‘La vida es sueño—¿o risa?’: Calderón Parodies theauto

Abstract

The long-established conception of Calderón as a supremely Catholic and sober if not sombre dramatist derives from his readers' primary focus on his serious dramas and his autos sacramentales.1 1. Furthermore, as Ignacio Arellano has pointed out recently, critics of Golden-Age drama tend to look for serious themes even in clearly comic works, rather than focusing on the nature of their comedy. The numerous ‘serious’ readings of La dama duende that he cites illustrate this trend. His criticism is certainly valid insofar as it underlines the potential distortion of readings that fail to acknowledge that themes such as honour, for example, function differently in a clearly comic structure than in a tragic plot. He is also right to point out the critical prejudice that leads us to undervalue the comic; this prejudice was well established by the time of Aristotle and one of its results has been a paucity of critical tools with which to evaluate comic works. However, it would also be reductive to dismiss as wrong-headed all attention to serious themes in comedy. One of the most fascinating aspects of the comic mode is the way it illustrates the human capacity to laugh at that which we most value or fear; therefore, a full appreciation of comedy may well require discussion of the serious themes on which it works its liberating magic (Ignacio Arellano, ‘Metodología y recepción: lecturas trágicas de comedias cómicas del Siglo de Oro’, Criticón, LII [1990], 7–21). Without questioning the importance of these works, I would like to suggest that we tend to overlook another side of his writings, the playful and parodic visions of life and stage versions of life that he offers in a number of entremeses and mojigangas. In this essay, therefore, I would like to bring these two aspects of Calderón into the sort of creative tension in which they existed—or co-existed—on the stages of Madrid in his lifetime. To do so, I will concentrate on one mojiganga, the delightfully funny Mojiganga de las visiones de la muerte which Calderón apparently wrote for performance with the auto La vida es sueño.2 2. Lobato postulates this combination on the basis of the fact that the one seventeenth-century manuscript of the mojiganga (BN Ms. 16.796) which attributes the piece to Calderón, also says that [Jerónimo de] Peñarroja played the part of the Carretero and that of the Ángel was played by Mariana, which could be either Mariana de Borja or Mariana Romero. These three actors worked together in the Corpus festivities of 1670–1674. The second version of La vida es sueño was performed as the auto for 1673 (see Calderón, Teatro cómico breve, ed. María-Luisa Lobato [Kassel: Reichenberger, 1989], 352). All citations of the work are drawn from this edition. In their edition of Calderón's burlesque pieces, Entremeses, jácaras y mojigangas (Madrid: Castalia, 1982), Evangelina Rodríguez and Antonio Tordera, citing Valbuena Prat's linkage of the theme of the mojiganga with that of the ‘auto viejo’ El pleito matrimonial del cuerpo y el alma, suggest that the burlesque piece was composed prior to 1655. However, references to La vida es sueño are at least as important in the mojiganga as those to discordant marriages, and as I argue, the metatheatrical play involved in the role of Caminante parodies the structure of Calderón's technique in the mature autos. In their monographic study of 1983, Rodríguez and Tordero agree with Lobato, and add further evidence from Calderón's ‘Memoria de apariencias’ for 1673 to support the combination of Visiones with La vida es sueño in that year (see Evangelina Rodríguez and Antonio Tordera, Calderón y la obra corta dramática del siglo XVII [London: Tamesis, 1983], 167–68). I will be examining the logic of its comedy; its play on and against the conventions, both thematic and structural, of the autos in general and of La vida es sueño in particular; and its function within the performance of the auto programme as a whole.