CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA, PEDRO (1600-1681), Spanish dramatist and poet, was born at Madrid on the 17th of January 1600. His mother, who was of Flemish descent, died in 1610; his father, who was secretary to the treasury, died in 1615. Calderón was educated at the Jesuit College in Madrid with a view to taking orders and accepting a family living; abandoning this project, he studied law at Salamanca, and competed with success at the literary fêtes held in honour of St Isaidore at Madrid (1620-1632). According to his biographer, Vera Tassis, Calderón served with the Spanish army in Italy and Flanders between 1625 and 1635; but this statement is contradicted by numerous legal documents which prove that Calderón resided at Madrid during these years. Early in 1629 his brother Diego was stabbed by an actor who took sanctuary in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns; Calderón and his friends broke into the cloister and attempted to seize the offender. This violation was denounced by the fashionable preacher, Hortensio Félix Paravicino (q.v.), in a sermon preached before Philip IV.;
Calderón retorted by introducing into El Príncipe constante a mocking reference (afterwards cancelled) to Paravicino's gongoristic verbiage, and was committed to prison. He was soon released, grew rapidly in reputation as a playwright, and, on the death of Lope de Vega in 1635, was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. A volume of his plays, edited by his brother José in 1636, contains such celebrated and diverse productions as La Vida es sueño, El Purgatorío de San Patricia, La Devoción de la cruz, La Dama duende and Peor está que estaba. In 1636-1637 he was made a knight of the order of Santiago by Philip IV., who had already commissioned from him a series of spectacular plays for the royal theatre in the Buen Retiro. Calderón was almost as popular with the general public as Lope de Vega had been in his zenith; he was, moreover, in high favour at court, but this royal patronage did not help to develop the finer elements of his genius. On the 28th of May 1640 he joined a company of mounted cuirassiers recently raised by Olivares, took part in the Catalonian campaign, and distinguished himself by his gallantry at Tarragona; his health failing, he retired from the army in November 1642, and three years later was awarded a special military pension in recognition of his services in the field. The history of his life during the next few years is obscure. He appears to have been profoundly affected by the death of his mistress—the mother of his son Pedro José—about the year 1648-1649; his long connexion with the theatre had led him into temptations, but it had not diminished his instinctive spirit of devotion, and he now sought consolation in religion. He became a tertiary of the order of St Francis in 1650, and finally reverted to his original intention of joining the priesthood. He was ordained in 1651, was presented to a living in the parish of San Salvador at Madrid, and, according to his statement made a year or two later, determined to give up writing for the stage. He did not adhere to this resolution after his preferment to a prebend at Toledo in 1653, though he confined himself as much as possible to the composition of autos sacramentales—allegorical pieces in which the mystery of the Eucharist was illustrated dramatically, and which were performed with great pomp on the feast of Corpus Christi and during the weeks immediately ensuing. In 1662 two of Calderón's autos—Las órdenes militares and Místicay real Babilonia—were the subjects of an inquiry by the Inquisition; the former was censured, the manuscript copies were confiscated, and the condemnation was not rescinded till 1671. Calderón was appointed honorary chaplain to Philip IV, in 1663, and the royal favour was continued to him in the next reign. In his eighty-first year he wrote his last secular play, Hado y Divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, in honour of Charles II.'s marriage to Marie-Louise de Bourbon. Notwithstanding his position at court and his universal popularity throughout Spain, his closing years seem to have been passed in poverty. He died on the 25th of May 1681.
Like most Spanish dramatists, Calderón wrote too much and too speedily, and he was too often content to recast the productions of his predecessors. His Saber del mal y del bien is an adaptation of Lope de Vega's play, Las Mudanzas de la fortuna y sucesos de Don Beltran de Aragón; his Selva confusa is also adapted from a play of Lope's which bears the same title; his Encanto sin encanto derives from Tirso de Molina's Amar par señas, and, to take an extreme instance, the second act of his Cabellos de Absalón is transferred almost bodily from the third act of Tirso's Venganza de Tamar. It would be easy to add other examples of Calderón's lax methods, but it is simple justice to point out that he committed no offence against the prevailing code of literary morality. Many of his contemporaries plagiarized with equal audacity, but with far less success. Sometimes, as in El Alcalde de Zalamea, the bold procedure is completely justified by the result; in this case by his individual treatment he transforms one of Lope de Vega's rapid improvisations into a finished masterpiece. It was not given to him to initiate a great dramatic movement; he came at the end of a literary revolution, was compelled to accept the conventions which Lope de Vega had imposed on the Spanish stage, and he accepted them all the more readily since they were peculiarly suitable to the display of his splendid and varied gifts. Not a master of observation nor an