Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the World Theatre in Early Modern Europe

Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular.

The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual.

By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.

Rasmus Vangshardt (born 1988) is a Danish scholar of comparative literature. He is a visiting research fellow (2023–2025) at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, and a junior research fellow at Linacre College. He is a 2020 recipient of the Danish Government’s Young Elite Researcher’s Travel Scholarship. His research is currently funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.