Acceso usuarios
Barcelona, España
This article interprets Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El príncipe constante (1629) through Walter Benjamin's generic lens of the Trauerspiel, that is, as a metatheatrical play about the difficulty of representing transcendence. According to Benjamin, the dialectic between immanence and transcendence constitutes the key narrative tension of baroque drama or Trauerspiel. The Trauerspiel represents this tension ambiguously in allegorical and metatheatrical terms: transcendence, the reality beyond the dramatic universe, can be suggested and pointed towards, but it cannot be represented with certainty on stage. I retrace and expand on the steps of Benjamin's analysis of El príncipe constante to argue that the metatheatrical dimension of the play questions what Benjamin takes to be its appearance of divine cosmological order and hierarchy. Through the allegory of the cradle and the grave, which represent the entrance and exit of life understood as drama, Calderón evokes the mutability and transience of existence as well as unveils false appearances of sacredness in the theatre of the world.
