Love after Death by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Originally Amar después de la Muerte, also known in English as To Love Beyond Death. I read the translation by Roy Campbell, in The Classic Theatre: Volume III (edited by Eric Bentley), which also contains The Trickster of Seville, Life Is a Dream, The Siege of Numantia, and a play adaptation of Celestina (though I read a different translation of Life is a Dream—Gwynne Edwards).  

1/ The good thing about reading many different authors from the same country and the same period is that you get to see different perspectives and the larger context. In Don Quixote, Cervantes writes about the expulsion of the Moors (1609-1614). In this play, Calderón writes about the period before the expulsion, the period of discrimination and conflict and rebellion. He especially focuses on the perspective of the Moors. 

“MALEC […] though it was just 

That Arab speech and customs must, 

In the long run, give place to Spanish, 

Yet such a harsh and furious thrust 

Some few surviving traits to banish 

Which of their own accord would vanish 

I thought excessive and unjust, 

And begged them to restrain their zeal 

Lest violence prove resort to steel, 

When ancient custom’s spurned as dust…” 

(Act 1) 

Malec is an old Moor, and he’s physically struck by Don John of Mendoza. 

“MALEC […] I’ll go around, persuading all. 

It would be infamous disgrace 

Such wrongs as mine in vain should call 

Demanding vengeance from our race.” 

(ibid.) 

This is good. Like Cervantes, Calderón portrays the Moors sympathetically. Don John of Mendoza, he depicts as hateful. Now you may argue that I’m looking at it through modern eyes, but Love After Death begins with the Moorish characters and when we get Mendoza’s words “The Moors—despicable and vile!”, they’re quoted by Matec and seen through his perspective. 

Calderón later depicts Mendoza in his own voice, and Mendoza sounds like a racist, especially in that scene where Zuñiga (the magistrate) tries to make peace between Don John of Mendoza and Matec by getting him to marry Matec’s daughter Doña Clara. 

“MENDOZA […] It’s indecent to mix Mendoza blood with 

The blood of the Matecs. They do not ring

Together in the same selfsame sort of key—

“Mendoza” with “Malec” cannot agree!

VÁLOR Don John Malec’s a man…

MENDOZA And one like you! 

VÁLOR Yes, for his ancestors were a whole line 

Of kings on either side, and so were mine. 

MENDOZA Yes, but my own, although they were not kings

Were higher than the kings of Moors; they were 

Castilian highlanders and mountaineers.” 

(Act 1) 

How vile. 

And yet, it’s not so simple. Whereas Lope de Vega writes two-dimensional villains and unambiguously good characters, that’s not the case with Calderón. Don John of Mendoza, everyone will agree, is racist towards the Moors, and yet he has a secret love affair with Doña Isabel Tuzaní, sister of Don Alvaro Tuzaní, and a Moor who converted to Christianity. 

2/ Look at Garcés, a Spanish soldier:  

“GARCÉS […] No soon were we by those crags surrounded 

Than he gave tongue, and all the rock resounded 

With Moorish horns responding to his yelp. 

Like dogs they rushed their fellow-cur to help…”

(Act 2) 

Calderón depicts (some of) the Spaniards as hateful and barbaric, and the Moors as vengeful—but justifiably so. 

“GARCÉS […] Have then no pity 

On children, let the old men not escape, 

And let the women be for spoil and rape—

It is this last I’m recommending chiefly.” 

(ibid.) 

I don’t doubt that Calderón has sympathy for the Moors (even if the comic character of Alcuzcuz might be seen as problematic). It is more obviously sympathetic than Shakespeare’s attitude about the Jews. 

Calderón also has sympathy for women: 

“CLARA […] How base of Nature and how cruel 

To trick us out for ear and eye 

With wit and beauty, each a jewel, 

And honour, too, with them to vie, 

A blazing diamond, brighter yet—

But ah! how insecurely set! 

What greater woe is there to feel 

For women, than that we can steal 

A husband’s honour, or with shame 

Besmirch even a father’s name—

Yet not restore or wash the same…” 

(Act 1) 

That’s good. That’s very good. 

3/ I read Shakespeare’s history plays and saw there were too many Henrys. Now Calderón’s play has too many Don Johns: Don John Malec (“New Christian” of Moorish descent), Don John of Mendoza (the Spanish racist), and Prince Don John of Austria. 

4/ I don’t want you to think that Love After Death is only interesting for its social themes and progressive attitudes—Calderón’s poetry seems great, even though I only read it in translation. 

