Hidden Treasure: The Marvelous Present and Magical Reality in The Tempest and La vida es sueño

This paper examines the aesthetic experience in Calderón's La vida es sueño and Shakespeare's The Tempest, centering on illusion as a means of revelation, and on the reiteration of the present as the alchemy that dissolves opposites to reveal a magical reality. The characters in the plays experience a bafflement that shows the limits of discursive reason. Critical interpretations of the plays have long been conditioned by the dualistic thinking and by the binary oppositions that are the legacy of Greek philosophy and of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Tempest and La vida es sueño refashion our modes of understanding through a perplexity that has more in common with Zen or magical realism than with the traditional belief systems of Western culture. Poetry is the real plot of these plays, in which confusion is the means to insight, and magic is the means to self-discovery. In these plays, the present, an elusive and illusory non-instant, is a veritable metaphor of our transience and of our permanence. (ASZ)