The Calderón who looks out at us from seventeenth-century engravings is not a happy man. The face is stern, the figure restrained, serious, nearly grim. No one thinks of Calderón as a great comic writer, and rightly so: comedias like La dama duende, El galdnfantasma, and El secreto a voces, which stand at the comic extreme of what he wrote, are not occasions of high laughter. In comparison to Shakespeare or Lope de Vega, Molière or Alarcón, Calderón's sense of humor is restrained. He does not have the festive, saturnalian spirit which animates Shakespeare's comic world. In his hands the conventions of social occasion produce sumptuous court entertainment, but not mythological mirth. In tone, Calderón is reserved. Selfmockery, the lighthearted reversal of literary tradition which underlies Shakespeare's As You Like It are not within Calderón's temperamental range. He respects tradition too much and accepts its limitations.

Lope's comedias are informed by a different drive. The unifying capacities of passionate, but innocent, human love lend a verve to his verse and a celebratory tone to the action of his plays. Even a work like Fuenteovejuna, which is comic in rhythm, if not humorous in tone, depends on the joyous energies released by the drive toward harmony. The marriage of Laurencia and Frondoso is the thematic embodiment of the unifying capacities which Lope sees in human love. Not so for Calderón. Eroticism – as in La dama duende – is suspect. In the grim honor plays, the erotic impulse is openly destructive. For Calderón, love is bounded by social constraints; for Lope, it is the groundwork of social harmony.