For example: 

“DON JOHN OF AUSTRIA Insulting, bold, rebellious mountain range

Whose wild uncultured ruggedness, whose strange

Outlandish height, whose awful weight, whose horrid

Monstrous build and overwhelming forehead 

Fatigue the ground, expand the air and earth, 

And make the sky conceive a monstrous birth! 

Primeval lair of bandits, thieves, and vandals, 

Whose breast, a thundercloud of plots and scandals, 

Gives forth seditious lightings, word for word, 

That striking here, in Africa are heard!...” 

(Act 2) 

Striking imagery. 

Or this passage, when Don John of Mendoza points at the landmarks: 

“MENDOZA […] That other, there, they call Galera, maybe

Because its keeled foundation’s like a galley’s 

Or that it rides an ocean of scrolled rocks, 

Curling like waves, and heaves a foam of flowers 

Spuming around, like a shawl of spray. 

It looks as though, subjected to the winds,

It turned and veered with them above the world.” 

(Act 2) 

If only I could read all this in the original! 

“GARCÉS […] Any moment

You can expect the mountain-side to burst 

And fill the sky with thunderclouds of dust…” 

(Act 2) 

All this is a very good. The translator himself, Roy Campbell, is a poet. 

Look at Don Alvaro Tuzaní’s description of war and destruction: 

“ALVARO […] All adders 

The houses are, of coiling flames, 

Of spiral smoke, gyrating screams 

That go on winding up the ladders 

Of their own ruin till it seems 

They re-establish there on high 

A capital of ghastly dreams 

And ghoulish nightmares in the sky!...” 

(Act 3) 

This could fit in a Shakespeare play. 

The greatest scene in Love After Death is probably after Don Alvaro Tuzaní watches his beloved Doña Clara Malec die:

“ALVARO […] You heavens that look down upon my pain, 

You mountains that behold my wrongs in vain, 

You winds that hear my sorrow and you fires

Who witness this the wreck of my desires, 

How could you have permitted that the best 

Light of this world, the star of all the west, 

Should be put out? The fairest flower grow pale? 

The sweetest breath be missing from the gale?

[…] My sole belief, 

Creed, faith, hope, or religion is my grief…” 

(Act 3) 

What a magnificent monologue. 

“ALVARO It is the most unearthly grief, 

A sorrow that surpasses all belief, 

Beyond alleviation or relief, 

To have seen die (how lamentably! how 

Piteously!) the partner of one’s vow, 

The person that one loves! It is the summit 

Of icy, piercing grief. It is the plummet 

That deepest sounds the gulf of black despair…” 

(ibid.) 

I don’t see such depth of feeling in Lope de Vega, at least not in the plays I have read. Calderón is my boy.  

This is a great play. Spanish Golden Age drama doesn’t get much attention in the English-speaking world, methinks—if you read only one play, go for Calderón’s Life Is a Dream; if you want to read two plays, add Love After Death or The Dog in the Manger. 

The King the Greatest Alcalde by Lope de Vega

Originally El mejor alcalde, el rey, it is another of Lope de Vega’s famous plays. I read the 1936 translation by John Garrett Underhill. 

1/ The play begins with a poor man named Sancho (not Panza) wanting to marry Elvira, daughter of a farmer named Nuño. Elvira loves him and Nuño approves of the marriage but Sancho has to ask for blessings from his employer Don Tello, who generously gives him a bunch of sheep and cows as a present. 

Troubles begin when Don Tello, the most powerful man in Galicia, shows up during the preparations for the wedding and sees Elvira and wants her for himself. It is a very good scene. 

He calls off the wedding, and then abducts her. 

Look at this exchange: 

“DON TELLO […] How then, Elvira, could your cruel rage 

Treat me thus foully? Cannot your rigor see 

That this is love? 

ELVIRA Never, my lord, for love 

That is deficient in a true respect 

For honor, is but vile desire, not love, 

And being evil, love never can be called. 

For love is born of loving what one loves 

In mad desire, 

And love that is not chaste 

By no name of love is graced 

Nor ever can to love’s estate aspire.” 

(Act 2) 

She explains: 

“ELVIRA […] Last night you saw me, Tello, for the first; 

Why, then, your love was such a sudden thing 

That you had scarce a moment to consider 

What that thing was which you so much desired; 

Yet in that knowledge all true love resides. 

For love is born of a great-grown desire, 

And love goes mounting then the steps of favor 

Even to its own end and exercise. 

So this you feel was never love we see 

In simple truth—mad lust and longing rather…”

(ibid.) 

Isn’t this so good? Jane Austen would have loved this, and I can’t help thinking that these speeches would have fit rather well in a Shakespeare play. 

