Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on texts and notes
- Introduction
- 1 La vida es sueño: Calderón's idea of a theatre
- 2 La dama duende
- 3 Calderón and Tirso: El galán fantasma
- 4 El secreto a voces: language and social illusion
- 5 Toward tragedy
- 6 El médico de su honra
- 7 Herod and Hercules: theatrical space and the body
- 8 El mágico prodigioso and the theatre of alchemy
- 9 The illusions of history
- 10 Authority and illusion: En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira
- 11 The use of myth: Eco y Narciso
- 12 Prometheus and the theatre of the mind
- 13 Calderón's last play: the comedia as technology and romance
- Notes
- Index
11 - The use of myth: Eco y Narciso
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on texts and notes
- Introduction
- 1 La vida es sueño: Calderón's idea of a theatre
- 2 La dama duende
- 3 Calderón and Tirso: El galán fantasma
- 4 El secreto a voces: language and social illusion
- 5 Toward tragedy
- 6 El médico de su honra
- 7 Herod and Hercules: theatrical space and the body
- 8 El mágico prodigioso and the theatre of alchemy
- 9 The illusions of history
- 10 Authority and illusion: En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira
- 11 The use of myth: Eco y Narciso
- 12 Prometheus and the theatre of the mind
- 13 Calderón's last play: the comedia as technology and romance
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the Palace of the Buen Retiro, in the Coliseum, a play was performed in May for the birthday of the Queen. The author was Calderón. The play used the most extraordinarily elaborate costumes, scenery, and effects ever seen in the theatre. The set changed seven times! There were lights for illumination! The production lasted a full seven hours! First, the Monarchs saw it, then the second day the Councils of Government, then the third the people of Madrid. And it ran for 37 days more, the longest run ever in Madrid.
Such was one journalist's account, in the Anales de Madrid for 1652, of Calderón's Lafiera, el rayo,y lapiedra, a mythological extravaganza. It could have been any of Calderón's mythological showpieces. The exuberance, the massive attention to detail, the sheer weight of theatrical effect are remarkable. Only Broadway, Hollywood, or the Lido can provide any points of comparison. Indeed, Valbuena Prat said that Calderón's mythological plays were the genre “most akin to current tastes and sensibilities.” They are artificial, and shamelessly so, “the merest and purest artifice,” the elevation of artifice itself to its own subject matter, as one critic put it. They are virtuoso pieces of artificiality. Conventional in every way, they are brilliant crystallizations of Calderón's theatrical showmanship. They sustain an illusion that is so elaborate that it becomes, necessarily, self-conscious. Indeed, they are so artificial that even when they falter they come crashing down awash with brilliance.
Looked at from the point of view of action, motivation, or characterization, these plays are anomalous.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón , pp. 130 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984