Bances Cándamo and the Calderonian Decadents

Abstract

Of All the decadents in the Spanish drama as it fell away from the glory of the golden age at the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, there are three who most merit the name of disciples of the great Calderón: Bances Cándamo, Vázquez de Zamora, and Cañizares. Taken together, they form a sort of trinity in their support of the Calderonian theory of the drama. But while all wrote, as well as they might, after the manner of their illustrious predecessor and master, it is to Bances Cándamo that one must turn as to the spokesman of a dramatic theory and technique more or less common to his time, a system whose repercussions are to be found not only in the works of the three writers just mentioned, but as well in those of a number of wholly inferior dramatists who, together with the three, form the background of the Spanish stage as it existed from the death of Calderón until, or perhaps slightly beyond the third decade of the eighteenth century; until, indeed, it found opposition and eventual overthrow at the hands of the afrancesados, led, as is generally thought, by Luzán, whose Poética (1737) was for decades the text-book and vade mecum of the neo- or rather pseudoclassicists.