expert in invention, he showed an unexampled skill in contriving ingenious variants on existing themes; he had a keen dramatic sense, an unrivalled dexterity in manipulating the mechanical resources of the stage, and in addition to these minor indispensable talents he was endowed with a lofty philosophic imagination and a wealth of poetic diction. Naturally, he had the defects of his great qualities; his ingenuity is apt to degenerate into futile embellishment; his employment of theatrical devices is the subject of his own good-humoured satire in No hay burlas con el amor; his philosophic intellect is more interested in theological mysteries than in human passions; and the delicate beauty of his style is tinged with a wilful preciosity. Excelling Lope de Vega at many points, Calderón falls below his great predecessor in the delineation of character. Yet in almost every department of dramatic art Calderón has obtained a series of triumphs. In the symbolic drama he is best represented by El Principe constante, by El Mágico prodigioso (familiar to English readers in Shelley's free translation), and by La Vida es sueño, perhaps the most profound and original of his works. His tragedies are more remarkable for their acting qualities than for their convincing truth, and the fact that in La Niña de Gomez Arias he interpolates an entire act borrowed from Velez de Guevara's play of the same title seems to indicate that this kind of composition awakened no great interest in him; but in El Médico de sa honra and El Mayor monstruo los celos the theme of jealousy is handled with sombre power, while El Alcalde de Zalamea is one of the greatest tragedies in Spanish literature. Calderón is seen to much less advantage in the spectacular plays—dramas de tramoya—which he wrote at the command of Philip IV.; the dramatist is subordinated to the stage-carpenter, but the graceful fancy of the poet preserves even such a mediocre piece as Los Tres Mayores prodigies (which won him his knighthood) from complete oblivion. A greater opportunity is afforded in the more animated comedias palaciegas, or melodramatic pieces destined to be played before courtly audiences in the royal palace: La Banda y la flor and El Galán fantasma are charming illustrations of Calderón's genial conception and refined artistry. His historical plays (La Gran Cenobia, Las armas de la hermosura, &c.) are the weakest of all his formal dramatic productions; El Golfo de la sirenas and La Púrpura de la rosa are typical zarzuelas, to be judged by the standard of operatic libretti, and the entremeses are lacking in the lively humour which should characterize these dramatic interludes. On the other hand, Calderón's faculty of ingenious stagecraft is seen at its best in his "cloak-and-sword" plays (comedias de capa y espada) which are invaluable pictures of contemporary society. They are conventional, no doubt, in the sense that all representations of a specially artificial society must be conventional; but they are true to life, and are still as interesting as when they first appeared. In this kind No siempre lo peor es cierto, La Dama duende, Una casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar and Guárdate del agua mansa are almost unsurpassed. But it is as a writer of autos sacramentales that Calderón defies rivalry: his intense devotion, his subtle intelligence, his sublime lyrism all combine to produce such marvels of allegorical poetry as La Cena del rey Baltasar, La Viña del Senor and La Serpiente de metal. The autos lingered on in Spain till 1765, but they may be said to have died with Calderón, for his successors merely imitated him with a tedious fidelity. Almost alone among Spanish poets, Calderón had the good fortune to be printed in a fairly correct and readable edition (1682-1691), thanks to the enlightened zeal of his admirer, Juan de Vera Tassis y Villaroel, and owing to this happy accident he came to be regarded generally as the first of Spanish dramatists. The publication of the plays of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina has affected the critical estimate of Calderón's work; he is seen to be inferior to Lope de Vega in creative power, and inferior to Tirso de Molina in variety of conception. But, setting aside the extravagances of his admirers, he is admittedly an exquisite poet, an expert in the dramatic form, and a typical representative of the
devout, chivalrous, patriotic and artificial society in which he moved.
Bibliography.—H. Breymann, Calderon-Studien (München and Berlin, 1905), i. Teil, contains a fairly exhaustive list of editions, translations and arrangements; Autos sacramentales (Madrid, 1759-1760, 6 vols.), edited by Juan Fernandez de Apontes; Comedias (Madrid, 1848-1850, 4 vols.), edited by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbuch; Max Krenkel, Klassische Buhnendichtungen der Spanier, containing La Vida es sueño, El mágico prodigioso and El Alcalde de Zalamca (Leipzig, 1881-1887, 3 vols.); Teatro selecto (Madrid, 1884, 4 vols.), edited by M. Menéndez y Pelayo; El Mágico prodigioso (Heilbronn, 1877), edited by Alfred Morel-Fatio; Select Plays of Calderón (London, 1888), edited by Norman MacColl; F.W.V. Schmidt, Die Schauspiele Calderon's (Elberfeld, 1857); E. Günthner, Calderon und seine Werke (Freiburg i. B., 1888, 2 vols.); Felipe Picatoste y Rodriguez, Biografia de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca in Homenage á Calderón (Madrid, 1881); Antonio Sánchez Moguel, Memoria acerca de "El Mágico prodigioso" (Madrid, 1881); M. Menéndez y Pelayo, Calderón y su teatro (Madrid, 1881); Ernest Martinenche, La Comedia espagnole en France de Hardy á Racine (Paris, 1900).
(J. F.-K.)
