History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

In 1651, he followed the example of Lope de Vega and other men of letters of his time, by entering a religious brotherhood; and the king two years afterwards gave him the place of chaplain in a chapel consecrated to the “New Kings” at Toledo;—a burial-place set apart for royalty, and richly endowed from the time of Henry of Trastamara. But it was found that his duties there kept him too much from the court, to whose entertainment he had become important. In 1663, therefore, he was created chaplain of honor to the king, who thus secured his regular presence at Madrid; though, at the same time, he was permitted to retain his former place, and even had a second added to it. In the same year, he became a Priest of the Congregation of Saint Peter, and soon rose to be its head; an office of some importance, which he held during the last fifteen years of his life, and exercised with great gentleness and dignity.[578]

This accumulation of religious benefices, however, did not lead him to intermit in any degree his dramatic labors. On the contrary, it was rather intended to stimulate him to further exertion; and his fame was now so great, that the cathedrals of Toledo, Granada, and Seville constantly solicited from him religious plays to be performed on the day of the Corpus Christi,—that great festival, for which, during nearly thirty-seven years, he furnished similar entertainments regularly, at the charge of the city of Madrid. For these services, as well as for his services at court, he was richly rewarded, so that he accumulated an ample fortune.

After the death of Philip the Fourth, which happened in 1665, he seems to have enjoyed less of the royal patronage. Charles the Second had a temper totally different from that of his predecessor; and Solís, the historian, speaking of Calderon, with reference to these circumstances, says pointedly, “He died without a Mæcenas.”[579] But still he continued to write as before for the public theatres, for the court, and for the churches; and retained, through his whole life, the extraordinary general popularity of his best years. He died in 1681, on the 25th of May,—the Feast of the Pentecost,—while all Spain was ringing with the performance of his autos, in the composition of one more of which he was himself occupied almost to the last moment of his life.[580]

The next day, he was borne, as his will required, without any show, to his grave in the church of San Salvador, by the Priests of the Congregation over which he had so long presided, and to which he now left the whole of his fortune. A more gorgeous funeral ceremony followed a few days later, to satisfy the claims of the popular admiration; and even at Valencia, Naples, Lisbon, Milan, and Rome, public notice was taken of his death by his countrymen, as of a national calamity.[581] A monument to his memory was soon erected in the church where he was buried; but in 1840 his remains were removed to the more splendid church of the Atocha, where they now rest.[582]

Calderon, we are told, was remarkable for his personal beauty, which he long preserved by the serenity and cheerfulness of his spirit. The engraving published soon after his death shows, at least, a strongly marked and venerable countenance, to which in fancy we may easily add the brilliant eye and gentle voice given to him by his friendly eulogist, while, in its ample and finely turned brow, we are reminded of that with which we are familiar in the portraits of our own great dramatic poet.[583] His character, throughout, seems to have been benevolent and kindly. In his old age, we learn that he used to collect his friends round him on his birthdays, and tell them amusing stories of his childhood;[584] and during the whole of the active part of his life, he enjoyed the regard of many of the distinguished persons of his time, who, like the Count Duke Olivares and the Duke of Veraguas, seem to have been attracted to him quite as much by the gentleness of his nature as by his genius and fame.

In a life thus extending to above fourscore years, nearly the whole of which was devoted to letters, Calderon produced a large number of works. Except, however, a panegyric on the Duke of Medina de Rioseco, who died in 1647, and a single volume of autos, which he printed in 1676, he published hardly any thing of what he wrote;[585] and yet, besides several longer works,[586] he prepared for the academies of which he was a member, and for the poetical festivals and joustings then so common in Spain, a great number of odes, songs, ballads, and other poems, which gave him not a little of his fame with his contemporaries.[587] His brother, indeed, printed some of his full-length dramas between 1640 and 1674;[588] but we are expressly told that Calderon himself never sent any of them to the press;[589] and even in the case of the autos, where he deviated from his established custom, he says he did it unwillingly, and only lest their sacred character should be impaired by imperfect and surreptitious publications.

For forty-five years of his life, however, the press teemed with dramatic works bearing his name on their titles. As early as 1633, they began to appear in the popular collections; but many of them were not his, and the rest were so disfigured by the imperfect manner in which they had been written down during their representations, that he says he could often hardly recognize them himself.[590] His editor and friend, Vera Tassis, gives several lists of plays, amounting in all to a hundred and fifteen, printed by the cupidity of the booksellers as Calderon’s, without having any claim whatsoever to that honor; and he adds, that many others, which Calderon had never seen, were sent from Seville to the Spanish possessions in America.[591]

By means like these, the confusion became at last so great, that the Duke of Veraguas, then the honored head of the family of Columbus, and Captain-general of the kingdom of Valencia, wrote a letter to Calderon in 1680, asking for a list of his dramas, by which, as a friend and admirer, he might venture to make a collection of them for himself. The reply of the poet, complaining bitterly of the conduct of the booksellers which had made such a request necessary, is accompanied by a list of one hundred and eleven full-length dramas and seventy sacramental autos which he claims as his own.[592] This catalogue constitutes the proper basis for a knowledge of Calderon’s dramatic works, down to the present day. All the plays mentioned in it have not, indeed, been found. Nine are not in the editions of Vera Tassis, in 1682, and of Apontes, in 1760; but, on the other hand, a few not in Calderon’s list have been added to theirs upon what has seemed sufficient authority; so that we have now seventy-three sacramental autos, with their introductory loas,[593] and one hundred and eight comedias, on which his reputation as a dramatic poet is hereafter to rest.[594]

In examining this large mass of Calderon’s dramatic works, it will be most convenient to take first, and by themselves, those which are quite distinct from the rest, and which alone he thought worthy of his care in publication,—his autos or dramas for the Corpus Christi day. Nor are they undeserving of this separate notice. There is little in the dramatic literature of any nation more characteristic of the people that produced it than this department of the Spanish theatre; and among the many poets who devoted themselves to it, none had such success as Calderon.

Of the early character and condition of the autos and their connection with the Church we have already spoken, when noticing Juan de la Enzina, Gil Vicente, Lope de Vega, and Valdivielso. They were, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, among the favorite amusements of the mass of the people; but at the period at which we are now arrived, they had gradually risen to be of great importance. That they were spread through the whole country, even into the small villages, we may see in the Travels of Augustin Roxas,[595] and in the Second Part of Don Quixote, where the mad knight is represented as meeting a car that was carrying the actors for the Festival of the Sacrament from one hamlet to another.[596] This, it will be remembered, was all before 1615. During the next thirty years, and especially during the last portion of Calderon’s life, the number and consequence of the autos were much increased, and they were represented with great luxury and at great expense in the streets of all the larger cities;—so important were they deemed to the influence of the clergy, and so attractive had they become to all classes of society; to the noble and the cultivated no less than to the multitude.