride and spirit so much / that you give up, distrustful, / aspiring with sensible judgment / to be more; the other, so that / you do not become vain / and so come to be less. Use / both purposes equally / with humility; for, being / humble, with right judgment / you will choose what is best / and, as such, you will forget / things that turn out / the other way for the haughty. / How many who have in the world / some defect of their own / have erased it by being humble; / and how many who have had / no defect have been found to have one / because they were ill regarded! / Be courteous above all; / be generous and open-handed, / for the hat and money / are what make friends; / and the gold that the sun breeds / in the Indian soil, and that the sea carries, / is not worth as much / as being well liked. / Do not speak ill of women; / the humblest, I tell you, / is worthy of esteem; / for after all we were born of them. / Do not quarrel over just anything; / for when in the towns I see / many who are taught to fight, / a thousand times I say to myself: / «This school is not / what it ought to be». For I conclude / that a man should not be taught / with skill, flourish and spirit / to fight, but rather why / he should fight; for I affirm / that if there were but one master / who taught, with foresight, / not how, but why one fights, / everyone would give him their sons.

On other occasions he deals with the amorous passions that blind the soul, especially the pathological jealousy he addresses in El mayor monstruo, los celos or in El médico de su honra, among other dramas.

• In his second register, the playwright invents, beyond the chivalric repertoire, a poetic-symbolic form unknown before him, which shapes an essentially lyrical theater whose characters rise toward the symbolic and the spiritual. He then writes chiefly philosophical or theological dramas, autos sacramentales and mythological or palatine comedies.

El alcalde de Zalamea. Detail of the monument to Calderón in Madrid (Joan Figueras Vila, 1878)

Calderón stands out above all as the creator of those Baroque characters, inwardly unbalanced by a tragic passion, who appear in El príncipe constante, El mágico prodigioso or La devoción de la cruz. His best-known character is the tormented Segismundo of Poland of La vida es sueño, considered the summit of Calderonian theater. This work, the paradigm of the genre of philosophical comedies, gathers and dramatizes the most transcendental questions of its age: freedom or the power of the will against destiny, skepticism in the face of sensory appearances, the precariousness of existence, regarded as a mere dream, and, finally, the consoling idea that, even in dreams, one can still do good. There are several versions of this work made by Calderón himself. The theme of education, so developed later in the 18th century, is also suggested in it, though very much in the background.

In this second register, he brings to perfection the so-called auto sacramental, a one-act allegorical piece on a Eucharistic theme intended to be performed on the day of Corpus. To mention only a few, we may cite El gran teatro del mundo or La cena del rey Baltasar.

As for philosophical dramas, his masterpiece is undoubtedly La vida es sueño; El médico de su honra and El alcalde de Zalamea as regards the honor drama, although there are also comparable pieces such as El pintor de su deshonra (c. 1648) or A secreto agravio secreta venganza (1635).

El escondido y la tapada. Detail of the monument to Calderón in Madrid (Joan Figueras Vila, 1878)

El secreto a voces and La dama duende are high points of the comedy of intrigue, along with many other less-known cloak-and-sword comedies such as El escondido y la tapada, No hay burlas con el amor (1637), Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar (1629) or Mañanas de abril y mayo, which anticipates the genre of the comedia de figurón, although a piece of his such as Guárdate del agua mansa already has one, the outlandish Don Toribio de Cuadradillos.

Comedies such as No hay cosa como callar (c. 1639), No siempre lo peor es cierto (between 1648 and 1650) or La niña de Gómez Arias (c. 1651) have a melodramatic character; they possess greater introspection and come close to the tragic universe.

Palatine comedies include El galán fantasma (1629), Nadie fíe su secreto, Manos blancas no ofenden (c. 1640), or El secreto a voces (of which an autograph manuscript from 1642 survives).

He approached the historical drama with pieces such as La gran Zenobia (1625), La cisma de Ingalaterra (1634), Amar después de la muerte, o El tuzaní de la Alpujarra (1659) or El mayor monstruo del mundo (1672).

Philosophical and symbolic dramas include La hija del aire in its two parts, which depicts the boundless ambition of Queen Semiramis, murderer of her husband Ninus, and Las cadenas del demonio (of doubtful attribution).

Religious and hagiographic dramas include La devoción de la Cruz (c. 1625), El Purgatorio de San Patricio (1640), El príncipe constante (c. 1629), whose staging was to have such an influence on the theatrical conception of Jerzy Grotowski, and El mágico prodigioso (1637), a work that powerfully influenced Goethe's Faust, to which it lent some entire passages.

Calderón began to take an interest in mythological comedies when he replaced Lope de Vega in 1635 as chamber playwright. He quickly adapted to the conditions of the great court spectacle with pieces such as El mayor encanto, Amor, from that year, and others such as El golfo de las sirenas, El monstruo de los jardines, Fieras afemina Amor, La fiera, el rayo y la piedra (1652) or La púrpura de la rosa (1660), among many others. To this genre belongs the opera, with music by Juan Hidalgo, Celos aun del aire matan, which Calderón himself parodied in his burlesque comedy Céfalo y Procris.

Illustration for Andrómeda y Perseo by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; a fable performed in the Coliseo of the Royal Palace of Buen Retiro. At bottom left can be read: Baccio dei Bianco 1653. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

But the genre that the master monopolized was that of the autos sacramentales, from those with a medieval air such as El gran teatro del mundo (considered by critics his masterpiece in the genre) or El gran mercado del mundo to those with a mythological pretext, such as Andrómeda y Perseo or Psiquis y Cupido. Others: La cena del rey Baltasar, La vida es sueño, El divino Orfeo (of which he made two versions separated by almost thirty years), La nave del mercader (1674), etc. Calderón is the undisputed master of this genre, in which the characters have already become pure conceptual or passional abstractions.

Calderón also composed a good deal of minor theater, for example entremeses such as El triunfo de Juan Rana.

