Preface: co-written with Claude. Netflix please notice me.

So far, we've covered this in depth. Drama was born in Athens as religious ritual honoring Dionysus. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides mapped out the entire terrain of tragedy in roughly a single century. Comedy also flourished — Aristophanes wrote savage, brilliantly obscene political satires like The Clouds and The Frogs that mocked real politicians and intellectuals by name in front of thousands of citizens. Greek theater established the fundamental vocabulary of Western drama — dramatic conflict, character psychology, plot structure, the chorus, the mask, the open air theater carved into hillsides. Everything that followed is in conversation with this moment. We discussed about Plautus and Terence in depth — the transplanting of Greek comedy into Latin, the invention of stock characters, the shift toward pure entertainment. Roman tragedy existed too — Seneca wrote enormously influential tragedies based on Greek models, full of horrific violence, philosophical monologues, and supernatural machinery. Roman theater also developed in a direction the Greeks never went — toward pure spectacle. The Romans built enormous permanent stone theaters, and eventually the entertainment on offer expanded to include acrobats, animal fights, and gladiatorial combat. Theater as literary art and theater as spectacular entertainment pulled further and further apart. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century CE, the institutional infrastructure of theater — the buildings, the companies, the patronage — collapsed with it.

The Medieval period (roughly 500–1400 CE) is the era most people skip over, assuming theater simply vanished after Rome fell. It didn't — it transformed. The Church initially suppressed theatrical performance, associating it with the pagan Roman entertainment culture it was replacing. But human beings do not stop performing(the power of theatre!!!), and within a few centuries the Church itself had become one of the primary venues for dramatic activity — not despite its suspicion of theater but because drama turned out to be extraordinarily useful for teaching scripture to largely illiterate congregations(same with singing). Liturgical drama began inside church services — priests enacting the events of Easter and Christmas with simple dialogue and movement. By the 10th century these had become elaborate enough to migrate out of the church building itself and into the churchyard and town square.

The Renaissance (15th–16th centuries) — meaning rebirth — was in theatrical terms a rebirth of classical knowledge and classical models, combined with the explosive energy of new commercial theater cultures in England and Spain. Italy was where the Renaissance began, and Italian theater produced two important innovations. Commedia dell'arte — literally "comedy of the professional" — was a form of popular improvised theater performed by traveling companies, built around fixed character types: Arlecchino the cunning servant, Pantalone the miserly old merchant, Il Dottore the pompous academic, the young lovers(sort of like a traveling circus). The performers were masked, acrobatic, skilled improvisers who could play the same character type in different stories endlessly. Commedia traveled across Europe and its character types — which you will immediately recognize as descendants of Plautus's stock characters — fed directly into Shakespeare's comedies and eventually into modern clown traditions, circus performance, and physical comedy. Italian courts also developed opera in this period — an attempt to recreate what scholars imagined Greek tragedy must have sounded like, combining drama with music. Opera eventually became its own distinct art form, but its origins are theatrical. Opera was invented in Italy, specifically in Florence, around the late 16th century. A group of intellectuals, poets, and musicians called the Camerata de' Bardi (or Florentine Camerata) developed the form in the 1570s–1580s, seeking to revive ancient Greek drama by setting text to music in a dramatic way.

Spain's Golden Age produced two extraordinary dramatists who are less well known in the English-speaking world than they deserve. Lope de Vega was perhaps the most prolific playwright in history — he claimed to have written 1,500 plays, of which around 400 survive. He wrote fast, brilliantly, for a popular commercial audience, combining tragedy and comedy freely in defiance of the neoclassical rules the Italians were developing. Calderón de la Barca was more refined — his Life Is a Dream, written in 1635, is one of the great philosophical dramas in any language, exploring the nature of reality, free will, and whether we can ever distinguish waking life from a dream.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca was born in Madrid in 1600 — the same year Hamlet was likely first performed in London, which feels cosmically appropriate given how much the two works share in theme and temperament. He lived until 1681, an extraordinarily long life for the era, and was productive almost until the end. He came from a minor noble family, was educated by Jesuits — which shaped his philosophical and theological thinking profoundly — and spent part of his young adulthood as a soldier before establishing himself as the dominant playwright of the Spanish court. The name "Jesuits" comes simply from Jesus. When Ignatius of Loyola founded the order in 1540, he named it the Societas Jesu in Latin — meaning "Society of Jesus." Members were therefore informally called Jesuits, meaning essentially "men of Jesus" or "followers of Jesus." Fun fact, The word "Jesuit" was originally an insult. Critics and rivals used it mockingly in the 16th century, implying the members were presumptuous for attaching Christ's name so directly to their order. Over time the order's members embraced it, and it lost its negative edge — though the related adjective "Jesuitical" (meaning overly clever or cunning) retained a somewhat skeptical flavor in English. Naming the order directly after Jesus was a bold statement of purpose — total devotion to Christ(!!!), with a fourth special vow of obedience directly to the Pope (in addition to the standard vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience). They saw themselves as a kind of spiritual army directly in Christ's service, which is why Ignatius — a former soldier — structured the order with military-style discipline and hierarchy.So in short: Jesuit = person of Jesus, with all the intellectual, spiritual, and institutional weight that identity carried.

