The Great Theater of the World
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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El gran teatro del mundo (1655, English: The Great Theatre of the World) is a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.
Life is a stage
The theme that life is a stage can be traced to classical antiquity in Pythagorean philosophers and Philebus by Plato. It is reported especially in the work of the stoics, particularly in the Moral Epistles to Lucilius by Seneca and Enchiridion of Epictetus.
In particular the latter text was key to the spread of theatrum mundi topos in the Renaissance Europe.
Christian authors such as Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria or Augustine of Hippo used it.
According to Ernst Robert Curtius, the text that mainly led to the popularity of this topic in the 16th and 17th centuries was the twelfth century Policraticus of John of Salisbury.
However, Antonio Rey Hazas and Florencio Sevilla Arroyo argue that the penetration of this issue on the Spanish literature was due more to the work of assimilation Erasmus of Rotterdam made of the Epistles of Seneca and the Dialogues of Lucian.
The first Spanish literary work in which it would appear was the Crotalon.
Later, it would become a common cliché in Spanish literature of the Golden Age, in works like Diana enamorada of Gaspar Gil Polo, Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemán or Quixote.
An interesting precedent of the great theater of the world, would be Comedia intitulada Doleria in Pedro Hurtado de la Vera, because it is the first in which it appears God as the author of the play that is the world.
