[From Don Fernando, Heinemann, 1935, rev. 1950; Vintage Classics, 2001, Chapter 7, pp. 72-87:]

It would be absurd to suppose that one could acquire from the picaresque novels more than a partial knowledge of the behaviour, the ways of thought and the sensibility of the Spanish in the Golden Age. They present but one side from the picture. For another you must go to the drama, which at no time and in no country has flourished so luxuriantly as in Spain during the hundred years that ended with Calderon’s death [1681]. Now, drama is a popular art and in order to succeed a play must reflect the temper of the age. A play is a close collaboration between the author, the actors and the audience, and the audience cannot play their part unless they can share and share alike in the author’s conception. The sentiments that he sets before them must be those with which they are in sympathy. He must feel as they feel and his morality must be the same as theirs. Sometimes he expresses sentiments and a morality that his audience have felt, but from timidity or obtuseness have refused to put into words; and then he is admiringly described as a dramatist of ideas. The revolt of Nora came as a shock to the world of her day, but the notion would have seemed preposterous (and so the play would have failed) unless there had been an obscure, but deep-seated feeling among the spectators that woman had a right to her own personality. Thus by reading the drama of a period you can get a very good impression of what men and women thought on the great issues that influenced their lives.

But if the drama presents an adequate picture of the way men think and feel, contrariwise it influences their thoughts and feelings. It gives voice to the inclinations that they have repressed and by the vividness of its appeal enables them to carry into action the promptings of their hearts. The contagiousness of the emotions it arouses, the man-to-man address, give it a power incomparably greater than that of fiction. Far more wives left their husbands because Nora slammed the door in Torvald Helmer’s face than ever men shot themselves because Werther suffered from the melancholia of the age. Though it must be admitted that suicide is a drastic and often painful affair. The dramatist not only represents the persons of his period, but by giving to their instinctive tendencies living shapes forms them after the pattern he has devised. So Mr. Coward not only portrayed the querulous frivolity of the decade that followed the Great War, but created a generation of querulously frivolous people. It is owing to this power that the playwright wields, that the church has always, and it may be with wisdom, looked upon drama askance.

[...]

Calderon had of course notable merits. He had the mystical feeling, common to many Spaniards of his age, that the world of sense we live in is but a part of the spiritual world and to this owes its significance. It gives certain of his plays a nobility that dramatists have seldom achieved. […] There is in such of his plays as I have read (for I have read but a dozen out of the couple of hundred he wrote) a sense of the mystery of things that can hardly fail to move. You seem to hear in the distance, faintly audible, while this or the other is happening, the sinister drum of unseen powers.
[…]
[Calderon’s] religious sense was profound, and indeed, after having a natural son or two, he was ordained. (The Spanish writers were prolific not only with their pens; they produced enough bastards to man a regiment and fill the nunneries of a fair-sized town.) He was passionately faithful to the Church and only naturally expected the Church to do the right thing by him. When he was not given certain preferment that he expected he wrote to the Cardinal-Archbishop and said he would write no more plays till the injustice was remedied. It was. Happy days for the dramatist! Now, a playwright’s decision to write no more would be accepted with equanimity.

[From Creatures of Circumstance, Heinemann/Doubleday, 1947, “The Point of Honour”:]

Some years ago, being engaged on writing a book about Spain in the Golden Age, I had occasion to read again the plays of Calderon, Among others I read one called El Medico de Su Honra, which means the Physician of His Honour. It is a cruel play and you can hardly read it without a shudder. But rereading it, I was reminded of an encounter I had had many years before which has always remained in my memory as one of the strangest I have ever had.

[…]

We sat down on the multicoloured bench and I gave my host a cigarette. I held a match to it. He had still my volume of Calderon in his hands and now he idly turned the pages.
"Which of the plays have you been reading?"
"El Medico de Su Honra."
He gave me a look and I thought I discerned in his large eyes a sardonic glint.
"And what do you think of it?"
"I think it's revolting. The fact is, of course, that the idea is so foreign to our modern notions."
"What idea?"
"The point of honour and all that sort of thing."
I should explain that the point of honour is the mainspring of much of the Spanish drama. It is the nobleman's code that impels a man to kill his wife, in cold blood, not only if she has been unfaithful to him, but even if, however little she was to blame, her conduct has given rise to scandal. In this particular play there is an example of this more deliberate than any I have ever read: the physician of his honour takes vengeance on his wife, though aware that she is innocent, simply as a matter of decorum.
"It's in the Spanish blood," said my friend. "The foreigner must just take it or leave it."
"Oh, come, a lot of water has flowed down the Guadalquivir since Calderon's day. You're not going to pretend that any man would behave like that now."
"On the contrary I pretend that even now a husband who finds himself in such a humiliating and ridiculous position can only regain his self-respect by the offender's death."
I did not answer. It seemed to me that he was pulling a romantic gesture and within me I murmured, Bosh. He gave me an ironic smile.