Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Calderon: Life's a Dream

Calderon: Life's a Dream

Kidd, Michael

Paperback

Series: Aris & Phillips Hispanic Classics

Literary CriticismFiction Anthologies

ISBN10: 0856688959
ISBN13: 9780856688959
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: May 15 2011
Pages: 266
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction; and the greatest good is fleeting, for all life is a dream, and even dreams are but dreams.

That is the haunting lesson learned by Prince Sigismund in Life's a Dream ( La vida es sueno ), the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Calderon's long life (1600-1681) witnessed the pinnacle and collapse of Spanish political power as well as the great flowering of classical Spanish literature. He inherited his dramatic principles from his brilliant predecessor, Lope de Vega, perfecting his formula with more economical plots, greater subtlety of thought, and, in some cases, deeper character development and psychological insight. The English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the first translators of Calderon into English, was of the opinion that he exceeds all modern dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare, whom he resembles, however, in the depth of thought and subtlety of imagination of his writings, and in the rare power of interweaving delicate and powerful comic traits with the most tragical situations.

Also from

Kidd, Michael

View All

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All