Calderon: Life's A Dream

"What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction; and the greatest good is fleeting, for all life is a dream, and even dreams are but dreams."That is the haunting lesson learned by Prince Sigismund in Life's a Dream ( La vida es sueno ), the best known and most widely admired play of Catholic Europe's greatest dramatist, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Calderon's long life (1600-1681) witnessed the pinnacle and collapse of Spanish political power as well as the great flowering