Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who lived from January 17, 1600, to May 25, 1681, was a Spanish dramatist and poet of the Spanish Golden Age, often called the Spanish Shakespeare and recognized as a national poet of Spain. Over his lifetime he wrote 120 comedies, 80 sacramental plays known as autos sacramentales, and 20 short comedic works called entremeses. His masterpiece, La vida es sueno, or Life Is a Dream, blends romantic plotting with philosophical exploration of whether an individual's fate is fixed or can be altered by free will, and his work, which refined and extended the dramatic forms established by his predecessor Lope de Vega while introducing techniques later identified as metafiction and surrealism, profoundly influenced later movements including Romanticism, Symbolism, modernism and expressionism, with admirers including Goethe, Byron, Shelley and Pasternak.