His theatrical debut was a history play about the life of King Edward III of England, was first performed on 29 June 1623 at the Royal Alcázar of Madrid, during the surprise visit to Spain of Charles, Prince of Wales to negotiate for a dynastic marriage alliance with the Spanish Habsburgs.

Born while the unwritten rules of Spanish Golden Age theatre were still being defined by Lope de Vega, Calderón pushed their limits even further by introducing radical and pioneering innovations that are now termed metafiction and surrealism.

His masterpiece, La Vida es Sueño ("Life is a Dream"), combines a beauty and the beast plotline, a disguised woman reminiscent of Viola from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, surrealist concepts, romantic complications, and the threat of a dynastic civil war, while exploring the philosophical question of whether each individual's fate has already been written without their involvement or if the future can be altered by free will.

His many admirers have included August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Dryden, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Fr.

In 1881, the Royal Spanish Academy awarded a gold medal to Irish poet Denis Florence MacCarthy for his highly praised and accurate literary translations of Calderón's verse dramas into English.

Calderón had also gained considerable favour in the court, and in 1636–1637 he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago by Philip IV, who had already commissioned from him a series of spectacular plays for the royal theatre in the newly built Buen Retiro palace.

On 28 May 1640 he joined a company of mounted cuirassiers recently raised by Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, took part in the Catalan campaign, and distinguished himself by his gallantry at Tarragona.

Though he did not adhere strictly to this resolution, he now wrote mostly mythological plays for the palace theatres, and autos sacramentales—one-act allegories illustrating the Real Presence in the Eucharist—for performance during the feast of Corpus Christi.

In 1662, two of Calderón's autos, Las órdenes militares and Mística y real Babilonia, were the subjects of an investigation by the Spanish Inquisition; the former was censored, its manuscripts confiscated, and it remained banned until 1671.

In his eighty-first year he wrote his last secular play, Hado y Divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, in honor of Charles II's marriage to Maria Luisa of Orléans.

Most famously in his masterpiece, La Vida es Sueño, Calderón uses an astrological prophecy made decades before the beginning of the play as a way to deliberately mislead the audience about how the plot will unfold.

For example, as a reader and great admirer of Scholastic theologians Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, Calderón liked to confront reason against emotion, intellect against instinct, love against vengeance, and understanding against the will.

The ideas most distinctive of his age which we see reflected in Calderón's dramatic works are intense devotion to the Catholic Faith; absolute and unquestioning loyalty to the Spanish sovereign; and a highly developed, even much exaggerated, feeling of honour.

No siempre lo peor es cierto (c. 1640; 'The Worst Is Not Always True') and No hay cosa como callar (1639; 'Silence Is Golden') mark the peak of this development; although the conventions of comedy remain, the overtones are tragic.

This play also presents a powerful contrast between the aristocracy and the people: the degeneration of the aristocratic ideal is exposed, wealth is associated with manual labour, and honour is shown to be the consequence and prerogative of moral integrity regardless of class.

"[21] While acknowledging that the plot of the same play has caused Calderón's humanity to be questioned, Alexander A. Parker has written, "The critics who allege that he approves of the murder of an innocent wife because honour demands it overlook the fact that the horror one feels at this deed is precisely what he intended.

In these plays, as well as in the honor tragedies, Calderón, the most profoundly Spanish poet of his epoch, speaks so intimately to the passions and ideals of the time that he often lacks the little universality which his contemporaries achieved...

"[24] According to Russian Symbolist poet and dramatic theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov, "Let us take a look at drama, which in modern history has replaced the spectacles of universal and holy events as reflected in miniature and purely signifying forms on the stages of the mystery plays.

"[25] Calderón's fame dwindled during the 18th-century due to the anti-religious currents of both the Bourbon Reforms and the Enlightenment in Spain and, in 1765, a law was passed forbidding the performance of Autos on the Feast of Corpus Christi, officially for being, "sacrilegious and in bad taste.

Later significant German-language adaptations include the work of highly influential Austrian Symbolist poet, metafictional playwright, and Richard Strauss' favorite opera librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal; who made literary translations of La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo.

During the 19th century in his homeland, Calderón de la Barca was embraced by adherents of Carlism and other opponents of the 1798-1924 mass confiscation and sale of Church property by the State, the expulsion of the religious orders, the ban on Classical Christian education, and the many other anti-Catholic policies of Liberal Spanish monarchs and their ministers.

[29] Félix Sardà y Salvany, the author of the book Liberalism Is a Sin, and his fellow integrists and Carlists considered Calderón de la Barca to embody the most brilliant incarnation of the Spanish Catholic literary tradition.

Although he is best known abroad as the Nobel Prize-winning author of Doctor Zhivago, Soviet dissident intellectual and former Ivanov protege Boris Pasternak produced acclaimed Russian translations of Calderón's plays during the late 1950s.

According to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, In working on Calderón he received help from Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubumov, a shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak.

The persistent influence of both anti-Catholicism and anti-Spanish sentiment rooted in the Black Legend still means that even the existence of the Spanish Golden Age, let alone its literary, artistic, and cultural achievements, remain widely unknown in the English-speaking world.

Both this ignorance and its cultural fallout were criticized even during the Black Legend's Elizabethan era inception by Sir Philip Sidney, whose 1580 essay An Apology for Poetry expressed very high praise for the verse dramas he had attended during diplomatic missions in France, Spain, and Italy.

[3] Byron's friend and fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley similarly had very high praise in his essays for Calderón and personally translated a substantial portion of El Mágico prodigioso.

Despite this, in his essay A Defence of Poetry, Shelley, as a staunch and vocal believer in Atheism, feminism, and the rejection of Christian morality, also expressed very harsh criticism for Calderón's religious beliefs and his regular decision to confront the human mind and conscience successfully against the emotions, "Calderón, in his religious autos, has attempted to fulfill some of the high conditions of dramatic presentation neglected by Shakespeare; such as establishing a relation between drama and religion, and the accommodating them to music and dancing; but he admits the observation of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly defined and ever-repeated idealism of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion.

"[32] Later in the same essay, however, Shelley concluded, "The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, and their disciples, in favor of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the gratitude of mankind.

George Ticknor declared in his History of Spanish Literature that MacCarthy "has succeeded in giving a faithful idea of what is grandest and most effective in [Calderón's] genius... to a degree which I had previously thought impossible.