2/ Don Tello imprisons Elvira in a tower, and when Nuño has a chance to speak to his daughter, what does he say? 

“NUÑO I never thought to see your face again, 

Not that these bars have confined you prisoner 

In cruel duress, but rather in my sight 

I held you for dishonored. So foul a thing 

Dishonor is in honorable minds, 

So vile, so loathsome ugly, even to me 

Who brought you to the world, even to me 

It must forbid that I should see you more. 

[…] Let her who renders count of her soul’s treasure

In faithless wise, call me no more father. 

Because a daughter of like infamy—

And all too weak are these the words I speak—

Upon a father has one single claim, 

That he shall shed her blood!” 

(Act 3) 

This is even worse than Hero’s father’s reaction to Claudio’s accusations in Much Ado About Nothing! 

I’m getting irritated with the way 17th century Spaniards keep harping on about a woman’s honour. Look at the plays I’ve been reading: 

A Dog in the Manger (Lope de Vega): X 

Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega): ✓ 

The Surgeon of Honour (Calderón): ✓

Life Is a Dream (Calderón): ✓

The Trickster of Seville (Tirso de Molina): ✓

And now, The King the Greatest Alcalde (Lope de Vega): ✓ 

It’s getting rather tiresome. 

3/ I shouldn’t be comparing Lope de Vega to Shakespeare, but I can’t help noticing the parallels between The King the Greatest Alcalde and Measure for Measure: in both plays, there is a tyrant; in both plays, the tyrant wants to possess a woman but she refuses; in both plays, a more powerful person walks around in disguise to uncover the truth and restore justice.

However, Measure for Measure is in many ways a deeper and more sophisticated play: Elvira has a vivid existence, especially in the conversations with Sancho at the beginning, but she’s unambiguously good, not complex and problematic (for lack of a better word) like Isabella; Don Tello shows his generosity at the beginning, but from the moment he lusts after Elvira, he’s purely tyrannical and monomaniacal; we don’t see Don Tello question himself or struggle with his conscience, as Angelo does in Measure for Measure; it depicts tyranny and the conditions of women, but Shakespeare’s play raises questions about power, justice, mercy, virtue, goodness, and so on. The King the Greatest Alcalde is a fun play, satisfying—when Don Tello gets his comeuppance—but like Fuenteovejuna, it’s an unambiguous play between the evil tyrant and the good lower class. There isn’t much depth or complexity. 

But I will be fair and say that one thing complicates the play, whether or not it’s Lope de Vega’s intent: Nuño’s speech to Elvira (quoted above) shows the fanatical obsession with a woman’s honour and the unfairness to women. Lope de Vega himself might not have intended it to be a condemnation of Spanish culture, but that detail is there and it darkens the play—what if the King doesn’t intervene? 

The King the Greatest Alcalde is a play feminists (in the Anglophone world) would love (if they know about it).

Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega

Fuenteovejuna, sometimes spelt Fuente Ovejuna, is another famous play by Lope de Vega. I read Jill Booty’s translation from 1961.

It was originally in verse and translated into prose. 

1/ Look at this conversation between two women: 

“LAURENCIA The Commander may think I am just a spring chicken, but he will find me tough meat for his table. I do not want his so-called “love,” Pascuala, I had rather have a sizzling rasher of bacon for breakfast, with a slice of my own baked bread, and a sly glass of wine from mother’s jar. […] For all their wiles and tricks, their so-called love serves no other purpose than to get us to bed with pleasure, to wake in the morning with disgust.” 

(Act 1) 

Harsh.

“PASCUALA […] Men are just the same [as sparrows]. When they need us, we are their life, their being, their soul, their everything. But when their lust is spent, they behave worse than the sparrows and we are no longer “Sweety-hearts” or even “idiots,” but drabs and whores!

LAURENCIA You cannot trust one of them. 

PASCUALA Not one, Laurencia.” 

(ibid.) 

That reminds me of Emilia in Othello: 

“’Tis not a year or two shows us a man:

They are all but stomachs, and we all but food;

To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,

They belch us…” 

The difference is that Shakespeare depicts the contrasting perspectives of the ordinary, earthy Emilia and the saintly and naïve Desdemona, whereas Laurencia and Pascuala agree with each other. 

Anyway, note “spring chicken”, “tough meat”. 

Later on, there’s a moment when Fernando Gómez the Commander wants to have Laurencia. 

“LAURENCIA Flores, let us go. 

[…]

FLORES Mind what you say! You are plucky little chicks! 

LAURENCIA Has not your master received enough flesh for one day? 

ORTUÑO But yours is the kind he wants.” 

