Abstract

At first sight, Calderón is a much less «autobiographical» writer than Lope: for example, he has no character like Lope’s Belardo to give us the author’s point of view. It is clear, however, that he refers in some works to his own situation and to that of members of his family. It is also clear that he was very interested in intelligent and determined female characters, although we cannot identify his non-historical models for these, if there were any. Nor is it easy to know why he began to experiment with dark comedies in the late 1630s, although his critical attitude towards men who ill-treat women is still found in late works such as Fieras afemina amor (1671) and Las armas de la hermosura (1676).

Abstract

The present article analyzes the scenic and dramatic functions of the Sun-King myth. A number of uses of the myth within texts of praise of the Habsburg monarchy are employed to extrapolate possible uses within court theatre. The article uses the Aristotelian analytic differentiation between ergon and parergon and exemplifies it in the loa at the beginning of Calderón’s Fieras afemina amor. This loa makes use of the Sun-King myth to perform the theatrical praise of Mariana de Austria on the stage, at court and within the entire cosmos.