Mr. Ticknor (Hist. of Span. Lit., ii. 351, note) says: “It seems probable that Calderon wrote no plays expressly for the public stage after he became a priest in 1651, confining himself to autos and to comedias for the court, which last, however, were at once transferred to the theatres of the capital.”
For nearly thirty-seven years he furnished Madrid, Toledo, Granada, and Seville with autos, and devoted to them all the energies of his matured mind.
Solis, the historian, in one of his letters says: “Our friend Don Pedro Calderon is just dead, and went off, as they say the swan does, singing; for he did all he could, even when he was in immediate danger, to finish the second auto for Corpus Christi.
“But, after all, he completed only a little more than half of it, and it has been finished in some way or other by Don Melchior de Leon.”
Calderon evidently based his claim for recognition as a great poet on his autos; of all his plays he deemed them alone worthy of his revision for publication, and he would now without doubt be judged by them, had not the spirit in which and for which they were written passed away, to a great extent, with the author.
Before we examine his autos in detail we must notice some of their most striking peculiarities, and see in what respect they differ from plays on religious subjects.
The intensely religious character of the Spaniards led, at an early date, to their consecrating to religion every form of literature; and plays based on the lives of the saints, miracles of the Blessed Virgin, etc., are very common.
Almost every prominent doctrine of the church is illustrated in the dramas of Lope de Vega and Calderon.
Their plays differ not at all in form from those of a purely secular character; they are all in three acts, in verse.
The autos, on the other hand, are restricted to the celebration of one doctrine—that of Transubstantiation; consist of but one act (that one, however, nearly equal in length to the three of many secular plays); and were performed on but one solemn occasion—the festival of Corpus Christi.