1 - La vida es sueño: Calderón's idea of a theatre

Summary

For the Spanish comedia as a genre, La vida es sueño represents the most accomplished example of what Francis Fergusson once called the ‘idea of a theatre,’ the sustained attempt at self-imagining through representation. Writing in 1949, when literary Modernism was still in force, it may have seemed that the theatrical ‘idea’ was no longer viable. In 1933 Antonin Artaud had written that “An idea of the theatre has been lost. And as long as the theatre limits itself to showing us intimate scenes from the lives of a few puppets, transforming the public into Peeping Toms, it is no wonder the elite abandon it and the great public looks to the movies, the music hall or the circus for violent satisfactions, whose intentions do not deceive them.” Whereas La vida es sueño, like Hamlet, is conscious of itself as a form of theatrical representation, dramatists in recent times have turned toward more spectacular forms of theatre, perhaps in order to compete with music-hall comedies, circus spectacles and the movies (as we shall see, Calderón's later plays have a similarly spectacular bent). Brecht for instance tried heedlessly to overturn the entire Aristotelian tradition in drama, replacing mimesis with “epic theatre” and the “street scene.” Beckett gave us characters stuck in garbage cans; Cocteau one side of telephone conversation (La Voix humaine). Ionesco's last gasp of an historical drama (Le Roi se meurt) is itself a disappearing act. Claudel composed with a lavish opulence throughout many decades, but his work tends toward the dramatic novel or the oratorio more than toward the theatre per se.