CALDERWOOD, DAVID (1575-1650), Scottish divine and historian, was born in 1575. He was educated at Edinburgh, where he took the degree of M.A. in 1593. About 1604 he became minister of Crailing, near Jedburgh, where he became conspicuous for his resolute opposition to the introduction of Episcopacy. In 1617, while James was in Scotland, a Remonstrance, which had been drawn up by the Presbyterian clergy, was placed in Calderwood's hands. He was summoned to St Andrews and examined before the king, but neither threats nor promises could make him deliver up the roll of signatures to the Remonstrance. He was deprived of his charge, committed to prison at St Andrews and afterwards removed to Edinburgh. The privy council ordered him to be banished from the kingdom for refusing to acknowledge the sentence of the High Commission. He lingered in Scotland, publishing a few tracts, till the 27th of August 1619, when he sailed for Holland. During his residence in Holland he published his Altare Damascenum. Calderwood appears to have returned to Scotland in 1624, and he was soon afterwards appointed minister of Pencaitland, in the county of Haddington. He continued to take an active part in the affairs of the church, and introduced in 1649 the practice, now confirmed by long usage, of dissenting from the decision of the Assembly, and requiring the protest to be entered in the record. His last years were devoted to the preparation of a History of the Church of Scotland. In 1648 the General Assembly urged him to complete the work he had designed, and voted him a yearly pension of £800. He left behind him a historical work of great extent and of great value as a storehouse of authentic materials for history. An abridgment, which appears to have been prepared by himself, was published after his death. An excellent edition of the complete work was published by the Wodrow Society, 8 vols., 1842-1849. The manuscript, which belonged to General Calderwood Durham, was presented to the British Museum. Calderwood died at Jedburgh on the 29th of October 1650.
CALDERWOOD, HENRY (1830-1897), Scottish philosopher and divine, was born at Peebles on the 10th of May 1830. He was educated at the Royal High school, and later at the university of Edinburgh. He studied for the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church, and in 1856 was ordained pastor of the Greyfriars church, Glasgow. He also examined in mental philosophy for the university of Glasgow from 1861 to 1864, and from 1866 conducted the moral philosophy classes at that university, until in 1868 he became professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh. He was made LL.D. of Glasgow in 1865. He died on the 19th of November 1897. His first and most famous work was The Philosophy of the Infinite (1854), in which he attacked the statement of Sir William Hamilton that we can have no knowledge of the Infinite. Calderwood maintained that such knowledge, though imperfect, is real and ever-increasing; that Faith implies Knowledge. His moral philosophy is in direct antagonism to Hegelian doctrine, and endeavours to substantiate the doctrine of divine sanction. Beside the data of experience, the mind has pure activity of its own whereby it apprehends the fundamental realities of life and combat. He wrote in addition A Handbook of Moral Philosophy, On the Relations of Mind and Brain, Science and Religion, The Evolution of Man's Place in Nature. Among his religious works the best-known is his Parables of Our Lord, and just before his death he finished a Life of David Hume in the "Famous Scots" series. His interests were not confined to religious and intellectual matters; as the first chairman of the Edinburgh school board, he worked hard to bring the Education Act into working order. He published a well-known treatise on education. In the cause of philanthropy and temperance he was indefatigable. In politics he was at first a Liberal, but became a Liberal Unionist at the time of the Home Rule Bill.
A biography of Calderwood was published in 1900 by his son W.C. Calderwood and the Rev. David Woodside, with a special chapter on his philosophy by Professor A.S. Pringle-Pattison.
CALEB (Heb. kēleb, "dog"), in the Bible, one of the spies sent by Moses from Kadesh in South Palestine to spy out the land of Canaan. For his courage and confidence he alone was rewarded by the promise that he and his seed should obtain a possession in it (Num. xiii. seq.). The later tradition includes Joshua, the hero of the conquest of the land. Subsequently Caleb settled in Kirjath-Arba (Hebron), but the account of the occupation is variously recorded. Thus (a) Caleb by himself drove out the Anakites, giants of Hebron, and promised to give his daughter Achsah to the hero who could take Kirjath-Sepher (Debir). This was accomplished by Othniel, the brother of Caleb (Josh. xv. 14-19). Both are "sons" of Kenaz, and Kenaz is an Edomite clan (Gen. xxxvi. 11, 15, 42). Elsewhere (b) Caleb the Kenizzite reminds Joshua of the promise at Kadesh; he asks that he may have the "mountain whereof Yahweh spake," and hopes to drive out the giants from its midst. Joshua blesses him and thus Hebron becomes the inheritance of Caleb (Josh. xiv. 6-15). Further (c) the capture of Hebron and Debir is ascribed to Judah who gives them to Caleb (Judg. i. 10 seq. 20); and finally (d) these cities are taken by Joshua himself in the course of a great and successful campaign against South Canaan (Josh. x. 36-39). Primarily the clan Caleb was settled in the south of Judah but formed an independent unit (i Sam. xxv., xxx. 14). Its seat was at Carmel, and Abigail, the wife of the Calebite Nabal, was taken by David after her husband's death. Not until later are the small divisions of the south united under the name Judah, and this result is reflected in the genealogies where the brothers Caleb and Jerahmeel are called "sons of Hezron" (the name typifies nomadic life) and become descendants of Judah.