Abstract

For his contemporaries, Calderón was probably an author primarily comic, because, at the time, his most successful plays on the stage were comical. The current image of Calderón as an eminently serious author emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and has prevailed until today. Because of it, on the one hand Calderón’s comical works have been marginalized and, on the other, serious interpretations of these plays have been sought to fit the author’s prevailing image. This situation will be exemplified through El astrólogo fingido, comedy that has received some serious interpretations which do not take into account the comical nature of the work, nor the context from which passages interpreted in a forced manner are extracted.