Here and elsewhere, to all for all.
Prince.
Depart
In peace.
Juan.
In peace! Come, Leonelo."
Similar motives are used by Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, both priests and grey-beards; but the effect is more emphatic in Calderón, and so early as 1683 his "immorality" was severely censured on the occasion of Manuel de Guerra y Ribera's eulogistic aprobación. In this matter, as in most others, he is satisfied to follow and to exaggerate an existing convention. His heroes are untouched by Othello's sublime jealousy: they kill their victims in cold blood as something due to the self-respect of gentlemen placed in an absurd position. He rehandles the theme in Á Secreto Agravio Secreta Venganza and in El Médico de su Honra; but the right emotion is rarely felt by the reader, since Calderón himself is seldom fired by real passion, and writes his scene as a splendid exercise in literature.
His genius is most visible in his autos sacramentales, a dramatic form peculiar to Spain. The word auto is first applied to any and every play; then, the meaning becoming narrower, an auto is a religious play, resembling the mediæval Mysteries (Gil Vicente's Auto de San Martinho is probably the earliest piece of this type). Finally, a far more special sense is developed, and an auto sacramental comes to mean a dramatised exposition of the Mystery of the Blessed Eucharist, to be played in the open on Corpus Christi Day. The Dutch traveller, Frans van Aarssens van Sommelsdijk, has left an account of the spectacle as he saw it when Calderón was in his prime. Borne in procession through the city, the Host was followed by sovereigns, courtiers, and the multitude, with artificial giants and pasteboard monsters—tarascas—at their head. Fifers, bandsmen, dancers of decorous measures accompanied the train to the cathedral. In the afternoon the assembly met in the public square, and the auto was played before the King, who sat beneath a canopy, the richer public, which lined the balconies, and the general, which filled the road. Even for an educated Protestant nothing is easier than to confound an auto sacramental with a comedia devota or a comedia de santos: thus Bouterwek, in his History, and Longfellow, in his Outre-Mer, have mistaken the Devoción de la Cruz for an auto. The distinction is radical. The true auto has no secondary interest, has no mundane personages: its one subject is the Eucharistic Mystery exposed by allegorical characters. Denis Florence M'Carthy's version of Los Encantos de la Culpa (The Sorceries of Sin) enables English readers to judge the genre for themselves:—
Sin.