The Mind and Art of Calderón: Essays on the Comedias - Paperback

by Alexander Augustine Parker (Author), Deborah Kong (Editor)

Don Pedro Calder n de la Barca (1600-81) was, with Lope de Vega, the greatest exponent of Spanish Golden Age drama. Professor Parker's essays are the fruits of a highly distinguished career spanning forty-five years. They provide a wide-ranging survey of Calder n's secular, three-act plays (comedias) through detailed analyses of individual works. The themes found in the plays are studied in relation to the background of ideas in seventeenth-century Spain and to the development of Calder n's own view of the intellectual life and the social, ethical and moral problems of this age. From the tensions of Calder n's early family life and his intellectual struggle with the associated problems, the book passes to the wider tensions in the social and political life of his time, and concludes with a demonstration of how Calder n raises all these human problems onto a wide 'philosophical' level through his use of myths and symbols.