Life Is A Dream poses fundamental questions about the nature of existence - are we truly awake or do we dream our way through life? One of the world's best known and most loved plays.

The Phantom Lady belongs to a delightful tradition of "cape-and-sword" Spanish drama. A searching exploration of illusion and reality, told against a backdrop of love's triumph over the artificial structures of the honor code.

The Constant Prince portrays a 15th-century episode from the long-fought conflict between the Christian and Islamic worlds in North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. The Constant Prince is notable for the respect, honor, and dignity with which Calderon portrays both sides in this life-and-death struggle.

The Great Theatre of the World represents the sacred one-act play. A delightful exploration of the power of theater as well as a deep examination of faith and free will.



Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) by most accounts the greatest playwright of a great era, the luminous siglo de oro or Spanish Golden Age remains best known in the English-speaking world for one play, Life Is a Dream. Like any truly great artist, however, Calderon's brilliance is impossible to understand through a single work. His range of subject, style, and tonality is vast, encompassing tragedy, metaphysics, romantic comedy, honor, illusion, reality, and religion. This group of plays demonstrates the scope of his achievement, in accessible, accurate, production-tested translations. Equally at home in the classroom or the theater, these texts bring a major playwright to life for English-speaking audiences.

This volume brings together four long out-of-print Honig translations: Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult, Devotion to the Cross, The Phantom Lady, and The Mayor of Zalamea, joined by the ever popular Life is a Dream and the newly translated, never before published version of The Crown of Absalom. Six Plays will make Calderon's work available to a new generation of readers.

Spanish Language. The University of Kansas Humanistic Studies No. 28.Texto y Estudio por Jose M. De Osma. In Memoriam Julio de Osma.

"What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction; and the greatest good is fleeting, for all life is a dream, and even dreams are but dreams." That is the haunting lesson learned by Prince Sigismund in Life's a Dream (La vida es sueno), the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Calderon's long life (1600-1681) witnessed the pinnacle and collapse of Spanish political power as well as the great flowering of classical Spanish literature. He inherited his dramatic principles from his brilliant predecessor, Lope de Vega, perfecting his formula with more economical plots, greater subtlety of thought, and, in some cases, deeper character development and psychological insight. Nowhere is Calderon's talent more evident than in Life's a Dream, the poignant tale of a prince imprisoned at birth by his astrologer-king father and liberated on the same day a beautiful woman stumbles into his life. The interwoven themes of love, loss, power, and destiny make it the peer of such plays as Oedipus and Hamlet. The volume comes with a generous set of supplementary materials including critical introduction, translator's notes, suggestions for directors, bibliography, and glossary.

Madrid, 1620. Pedro Calderón de la Barca medita sobre su futuro, cuando la casualidad le lleva a presenciar una pendencia de armas en la que se ve involucrada una dama de quien sólo contempla unos ojos que parecen pedir ayuda.

Con el pretexto de devolverle un objeto que perdió durante el incidente y el secreto deseo de librarla de una amenaza intuida, Calderón inicia una búsqueda en pos de la joven surcada de peligros.

En su periplo recibe el apadrinamiento moral de don Fernando, tutor del Condestable de Castilla y hombre de mundo; conoce a una joven prostituta que lo alienta en sus primeros pasos como poeta; se enfrenta a un enemigo implacable y sufre el acecho de un misterioso perseguidor.

En esta novela de época el argumento de algunas de las más prestigiosas obras del dramaturgo, como El alcalde de Zalamea o La dama duende, se conjuga con episodios de su vida privada, configurando así un retrato profundamente documentado del siglo de Oro español.

Madrid, 1620. Pedro Calderón de la Barca medita sobre su futuro, cuando la casualidad le lleva a presenciar una pendencia de armas en la que se ve involucrada una dama de quien sólo contempla unos ojos que parecen pedir ayuda.

Con el pretexto de devolverle un objeto que perdió durante el incidente y el secreto deseo de librarla de una amenaza intuida, Calderón inicia una búsqueda en pos de la joven surcada de peligros.

En su periplo recibe el apadrinamiento moral de don Fernando, tutor del Condestable de Castilla y hombre de mundo; conoce a una joven prostituta que lo alienta en sus primeros pasos como poeta; se enfrenta a un enemigo implacable y sufre el acecho de un misterioso perseguidor.

En esta novela de época el argumento de algunas de las más prestigiosas obras del dramaturgo, como El alcalde de Zalamea o La dama duende, se conjuga con episodios de su vida privada, configurando así un retrato profundamente documentado del siglo de Oro español.

Alan Paterson presents Calderon's original text, from manuscript and printed sources, with a skilful verse translation into English of a remarkable play, in which Calderon develops the motif of marital honour in quite original ways. The blending of deep pathos and humour anticipates the modern theatre of the absurd, though Calderon is pushing to the limits the license gained by Lope de Vega to mingle tragedy with comedy. ~ The play incorporates important aesthetic ideas of the Renaissance on painting and the character of the artist. ~ It must be unique in seventeenth-century European in dramatising the painter as he works in his studio and meditates on his art.~ Since the play deals with the aesthetic component in human behaviour, its own aeathetic status as a verse drama had been conserved in the translation. Those with no knowledge of Spanish will find a text which is agreeable to read and to perform. The translation is close enough, however, to offer the reader of limited ability in Spanish a reliable key to the Spanish text.~

Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), one of the great dramatists of Spain's Golden Age, wrote a series of mythological spectacle plays for the Habsburg courts. Written when court spectacles were an instrument of monarchical absolutism, these later works by Calderon have often been dismissed by critics as servile flattery of the royalty or mere displays of dazzling showmanship. Margaret Rich Greer argues, however, that many of the playwright's court dramas not only explore human life and social organization, but also possess artistic unity and thematic complexity that make them landmarks in European dramatic history. Analyzing seven of these plays, she demonstrates Calderon's mastery in the integration of music, dance, elaborate scenery, and stage machinery to enhance rather than overpower his poetic text. Greer shows that by envisioning each drama in the physical setting of its performance and in the political context of its time, readers can appreciate a complex relationship of texts: intertwined with the flattering image of the splendor of royal power are a discourse relevant to common spectators and another one that is subtly critical of the policies of the king and the court.