Playing Calderón: Tracing a Play's Receptive Frame

At the opening of a play, the playwright focuses attention by delimiting a spectator's field of reception and in so doing channels response in the direction projected. Tracing the play's receptive frame, therefore, is of primary importance in any interpretative initiative, as much for performance as for criticism.

There are, of course, countless ways of involving the spectator, but a favoured one among seventeenth-century European dramatists worked much as a musical overture does: it draws the broad lines of plot development in a compressed and impressionistic manner. Take the opening of Macbeth and the account of the battle against traitors and intruders: it suggests the end of all such enterprise and in so doing elevates the figure of Macbeth to the heights of military hero and loyal subject from which he will fall. In this study, I have traced the receptive frame in three well-known plays by Calderón, and have considered the interpretative direction suggested.