(Act 1) 

The Commander is “a whore-master and a tyrant”. He forces all the women, virgin or married, to have sex with him, and has the men beaten up.  

“COMMANDER Oh, these easy women. I love them well and pay them ill. If only they valued themselves at their real worth, Flores! 

FLORES When a man is never put in doubt, the delight he gains means nothing to him. A quick surrender denies the exquisite anticipation of pleasure. But has not the philosopher said that there are also those women who as naturally desire a man as form desires its matter? And that it should be so is not surprising, for—

COMMANDER A man crazed with love is ever delighted to be easily and instantly rewarded, but then as easily and instantly he forgets the object of his desire. Even the most generous is quick to forget that which cost him little.” 

(Act 2)  

Again, these two characters agree with each other. 

2/ Fuenteovejuna is among the Lope de Vega plays most frequently translated into English, and I’m under the impression that it’s also among his most famous and acclaimed plays in general (all right, I don’t speak Spanish, but I can see its multiple mentions on the Spanish Wikipedia page about the playwright). 

Is it so popular because it’s essentially a revolutionary play? 

“ALDERMAN Die, or bring death to the tyrants, for we are many, they are few. 

BARTILDO What, rise in arms against our master? 

ESTEBAN Only the King is master under heaven, not Fernando Gómez. If God is with us in our zeal for justice, then how can we go wrong?” 

(Act 3) 

Laurencia’s angry, accusatory speech in this scene is excellent. “Well may this village be called Fuenteovejuna for its people are nothing but sheep. A flock of bleating sheep who run from curs.”

It is an exciting play—Lope de Vega knows how to hook your attention, and he’s also good at the crowd scenes. The mutiny scenes are good; the scene where the judge interrogates the entire village after the murder of the Commander, and everyone under torture still says “Fuenteovejuna did it”, is very good. It’s good fun. 

But there isn’t much depth or complexity in the play. Fernando Gómez (the Commander) is a two-dimensional villain and the peasants are good people. Consider Shakespeare: Shakespeare always explores different aspects and depicts contrasting viewpoints; there’s no play in which he doesn’t do something to complicate things, to make it impossible to know with certainty where he stands. Cervantes does something similar in Don Quixote, which is why there have been lots of different views, different interpretations. 

The disagreement over Fuenteovejuna may be about whether Lope de Vega has sympathy for “the mass” rising up and killing their “oppressor” in a general sense, or only sympathises with this particular case (a real event from the 15th century) because of Fernando Gómez’s tyranny and cruelty, but there is no doubt that he thinks the Commander has it coming because of his actions towards the villagers. Lope de Vega does nothing to humanise the villain, to complicate the revenge of the villagers. 

I should add that this is not an early play. Fuenteovejuna was published in 1619, and R. D. F. Pring-Mill writes in the introduction that it “may have been written as early as 1611 (Morley and Bruerton place it between 1611 and 1618, and probably between 1612 and 1614).” Lope de Vega was born in 1562 (2 years before Shakespeare) but lived for a relatively long time, till 1635, and Fuenteovejuna belongs to the middle period of his career. 

That said, it’s a fun play and Laurencia is a vivid character. 

The Dog in the Manger by Lope de Vega, contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes

Born 15 years after Cervantes and 2 years before Shakespeare, Lope de Vega died 19 years after the two of them and claimed to have written something like 1,500 plays*, about 400 of which survive. In Spain, he was a successful playwright when Cervantes wasn’t (Nabokov called Cervantes a frustrated playwright who found his medium in the novel). But most importantly, Jonathan Bate argues in The Genius of Shakespeare that if the Spanish Armada hadn't been defeated by England and Spanish had become the international language rather than English, Lope de Vega would have taken the place of Shakespeare.

Well, I have to find out for myself. 

(But how many of those 400 plays—or let’s say 50, the number of plays that have been translated into English—do I have to read before I can deliver my judgement?) 

1/ The Dog in the Manger is, in the original, El Perro del hortelano. I read Jill Booty’s translation from 1961. 

Was the play originally written in verse? Jill Booty translates it into prose.

The trouble with reading classic non-English language plays is that sometimes you think you found the play but it’s “adapted by…” or “a version by…”. That’s what happened with quite a few Spanish plays I picked up. So I got this one, but found in the small print that “Miss Jill Booty would describe her translations as ‘acting versions’” and she “has had to sacrifice much Golden Age rhetoric in the interests of producing credible dialogue”, and now I have no idea how far it is from Lope de Vega’s text. 

Oh well. 

2/ Lope de Vega can be quite funny. 

The play begins with Diana, Countess of Belflor**, shouting that some man’s just in her chamber in the middle of the night. Her people find a hat. 

