Playing for Time and Playing with Time in Calderón's Eco y Narciso

The treatment of time in Calderón's Eco y Narciso combines diachrony with synchrony in terms of theme, plot, and structure. In addition, Calderón's use of Ovid's Metamorphoses as the source of his myth play posits an excursion into the ways that intertextual echoes of past works affect a seventeenth-century text. The fragments of the pastoral, the zarzuela, literary romance, and other works by Calderón himself, all woven into the fabric of Eco y Narciso, offer a rich interplay of the notions of literary time, literary transformation, and artistic creation. Diachronie and synchronic time fuse in this dramatic text, producing a type of spiral that simultaneously looks back upon the past and points ahead to the future, while it addresses the concerns and realities of the Spanish court and nation in the waning days of the reign of Philip IV.