Approaches to the Theater of Calderón (review)

BOOK REVIEWS McGAHA, MICHAEL D., ed. Approaches to the Theater of Calderón. Washington, D.C: University Press of America, 1982. Paper. 287 pp. $11.25. This collection of nineteen papers is a very worthy tribute to the dramatist on the occasion of the tercentenary of his death. They are nearly all of the highest scholarly scrupulousness, and they nearly all constitute measurable advances in the study of Calderonian texts and topics. The volume begins with a most useful set of synopses of the nineteen pieces, which allows for easy consultation. Professor B. W. Wardropper then surveys the course of Calderón studies, and the curious avoidance of any serious interest in them on the part of Spanish scholars, either because of a hasty identification of the dramatist with reactionary thought and politics in former times, or because of a lack of temperamental affinity between him and the highly influential Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo. Professor Wardropper proposes that much of the present volume will help to correct the injustice done to Calderón. He laments having to surmise there will be no advance made from análisis temático-estructural in the direction of things more modish, but many Calderonists will not necessarily care to keep him company. It is very refreshing, however, to read his masterfully brief sketch of the way studies of the honor tragedies are moving: away perhaps from neo-Scholastic moralizing (and guessing how Don Pedro might have squared wife-murder with Christian ethics) and towards considerations of the «geometry» of honor once honor is conceded to be a matière of a specific kind of literature. The term matière occurs here and there in this volume, and seems to be a most useful borrowing from the terminology of medieval romance (that «lost genre» of Spanish literature which Professor Alan Deyermond has in217 218BCom, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter 1982) vestigated). It suggests itself to me that the well-known topoi of romance, such as truancy, the active and the contemplative life, and the rest, might be profitably detected in Calderonian tragedy, comedy and even auto sacramental. The aforementioned correction of the notion of Calderón as the dramatist of reaction is boldly attempted in the next paper, Professor M. Durán's on intimations from the life-records of Calderón which may allow us to infer certain things regarding unconscious drives which could condition his art. One pauses to express the hope that out of the tercentenary celebration someone somewhere will have decided to furnish Calderonists with a worthy set of attested life-records — like those of Raymond Picard for Molière — so that this recent direction of research on Calderón does not end in tautological surmise. Professor Durán's piece is, given the slim biographical clues we so far have, admirable. Professor R. ter Horst's paper is polemical and novel, and is a plea for the study of a wider spectrum of Don Pedro's dramas than the customary one. Two statements seem to me to be the nodal points of this paper: «(Calderón's) is a bellicose response to the authoritative persons, ideas and patterns that rule our lives.... (It) is a terrible injustice to see him as a pawn of the very institutions which he threatened artistically, if not intellectually» and «The primordial process (of Calderón's art) is entropy,... the outflow of vitality into death and nothingness» (40-41). Professor ter Horst may not quite substantiate these heady statements, even in his valuable discussion of the honor tragedies, or even in his advocacy of the superior excellences of La estatua de Prometeo and El segundo Escipión, but he indeed directs us here to new and promising paths of investigation. One awaits his announced book on Calderón with expectancy. The central portion of the book consists of usually orthodox analyses —but none the worse for that—of the most widely studied plays and some autos. All of these push the frontiers forward somewhat, and all are superbly informed. It would be inappropriate to summarize them here. Later on there is a probing analysis of Calderón's predilection for the anteposed adjective by...