parallel between Fernando and her. Like him, she is constant—in her love for Muley. Moreover, the competition between Muley and Tarudante for the beautiful Fénix mirrors the competition between Fernando and the King of Fez for the city of Ceuta (whose name corresponds to the Hebrew word for “beauty”). These parallels allow Calderón to evoke poetically the question of the true nature of beauty. When, at the end of the play, Fénix is captured by the Portuguese and returned to her people (with the stipulation that she is to marry Muley) in exchange for Fernando’s dead body, it is evident that Calderón, establishing a baroque contrast between appearance and reality, wishes to communicate that the beauty of Fernando’s faith is more real than Fénix’s physical beauty.

Nowhere is the contrast between Fernando and Fénix more evident than in a much-discussed scene toward the end of the second act in which the two of them recite to each other sonnets on the impermanence of flowers and of stars. Fénix, who had ordered Fernando to bring her a bouquet of flowers, is horrified by the thought that their beauty is only transitory. Fernando, on the other hand, can face even the knowledge that the stars (which at the time the play was written were believed to influence human destiny) are not permanent. Unlike Fénix, he has learned to penetrate beyond appearances. Thus, he is neither captivated nor disturbed by temporary things; he recognizes that both physical beauty and misfortune will become lost in eternity, which he believes to be ordered according to a divine plan. Thus, Calderón has used Fernando’s constancy in order to teach a moral lesson concerning the Christian virtue of fortitude.

Cloak-and-Sword Plays

The theme of appearance versus reality, which is handled seriously in The Constant Prince, is also present in The Phantom Lady and A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard, two Calderonian plays typical of a genre referred to as comedias de capa y espada, or cloak-and-sword plays. The name for this genre, which was seventeenth century Spain’s equivalent of a situation comedy, derives from the costume worn by the actors playing the leading male roles. Cloak-and-sword plays have complicated plots revolving around the courtship of one or more sets of middle-class youths who devise ingenious measures to overcome the obstacles to their love. The obstacles are usually presented by a domineering father or brother, anxious to protect the honor or reputation of a daughter or sister, and the young people frequently resort to disguises and other forms of deception, which often backfire with comic results. Duels are a frequent ingredient of these plays, but they never have grave consequences; cloak-and-sword plays invariably have happy endings involving at least one wedding.

The Phantom Lady

The Phantom Lady dramatizes the ingenuity of Angela, a bright and attractive young widow, whose brothers Don Juan and Don Luis, in a desire to protect her reputation, have confined her first to their home and then—during the visit of Don Juan’s friend Don Manuel—to her room. Because the room Don Manuel is occupying is next to her own, Angela makes use of a secret door (concealed by a glass cabinet) joining the two rooms to enter their guest’s quarters and play pranks on him and frighten his servant, who believes she is a ghost. As he is unaware of her existence, Don Manuel is also puzzled by Angela, but he refuses to believe that she is a phantom and eventually follows her into her room, where the two of them are discovered by Don Luis. Following a duel, which Don Manuel wins (sparing Luis’s life), everyone receives an explanation of what has been happening, and Don Manuel and Angela agree to be married.

The use of illusion in the play is obvious. As a result of deceits, disguises, false entrances, and so on, all the play’s male characters remain utterly confused until the final scene. As is typical of many cloak-and-sword plays, only the female characters—Angela and her cousin Beatriz—realize what is really happening. Also typical is that the would-be deceivers (the two brothers who conceal Angela’s presence from their guest) are themselves the most deceived. This is especially true of Don Luis, who, on an occasion when Angela has left the house in disguise, follows her and endeavors to seduce her, believing that she is another woman.

A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard

The stereotyped plots and characters of all cloak-and-sword plays bear a certain resemblance to one another—though Calderón somehow manages to endow most of his with a fresh quality which makes them appealing even three hundred years after his death. Thus, many of the elements of The Phantom Lady—the unknown entrance, disguises, a tyrannical brother, a mysterious and beautiful lady who appears and disappears—are also present in A House with Two Doors Is Difficult to Guard. In this play, the appearance-versus-reality theme is even more noticeable, as when Fénix, describing (in typically baroque language) to his friend Lisardo his first encounter with the beautiful Marcela in the gardens of Aranjuez, remarks on the difficulty of distinguishing her from the carved statutes of nymphs in the garden’s fountains.

