Where Segismundo Learns a Lesson in Prison

Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I found this interesting and thought-provoking but not very entertaining overall. A bit. Lemme explain.

The play explores philosophical themes as its first purpose, or so it seems to me. The king of Poland believes his son is fated to become a tyrant who deposes him, so to prevent this he traps him in a tower in the wilderness, where we find him at the start of the play as a young man. For a short time he is released, brought to the palace, and treated as the prince, as a test, but he kills a man and acts like a tyrant just as his father had been warned. The king has him returned to his cell, drugged, so that they can convince him it was all a dream and he is still just the trapped man he always was. The events that follow, and the long speeches that accompany it, show that one cannot avoid one's fate and should face it--even oppose it, though you fail--but not flee or hide.

The scenes with Prince Segismundo after he is returned to his cell reminds one a bit of Plato's cave, trying to identify what is reality, and even more of Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly:

"Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou."

I don't know if Calderon had heard the story, but he no doubt was aware of others like it, being a much greater scholar than me... Segismundo doesn't know what to believe, which is a lesson to him:

Experience teaches me that each man who lives dreams what he is, until he wakes. The king dreams he is a king, and in this deception spends his days, commanding, governing, disposing. But this renown he receives is written on the wind. At the touch of death--oh dread misfortune--it turns to ashes.

He is more humble because of this realization, leading eventually to a reconciliation with his father.

The story, at least as it's told on stage, is not super compelling. There is the start of a kind of romance, with a young woman traveling in the clothes of a man, carrying a sword that is a clue to her father's identity, which promises to be fun, but not much is made of that. Instead, we get pages-long soliloquys and monologues, very sober action, and characters that take themselves very seriously. The only comic relief, the character of Clarin, gets killed in the end as a bystander hiding from war, and that tells you what the author thinks about humor. At least in this play.

It's moderately fun overall, IMO. The high diction and ultra-serious tone make it hard to read straight, and the long, long speeches feel a bit silly in 2023, but it did get me thinking, and now I'm curious to see if someone could stage it in a way that spoke to modern audiences.

This is the only thing I've read by Calderon, and I'm intrigued enough to be ready for a little more.

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