Developed through a document called the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies, finalized 1599), it was a standardized curriculum used across all Jesuit schools worldwide — meaning a student in Madrid got essentially the same education as one in Rome or Mexico City. You can think of it as a school system where all the kids would be recommended to take the following classes. Built on the classical tradition: Latin and Greek, mastered to a very high level, through reading original texts; Rhetoric and debate, students were trained to argue any side of a question persuasively; Philosophy, especially Aristotle and Aquinas (Scholasticism); Theology, rigorous, systematic, rooted in logic; History, mathematics, and natural sciences, which is unusually broad for the era. Students regularly debated each other formally, sharpening their reasoning and argumentation. This is where the reputation for Jesuitical cleverness comes from. Jesuits actually used dramatic performance as a teaching tool. Students wrote and performed plays, which is directly relevant to Calderón. Everything was structured, sequenced, and cumulative. The schools cared not just intellect but character, will, and spiritual discipline (the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius ran alongside academic work). Jesuit-educated minds shaped the modern world disproportionately — Descartes, Voltaire, Joyce, Fidel Castro, and Pope Francis all passed through Jesuit schools. The system essentially invented the model of the modern liberal arts education.

But anyways, back to Pedro Calderón de la Barca. He eventually took holy orders and became a priest in 1651, which deepened rather than ended his dramatic career. He wrote over a hundred plays and nearly eighty autos sacramentales — one-act allegorical plays performed on wagons during the feast of Corpus Christi, exploring theological questions through dramatic allegory. Corpus Christi is a Latin phrase meaning "Body of Christ.", in this context, it refers to a Catholic feast day celebrating the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist (the bread and wine of communion, which Catholic doctrine holds are literally transformed into Christ's body and blood). It falls in late May or June, roughly 60 days after Easter. It's celebrated with processions, incense, and elaborate ceremony — a very visually dramatic feast. You could see the scale of this thing. Pedro Calderón de la Barca was running some big, prestigious productions. It feels surprisingly modern — closer to a 20th century existentialist play than to anything we usually associate with the 17th century.

Existentialism is not simply a mood of bleakness or alienation, though it is often associated with both. It is a philosophical tradition — developed primarily in the 20th century by thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers — that places the individual human being and the problem of existence at the center of philosophical inquiry. According to Existentialism, human beings are not born with a predetermined nature or purpose. We exist first, and then we define ourselves through our choices and actions. There is no God-given human nature, no cosmic blueprint for what a person should be. We are radically free and radically responsible for what we make of ourselves. Because there is no predetermined essence, we cannot appeal to nature, God, society, or circumstance to excuse our choices. We are condemned to be free, as Sartre put it — we cannot escape the burden of choosing, even refusing to choose is itself a choice. The awareness of this radical freedom, combined with the absence of any cosmic guarantee of meaning or purpose, produces a fundamental anxiety. The universe is indifferent to human concerns. Life has no inherent meaning. We must create meaning ourselves, in full awareness that it is created rather than given.The existentialist ideal is to live authentically — to face the reality of one's situation honestly, without hiding behind social roles, religious consolations, or what Sartre called bad faith — the self-deception by which people pretend they have no choice, that they are simply what circumstances have made them, that their freedom is less than it actually is. These ideas emerged in response to specific 20th century conditions — the collapse of traditional religious certainty, the catastrophe of two world wars, the experience of totalitarianism, the sense that the civilized world had revealed itself to be capable of systematic barbarism. But as Calderón demonstrates, the underlying questions are much older than the 20th century. More on this in the next post. ☀️