The Surgeon of His Honor

Appearances produce tragic consequences in The Surgeon of His Honor, a play that dramatizes Don Gutierre Alfonso’s murder of his wife, Mencía, because of his belief that she has been unfaithful. In the eyes of a modern audience, at least, Mencía seems to be an innocent victim of misfortune. At the beginning of the play, she is a happily married woman whose happiness is seriously threatened when a former suitor, Prince Enrique, is thrown from his horse (a typical occurrence in Golden Age drama with men who are unable to control their passions) and is brought to her house to recover. When he awakens and discovers his former fiancée, Mencía, Enrique—even after learning that she is now married—persists in efforts to resume his former relationship with her. That night, when her husband is absent, he bribes a servant to gain entry to her house. Though she rejects all Enrique’s advances, Mencía does commit various indiscretions. When her husband returns unexpectedly, for example, she conceals Enrique in her room and later arranges a diversion so that he may leave. In his hasty departure, however, Enrique leaves behind a dagger, which Gutierre discovers and which causes him to suspect his wife of infidelity. After gathering additional misleading evidence that convinces him of his wife’s guilt, Gutierre arranges a bloody and startling denouement that is typical of the Senecan tragic style then popular in Spain: He engages a bloodletter, brings him to the house blindfolded, and orders him to bleed his wife to death.

The Surgeon of His Honor is thus typical of a peculiarly Spanish genre that is referred to informally as the wife-murder play. These plays have plots based on Spain’s old and infamous honor code, which gave a husband (or father or brother) the legal and moral right to kill a wife (or daughter or sister) whose sexual misconduct had threatened the family’s reputation. Although the plots of these plays resemble that of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604), there are notable differences. In The Surgeon of His Honor, Gutierre—unlike Othello, who becomes aware of Desdemona’s innocence and of his own blindness—remains convinced that what he did (though lamentable) was right, and the play concludes with the announcement of Gutierre’s engagement to a former fiancée, an engagement arranged by King Pedro (Enrique’s brother). Because the king has been informed by the bloodletter (who surreptitiously left a bloody handprint by the door of Gutierre’s house so that it could be identified) of all that has happened, the king’s arrangement of a new marriage for Gutierre seems puzzling. Basing their interpretation of the play on this ending, critics assumed for many years that Calderón—and other Spanish authors of similar plays—actually approved of the bloody honor code that was the basis of their dramas.

More recently, however, Calderón scholars have become convinced that this is not the case. Various elements of the play—the bloody handprint by the door (recalling the biblical account of the Passover) and the crucifix hanging above Mencía’s bed when her dead body is discovered—invite the audience to examine the play’s plot in a religious context and to compare the sacrifice of the innocent Mencía to the sacrifice of the innocent Christ. In this light, it is clear that Calderón has wished to show his audience how easily one may be deceived by appearances. Thus he structured the play in a way that makes the viewer participate initially in Gutierre’s error, but he provided enough evidence so that further reflection would correct this initial illusion.

The Great Theater of the World

Calderón’s most famous auto sacramental, The Great Theater of the World, again emphasizes the theme of illusion. Based on the idea that, quite literally, “all the world’s a stage,” this play dramatizes the production of a play in which a theater manager (an allegorical representation of God) assembles a set of characters (a rich man, a king, a peasant, a poor man, Beauty, Discretion, and a child) in order to represent human life. Because the purpose of the autos sacramentales was to instruct the public concerning the meaning of the Eucharist, at the end of the play, the theater manager issues an invitation for some of the characters (those who have behaved appropriately) to join him at his table for a feast, but only after the audience has had ample opportunity to observe how easily some of the actors were seduced into confusing their fictional roles with reality.

The Devotion to the Cross

Often, Calderón’s full-length plays also appear to be religious allegories. It has been suggested, for example, that one must view The Devotion to the Cross as an allegorical representation of the fall and redemption of humankind. The play dramatizes the fate of Eusebio, a child of unknown parents who has been reared by a shepherd and who refers to himself as “Eusebio of the Cross” because his only clue to his identity is a cross-shaped birthmark. Eusebio wins the affection of a wealthy girl, Julia, but Julia’s brother Lisardo—resentful of his sister’s lowly suitor—challenges Eusebio to a duel and is killed by him. Pursued by Julia’s father, Curcio, Eusebio then becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. He behaves erratically, however, when he captures a priest and sees a book entitled The Mystery of the Cross, for he continues to be tormented by the mystery of his own origin and by the meaning of his birthmark. The mystery of his identity is resolved at the end of the play when he and the other characters discover that he is Julia’s twin, Curcio’s own son.

