Autos Sacramentales: Historical World as Divine Pageant

Performed in city streets during the Corpus Christi, the autos sacramentales were closely related to the sacrament of the Eucharist. As dramatic reimaginings of the abstract theological ideas about Fall and Redemption, death and transformation to new life informing this major Catholic feast, the autos were an artistic expression of the Golden Age idea of the historical world as a great allegorical drama comprising literal-historical and figurative-spiritual meanings in one boundless mystical unity. Though other Golden Age dramatists, including Lope de Vega, also wrote autos sacramentales, the genre remains intimately connected with the name of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and one of his most famous engagements with this densely symbolic type of drama is no doubt El gran teatro del mundo [The Great Theater of the World] (c. 1635), which is discussed here in depth.