Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a Spanish Golden Age playwright who — from the beginning of his theatrical career in the 1620s to his death in 1681 — wrote about 120 comedias and about 80 autos sacramentales.
After this "bubble" based on Calderón's reputation as a popular playwright, his direct influence vanishes almost entirely from the English stage for over a century.
Edward Fitzgerald, turning Calderón into a pseudo-Elizabethan, states: I do not believe an exact translation of this poet can be very successful… I have, while faithfully trying to retain what was fine and efficient, sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced, much that seemed not…[6]Denis Florence MacCarthy exhibiting a more formal "bardolotry" writes: All the forms of verse have been preserved; while the closeness of the translation may be inferred from the fact, that not only the whole play but every speech and fragment of a speech are represented in English in the exact number of lines of the original, without the sacrifice, it is to be hoped, of one important idea.
[9] The "high" plot (one of several) in William Wycherley's Love in a Wood (1672) is based on Mañanas de abril y mayo (Mornings of April and May).
has provided Vanbrugh, Centlivre, Cibber, and Steel [sic], with The Mistake, The False Friend,[12] The Wonder, The Busy Body, The Kind Impostor, The Lady's Philosophy, and The Lying Lover, all English Comedies, which have been received upon the stage with the warmest marks of approbation.