Another classification is the following:

• Tragedies: El médico de su honra, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza; El pintor de su deshonra; La hija del aire.
• Serious comedies: La vida es sueño; El alcalde de Zalamea; El mágico prodigioso.
• Court comedies: El hijo del sol, Faetón. La fiera, el rayo y la piedra; El monstruo de los jardines; Eco y Narciso.
• Cloak-and-sword comedies: La dama duende; Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar; No hay burlas con el amor.
• Mythological comedies: El mayor encanto, amor.
• Autos sacramentales: El gran teatro del mundo; El gran mercado del mundo; La cena del rey Baltasar; La protestación de la fe; El verdadero dios Pan.

Calderón's comic theater

For a time Calderón's comic theater was underestimated, but it has recently been reappraised, for he certainly composed masterpieces in the genre that can be classified as comedies of intrigue, such as La dama duende, Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar or El galán fantasma, and he did not neglect minor theater.

Calderón's characters

Although Calderón sometimes manages to create human and unforgettable characters, such as Pedro Crespo, most of the time what Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo said holds true:

Calderón's characters scarcely manage natural and simple expression; instead they replace it with hyperboles, witticisms, subtleties and a shower of metaphors... They have a relative and historical truth; they lack the human, absolute and beautiful truth that bursts forth in the lion's roars of Shakespeare's characters.

Likewise, Calderón's characters have been compared with some of their contemporaries. Harold Bloom, analyzing the components of Goethe's work, takes the example of Faust and superimposes its protagonists on Calderón's:

In Calderón's great works, as in Faust, the protagonists move and have their existence in an indeterminate realm between character and idea; they are sustained metaphors of a complex of thematic concerns. This works marvelously in the cases of Calderón and Lope de Vega, but Goethe wanted to alternate the two modes of personalities and themes, and he took the liberty of abandoning the Calderonian model and returning to the Shakespearean cosmos whenever he felt like it.

— Harold Bloom (1994)

On the other hand, Calderón's female characters are excessively mannish and lack the femininity and natural liveliness of Lope's women, although, when it comes to women invested with authority, this defect turns into a virtue, and thus we find genuine embodiments of ambition, such as Queen Semiramis in the two parts of La hija del aire.

On the male side, Calderón has a repertoire of unforgettable characters such as Segismundo, Don Lope de Figueroa, Pedro Crespo, the Constant Prince, or that prototype of one of the characters Calderón most frequently portrayed, the husband maddened by jealousy represented by Don Gutierre of El médico de su honra; these pathologically jealous men who abound in Calderón's dramas reason with iron logic, but the conclusions of their syllogisms rest on suspicions and unleashed passions, so that the result of their long ruminations ends in dramatic absurdity; that is why Calderón finds tragic substance in them.

Calderonian dramaturgy

Calderón reduces the number of scenes that Lope de Vega and his followers habitually used, because he takes greater care with dramatic structure; he likewise restricts the abundant polymetry of the earlier theater to the octosyllable, the hendecasyllable and occasionally the heptasyllable; he also narrows the stanzaic repertoire in order to achieve greater unity of style. Instead of seeking new themes, which he also does, he prefers to use themes already developed by earlier playwrights of Lope's time or school, which he rewrites by removing useless, weak, superfluous or scarcely functional scenes, or by adding those he thinks necessary; that is, by reworking them. Otherwise, he follows the same mechanisms and conventions of the Lopean comedia, with the added contributions of Antonio Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, but sometimes mocking those mechanisms by resorting to metatheatricality. His style uses the formal adornments of culteranismo, but also popularizes it with a series of metaphors built around the four elements that his whole audience could understand, which makes it more accessible. He likewise employs symbols in his comedies, often taken from the Neoplatonic philosophy that influenced him so much: the fall from a horse, which represents dishonor or the alteration of the natural order; coincidences that are not coincidental; the deep meaning of light and darkness; the natural balance among the four elements; and some dramatic techniques such as the prophecy or horoscope at the beginning of the work, which creates misleading expectations for the audience, for example in La cisma de Inglaterra or in La vida es sueño itself. Calderón sometimes realizes how artificial and mechanical the Baroque dramatic formula is, and for this reason he sometimes allows himself metatheatrical games or jokes, letting his actors make humorous comments about the commonplaces that cross their path and that they are obliged to follow.

Monument to Calderón in the Plaza de Santa Ana (Madrid), work by Joan Figueras Vila, 1878.

With Calderón de la Barca, scenography (what he called «memoria de las apariencias», "memorandum of the appearances") and music (Calderón is considered the first author of zarzuela librettos) acquired full importance in the Baroque comedia, in pursuit of an integral Baroque spectacle that would unite the various plastic arts. To this end he collaborated closely with Italian stage designers such as Cosme Lotti. Ephemeral theatrical carpentry became a key element in the composition of his works, especially of the autos sacramentales, which in this way were transformed into complex allegorical emblems pregnant with moral symbolism:

The itinerary of the Spanish dramatic school thus described a circular line that begins with the idea of performance as a mirror of customs and moves on to conceiving the genre as an art that creates a poetic-ideological reality. In other words, from the open art of Lope de Vega it passed to the intellectual, perfect, dehumanized manner of Calderón, which attained universal value through the emblem and the symbol.

Language and style

As for his language, it is handled with solemnity, emphasizing beauty through the use of antithesis, metaphors and hyperboles; Calderón makes his mastery of rhetoric shine and, although he could be considered the theatrical culmination of culteranismo, he ensures that his metaphors can easily be unraveled by his audience by repeating a mechanical system of cross-references around the four elements and by resorting to a Rhetoric of easy parallelisms, oppositions, symmetries, and disseminations and recollections, or by repeating concepts so that they sink in and are understood:

In one day the sun shines / and fails; in one day / a whole kingdom is overturned; in one day / a rock becomes a building; / in one day a battle / displays defeat and victory; / in one day the sea has / calm and storm; / in one day a man is born / and dies; so it could be / that in one day my love might see / shadow and light, like a planet; / sorrow and joy, like an empire; / people and beasts, like a forest; / peace and unrest, like the sea; / triumph and ruin, like war; / life and death, like the master / of senses and faculties. / And since its violence / had time in one day / to make me so unhappy, / why, why could it not / have time in one day / to make me happy? Must it be / that glories are begotten / more slowly than offenses? (P. Calderón, El alcalde de Zalamea, 969–994)

