Calderon's Monopoly, and the Decree That Ended It

Pedro Calderon de la Barca did not merely write autos sacramentales; for more than three decades he was effectively the only person in Madrid permitted to. Calderon is credited with more than seventy autos across his career, and from 1647 until his death in 1681 his were the only ones the city's Corpus Christi festivities staged, an arrangement without real parallel elsewhere in the history of the form. His plays used the genre's stock of personified abstractions with unusual philosophical ambition: El Gran Teatro del Mundo, The Great Theatre of the World, casts the Author, understood as God, assigning roles of Rich Man, Poor Man, King, Beggar and Beauty to the human cast of a single day's performance on the stage of the world itself, arguing through allegory that the roles fortune assigns matter less before God than how honestly each is played.

That very ambition and spectacle became the genre's undoing. As productions grew more theatrically extravagant, so did the machinery, the special effects and the frank crowd appeal that came with them, and by the eighteenth century critics both inside and outside the Church argued the form had drifted from sacred instruction toward secular entertainment merely wearing religious costume, a charge made harder to answer once its central subject was literally the sacrament. King Charles III's government issued a royal decree in 1765 banning autos sacramentales outright, citing exactly that disrespect for the Eucharist, and public performance of the form ended in Spain that year and did not return. Alexander Parker's 1943 study The Allegorical Drama of Calderon remains the standard English language account of how the plays built doctrine out of allegory during the genre's final and most accomplished century.