Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (b. 1600–d. 1681) had a very long life, longer than the average of his time and even longer than Lope de Vega, who died at the age of seventy-three in 1635. He started writing for the theater at a very early age (his earliest preserved works date from 1623) and continued to write until his death: his production thus spans almost sixty years, and shows, at a closer look, a noticeable evolution in the structure of the plots, in the choice of themes and generic structure, and in the use of polymetry. At the same time, certain recurring motifs and situations continue to occur, albeit treated differently, throughout Calderonian production: the conflictuality of the father-son relationship, the motif of the inauspicious horoscope, the character of the rebellious young man, the misunderstandings and difficulties with which love relationships are studded . . . A widespread but reductive view sees in Calderón the dramatist of honor, due to the centrality that this complex of values occupies in his theater; or the dramatist of the Counter-Reformation, due to his extraordinary commitment to the production of autos sacramentales, one-act plays intended to celebrate the Eucharist and, with it, the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. For this, and for cultural and historical reasons linked to the ideological complexities of Romanticism, especially German Romanticism, which elevated him to the pinnacle of dramatic poetry, Calderón has been instrumentally transformed (and deformed) into an icon of conservatism. To a gaze free of ideological prejudices, and above all attentive to the breadth of his production, Calderón appears instead as an extraordinarily modern playwright, both in his tragedies and comedies. The existing critical bibliography on Calderón is so immense that it would be impossible to give a satisfactory account of it in a few pages; and perhaps it would not even be useful because, for the most part, these are very specific or specialized contributions that can be found in dedicated bibliographies and digital resources. Only those works and contributions will be illustrated here, that are indispensable for those who wish to approach the study of Calderón and his dramaturgy. This annotated bibliography will be therefore articulated in General Overviews and Introductory Studies, Reference Works, Bibliographies, Biographies, Texts and Textual Studies, Editions, English Translations, Journals and Conference Proceedings, Criticism, and Calderón’s Reception in Later Times.