Life Is a Dream

The spine is subtractively tight. Remove the first jornada’s tower and the palace test has no meaning; remove the return to the tower and the third jornada’s restraint is unearned; remove Clotaldo’s recognition of the sword and Rosaura’s honour plot never touches the prince’s. The parts the play could most nearly lose come from the form, not the argument: the Astolfo and Estrella courtship of the first jornada, dynastic exposition with gallantry laid on; Rosaura’s long narrative to Segismundo in the third, which retells what the audience half knows; some of Clarín’s business before his death. The subplot is the main plot’s mirror and is carried as design, but not every scene of it is required, and that holds the axis at 8.4.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: a man cannot know whether the world he acts in is real, and must act well regardless. Clotaldo gives the hinge at the end of the second jornada, and Segismundo makes it a rule in the third: “obrar bien es lo que importa”
“to act well is what matters” (III). A second disclosure is political and colder: the learned king makes the tyrant he feared by caging the child the stars accused, so that the prophecy is fulfilled through the precaution against it. A third the ending shows without preaching: the soldier who freed the prince goes to the tower once the treason is past. Held from the top because the first is framed as doctrine on free will and the stars, and the play sometimes argues it rather than discovers it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

It rises often, and at the openings and closings of acts. The first soliloquy is a lament that becomes an indictment of the heavens, resolved in “pues el delito mayor / del hombre es haber nacido”
“for man’s greatest crime is to have been born” (I). The comparisons that follow, bird, beast, fish and stream, each born freer, close on the refrain “tengo menos libertad”
“I have less liberty” (I). The second jornada ends on the décimas that define life as a dream. The third has the father kneeling to the son. Between these the courtly and comic scenes keep to level ground, and the military action of the third jornada rises less than its stakes allow.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Built, not evoked. Three deep patterns carry the whole weight: the child condemned by prophecy and cast out by the father, the Oedipus pattern turned so that the son spares the father and the prophecy is fulfilled in the letter, the king at his feet, and voided in the spirit; the sleeper made king for a day and returned to his straw, here not a jest but a test of the soul; and the man in the tower dressed in skins, half beast, who must become human. Segismundo is at once a Polish prince with a grievance and every soul born into a world it did not choose. The title is a proverb in Spanish and its prince a type. Held off the top because the archetype is partly allegory, and the particular thins at moments into the exemplary.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The form is inherited whole from Lope’s comedia nueva: three jornadas, polymetric verse, a gracioso, a wronged woman in breeches, an honour plot, marriages at the close. The swerve is in what Calderón made the form carry: a dramatized argument in which the plot is the proof and the scenes are premises, an experiment on the prince, its failure, its repetition under doubt, and the conclusion acted. The ending refuses the comedia’s festive release: the gracioso is shot dead for hiding, the rescuing soldier is punished, the marriages are dispositions of state, and the hero ends master of himself and colder for it. Held at the bar because the philosophical comedia had predecessors in the same repertory, and the departure is one of rigour within the form, not a break with it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. A play can make its audience share the doubt as narration cannot: the spectator watches Segismundo wake in the palace knowing it is real, then watches him wake in the tower and be told it was a dream, and is left in his place, unable to say which waking to trust. The shape of tower, palace, tower and then the world enacts the argument’s two trials and its conclusion. The verse forms are functional: décimas for the soul, romance for the narratives of fact, silva for the violent arrival. Rosaura moves from disguise to recovered name as Segismundo moves from beast to king. Held below the top by machinery the argument does not need, the sword token and the convenient paternity, and by court scenes that carry exposition rather than knowledge.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: nearly four centuries of reading have not settled the centre. The ending is still argued: whether the soldier’s imprisonment shows achieved prudence or a new tyranny; whether Basilio is pardoned or merely subdued; whether the marriages of the close are justice or policy. The theology has been read as Molinist free will, the politics as a mirror for princes and as its critique, the dream as Platonic, Stoic and Baroque scepticism, and the Romantics read the prince as the self against the father and the state. The Rosaura plot was dismissed as an excrescence for generations and then shown to be the play’s second voice. The soliloquies reward line-by-line reading as lyric does. Held a step down because the play is short and its argument more nearly closed by its own rule.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is the literature of Spain and the European stage of the seventeenth century. The force is high: the play is the culmination of the Spanish comedia, the work in which the popular form proved it could carry philosophy without ceasing to be theatre, and it set the model of the drama of ideas that ruled the Spanish stage for the rest of the century. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Spain it was continuous until eighteenth-century neoclassical criticism turned against Calderón; abroad it came through German Romanticism, in the Schlegels, Goethe’s staging at Weimar, Grillparzer’s Der Traum ein Leben and Schopenhauer’s citation of its line on man’s greatest crime, and later Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm. Delayed reach is credited and discounted; it did not redirect European drama as Shakespeare or the French classical stage did.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival of nearly four centuries, weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: the two printings of 1636, with their variants, are a matter of editing, not loss, and charge nothing material. Presence: continuously read and staged in Spain, a set text of Spanish schooling, translated into the major European languages from the Romantic period on, and staged in English in new versions within living memory. The charges fall on presence, not text: an eclipse in the eighteenth century under neoclassical taste, and outside the Spanish-speaking world a presence held largely by the academy and by occasional productions rather than general reading. That sets it in the row for centuries, above a text read mainly in the academy, because in its own language it is not, and well below the survivals of millennia.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on Calderón’s Spanish verse, and load-bearing. The soliloquies are built as arguments in stanzas: in the first, each décima advances one comparison and closes on its turn, so that the structure of the verse is the structure of the reasoning; in the second, the series of clauses on dreaming, “Sueña el rey que es rey”
“The king dreams he is king” (II), builds the definition of life by anaphora and compresses it into the closing couplet. Rosaura’s entrance in silva, its run of conceits on the fallen horse, heightens the Gongorine manner deliberately for disorder. The costs: symmetry of conceit turned mechanical in some exchanges, the recognition by sword and the expository narratives done by convention, and court dialogue that is correct rather than alive.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Clarín’s comic flight into the rocks, and Segismundo’s kneeling father. They obey one law. Clarín hides to escape death and is found by it, and his dying words tell the king that no road is safe from what is fated; Basilio, who hid his son to escape the stars, hears in that death his own story and submits. The farce and the metaphysics are one physics, and Rosaura’s honour plot obeys the same law of a self reclaimed through action under disguise. The strain is at the close, where the play’s two laws, the providential rule to act well since all is a dream and the political rule of reason of state, are both in force and do not entirely agree, so that the soldier’s imprisonment reads to many as a breach. It costs a few tenths.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Weighed on what one play of about 3,300 lines holds. The self and its freedom; the family, a father and son, a father and an unknown daughter; the state, in succession, tyranny, rebellion and the legitimacy of a ruler who governs himself; the cosmos, in astrology and the heavens accused and called to witness; the sacred, in providence, free will and the soul’s trial; the natural order, in the man in skins measured against bird, beast, fish and stream. These are integrated, not listed: the horoscope is at once family secret, state policy and theological question. What holds it lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable: the social breadth of the comedia at large is absent, labour, the town and the material life of anyone below the court but the gracioso and the soldiers.

Score: 8.4 / 10