He uses cultismos unabashedly, some even condemned by Lope de Vega in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609), such as hipogrifo. In his characters a characteristic reasoning frenzy is evident: Calderonian characters think in an iron-clad and impeccably logical way, even though their premises are in fact absurd; in this way, the characteristic Calderonian husbands go mad with jealousy and justify their crimes in an impeccable but ethically absurd manner, their language abounding in links of logical subordination, causal, consecutive, conditional, concessive or final. Metaphor-making also undergoes this process of mechanical logicism and develops exclusively the aforementioned system of symbols founded on the combinatorics of the four elements. Metatheatrical games abound, for the author himself was well aware of the conventionality the Lopean formula had reached:

A barren poet is this one, / since in a field he lacks / ivy, jasmine or myrtle / to hide some ladies [...] But don't you see that we are behind / San Jerónimo, and it is enough / for him to feign garden walls? And even those, / please heaven that there are any (P. Calderón, Hombre pobre todo es trazas)

ARCEO: And if the gallant and the lady / are now undeceived, / here the comedy ends. / DON PEDRO: Have you heard the undeceiving now, / Don Juan? / DOÑA ANA: I am not so fortunate. / DON PEDRO: How so? DOÑA ANA: Because when / I came in, I saw only a man / who, bold and reckless, / threw himself out of the window / that there is, sir, onto those roofs. / ARCEO: Then the comedy does not end... (P. Calderón, Mañanas de abril y mayo)

Also frequent are fragmented dialogues «al alimón», in which two or more characters successively and symmetrically continue and finish the sentences that the others leave half-finished. Moreover, Calderón's intratextuality is very strong, since the author sometimes reuses or rewrites texts from some comedies or autos in others, parodying himself with comic intent or consciously imitating himself.

Above all in his minor theater, his use of comedy becomes almost Ubuesque in the mouth of the gracioso, subverting, among other conventions, the sacred sense of honor through the mechanism of oblique parody. Thus, in El toreador, when a nobleman says to Juan Rana: And your honor, your good name? Is that what I hear from you?, the latter answers: You are right: honor squeezes me a lot, which he repeats on another occasion: Reputation has put me / in such a tight spot / that honor is the least of it. As for nobility of blood, it is well said in La casa de los linajes: "Is there anyone with more blood / than a tripe-seller?". Even sexist patriarchalism is subverted, and when Juan Rana's wife insists that he avenge her sullied honor, he says: You challenge him, for it is your business (P. Calderón de la Barca, El desafío de Juan Rana).

But the device to which Calderón resorted with the greatest confidence, because it satisfied his desire to play with abstractions and concepts (something he could also exercise in mythological comedy), was allegory. In fact, he definitively shaped on this device the genre of the auto sacramental, a one-act allegorical piece on a Eucharistic theme that was performed on the Christian feast of Corpus Christi, with great scenic apparatus. Calderón defined it thus:

Allegory is nothing more / than a mirror that renders / what is with what is not, / and all its elegance lies / in the copy on the panel / coming out so alike / that whoever is looking at one / thinks he is seeing both (P. Calderón, El verdadero dios Pan)

But Calderón was well aware of the conventional artificiality of the genre and summarized it in jest, again by resorting to metatheatricality:

...It was the established style / that Man begin by sinning, / that God end by redeeming / and, when the bread and wine arrive, / rise up with him to Heaven / to the sound of the shawms... (P. Calderón de la Barca, Lo que va del hombre a Dios)

Themes and ideology

La vida es sueño. Detail of the monument to Calderón in Madrid (Joan Figueras Vila, 1878).

Calderón's education in schools of the Society of Jesus led him to assimilate the thought of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas through the interpretation of Domingo Báñez, Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, and thus Menéndez Pelayo believed him to be an Aristotelian. More recent criticism (Michele Federico Sciacca, Jack Sage, Ángel Valbuena Briones) has likewise appreciated the enormous importance that Neoplatonic philosophy had for Calderón. Alongside this, a profound pessimism can be perceived in his theater despite the autonomy and validity of human action. His works usually center on the opposition or confrontation between:

• Reason and the passions
• The intellectual and the instinctive
• Understanding and the will.

<phonos file="Segismundo.ogg">Segismundo's monologue</phonos> (Act II, scene 19. Segismundo's monologue.)

Life is a pilgrimage, a dream, and the world is a theater of appearances. His pessimism is tempered by his faith in God and by the strong rationalism he assimilated from Thomas Aquinas. The sense of anguish of many of his characters brings him close to contemporary Christian existentialism and to the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer:

What is life? A frenzy. / What is life? An illusion, / a shadow, a fiction, / and the greatest good is small. / For all life is a dream, / and dreams are dreams!

Likewise Fernando, the Constant Prince, exclaims thus shortly before dying, consumed by his own will:

But what illness is not mortal / if man is mortal, / and in this confused abyss / the illness of himself / comes to kill him afterward? / Man, take care that you are not / careless. Follow / the truth, for there is eternity, / and do not wait for another illness / to warn you, since you are / your own greatest illness. / Man is continually / treading the hard earth, / and every step he takes / is upon his grave. / Sad law, harsh sentence / it is to know in any case / that every step (great failure!) / is for walking forward, / and God Himself is not able / to make that step not to have been taken.

— El príncipe constante, act III

Calderón holds a providentialist conception of history, ancient or contemporary, which is a trace of the divine will and therefore has a meaning, although God does not allow us to find it in earthly life; and he contemplates that same will in the natural world, ordered according to the four elements, where God's plan and promise can be read, though their ultimate meaning cannot be divined.

Calderón's thematic repertoire is broad and treated with very diverse variations: honor; man's relationship with power and, in connection with this, freedom and moral responsibility, or the conflict between reality and illusion, frequent in the Baroque aesthetic of disillusionment. He treats in a particular way pathological jealousy and Oedipal conflicts.

Cultural icon

Mateo Fuster, float of Spain, design by Giorgio Busato and Bernardo Bonardi, watercolor. Album of drawings of the Centenario de Calderón de la Barca: Carrozas, comparsas y estandartes del Cortejo histórico que figuró en Madrid en las fiestas de 1881. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España

Appreciation of his figure, begun with Menéndez Pelayo, was consolidated in the 20th century to the point that he came to be considered a cultural icon.

