Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the Spanish dramatist, was widely considered to be the last important figure of the Spanish Golden Age. His more than 100 plays were carefully contrived, subtle, and rhetorical. His finest work is in his more than 70 autos sacramentales (one-act religious plays), among them El divino Orfeo and A Dios por razón de estado [to God for reasons of state]. Of his philosophical dramas the best known are El mágico prodigioso [the wonderful magician] and La vida es sueño [life is a dream], which deals with the themes of fate, prognostication, and free will.
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