Spanish Golden Age Drama: Lope de Vega, Tirso & Calderón

The Work of Lope de Vega

The work of Lope de Vega:

Dramas of Unjust Power

Dramas of unjust power: One of his recurring themes is the abuse of power by a noble. When a noble exercises power unjustly, the victim, driven by conscience and personal dignity, appeals to the king for punishment or seeks vindictive revenge.

Dramas of Honor

Dramas of honor: Most representative works include El castillo sin venganza. Lope questions and challenges many social norms surrounding honor.

Drama of Love and Death

Drama of love and death: Alongside honor, love animates the characters and frequently appears in the inevitable comedias. Consequences of love often include jealousy and tragic outcomes.

Plays of Love

Plays of love: In many comedias, love is the driving force that seeks to overcome all obstacles.

The School of Lope de Vega

The school of Lope de Vega

Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina: The most important disciple of Lope was the friar Gabriel Téllez, who under the pseudonym Tirso de Molina continued Lope's dramatic model.

Features

Features: The most prominent aspects of Tirso's work are clarity of exposition, psychological portraiture of characters, the presence of decisive and enterprising women, ideological precision, and a rich language with some culteranismo influence.

Transcendental Themes

Transcendental themes: Preference for predestination, questions of free will, salvation and God's mercy appear throughout his work.

Notable Works

Work: Notable plays include titles that explore guilt, shame, deception, and mercy: a person convicted of mistrust; shame in the palace; Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes (Don Gil of the Green Stockings); works where mercy is a theme; and The Trickster of Seville, which develops the Don Juan myth of the young libertine devoted to deceiving women.

Argument and Characters

Argument: In The Trickster of Seville, the trickster traps Don Juan in a web of mockery and retribution directed against individual women.

Characters: Don Juan; deceived women; Catalinon (the servant).

Calderón de la Barca

Calderón de la Barca:

Topics and Influences

Topic: Jesuit formation greatly influenced Calderón's work. His most recurrent themes are freedom, moral conflict, the relationship of humans with power, the mismatch between reality and illusion, honor, and destiny.

Style and Metrics

Style: Calderón was an author who worked almost exclusively for the theatre. Metric and stylistic traits include frequent use of eight-syllable verses and heroic (hendecasyllabic) verse; he sometimes also used heptasyllables. His language often shows culteranismo influences and abundant rhetorical devices such as antithesis, metaphor, and oxymoron. These resources are habitual in Calderón's baroque aesthetic.

Paradigm and Dramatic Logic: Calderón constructed dramatic parts according to a baroque, logical scheme whose components include clarity in formulation, systematization, and hierarchical grouping.

Types of Dramas

• Honor dramas
• Tragic dramas
• Catholic dramas
• Dramas of freedom and style
• Biblical dramas

Comedies and Autos Sacramentales

Comedies: The most notable are the so-called comedies of cloak and dagger.

Autos sacramentales: Calderón wrote over 70 mystery plays and brought the genre to its fullest expression.