Two centuries after his death, some social groups came to regard him as a defender of the Catholic faith and of the Spanish pre-liberal way of life. In 1881, during an event in El Retiro connected with the commemoration of Calderón's bicentenary, Menéndez Pelayo toasted with foreign academics to the celebration of Calderón's Spain and to the superiority of the Latin race over «Germanic barbarism».

Félix Sardá y Salvany questioned the claim made by progressives and liberals on the double centenary. For the former, his figure constituted the most brilliant embodiment of the Spanish religious position.

Beyond this, readers, scholars, performers and theater companies all over the world recognize in Calderón de la Barca one of the most brilliant writers and dramatists of the Baroque period. Together with his texts, the demands posed by Calderonian theater contributed decisively to perfecting and increasing the technological means available to the Golden Age theaters in which his works were performed.

Calderón's dramatic school

Main article: School of Calderón

The refined Calderonian dramatic formula and his particular style were imitated by important writers who, like the Madrid-born playwright, reworked works already composed by Lope and his disciples while at the same time composing original pieces. The most important of these authors were Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla and Agustín Moreto, but his disciples must also include Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneyra, Juan Bautista Diamante, Agustín de Salazar, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cristóbal de Monroy, Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón and Francisco Bances Candamo. Other authors who followed Calderón and achieved some success were also Juan de Zabaleta, Juan de la Hoz y Mota, Jerónimo de Cáncer, Juan de Matos Fragoso, Alejandro Arboreda and Antonio Coello, who frequently wrote in collaboration; also Juan Vélez de Guevara, son of the most celebrated playwright Luis Vélez de Guevara; Antonio Martínez de Meneses and Francisco de Leiva.

Main works

Datable dramatic pieces

• La selva confusa, comedy of intrigue (1622).
• Amor, honor y poder, historical comedy (1623).
• La cisma de Inglaterra, historical drama (1627).
• Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar, comedy of intrigue (1629).
• La dama duende, comedy of intrigue (1629).
• El príncipe constante, historical drama (1629).
• La banda y la flor, comedy (1632).
• La cena del rey Baltasar, auto sacramental (1632).
• El mágico prodigioso, religious drama (1637).
• El mayor monstruo del mundo, honor drama (1637).
• El médico de su honra, honor drama (1637).
• Los dos amantes del cielo, religious drama (1640).
• El secreto a voces, palatine comedy (1642)
• El pintor de su deshonra, honor drama (1650).
• El alcalde de Zalamea, honor drama (1651).
• La hija del aire, historical drama (1653).
• El gran teatro del mundo, auto sacramental (1655).
• Guárdate del agua mansa, comedy of intrigue (1657).
• Eco y Narciso, mythological drama (1661).
• Hado y divisa de Leonido y de Marfisa (1680).

Dramas

• Alcalde de Zalamea, El.
• Amado y aborrecido.
• Amar después de la muerte o El Tuzaní de la Alpujarra.
• Apolo y Climene.
• A secreto agravio secreta venganza.
• Armas de la hermosura, Las.
• Aurora en Copacabana, La.
• Cabellos de Absalón, Los.
• Cadenas del demonio, Las.
• Celos, aun del aire, matan.
• Cisma de Ingalaterra, La.
• Darlo todo y no dar nada.
• De un castigo tres venganzas.
• Devoción de la Cruz, La.
• Dos amantes del cielo, Los.
• Duelos de amor y lealtad.
• Eco y Narciso.
• En esta vida todo es verdad y todo es mentira (1664).
• Estatua de Prometeo, La.
• Exaltación de la Cruz, La.
• Fiera, el rayo y la piedra, La.
• Fieras afemina amor.
• Fineza contra fineza.
• Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo.
• Golfo de las sirenas, El.
• Gran Cenobia, La.
• Gran príncipe de Fez, El.
• Hija del aire, La (two parts).
• Hijo del Sol, Faetón, El.
• Hijos de la fortuna, Teágenes y Cariclea, Los.
• José de las mujeres, El.
• Judas macabeo.
• Laurel de Apolo, El.
• Luis Pérez el Gallego.
• Mágico prodigioso, El.
• Mayor encanto amor, El.
• Mayor monstruo del mundo, El.
• Médico de su honra, El or El celoso de su honra.
• Monstruo de los jardines, El.
• Ni amor se libra de amor.
• Niña de Gómez Arias, La.
• Origen, pérdida y restauración de la Virgen del Sagrario or Las tres edades de España.
• Postrer duelo de España, El.
• Pintor de su deshonra, El.
• Príncipe constante, El.
• Purgatorio de San Patricio, El.
• Púrpura de la rosa, La.
• Saber del mal y del bien.
• Segundo Escipión, El.
• Sibila de Oriente, La.
• Sitio de Breda, El.
• Tres afectos de amor, Los.
• Tres justicias en una, Las.
• Tres mayores prodigios, Los.

La Danza de la Muerte. Detail of the monument to Calderón in Madrid (Joan Figueras Vila, 1878).

Comedies

• Acaso y el error, El.
• Afectos de odio y amor.
• Agradecer y no amar.
• Alcalde de sí mismo, El.
• Amigo, amante y leal.
• Amor, honor y poder.
• Antes que todo es mi dama.
• Argenis y Poliarco.
• Astrólogo fingido, El.
• Auristela y Lisidante.
• Banda y la flor, La.
• Basta callar.
• Bien vengas, mal, si vienes solo.
• Cada uno para sí.
• Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar.
• Castillo de Lindabridis, El.
• Conde Lucanor, El.
• Con quien vengo, vengo.
• Cuál es mayor perfección.
• Dama duende, La.
• Dar tiempo al tiempo.
• Desdicha de la voz, La.
• De una causa, dos efectos.
• Dicha y desdicha del nombre.
• Empeños de un acaso, Los.
• Encanto sin encanto, El.
• Escondido y la tapada, El.
• Fuego de Dios es el querer bien.
• Galán fantasma, El.
• Guárdate del agua mansa.
• Gustos y disgustos son no más que imaginación.
• Hado y divisa de Leonido y de Marfisa.
• Hombre pobre todo es trazas.
• Jardín de Falerina, El.
• Lances de amor y fortuna.
• Maestro de danzar, El.
• Manos blancas no ofenden, Las.
• Mañana será otro día.
• Mañanas de abril y mayo.
• Mejor está que estaba.
• Mujer, llora y vencerás.
• Nadie fíe su secreto.
• No hay burlas con el amor.
• No hay cosa como callar.
• No siempre lo peor es cierto.
• Para vencer amor, querer vencerle.
• Peor está que estaba.
• Primero soy yo.
• Puente de Mantible, La.
• Secreto a voces, El.
• Selva confusa, La.
• Señora y la criada, La.
• También hay duelo en las damas.

