dream of power—the event which should have been made the central point of the drama—is as sudden and miraculous as the conversion of any fabled saint. The beast turns human all at once; the ferocious creature becomes courteous and generous; the savage stands forth as a compendium of Christian virtues. As Farinelli says:
It is precisely this sudden intervention of the superhuman in the human that offends us in the play. Such inexorable suppression of all development in the character of the protagonist, such disregard of nature, makes the human spirit merely the slave of a thesis, of a doctrine.
That is precisely the point. Calderón wrote his drama in order to teach a moral lesson.
The plot is of course familiar. A certain king of Poland, Basilio, an old chatterer swollen with fantastic science, has a son, Sigismund, who is destined, according to the horoscope, to prove a rascal. Basilio therefore has the child imprisoned in a tower on a remote mountain, under the care of another pedantic old man, Clotaldo, who keeps the boy from contact with other human beings, and in ignorance of his identity. But when the boy grows up, the father takes it into his head to bring him out in order to see whether or not the astrologers were right. They give the youth an opiate—an old prescription, well known to the author of the Arabian Nights and
