Pedro+Calderón+de+la+Barca

In 1635, Calderón was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. Calderón had also gained considerable favor in the court, and 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 newly built Buen Retiro palace. Calderón tended to write his plays taking special care about their dramatic structure. He usually reduced the number of scenes in his plays if compared to those of Lope de Vega, so as to avoid any superfluous one and present only those essential to the play, also reducing the number of different meters in his plays for the sake of gaining greater style uniformity. Although his poetry and plays leaned towards the culteranismo, he usually reduced the level and obscurity of that style by avoiding metaphors and references away from those that uneducated viewers could understand. However, he had a like for symbolism, for example making a fall from a horse a metaphor of a fall into disgrace, the fall representing dishonor; the use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of the play as a way of making false predictions about the following to occur, symbolizing the utter uncertainty of future. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Calderon_de_la_Barca)
 * Pedro Calderón de la Barca** (17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681): Calderón was a Roman Catholic priest, writer, poet and dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age. He is regarded as one of Spain's foremost dramatists and one of the finest playwrights of world literature. Calderón wrote more than 70 plays, the majority of which were secular dramas written for the commercial theatres.



portrait of Pedro Calderón de la Barcaa (Source: [] )

▪ El médico de su honra (The Surgeon of his Honour) ▪ La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) ▪ El Alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea) ▪ La Dama duende (The Phantom Lady) ▪ Casa con dos puertas (The House with Two Doors) ▪ El Mágico prodigioso (The Mighty Magician) ▪ La Devoción de la Cruz (Devotion to the Cross) ▪ El Gran Teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World) ▪ El Gran Mercado del mundo (The World is a Fair) ▪ El Pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonour) ▪ El Prodigio de Alemania (The Prodigy of Germany) (in collaboration with Antonio Coello) (Source: [] )
 * List of Plays:**

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc49.html http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/89287/Pedro-Calderon-de-la-Barca http://www.theatrehistory.com/spanish/calderon001.html http://www.nndb.com/people/877/000107556/
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