In Don Pedro Calderón, Don W. Cruickshank revisits the career of one of Spain's greatest dramatists of the seventeenth century, Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Cruickshank's intentions are simple: to create a reference book that begins with Calderón's birth in 1600, and ends with the conclusion of his production of secular drama in approximately 1650. Since the last formative biography of Calderón was published in 1924, Cruickshank's volume synthesizes more than eighty years' worth of additional research to create the latest germinal text in Calderón studies.
Cruickshank takes time in his book's first chapter, “The Birthplace: Madrid in 1600,” to orient the reader to Calderón's Spain and, in particular, to his Madrid, a town then in the process of transforming itself from a minor municipality into a national capital. As he enumerates the cultural and political transformations underway in Madrid in 1600, Cruickshank carefully correlates seventeenth-century events with their modern equivalents, something he does quite well throughout the entire work. For example, he compares the unsanitary street conditions of the 1600s with the pollution we face today, and the plague with our AIDS and SARS. This reader-friendly introduction will prove useful to those unfamiliar with early seventeenth-century Spain.
After this very general introduction to Madrid, Cruickshank spends the next four chapters meticulously exploring both Calderón's genealogy and his formative years up until the death of his father in 1615. The author does a fine job of bringing together what is known about Calderón's life and of filling in gaps with information from other sources: perusing, for example, early modern Spanish schoolbooks to discover what Calderón might have been learning at the colegio. Additionally, Cruickshank corrects the mistakes of previous biographers, no matter how minor the error. However, his observations focus heavily on Calderón's father and his relationship with the family. Cruickshank emphasizes several incidents in particular: (1) the father's decision to send Pedro's brother, Diego, at age twelve, to Mexico; (2) his decision to place Pedro's sister, Dorotea, also at age twelve, in a convent in Toledo; and (3) his mismanagement of money and the tension this created between him and Pedro's maternal grandmother. Along with presenting the facts of these incidents, Cruickshank postulates as to the father's motives for sending his children away, and he uses these suppositions to call into question Calderón's father's parenting skills. But Cruickshank takes the process a little too far by continually employing verses from Calderón's plays to project certain feelings and emotions onto both the playwright and his father. If we have learned anything from biographies about Miguel de Cervantes, it is that we cannot look into the artist's work for clues about his life. However, Cruickshank continually does precisely this to generate opinions and insights about Calderón's father as well as about other aspects of his youth. At one point, Cruickshank even admits that “there is no reason to regard this remark as autobiographical” (80), but he continues to do so nonetheless.
Cruickshank proceeds first decade by decade and then year by year as he weaves the story of Calderón's secular theatrical production into the context of Spain's history. Several points become evident regarding Calderón's earlier works. First, Calderón was ready to sacrifice fidelity to historical accuracy in order to create a better theatrical experience for his audiences. Second, it is erroneous to assume that Calderón's plays got better as he got older, for some of his well-known plays come from his early period. Finally, Calderón often reworked his own material to create later productions. His secular dramatic production hit its height during the 1630s when he took the reins from Lope de Vega, who died in 1635. Try as he might, Calderón would not be able to replicate this literary output during the 1640s, and by 1650 he stopped writing for secular audiences.
As the above survey might suggest, Cruickshank's book quickly becomes a recounting of plots, situating Calderón's plays within his own dramatic corpus while also trying to date them. This is done as Cruickshank continues to position Calderón's work within the context of Spanish history and to relate the major events in the playwright's life. As he dates the plays, Cruickshank looks to Calderón's own literary production along with that of his contemporaries. Cruickshank is thus able to date Calderón's plays not only by tracing certain verses and themes within his comedias, but also by looking to other known dated material in an attempt to establish a literary timeline. For example, Cruickshank often looks to Góngora's verses to date Calderón's material. He does this so often, however, that one starts to wonder what is original to Calderón. At one point Cruickshank admits that “[i]t may be said that many of Don Pedro's plays, while carefully constructed, are less than original,” but he also suggests that Calderón's reworking of familiar plots was motivated by his desire “to reiterate moral points he had made before” (266). With the lasting notoriety of Calderón, the latter is easier to fathom.
In addition to the copious amounts of information in his text, Cruickshank enhances the written word with more than thirty black-and-white illustrations. In the end, despite the book's limitations, the printed word and these illustrations coalesce to create a valuable scholarly effort. Cruickshank has written more than just an updated biography of Calderón's secular career. He has written the germinal reference book for any calderonista.
