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• W1540340705 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeDon W. Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón Don Pedro Calderón. Don W. Cruickshank. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. vii+471.Margaret GreerMargaret GreerDuke University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreStudents and scholars of Spanish classical theater can be grateful that Don W. Cruickshank took on what he describes as the “daunting task” (xiii) of producing a biography of Pedro Calderón de la Barca; he has accomplished that task admirably. Calderón’s long life (1600–1681) and large output, along with the difficulties of securing reliable texts, have repeatedly frustrated the ambitions of his editors and biographers, from Don Juan de Vera Tassis and Cristóbal Pérez Pastor to the present, as Cruickshank observes. Pérez Pastor promised a second volume of his Documentos para la biografía de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Madrid: Fortanet, 1905), and Emilio Cotarelo y Mori planned to complement his Ensayo sobre la vida y obras de D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Madrid: Tip. de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1924) with three more volumes, but neither of their important contributions to Calderón scholarship ever advanced beyond the first volume. Cruickshank dedicates his biography to his mentor, Edward Meryon Wilson, whose two-chapter typescript of a planned Calderón biography he inherited.Cruickshank, in contrast, clearly states the limits of his biography as centered on Calderón’s secular career to 1650, before he began his path to the priesthood. He does include attention to some autos, however, particularly those linked to current events or for which there is reliable dating. Cruickshank describes his study as “an old-fashioned, traditional biography” (xv), one that sets Calderón’s life and works in their political and cultural context, in chronological order. He also sets—and meets—the goal of giving readers a sense of what Calderón’s world and works looked like, with a generous set of illustrations that includes pictures of the Calderón ancestral home and coat of arms and of his house in Madrid, portraits of royalty and other personages in his life, multiple samples of his handwriting, a simplified Calderón family tree, contemporary paintings of Madrid, and portraits of Calderón. He includes Velázquez’s painting Caballero desconocido (1640s?) and weighs the evidence for and against identifying it as a portrait of the playwright. A crucial advance beyond other Calderón biographies is Cruickshank’s thirty-seven-page, well-designed indexing, with a section listing titles of all plays and autos mentioned in the volume, including lost titles, works written in collaboration or attributed to Calderón, and a generous subject index, encompassing even such categories as characters’ names and streets.The seventeen chapters of the biography do indeed treat the stages of Calderón’s life in order but enrich the narrative by weaving around them without chronological constraint references to his works and those of other authors. For example, in the opening chapter that succinctly paints the history, architecture, climate, rapid growth, economic disparity, and even the stench of Madrid in 1600, he quotes Góngora’s and Lope’s jokes about the disproportion between the Manzanares river and the Juan de Herrera bridge that dwarfed it, as well as a joke Calderón inserted in Fuego de Dios en el querer bien (1640–42?). He relates references to marriage and social class in El alcalde de Zalamea and El agua mansa to Calderón’s hidalgo grandfather’s marriage into a well-to-do artisan family of Toledo sword smiths in his account of the dramatist’s family background in chapter 2, which also contextualizes the position of civil servants like the poet’s father and grandfather in a growing Madrid bureaucracy from the latter years of Philip II’s reign through that of Philip III and the Duke of Lerma.Cruickshank concisely summarizes each play he treats, citing brief passages that transmit its flavor and adding accurate, often witty, English translations of them. He weighs historical, performative, thematic, and bibliographic evidence for dating each play, while cautioning against reckoning their chronology on Calderón’s frequent reuse of motifs, or over-reliance on Harry W. Hilborn’s versification-based dates (A Chronology of the Plays of D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca [University of Toronto Press, 1938]). He dispels confusion resulting from Calderón’s revision of plays and reworking of plots (his own and those of others). Cruickshank also calls attention to Calderón’s multiple sources, historical, biblical, and literary, noting particularly his allusions to Cervantes and Góngora and his debts to Lope, Tirso, Alarcón, Pérez de Montalban, and many other Spanish playwrights, and cites the English, Italian, and French plays Calderón’s works inspired. Cruickshank’s thorough knowledge of the material aspects of Calderón’s production—from the evolution of his handwriting to the publication of his plays, whether in authorized Partes or pirated suelta