The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of La vida es sueno

This volume testifies to the stature of Frederick A. de Armas, who in 1990 was able to bring together some of the most highly regarded comedia scholars for a symposium exploring recent critical developments on Calderón’s La vida es sueño. The Prince in the Tower contains a number of the papers presented on that occasion, revised for publication. Several of the essays published here should not be overlooked by anyone who would investigate or teach the most renowned play in the Spanish language.

One ought to begin with de Armas’s piece, and not just because it serves as the preface to the other studies. This critic muses over what he characterizes as Calderón’s conscious debt to and rebellion against the comedia nueva founded by Lope. Commencing with the significance to both dramatists of the word “hipogrifo” (Lope condemned it, and Calderón’s use of it to open La vida es sueño is a direct challenge), de Armas delineates a series of correspondences, based on the fundamental mythological paradigm of the generational conflict between the Father (Saturn) and the Son (Jupiter).

“With the aid of Rosaura/Astraea,” de Armas writes, “Segismundo/Jupiter/ Calderón struggles with the father (Basilio/Saturn/Lope)” (p. 5). However, while grappling with their “melancholy of influence,” Segismundo and Calderón (if not Jupiter and Harold Bloom) are eventually able to transcend the animosity, so that while challenging their progenitors, both protagonist and playwright finally extend to them an olive branch and tribute. De Armas sees La vida es sueño as granting fresh and distinctive life to the comedia nueva. Similarly, he suggests that the essays in this volume can be considered simultaneously to build on and diverge from earlier views of the play.

While acknowledging that critical theory is always on the move, Javier Herrero justifies the structural analysis of the text as a necessary first step in literary interpretation. Before one can apply political, social, psychological, or any other type of interested criticism to the work, one must determine what the text says; it must be recognized as a literary creation. Herrero goes on to perform a virtuoso appraisal of Rosaura’s speech when she first encounters Segismundo’s tower early in the play (“¿No es breve luz aquella/ caduca exhalación . . . ?” [lines 85–86]). Herrero shows that her particular phrasing of the lightness/darkness imagery originates in Genesis, and is a configuration consistent across Calderón’s opus. It connotes the basic “model of all human experience” (p. 189), the conflict of good and evil.

The sudden and violent demise of the clown has always been a rich source of critical conjecture. In “Death as a Laughing Matter” (pp. 79–87), Teresa Scott Soufas complements Bakhtin with Terry Eagleton to achieve a new understanding of the occurrence. “Clarín’s death,” she writes, “becomes the significant event linked to the process of picking the king’s replacement and answering the demands of the populace” (p. 80). Normally in monarchy the issue of succession to the throne is not truly resolved until after the king’s passing. Here, the period of uncertainty is eliminated, thanks to Clarín’s “unplanned proxy for the king through death” (p. 86). Invaluable service of the clown to the realm notwithstanding, this comedia can be characterized as slightly subversive in that representatives of the general public (among them those who free Segismundo from the tower in Act Three and fight in the civil war) participate in determining succession to the throne.

Henry W. Sullivan’s Lacanian discussion of the comedia is likewise enlightening. For Freud, Lacan, and Calderón, the dream is of great importance, but needs to be deciphered. Sullivan points out that the pregnant Queen’s nightmare foretelling catastrophe preceded Basilio’s astrological forecast. Therefore, “it is not the astrological prophecy . . . that gives rise to the dire predictions concerning Segismundo’s future career, but an...