Pedro Calderon De La Barca, a Spanish dramatist, and next to Shakespeare the greatest of modern playwrights, born in Madrid, Jan. 17, 1600, died there, May 28, 1681. The name of his mother, Henao y Riano, whose family had originally emigrated from the Low Countries to Spain, is occasionally found added to his own. His father, who was connected with the financial branch of the government under Philip II., bequeathed to him ancestral estates in the valley of Carriedo (Burgos), and died before his son had reached his 9th year. He received his education in a college of Jesuits, and at Salamanca, where he studied history, philosophy, and law, and produced several plays which gained for him influential admirers and patrons. He left the university in. 1610 to seek employment at the court, where Lope de Vega was. among the first to praise his contributions to the contests for poetical composition (1620-22). In 1625 he became a soldier, and served respectably in Italy and Flanders, but was recalled to Madrid in 1635, on the death of Lope de Vega, and appointed by Philip IV. superintendent of the royal theatres and festivals.

In 1636 he was made a knight of Santiago and took part in a campaign in Catalonia, remaining in the military service until the peace of 1641. The king now gave him a pension of 30 gold crowns monthly, and employed him exclusively in writing and producing plays and managing the festivals of the court, the expense of bringing out his pieces in the most costly style being borne by the royal treasury. In 1651 he obtained from the order of Santiago permission to become a priest, and two years later was appointed chaplain to the cathedral of Toledo. In 1663 he was attached to the royal chapel in Madrid, and received as a member of the brotherhood of St. Peter, by whom he was finally chosen to be their capellan mayor, and to whom on his death he bequeathed his large fortune. To the last he was incessantly engaged in writing, and his death was deplored as a public calamity, his popularity having gradually extended from the court, the clergy, and the higher classes to the masses of the people. His funeral, which at first took place, according to his request, with the utmost simplicity in the church of San Salvador, had to be celebrated over again in a more conspicuous manner, while public demonstrations of sympathy were made in Rome, Naples, Milan, and Lisbon. His remains were removed, April 19, 1841, to the campo santo adjoining the Atocha church, where a fine monument was erected in his honor by public subscriptions. - Calderon had no superior in the fertility of his inventive power or in the skilful arrangement of ingenious, entertaining, and striking plots, and startling stage effects, which latter faculty was, according to Goethe, the most remarkable characteristic of his genius.

His works continue to be held in the highest esteem in Spain, and have been the source of inspiration for English, French, German, and Italian dramatists. He was barely 15 when he wrote his first play, El carro del cielo, and over 80 when he wrote his last, Hado y divisa, founded on the story of Boiardo and Ariosto. His principal productions may be divided into three classes: I. Over 70 sacramental autos or religious outdoor plays for Corpus Christi day or other church festivals, and chiefly on allegorical subjects mixed with national and Scriptural incidents and stories, and also occasionally with amorous passages, especially the most celebrated of them, El divino Orfeo, which is partly set to music, like many of his other plays.

The autos opened with a prologue (loa), which was recited or chanted; next came a farcical entremes, and last the auto or sacramental act proper. They all abound in lyrical beauty, and were produced in a gorgeous manner, characteristic of the lingering Moorish elements in Spanish civilization. Some of them partake of such extravagance as Aristophanes displayed in the representation of Greek divinities, and others of the brilliancy of Ben Jon-son's poetical masques. The all-pervading purpose was to exalt the doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist, and many shadowy characters are introduced to personate evils and blessings, Satan playing a conspicuous part in many fantastic forms. II. There are about 15 religious and miracle plays, though chiefly called so to evade the restraints imposed in Spain on theatrical performances from 1644 to about 1649. Many of them were acted by priests in the palaces of the nobility, the sanctimonious title serving only as a cover for loose plots and free writing.