Autos sacramentales

(In alphabetical order)

• A Dios por razón de estado (1650–1660).
• Alimentos del hombre, Los (1676).
• A María el corazón (1664).
• Amar y ser amado y divina Filotea (1681).
• Andrómeda y Perseo (1680).
• Año santo de Roma, El (1650).
• Año santo en Madrid, El (1615–1652).
• Árbol del mejor fruto, El (1661).
• Arca de Dios cautiva, El (1673).
• Cena del rey Baltasar, La (1634).
• Cordero de Isaías, El (1681).
• Cubo de la Almudena, El (1651).
• Cura y la enfermedad, La (1657–1658).
• Devoción de la misa, La (1637?).
• Diablo mudo, El (1660).
• Día mayor de los días, El (1678).
• Divino Jasón, El (before 1630).
• Divino Orfeo, El (two versions).
• Encantos de la culpa, Los (1645?).
• Espigas de Ruth, Las (1663).
• Gran Duque de Gandía, El (1639?).
• Gran mercado del mundo, El (1634–1635?).
• Gran teatro del mundo, El (1634–1635?).
• Hidalga del Valle, La (1634?).
• Humildad coronada de las plantas, La (1644).
• Iglesia sitiada, La (before 1630).
• Indulto general, El (1680).
• Inmunidad del Sagrado, La (1664).
• Jardín de Falerina, El (1675).
• Laberinto del mundo, El (1677).
• Lepra de Constantino, La.
• Lirio y la azucena, El (1660).
• Llamados y escogidos (1648–1649?).
• Lo que va del hombre a Dios (1640?).
• Maestrazgo del Toisón, El (1659).
• Misterios de la misa, Los (1640).
• Mística y real Babilonia (1662).
• Nave del mercader, La (1674).
• No hay instante sin milagro (1672).
• No hay más fortuna que Dios (1653?).
• Nuevo hospicio de pobres (1688).
• Nuevo Palacio del Retiro, El (1634).
• Orden de Melchisedech, El.
• Órdenes militares, Las (1662).
• Pastor Fido, El (1677?).
• Piel de Gedeón, La.
• Pintor de su deshonra, El.
• Pleito matrimonial del cuerpo y el alma, El (1634).
• Primer flor del Carmelo, La (before 1650).
• Primero y segundo Isaac (before 1659?).
• Primer refugio del hombre y probática piscina, El (1661).
• Protestación de la fe, La (1656).
• Psiquis y Cupido (1640).
• ¿Quién hallará mujer fuerte?.
• Redención de cautivos, La (c. 1672).
• Sacro Parnaso, El (1659).
• Santo rey don Fernando, El (first and second parts) [1671].
• Segunda esposa y triunfar muriendo, La (1648–1649?).
• Semilla y la cizaña, La (1651).
• Serpiente de metal, La (1676).
• Siembra del Señor, La (before 1655).
• Socorro general, El (1644).
• Sueños hay que verdad son (1670).
• Tesoro escondido, El (1679).
• Torre de Babilonia, La.
• Tu prójimo como a ti (second version) [before 1674].
• Universal redención, La. A tu prójimo como a ti.
• Vacante general, La (1649).
• Valle de la Zarzuela, El (c. 1655?).
• Veneno y la triaca, El (1634).
• Verdadero Dios Pan, El (1670).
• Viático cordero, El (1665).
• Vida es sueño, La (second version) [before 1674].
• Viña del Señor, La (1674).

Short theater (bailes, entremeses, jácaras and mojigangas)

• Baile de las jácaras (part 2).
• Baile de la plazuela de Santa Cruz.
• Baile de los zagales.
• Entremés de la barbuda (parts 1 and 2).
• Entremés de la casa de los linajes.
• Entremés de las carnestolendas.
• Entremés de la casa holgana.
• Entremés del convidado.
• Entremés de los degollados.
• Entremés de don Pegote.
• Entremés del dragoncillo.
• Entremés del escolar y el soldado.
• Entremés de la Franchota.
• Entremés de guardadme las espaldas.
• Entremés de los instrumentos.
• Entremés de las jácaras (part 1).
• Entremés del desafío de Juan Rana.
• Entremés de la melancólica.
• Entremés de la pedidora.
• Entremés del mayorazgo.
• Entremés de la plazuela de Santa Cruz.
• Entremés de la premática (parts 1 and 2).
• Entremés del reloj y genios de la venta.
• Entremés de la rabia (part 1).
• Entremés del robo de las Sabinas.
• Entremés del sacristán mujer.
• Entremés del toreador.
• Entremés del triunfo de Juan Rana.
• Jácara del Mellado.
• Mojiganga de la garapiña.
• Mojiganga de los guisados.
• Mojiganga de los ciegos.
• Mojiganga de la muerte.
• Mojiganga de la pandera.
• Mojiganga del Parnaso (part 2 of la Rabia).
• Mojiganga del pésame de la viuda.
• Mojiganga de Juan Rana en la zarzuela.
• Mojiganga de los sitios de recreación del Rey.

Works in collaboration

• La bárbara de los montes (the first act by Tomé de Miranda, the other two by Calderón).
• Margarita preciosa, La (with Juan de Zabaleta and Jerónimo de Cáncer y Velasco).
• Más hidalga hermosura, La (with Juan de Zabaleta and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla).
• Monstruo de la fortuna, El (with Juan Pérez de Montalbán and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla).
• Prodigio de Alemania, El (with Antonio Coello y Ochoa).
• Proezas de Frislán, y muerte del Rey de Suecia, Las (with Antonio Coello y Ochoa).
• Troya abrasada (with Juan de Zabaleta).
• Yerros de naturaleza y aciertos de la fortuna (with Antonio Coello y Ochoa).

