Calder=n de la Barca's Life is a Dream

Many of these pairings can be rearranged to complement other pairings. For instance, the contrast of illusion and righteousness is reflected in the contrast of honesty and deception, since deception is one of the means taken to create illusion and hide truth. The style in which these questions argon presented is known as culteranismo, or the ostentation of "culture," meaning an moved(p) erudition intended to lend artificial brilliance to literary style with excessive use of classical allusions and mythological beginnings. The style can be seen early in the play with the reference to the "hippogriff," to be discussed below:

It was, in effect, another manifestation of the esthetic crisis of seventeenth-century Spain, the literary counterpart of the architectural and decorative extravagances of the baroque and the churrigueresque (Colford iii).

The primary theme in the play is realism versus illusion, a theme to which Calder=n returned in his works again and again. For Calder=n, on that point is an almost inescapable human tendency to confuse truth and illusion. In the play, the efforts of Basilio to escape his fate ac

He contrasts himself with a bird, a beast, a fish and a stream; he has less emancipation than they although of superior intellect. When he spies Rosaura, he is chagrined that anyone should find him in his present plight, and . . . he threatens to attack her. Only the power of love prevents him from doing her bodily harm. . . present and elsewhere Calder=n has the protagonist confuse the idea of set downdom with free will; or, to state it another way, he neglects to key between freedom and license (Hesse, Calder=n 141).

Hesse notes the degree of mix-up in the play brought about by its emphasis on deception and illusion, producing a series of false impressions as characters fail to see the reality of their situation or of the identities of other characters, or perhaps they deceive themselves about their own nature.

Hesse believes that this tendency begins with the act of the play itself:

Rosaura's fall from her horse, which has just occurred as the play opens, would egress to be, at first sight, merely a dramatic artifice which results in the confrontation of the two protagonists. Around this seemingly commonplace event, however, gathers a complex symbolic system, whose ramifications constitute an essential theme of the play. . . The true significance of Rosaura's fall becomes evident when she discloses that she has journeyed to Poland in disposition to avenge her honor, and her accident thus becomes at once reality and symbol, concrete evidence of her moral "fall," symbolic representation of her unjust passion (Maurin 133).

It has become apparent that the virtuous ruler hides nothing from his subjects: the private and public personas of the monarch must be whole compatible. . . The king who governs absolutely, anticipating no resistance to his will, welcomes trouble to his realm (Fox 105).

Magill, F.W. faultfinding Survey of Drama. Englewood Press, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1986.

Freedom and free will are both addressed in the play, and all(prenominal) is
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