El dinero como principio de mecánica imprecisa en El hombre pobre todo es trazas (1637) de Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Abstract

Calderón de la Barca’s comedy, El hombre pobre todo es trazas, belongs to the genre of ‘capa y espada’ comedy. A very common comic genre in the Spanish theater of the seventeenthth century, highly cultivated by most playwrights, which entails a high degree of artificiality and repetition of entanglement situations and conventional motifs that can be included within the so-called principle of precise mechanics. But there are other elements that individualize these works and that respond to that other principle of the so-called imprecise mechanics. Calderón, aware of the need to innovate in this type of comic comedy genre, always resorts to surprising variants that, in this case, have to do with money and the picaresque behavior of a nobleman who, characterized by poverty, uses his ingenuity to try thriving in society through an advantageous marriage. At the end of the comedy, as in the picaresque novel, the protagonist fails resoundingly in his aspirations to achieve wealth.