Attributed works

• Castigo en la traición, El.
• Primer blasón del Austria, El.
• Que busca la mojiganga, El.
• Saco de Amberes, El.
• Agravios satisfechos y vísperas sicilianas, Los.
• Palabra en la mujer, La.
• Mujeres cuando quieren, Las.
• Honra, confusión y amor.
• Huyendo vence el honor.
• Casamentero, El
• Mejor testigo es Dios, El.
• El prodigio de Alemania.
• Paciencia de Job, La.
• Pedir con mal intento, El.
• Perdón castiga más, El.
• Marco Antonio y Cleopatra.

Historical editions of Calderón's works

Mateo Fuster, float of the society El Fomento de las Artes, watercolor. Album of drawings of the Centenario de Calderón de la Barca: Carrozas, comparsas y estandartes del Cortejo histórico que figuró en Madrid en las fiestas de 1881. Madrid, National Library of Spain.

• Primera parte de Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Madrid, by the widow of Juan Sánchez, at the expense of Gabriel de León, 1636
• Segunda parte de Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Madrid, by María de Quiñónez, 1637 (Parte segunda de comedias del celebre poeta don Pedro Calderon de la Barca [...], que nueuamente corregidas publica don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villaroel [sic], Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1683)
• Tercera parte de Comedias de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Madrid, by Domingo García Morràs, at the expense of Domingo Palacio y Villegas, 1664
• Cuarta parte de Comedias de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Madrid, by Bernardo de Hervada, at the expense of Antonio de la Fuente, 1674
• Verdadera Quinta parte de Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca que publica Don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1682
• Sexta parte de Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca que nuevamente corregidas por sus originales publica don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1683
• Séptima parte de Comedias de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca que nuevamente corregidas, publica Don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1683
• Octaua parte de comedias del celebre poeta español don Pedro Calderon de la Barca [...], que corregidas por sus originales publica don Iuan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1684
• Novena parte de Comedias de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca que nuevamente corregidas, publica Don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Madrid, by Francisco Sanz, 1691
• Facsimile edition of the nine parts in The comedias of Calderón. A facsimile edition, ed. by D. W. Cruickshank and John E. Varey, London, 1973, 19 vols.
• Las Comedias de ~, cotejadas con las mejores ediciones hasta ahora publicadas, corregidas y dadas a luz por Juan Jorge Keil, Leipzig, published at the house of Ernesto Fleischer, 1827–1830, 4 vols.
• Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca: colección más completa que todas las anteriores hecha e ilustrada por Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Madrid, M. Rivadeneyra, 1848–1850, 4 vols. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 7, 9, 12, 14
• Autos sacramentales, alegoricos, y historiales de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Obras posthumas, que saca a luz don Pedro de Pando y Mier, Parte Primera, Madrid, at the Press of Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1717, 6 vols. (edition Autos sacramentales alegóricos y historiales del phenix de los poetas / el español, Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, cavallero del Orden de Santiago, capellán de honor de S. M. y de los Señores Reyes nuevos de la Santa Iglesia de Toledo; obras pósthumas que saca a luz Don Juan Fernández de Apontes, Madrid, at the Office of the Widow of Don Manuel Fernández and Press of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, 1759–1760, 6 vols.
• Ignacio Arellano (dir.), Autos sacramentales completos de Calderón, Pamplona-Kassel, Universidad de Navarra-Edition Reichenberger, 1992–2009)
• Entremeses, jácaras y mojigangas, ed. by E. Rodríguez and A. Tordera, Madrid, Castalia, 1983 (reprinted 1990, 2001)
• Teatro cómico breve, ed. by M.ª L. Lobato, Kassel, Reichenberger, 1989
• Obras completas, ed., prologue and notes by Ángel Valbuena Briones, Madrid, Aguilar, 1952–1956, 3 vols. (vol. 1. Dramas, vol. 2. Comedias, vol. 3. Autos sacramentales, compiled, with prologue and notes by Ángel Valbuena Prat)
• Autos sacramentales, ed. by Enrique Rull Fernández, Madrid, Biblioteca Castro, 8 vols., 3 printed since 1994.
• Comedias, edition coordinated by Luis Iglesias Feijoo, Madrid, Biblioteca Castro, 6 vols. since 2007.

Creative works inspired by Calderonian plots

• Antoine Le Métel d'Ouville, L'Esprit follet (Paris, 1642), an imitation of La dama duende.
• Antoine Le Métel d'Ouville, Jodelet astrologue (Paris, 1646), an imitation of Calderón's El astrólogo fingido.
• Thomas Corneille imitates Calderón's El astrólogo fingido in his piece Le Feint Astrologue (1647, printed in Rouen and Paris, 1651), and is in turn imitated by John Dryden in his An Evening's Love the following year.
• François Le Métel de Boisrobert imitates Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar in L'Inconnue (Paris, 1655)
• Philippe Quinault imitates El galán fantasma in his Le Fantôme amoureux (1657)
• François Le Métel de Boisrobert imitates La vida es sueño in his novel La vie n'est qu'un songe (1657)
• Thomas Corneille imitates Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar and Los empeños de un acaso in Les engagéments du hazard (Rouen and Paris, 1657)
• George Digby adapts No siempre lo peor es cierto in his work Elvira, or the Worst not Always True (1664)
• John Dryden bases his The Indian Emperour (1665) on El príncipe constante.
• Music for El secreto a voces (1671) by Giovanni Maria Pagliardi.
• William Wycherley bases his Love in a Wood (1671) on Calderón's Mañanas de abril y mayo.
• William Wycherley bases his The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672) on Calderón's El maestro de danzar.
• John Dryden bases his The Assignation (1672) on Calderón's Con quien vengo, vengo.
• Aphra Behn bases her The Young King (1679) on Calderón's La vida es sueño.
• Alain René Lesage imitates Calderón's Peor está que estaba in his comedy Don César Ursin, staged successfully in Paris in 1707.
• Il y a bonne justice, ou le Paysan magistrat (1778), a comedy by Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois inspired by El alcalde de Zalamea.
• Isabelle et Fernand ou L'Alcalde de Zalaméa (1783), a comédie mêlée d'ariettes by Stanislas Champein, with a libretto by L.-F. Faur based on El alcalde de Zalamea.
• El alcalde reelecto [Teatro de la Cruz, December 25, 1792], a general tonadilla by Blas de Laserna.
• La tragedia [1799–1808], a tonadilla for two voices by an unknown author.
• In 1814 Nicolás Böhl de Faber publishes in El Mercurio Gaditano an article titled «Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro traducidas del alemán» in which Calderón's work is vindicated, introducing Romanticism into Spain.
• The poet Percy B. Shelley writes a letter to Thomas L. Peacock in November 1820 in which he says: "I read nothing but Greek and Spanish: Plato and Calderón are my gods."
• Der Graf Lucanor (1845), translation of Calderón's El conde Lucanor by Joseph von Eichendorff.
• Die geistlichen Schauspiele Calderons (1846–53), 2 vols., by Joseph von Eichendorff.
• Calderon, his Life and Genius, with Specimens of his Plays (1856), essay and anthology by the Irishman Richard Chenevix Trench.
• Incidental music for Der wundertätige Magus (El mágico prodigioso), 1865, by Josef Gabriel Rheinberger.
• Incidental music for Der Richter von Zalamea (1883) by Engelbert Humperdinck.
• The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy by Robert Bridges inspired by Calderón's El secreto a voces.
• Two songs from Der Richter von Zalamea (1904), with music by Richard Strauss, with the translation by Rudolf Presber.
• Manuel de Falla, incidental music for the performance of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's auto sacramental El gran teatro del mundo held in the Plaza de los Aljibes of the Alhambra on June 27, 1927.
• Laurenca, Johannisnacht, stage music by Carl Schadewitz (1887–1947).