In a sense, all the principal characters of this play are as confused about their identities as is Eusebio. Like the actors of The Great Theater of the World, they have been trapped into playing illusory roles. In The Devotion to the Cross, the roles are antagonistic ones, which belie the characters’ true identity as a family, and it is clear that Calderón believes that their dilemma is shared by humanity in general. He thus invites his audience to view Eusebio as a kind of Everyman—born into a confused world, uncertain of his identity. Protected by a shepherd (evoking Christ the Good Shepherd), he finally discovers the secret of his existence in the sign of the cross.

Life Is a Dream

Unanimously recognized as Calderón’s outstanding masterpiece, Life Is a Dream is again an expression of the author’s favorite theme of reality and illusion, and of the almost inescapable human tendency to confuse them. Set in Poland, the play dramatizes the destiny of Prince Segismundo, who is imprisoned in a forest by his father, King Basilio, immediately after his birth. Basilio is motivated to imprison his son because—as an astrologer—he has become convinced that Segismundo will become a tyrant who will conquer his father. As is usually the case in drama, Basilio’s very efforts to avoid a prophesied destiny actually cause the prophecy to be realized. Because he grows up isolated from humanity and surrounded only by animals, Segismundo quite naturally becomes a savage himself. Thus, when his father—wishing to test the accuracy of his astrological deductions before declaring his Russian nephew Astolfo heir to the Polish throne—has his son drugged, brought to the palace, and informed that he is King of Poland, Segismundo does indeed behave as a tyrant by seeking to violate an attractive woman and by throwing from the palace window a servant who gets in his way. Convinced of the accuracy of the prophecy, Basilio has Segismundo drugged again and returned to prison and proceeds with his plan to have Astolfo declared heir to the throne. The people of Poland, however, are unwilling to accept a foreign king, and, discovering the location of Segismundo’s prison, they proclaim him their leader in an insurrection against Basilio. The prophecy that Segismundo would conquer his father is thus fulfilled. Its fulfillment has a rather odd twist, however, since Segismundo—who was indeed a tyrant in his first visit to the palace—is now changed. He has been told by his jailer that all that happened to him in his father’s court was only a dream, that one can never distinguish between dreams and reality, but that even in dreams one has the opportunity to do good. Having learned this lesson, he pardons his father and is thus prepared at the play’s close to become a wise and benevolent ruler.

Initially, it may appear that Segismundo’s conversion derives from an illusion, but Calderón makes it clear that this is not really the case. Segismundo, like Fernando of The Constant Prince, has seen through the illusion of life and has glimpsed the reality of eternity. The soliloquy in which he proclaims that life itself is a dream is an excellent example of Calderón’s poetic talent at its finest. Probably the most famous soliloquy in the Spanish language, it is as well known in Hispanic countries as Hamlet’s question of existence is in English-speaking ones.

Indeed, it is clear that, in Calderón’s view, Segismundo is one of the few characters of the play who has freed himself from illusion. In the author’s mind, the greatest illusion of which humans are capable is the belief that they may autonomously control their destiny. It was because Basilio was a victim of this illusion at the beginning of the play that he had Segismundo imprisoned, but in the course of the drama, he also learns the nature of reality and thus kneels before his son at the play’s end to ask his forgiveness. Another character, the gracioso Clarín, is not so fortunate. He tries cynically to manipulate each situation for his own gain and, during the battle between Segismundo’s and Basilio’s forces, hides to protect himself from harm until it is over. Ironically, an arrow lands in the very spot where he is hiding and kills him, illustrating once again Calderón’s conviction that those who cling to the illusory beauty of life are inviting destruction.

Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult

Like The Surgeon of His Honor, Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult dramatizes a husband’s murder of his wife (and her suspected lover) in order to defend his honor, and the later play repeats many elements of the earlier one. Shortly before her wedding, Doña Leonor, like Mencía in The Surgeon of His Honor, is surprised by the sudden appearance of a former suitor, Don Luis. Like Mencía, she resists her former suitor’s advances, but also like her, she makes the mistake of granting him an interview and is forced to hide him when her husband returns unexpectedly. Her husband, Don Lope, becomes suspicious and resolves to protect his honor by killing both Leonor and Luis. Because his goal is to protect his reputation and he believes that no one else suspects his wife’s supposed infidelity, he arranges for both murders to look like accidents, but again recalling The Surgeon of His Honor, King Sebastián learns the true nature of what has happened and gives it his approval.

It is clear again, however, that Calderón does not endorse what his protagonist has done, and he communicates his disapproval to the audience by ironically undermining Don Lope’s character. From the beginning of the play, he portrays Don Lope as an arrogantly self-centered individual who is blindly proud of his ability to control his destiny. When a friend, Don Juan, confides his sorrow at having been forced (in order to protect his honor) to kill a man who insulted a lady he was courting, Don Lope replies that Don Juan should be happy because there is no greater joy than having one’s honor unstained. When Don Juan is obliged to kill yet another man (who, aware of the earlier duel, refers to him as the “offended” rather than as the “avenged” party), Don Lope decides confidently to avoid such complications by making his own vengeance a secret one. With this same air of confidence, he prepares at the end of the play to embark with King Sebastián on an expedition against the Moors in Africa—an expedition that the seventeenth century audience knew had ended in disaster. Therefore, at the conclusion of the play, Don Lope is a fine example of a tragedy about to happen—of hubris before a fall—and the audience is fully aware that the same blind pride that led him to murder two people is now leading him to his own destruction.

The Mayor of Zalamea

The Mayor of Zalamea, which is considered by Calderón scholars to be second only to his Life Is a Dream, is in many ways an atypical Calderonian play. Because its protagonist, Pedro Crespo, is a wealthy peasant (unlike most of Calderón’s principal characters, who are noble) and because the theme of the play is a peasant’s right to defend his honor, this work bears a certain resemblance to Lope de Vega Carpio’s famous “peasant plays” such as Fuenteovejuna (wr. 1611-1618, pb. 1619; The Sheep Well, 1936), Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (wr. 1609-1612, pb. 1614, Peribáñez, 1936), and El mejor alcalde, el rey (wr. 1620-1623, pb. 1635; The King, the Greatest Alcalde, 1918); indeed, The Mayor of Zalamea is a reworking by Calderón of another play by the same name attributed to Lope de Vega.

Initially, the plot of this play may appear to contradict Calderón’s implied criticism of the honor code in The Surgeon of His Honor and Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, for The Mayor of Zalamea dramatizes Pedro Crespo’s utilization of his authority as the newly elected Mayor of Zalamea to order the death of Don Alvaro, a captain who, when quartered in Crespo’s house, abducted and raped Crespo’s daughter Isabel. Moreover, Crespo’s use of this authority is of questionable legality because, as the offended party, he can scarcely be considered an impartial judge, and because the offender is a nobleman. Nevertheless, Crespo is neither blind nor arrogant. He orders Don Alvaro’s death reluctantly and only after first imploring him to marry Isabel in order to repair the damage done to the family’s honor. He likewise shows compassion for his daughter. A typical Golden Age father might have felt constrained by the honor code to murder a dishonored daughter, and Isabel actually expects her father to do so. Crespo arranges instead, after his efforts to have her honorably married have failed, for her to enter a convent.

Even in this play, however, Calderón makes it clear that the honor code allows no occasion for rejoicing. At the end of the play, the widowed Crespo is bereft of both his children. Isabel is in a convent, and he has reluctantly given his consent for his only son, Juan, to join the military. Although he has been honored by King Pedro II, who exonerated his execution of Don Alvaro by naming Crespo mayor for life, he faces a lonely future filled with sad memories.

