The Golden Age of Spanish Theatre spanned from 1590 to 1681. During this time, several important developments in Spanish theatre emerged, including the establishment of the corrales, or public theatres, the rise of influential playwrights like Lope de Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and the development of new theatrical genres such as the auto sacramental and zarzuela.

1. Golden Age of
Spanish Theatre
c. 1590 - 1681

2. Spain in 1492

3. Ferdinand and Isabella

4. Ferdinand and Isabella with Columbus

5. The Alhambra
in Granada

6. Cordoba’s Cathedral: Mosque converted into Church

7. Autos Sacramentales
• religious plays similar to cycle plays
• associated with Corpus Christi festival
• originally produced by trade guilds
• used large, mobile carts (carros)
• performed by professional actors

8. Corpus Christi Procession

11. The Corrales
• professional public theatres
• developed from courtyards and inns
• originally benefited hospitals and poor houses
• audience segregated by gender and status
(separate sections for clergy and women)
• Corral de la Cruz: Madrid’s first permanent
theatre (1579)

14. Almagro

17. Court Theatre
• in royal palaces and
castles beginning at
Alcazar Castle c. 1600

20. Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra (1547–1616) was
a Spanish novelist, poet and
playwright, best known for
his beloved Don
Quixote, widely considered
to be the first modern novel,
the greatest novel in the
Spanish language, and one
of the most influential and
enduring works in Western
literature.

21. Don Quixote

22. Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega (156 –1635) was a
playwright and poet of the Siglo de
Oro, or Golden Age of Spanish
literature. His reputation in the world
of Spanish letters is second only to
that of Miguel de Cervantes, while
the sheer volume of his literary
output is unequalled: he is estimated
to have written between 1,500 and
2,500 fully-fledged plays—of which
some 425 have survived until the
modern day—together with a
plethora of shorter dramatic and
poetic works.

23. Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep’s Well)

24. Calderon de la Barca
Pedro Calderón de la Barca was born in
Madrid in 1600. He was a soldier and
priest, philosophical poet and playwright.
His life spanned the reign of three kings
(Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II). He saw
Europe go through pacifism, the Thirty
Years' War and the change in hegemony
towards the more bourgeois north. He
streamlined the form known as the
'Comedia Nueva', or New Comedy,
eliminating superfluous scenes and
secondary characters, and brought the
individual and his conflicts to the fore. In
his dramatic style he placed particular
emphasis on the staging of his work,
which he described as the 'memory of
appearances’. Life is a Dream is his most
universal work. He died in Madrid in
1681.

25. La vida es sueño (Life Is A Dream)

26. Zarzuela Palace

27. Zarzuela: Operetta

28. Golden Age Costumes