• The poet Boris Pasternak decides in his last years to translate the work of Pedro Calderón de la Barca.
• Calderón (1966), a theatrical piece by Pier Paolo Pasolini, is inspired by La vida es sueño, and was brought to television for RAI in 1981 by Giorgio Pressburger, based on the version of the resident theater of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The work had already been staged by Luca Ronconi.
• Francisco Nieva designs the costumes for La dama duende in 1966.
• The famous staging of El príncipe constante produced by the Polish stage director Jerzy Grotowski in Wrocław in 1968, with a performance by Ryzsard Cieslak, influenced his dramatic conception of poor theatre.
• Mahmud Ali Makki translates Calderón de la Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea into Arabic (1993).
• Incidental music for El gran teatro del mundo (1998) by Antón García Abril.
• Calderón is a character in the novel El sol de Breda (1998) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
• Giannina Braschi's novel Estados Unidos de Banana (2011) is inspired by La vida es sueño.
• Albert Camus made a French adaptation of La devoción de la cruz, published by Gallimard.

Operas based on works by Calderón de la Barca

Afectos de odio y amor

• Gare dell´Odio e dell´Amore, opera scenica, unknown composer, Macerata, 1666;
• L´odio e l´amore, music by C. F. Pollaroli, Teatro S. Giovanni Grisostomo, Venice 1703 / 1717;

El alcalde de sí mismo

• Sein Selbst Gefangener, oder der närrische Prinz Jodelet, opera buffa, music by Johann Wolgang Franck, Hamburg 1680;
• Il carceriere di se medesimo, opera with music by Alessandro Melani, Florence 1681;
• Der lächerliche Printz Jodelet, opera with music by Reinhard Keiser, Hamburg 1726;

El alcalde de Zalamea

• Isabelle et Fernand, ou l´Alcade [sic] de Zalamea, opéra comique by N. Faur, Paris 1784;
• Pedro de Zalamea, opera with music by Benjamin Godard, Antwerp 1884;
• Dommeren i Zalamea, opera by Christian Frederik Emil Horneman, 1892;
• Der Richter von Zalamea, opera with music by Georg Jarno and libretto by Viktor Blüthgen and music by Georg Jarno, 1899;
• Pedro Crespo oder der Richter von Zalamea, opera with music by Arthur Piechler, 1944;
• El alcalde de Zalamea, zarzuela with music by Henri Collet, 1946.

Amigo, amante y leal

• La potenza della lealtá, riverena e fedeltá, opera with music by an unknown author, Bologna 1685;

Ni amor se libra de amor

• Ni amor se libra de amor, semi-opera with libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, 1662;
• La Psiche o vero Amore innamorato, opera with libretto by Giuseppe Domenico de Totis and music by Alessandro Scarlatti, (1683);

La banda y la flor

• Liebe und Eifersucht, opera with libretto and music by E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1807;

Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar

• La maison a deux portes, opéra comique, unknown composer, Foire de Saint-Laurent 1755;
• Hus med dubbel ingång (1970), lyric comedy with music by Hilding Constantin Rosenberg, 1970;

Céfalo y Pocris

• Procris und Cephalus, opera with music by Georg Bronner, Hamburg 1701;

La cisma de Occidente

• Henry VIII, opera with libretto by Léonce Détroyat and Armand Silvestre with music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Paris 1883;

Celos aun del aire matan

• Celos aun del aire matan (1660), libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, Madrid 1660;

Contra el amor desengaño

• Contra el amor desengaño, semi-opera with libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, 1679;

La dama duende

• The Lady and the Devil, operatic farce with libretto by William Dimond and music by Michael Kelly, London 1820;
• Dame Kobold, opera with libretto by Paul Reber and music by Joseph Joachim Raff, Berlin and Weimar 1870;
• Die Dame Kobold, opera with libretto by Carl Scheidemantel using the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Leipzig 1909;
• Dame Kobold, opera with music and libretto by Felix Weingartner; Vienna 1916;
• Dame Kobold, opera with libretto by E. Kurt Fischer and music by Kurt von Wolfurt, Kassel 1940;
• Dame Kobold, musical comedy by Gerhard Wimberger based on the translation by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 1964;

El divino Orfeo

• El divino Orfeo, opera with libretto by Sumiko Shibata and music by Minao Shibata, 1984;

Eco y Narciso

• Echo und Narcissus, opera with libretto by Friedrich Christian Bressand and music by Georg Bronner, Hamburg 1694;

Los empeños de un acaso

• Le armi e gli amori, opera with libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi and music by Marco Marazzoli, Florence 1658;