Most admired among them was the Purgatorio de San Patricio, founded on the story of the Irish St. Patrick, with a regular love plot and the inevitable clown (gracioso); and the Devotion de la cruz (translated into German by A. W. von Schlegel), which, though still more licentious, became a favorite even in Protestant countries on account of its exquisite devotional passages. The most famous of the miracle plays was El mdgico prodigioso, founded on the legend of St. Cyprian, and so Faust-like in its metaphysi-cal and mystical poetry that the German Rosen-kranz has written an explanatory work on it, entitled Ueber Calderon's Tragbdie vom wun-derthatigen Magus (Halle, 1829). Milman has paraphrased it in his "Martyr of Antioch." III. Over 100 secular plays, different from the preceding ones in not assuming to be religious, and consisting of tragedies, dramas, comedies, and melodramas, and a few operas like La purpura de la rosa and Las fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo, both adapted from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The best known of these plays in foreign countries is perhaps El prln-cipe constante, founded on the disastrous expedition of the Portuguese infante Ferdinand against the Moors. The most powerful of those pieces in which the passions form the groundwork of the plot are Amar despues de la muerte; El medico de su lionra; El p'mtor de su deslwnra; and above all, El mayor mon-struo los zelos (" No Monster like Jealousy "), founded on the story of Herod in Josephus. This last named tragedy has been often compared to Shakespeare's Othello. The so-called comedias de capa y espada (cloak and dagger comedies), depending for success mainly on their intrinsic wit, illustrate Calderon's talent for brilliant dialogue and amusing complications.

Some of the most popular among these are La damn duende (" The Fairy Lady"), which he himself regarded as his masterpiece, and El astrblogo Jingido, adapted to the French by Thomas Corneille, and from the latter into English in Dryden's "Mock Astrologer." Many of his spectacular plays were performed with great splendor in the royal palaces and the adjoining pleasure grounds, different sets of actors being occasionally engaged in the succeeding acts of the same piece. - The publishers of the day took such liberties with Calderon's name, that he reluctantly consented to attend to the printing of his sacramental plays, lest they should be desecrated by garbled and surreptitious texts; but he personally never sent any of his other productions to the press, and over 100 pieces with which he had nothing to do were circulated as his in the Spanish dominions on both sides of the Atlantic. His brother had four volumes of his dramas published (1640-'74) without the authority of Cal-deron, who, however, did not dispute their genuineness.

At the request of one of his most munificent patrons, the duke of Veraguas, Cal-deron sent him a catalogue of 111 dramas and 70 sacramental autos which he claimed as his own, though these figures show a discrepancy as compared with those of the editions of his friend Vera Tassis (9 vols., 1682-'91) and of Apontes (11 vols., 1760-'63). The former, in his "Life of Calderon," credits him with 100 short farces (saynetes), 100 autos with 200 prologues or loas, and over 120 comedies; but he only published about 70 autos and 108 comedies. A number of Oalderon's works have evidently never been printed, while those generally attributed to him may possibly include a few of which he is not the author, and certainly in some of them he wrote only single acts. De Castro published in Cadiz (1848) a volume of Calderon's smaller poems, but most of his works of that sort have been lost, though the titles of many of the sonnets which he wrote for the academies of which he was a member and on other occasions have been preserved. Some of the occasional sonnets in the plays are masterpieces of wit and elegance.

Of the dramatic works Keil has published a collection (4 vols., Leipsic, 1827-'30), and another more complete one is that of Hartzen-busch (4 vols., Madrid, 1848-50). Among the English translations of his dramas are two volumes by McCarthy (London, 1853), and Archbishop Trench's "Life's a Dream: The great Theatre of the World. From the Spanish of Calderon, with an Essay on his Life and Genius" (1856; new ed., with specimens of Calderon's plays, 1865). The Chefs d'ceuvre des theatres Strangers contains French translations of a number of his plays by Esmenard and Labaumelle (3 vols., Paris, 1845). Among the principal German translators are A. W. von Schlegel (2 vols., Berlin, 1803-'9), Gries (7 vols., 1815-'26), Malsburg (6 vols., Leipsic, 1819-'25); and of the autos exclusively, Ei-chendorff (2 vok., Stuttgart, 1846-'53), and Lorinser (2 vols., Ratisbon, 1856-7). The best critical work upon his dramas is Schmidt's Schauspiele von Calderon (Elberfeld, 1857), and the latest collections are in Rapp's Spa-nisches Theater (6 vols., 1870), and Barrera's critical edition of his works (Madrid, 1872).