The Mind and Art of Caldern : Essays on the Comedias

Don Pedro Caldern 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 Caldern'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 Caldern's own view of the intellectual life and the social, ethical and moral problems of this age. From the tensions of Caldern'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 Caldern raises all these human problems onto a wide 'philosophical' level through his use of myths and symbols.