The first comprehensive study of Calderón in EnglishPedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists - many would say the single most important dramatist - of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain's dominant and most prestigious playwright for much of the seventeenth century, his work is still regularly staged and translated, influential in more recent times on writers as diverse as Schiller, Shelley and Lorca. The author of around 120 plays (not counting his numerous Corpus Christi autos) in a variety of styles, Calderón is most famous for his stirring dramas, characterized by rhetorically powerful poetry, dramatic structures carefully calibrated to produce poignant echoes, and the fizzing intellectual energy they apply to the age's ontological, eschatological and political preoccupations. His plays succeed in combining these perennial concerns with compelling plots subtle enough to defy definitive interpretation. As this volume seeks to show, however, Calderón's comedies deserve equal recognition. Too long stereotyped as a dour, cerebral conservative, this playwright's comic works are as amusing as they are clever. This Companion is the first comprehensive study of Calderón in English. It provides a rigorous but readable introduction to the man, his work and its legacy. Its chapters - written by leading international comedia specialists - provide an overview of his life, explain his intellectual, social, moral, and literary contexts, and examine his stagecraft, his corpus, and his reception both within and without the Hispanic world up to the twenty-first century. Specific chapters are devoted to La vida es sueño, his most famous work, which appears on many a university syllabus, and to his infamous wife-murder plays.

List of Illustrations List of Contributors Foreword / Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction, Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker1 Biography and Context, Don Cruickshank2 The Calderonian World, Jeremy Robbins3 The Playwright's Craft: Calderón and the Great Theatrical World of Early-Modern Spain, Alejandro García-Reidy4 La vida es sueño, Jeremy Lawrance5 The Honour Plays of Calderón, Colin Thompson6 Calderón, the Comedian, Jonathan Thacker7 Mythological Court Spectacle Plays, Margaret R. Greer8 Religious comedias, Isabel Hernando Morata9 Calderón's 'Sacramental, Allegorical and Historical' autos, Ignacio Arellano10 Calderón's graciosos, Roy Norton11 Calderón and Visual Art, Oliver Noble Wood12 The Staging of Calderón's Theatre, Santiago Fernández Mosquera13 Calderón's European Reception from Romanticism to the Twentieth Century, Ritchie Robertson 14 The Reception of Calderón in the Hispanic World, Duncan WheelerAppendicesI. Key Digital and Print Sources and Works by Calderón MentionedII. Versification in CalderónConsolidated BibliographyIndex