versions—further enriches this study.One cannot do justice to the wealth of information in this biography in a relatively brief review. Cruickshank combines analysis of available documentation—from Vera Tassis, Gaspar Agustín de Lara, Pérez Pastor, Cotarelo, a wide range of other scholars, and his own archival research—with balanced interpretation of the story that documentation can and cannot tell us about his life and works. The forty-page bibliography itself testifies to the breadth and depth of his reading and ample notes reflect his generosity in crediting other theater scholars and historians. Furthermore, he intertwines the account of fifty years of Calderón’s life with that of relevant events and trends in Spanish and European political history. For example, he notes that the cost of the war in Flanders nearly doubled receipts from the Indies in the same years, and he underlines the dissonance between lavish court celebrations and the deepening crisis of the late 1630s and war in the 1640s. Cruickshank recounts in detail the process and economics of Calderón’s receipt of a knighthood of Santiago and his and his brother José’s military service in Cataluña in the 1640s, a “traumatic decade” (282) of personal losses for Calderón as well as for the Spanish monarchy.What follows, therefore, is only a sampling of the assessments that I personally found most interesting or significant. Cruickshank documents the enduring effects that poor financial management by Calderón’s father had on his family and connects the poet’s production rate over the decades to his need for money. He augments A. A. Parker’s evidence (“The Father-Son Conflict in the Drama of Calderón,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 2 [1966]: 99–113) of Calderón’s repeated dramatization of paternal decisions that destroy their offsprings’ lives, while questioning the probability of incestuous attraction between his sister and illegitimate half brother. Calderón, he shows us, was stubborn and sometimes hotheaded but also endowed with a keen intelligence, a lively sense of humor, and a capacity for self-mockery. Frequent Calderón themes that Cruickshank distinguishes include generosity to military and religious enemies; favorable portrayal of queens and strong, independent-minded women; failures of honor-obsessed brothers; and the need for self-restraint by those in power. He crafted plays that could include praise of the king and his privado or that could suggest constructive criticism without seeming disloyal. His interest in painting was evidenced in his valuable personal collections as well as in many plays.Calderón scored early success with situation comedies, a model he repeated even after 1650, while experimenting with other play structures and responding to changing political circumstances and royal tastes, Cruickshank observes. Beginning with La cisma de Inglaterra, he sometimes allowed audience knowledge of history to ironically contradict characters’ understanding of events. Despite his awareness of Aristotelian unity of time, the playwright consciously disregarded it to tell religious stories and would sacrifice verisimilitude to make a moral point.Cruickshank documents Calderón’s regular connections with theater company owners and his assignation of roles to particular actors in his manuscript cast lists, even giving some nonsinging male roles to actresses. Cruickshank speculates that the cuarta dama identified only as “Doña Beatriz” in Calderón’s cast list for Troya abrasada, as the rare hidalga in the theater, might have been the kind of woman with whom Calderón had a son (270). Records published in DICAT (Diccionario biográfico de actores del teatro clásico español, ed. Teresa Ferrer Valls [Kassel: Reichenberger, 2008]) suggest that she was Beatríz de Arévalo, married to an actor, José de Reinoso, with whom she had two children.That Cruickshank could illuminate Calderón’s later, more court-spectacle- centered career is evident in his interesting deliberations on Calderón’s techniques for staging supernatural visions, particularly when the “visions” are live actors supposedly seen in a mirror, as in La púrpura de la rosa (1660). Noting that technology did not allow for the production of a large piece of glass, he suggests the use of a frame that imitated a mirror, creating an upstage scene within a scene, like Velázquez’s Las hilanderas. He also relates Calderón’s staging in Las fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo (1653) to Titian’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold and quickly reviews the types of plays Calderón wrote in his last decades. I am aware that there was an informal agreement that a colleague would do a second, post-1650 volume, but that has not materialized. We can hope, therefore, that Cruickshank himself might find the time, energy, and editorial support to write a second volume that would join this one as an essential reference for every serious scholar of early modern Spanish theater, and a good read. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 4May 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/669494 Views: 357Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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