“DIANA But the feathers I saw… why the hat was loaded with plumes, how can they have shriveled to this? 

FABIO They must have got burned when he threw it at the lamp, madam. Feathers would go up like chaff, you may be sure. Why, did not the same thing happen to Icarus? As soon as he flew too near the sun, his feathers caught fire, and down he fell into the foaming sea. That is what must have happened. The lamp was the sun, the hat was Icarus, its feathers were consumed by fire, and it fell on the stairs—where I found it. 

DIANA I am in no mood for jesting, Fabio...” 

(Act 1) 

Diana then finds out that the man is Teodoro, her secretary, and he’s in love with one of her maids, Marcela. She’s jealous, she has always had a thing for Teodoro. The premise of the play is that she cannot have him, as he’s socially beneath her, but she doesn’t let anyone else have him either—that’s why the play is called El Perro del hortelano, the Spanish equivalent of “dog in the manger”.

Anyway, upon finding out, Diana comes to Teodoro and makes up a story about a friend of hers, a highborn woman, as a roundabout way of confessing to him her feelings: “this lady […] had never felt any loving desire for him. But when she saw him love another, the jealousy she felt awoke her love for him…” 

This bit is interesting: 

“TEODORO You reason well. And yet Icarus, and Phaeton too, plunged down to their destruction, the one with his wax wings destroyed by the furnace of the sun, and the other the golden horses cast headlong upon a rocky mountain, because they aimed too high. 

DIANA But the sun is not a woman…” 

(Act 1) 

Icarus again. Note that Diana says “the sun is not a woman.” 

Now look at the scene where Diana’s suitors are watching each other: 

“CELIO Have you never seen a fair May morning break, when the sun shines in the sign of the bull—the white bull, the poets call him—that grazes among the ruddy clouds of dawn? So came she forth, and yet more perfect, for Diana, the Countess of Belflor, shines with two suns, while the heavens boast only one. 

RICARDO […] You do well to depict so fair a landscape and to portray Diana as the sun, for so she is, and as the sun passes through each sign of the zodiac in turn, so her eyes pass over her suitors, resting on none. See, there is Federico, waiting for his share of the golden beams. 

CELIO Which of you will prove the bull this morning? Upon whom will her spring light fall? 

RICARDO Federico was here before me, and so wins the sign of Taurus, but I will be the Lion, and hope her warmer gaze shall shine on me.” 

(Act 2) 

The sun imagery and the Icarus metaphor recur throughout the play. Teodoro says “my reason is to blame, that allows my hopes to soar too near the sun” and at some point says “Oh, sun, melt to nothing the waxen wings that bore me up so presumptuously to set myself beside an angel!” (Act 2). 

3/ There is a scene where Diana, in anger and jealousy, gives Teodoro a bloody nose, spoiling his handkerchief.

Then she comes back. 

“DIANA Show me your handkerchief. 

TEODORO Why? 

DIANA Give me it. 

TEODORO Why do you want it? 

DIANA I want it, Teodoro. Go and speak to Octavio. I have ordered him to give you two thousand escudos. 

TEODORO For what? 

DIANA You will need some new handkerchiefs. [She goes] 

TEODORO Did you ever hear such madness? 

TRISTÁN She must be bewitched.” 

(Act 2) 

Not hard to understand Lope de Vega’s popularity in the Spanish Golden Age. There isn’t much depth in The Dog in the Manger, but it’s a fun play. I will not compare him to Shakespeare (for now), but if we compare him and Christopher Marlowe, Lope de Vega scores two points against Marlowe: firstly, his characters are more individualised whereas Marlowe tends to have one important character (either a Machiavelli or an overreacher) and everyone else speaks with the same voice; secondly, Marlowe isn’t good with female characters whereas Lope de Vega’s Diana is a rather good depiction of a proud, unpredictable woman who keeps changing and keeps contradicting herself (just don’t expect Cleopatra). Marcela is also all right—in some ways, she mirrors Diana in her games with Teodoro, but she is different. 

(Obviously I’m being unfair, Marlowe’s power is mostly in his poetry—“his mighty line”—rather than characterisation and psychology). 

If I’m not mistaken, in Spain women were allowed to perform onstage in the late 16th, early 17th century—this means that Lope de Vega had an advantage over Shakespeare, John Webster, and other English playwrights. 

I’m going to read more Lope de Vega. 

*: Most likely a shameless exaggeration, but he probably wrote about 500, which is already a lot. The Shakespeare canon has fewer than 40 plays. 

**: I don’t know where that is, but the play is set in Naples.