Los encantos de la culpa

• Der Sünde Zauberei, opera with libretto based on the translation by Joseph von Eichendorff and music by Walter Courvoisier, 1929;

La estatua de Prometeo

• La estatua de Prometeo, semi-opera with libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, 1670;

Fieras afemina amor

• Fieras afemina amor, opera with libretto by Alejandro Rodríguez and music by Giacomo Facco, 1724;

Las fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo

• Las fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo, semi-opera with music by an unknown composer, probably Juan Hidalgo, preserved in the Houghton Library, Harvard, Madrid 1653;

El galán fantasma

• Der Liebhaber nach dem Tode, opera with libretto by C. W. Salice-Contessa and music by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Leipzig 1826; the work is lost;

El gran teatro del mundo

• Le théâtre du monde, opera with libretto by Edmond Jeanneret and music by Heinrich Sutermeister, 1956;

Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa

Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, semi-opera with libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, 1680;

La hija del aire

• La Semiramide ossia la schiava fortunata, opera with libretto by G. A. Moniglia and music by Marc´Antonio Cesti, Vienna 1667;
• Die glückliche Sklavin oder die Ähnlichkeit der Semiramis un des Ninus, opera with libretto by an unknown author and music by Marc´Antonio Cesti, Hamburg 1693;
• Semiramis, melodrama with libretto by Baron Otto von Gemmingen and music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 1779 (text and music are lost);
• Die Tochter der Luft, opera with libretto by Josef Schreyvogel and music by Josef Weigl, 1819;
• Semiramis, fragment of a libretto written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal to be set to music by Richard Strauss;

El hijo del sol, Faetón

• El hijo del sol, Faetón, semi-opera with libretto by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and music by Juan Hidalgo, 1675;

Lances de amor y fortuna

• Le Vicende d´Amore e di fortuna, opera with libretto by G. B. Toschi and music by an unknown author, Modena 1677;
• Vicende d´amore e di fortuna, opera with libretto by C. Pallavicino and various composers, Venice 1710;
• Tiberio, imperatore d´Oriente, opera with the same libretto by C. Pallavicino and music by Gasparini, Venice 1702;

El mágico prodigioso

• Il mago, unfinished opera with libretto by Emilio Mucci and music by Licinio Recife;

Las manos blancas no ofenden

• Manos blancas no ofenden, opera by José de Herrando, 1761;

El mayor encanto amor

• Ulysses und Circe, Singspiel with libretto based on the translation made by August Wilhelm Schlegel and music by Bernhard Romberg, Berlin 1807;
• Circe, opera with libretto based on the translation made by August Wilhelm Schlegel and music by Werner Egk, Munich 1950;

El mayor monstruo del mundo

• Le Mariene ovvero, il maggior mostro del mondo, opera with libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini and music by an unknown composer, Perugia 1656;
• Gli eccessi della gelosia, opera with libretto by Domenico Lalli and music by Tomaso Albinoni, Venice 1722;
• El mayor monstro los celos, opera by Josep Soler i Sardà, 1977;

El monstruo de los jardines

• Achille in Sciro, opera with libretto by Pietro Metastasio and music by Antonio Caldara, Vienna 1736;
• Achille in Sciro, melodrama with libretto by Pietro Metastasio and music by Niccola Jomelli, Vienna 1749;

Peor está que estaba

• Dal male il bene, dramma per musica with libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi and music by Antonio Maria Abbatini (first and third acts) and Marco Marazzoli (second act), 1656;

La puente de Mantible

• Fierabras, opera with libretto by Joseph Kupelwieser based on the translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel and music by Franz Schubert, Leipzig 1886;

La púrpura de la rosa

• La púrpura de la rosa, opera with libretto by Calderón de la Barca and music by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco, Lima 1701;

El secreto a voces

• Das laute Geheimniss, libretto by Allgeyer based on the reworking made by Carlo Gozzi, planned to be set to music by Johannes Brahms, Hamburg 1869 / 1872;

El sitio de Breda

• Friedenstag, opera with libretto by Joseph Gregor and music by Richard Strauss, 1938;

La vida es sueño

• Aldimiro overo, Favor per favore (1683), operas and music by Alessandro Scarlatti and librettos by Giuseppe Domenico de Totis;
• Der königliche Printz aus Bohlen Sigismundus, oder das menschliche Leben wie ein Traum, libretto by Christian Heinrich Postel based on the version by Schouwenbergh and music by J. G. Conradi, Hamburg 1693;
• La vie est un songe, opera with libretto by Louis Fuzelier and music by an unknown composer, Paris 1717;
• Segismondo, re di Polonia, opera with libretto by an unknown author and music by Leonardo Vinci, Turin 1727;
• Sigismondo, opera with libretto by Giuseppe Foppa, probably based on the reworking by Boissy, with music by Gioachino Rossini, Venice 1814;
• Das Leben ein Traum, opera with music by Friedrich Ludwig Seidel, 1818;
• Das Leben ein Traum, oder das Horoskop, opera with libretto by A. Steppes and music by Louis Schlösser, Darmstadt 1839;
• La vita e sogno, opera with libretto and music by Gian Francesco Malipiero, Breslau 1943;
• Life is a Dream, opera with libretto by James Maraniss and music by Lewis Spratlan, 1980;
• Segismundo (Soñar el sueño), opera with music by Tomás Marco, 2003;
• La vida es sueño, opera with libretto by Giacomo Carbone and music by David Tukici, 2010;
• Life is a Dream, opera with libretto by Alasdair Middleton and music by Jonathan Dove, 2012;
• La vida es sueño, opera with libretto by Iván Olano Duque and music by Juan Pablo Carreño, 2023.

External links

• Portal devoted to Calderón at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Digitized works by Calderón at the Hispanic Digital Library of the National Library of Spain.
• Works by Calderón at Project Gutenberg.
• Calderón y el Siglo de Oro at the Centro Virtual Cervantes.
• Calderón y la cultura europea at the Centro Virtual Cervantes.
• Poetic selection of Calderón.
• Works available on the Comedia portal.
• Profile at NNDB.
• Documents on Pedro Calderón de la Barca.
• Direct references on the life and work of Calderón de la Barca.

• El encanto sin encanto: comedia famosa, Sevilla, 17--, at the National Library of Portugal