The Wonder-Working Magician

Because of its resemblance to the Faust legend, The Wonder-Working Magician has received considerable attention and praise—exciting, for example, the admiration of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who enthusiastically compared it to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous treatment of the same legend. Calderón’s play dramatizes the fourth century martyrdom of two saints. The protagonist Cipriano (Saint Cyprian) is enamored of the young and beautiful Justina and, like Faust, signs a pact with the devil so that he may learn black magic in order to seduce her. Though he does acquire spectacular powers, they are unable to prevail against Justina’s virtuous will, and Cipriano—after embracing a skeleton that he has mistaken for Justina—recognizes, like all Calderonian heroes, that the seemingly impressive powers of evil are an illusion. The play concludes as he and his beloved, united at last, suffer death as martyrs. Ironically, the devil, who initially approached Cipriano in order to distract him from his study of theology, has been an instrument in his martyrdom and salvation. The purposes of evil have been thwarted by the purposes of good.

Los cabellos de Absalón

Of all the Calderón plays based on his reworking of earlier material, the best-known is Los cabellos de Absalón. Its source, Tirso de Molina’s La venganza de Tamar (wr. 1621, pb. 1634), dramatizes the biblical story of King David’s daughter Tamar’s rape by her half-brother Amnon and her brother Absalom’s murder of Amnon in order to avenge her honor. Calderón’s play condenses Tirso’s into two acts (the second of which is an almost word-for-word copy of Tirso’s act 3) and adds an original third act that dramatizes Absalom’s own death when, in his revolt against his father, his hair becomes entangled in the low branches of a tree as he is riding through a forest.

Although Calderón’s appropriation of Tirso’s material may appear questionable in an age that has become accustomed to copyright laws, one should note that in the seventeenth century such practices were considered entirely legitimate. Indeed, it is quite possible that Calderón composed his play at the request of a theater manager who instructed him to write a new final act for Tirso’s material.

Obviously, both dramatists found in the biblical account of David’s tragic family an echo of the nefarious Spanish honor code, and both of them implicitly criticize this code by reminding their audiences that the vindication of honor may—as in the case of Absalom—be only a disguise for self-serving motives. Calderón’s arrangement of the material to emphasize Absalom’s hair (of which Absalom was so proud that he mistakenly understood a prophecy that he would be “elevated by his hair” to mean that his physical beauty would cause him to become king) is typical of the author’s penchant for showing his villains captivated by illusion.

The Painter of His Dishonor

Calderón’s last famous wife-murder play, The Painter of His Dishonor, is perhaps his best contribution to the genre. In its rapid action, which shifts from Italy to Spain and back again, the author achieves a perfect synthesis of the themes of illusion and revenge. Many elements of its plot are familiar from The Surgeon of His Honor and Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult. The young and beautiful Serafina consents to marry Juan Roca, an old artist who attempts vainly to capture her beauty on canvas, only because she believes her former suitor, Don Alvaro, has perished at sea; Alvaro returns and, ignoring Serafina’s protests that she wishes to be faithful to her husband, abducts her and hides her in his father’s country house near Naples. The Prince of Naples, who has also been captivated by Serafina’s beauty, discovers her presence and engages a traveling artist to paint her portrait. Ironically, the artist is Serafina’s husband, who has returned to Italy to locate his wife and avenge his honor. In an action-packed final scene, Juan manages at last to capture his sleeping wife’s likeness on canvas; when Serafina awakens, frightened by a dream in which she imagined her husband was killing her, she rushes for the first time to seek comfort in her abductor’s arms. Alvaro and Serafina’s embrace convinces Juan of his wife’s guilt, and he rapidly fires two pistols, leaving both his wife and her suitor dead inside the “frame” provided by the windows that served as the standard background for the seventeenth century Spanish stage.

The painting motif that is the context for this drama suggests a number of conclusions. By emphasizing art’s ambiguity, Calderón clearly suggests that Juan Roca has fallen victim to his own artistic imagination. At the same time, however, Serafina’s own conduct seems equally ambiguous. While on the conscious level she remains faithful to her husband, it is clear that unconsciously she is indeed guilty of an adulterous love for Alvaro. Indeed, Serafina and Juan are similar in that both struggle in vain to exercise conscious control over a deeper self that is more real than their illusory social masks; both are examples of the inevitable human subjection to sin. Calderón’s solution to this human dilemma, which is a basic theme of his work, is found in an auto sacramental also entitled The Painter of His Dishonor, in which the offended husband, Christ, pardons his wife, Human Nature, and fires instead on guilt and Lucifer.