Culteranismo, Conceptismo, and Spanish Golden Age Theater

Culteranismo (Góngora)

Seeks to cultivate beauty and impress the reader's senses with light, heat, and sound.

• Features: hyperbaton; metaphors; cultism (use of words from Latin or Greek); adjectives (color, sound, appearance); mythology (subjects taken from Greek and Latin mythology).

Conceptismo (Quevedo)

Explores the meaning of words, wit, and clever puns that surprise the reader by the accumulation of reasoning.

• Features: metaphors based on ingenious partnerships; neologisms (creating words with prefixes and suffixes); antithesis (presentation of competing ideas); hyperbole (exaggeration); ornamental adjectives but not conceptual.

Characteristics of Lope de Vega's Theater

• Themes and issues: issues like love, honor, religious and monarchical ideals. A defense of the crown and aristocratic society is observed.
• Drama: breaks with the Aristotelian rule of the three unities.
• Language and versification: uses polymetry.

Autos Sacramentales

Verse dramas that take place at an event and have an allegorical character, as their characters symbolize virtues, passions, or abstract concepts.

Features of Calderón's Comedies

• Intellectual Foundation: His comedies also have a higher intellectual and ideological background to the point that, sometimes, the dominant idea overshadows the dramatic action itself.
• Language and Versification: Language is more elaborate.
• Calderonian Characters: The theater is distinguished by the strength of its characters. Some take on a true universal value for representing the strength of human character or symbol. His characters are more incarnations of ideas than individuals.

Pessimism and Disappointment

Meditation on death, pessimistic attitude toward reality and life, new vision of the world, most harrowing and bleak, but the sad reality is in line with historical and social context.

New Questions:

• Political and social disappointment.
• Disappointment in human expectations created by the ideological and cultural Renaissance.
• Pessimism and doubt can be addressed only with resignation, "the obsession with time," the desolation.
• Life regarded as a dream; fragile and illusory reality.
• The madness of the world; national decline.