Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Pedro Calderón de la Barca was the last great dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, soldier, courtier and, from his fifties, priest, who wrote some hundred and twenty plays and eighty autos sacramentales, the allegorical pieces performed on Corpus Christi. Life Is a Dream, in which a prince imprisoned from birth is released for a day and cannot tell waking from sleep, is the most philosophical play of its century and the one that Schopenhauer, Shelley and the German Romantics translated and revered. He succeeded Lope de Vega as the king’s playwright and outlived the theatre he had served.