Auto Sacramental

The auto sacramental began, on the most widely repeated account, as a moving picture rather than a play. Medieval Corpus Christi processions in Spain carried decorated floats and tableaux vivants through city streets, silent scenes meant to be looked at rather than watched as drama. Over the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries those tableaux gained speech, then dialogue, then plot, until they became a self standing form performed on wagons, carros, wheeled between a city's squares so a single production reached several audiences in one feast day.

Gil Vicente's Auto de San Martin, staged at the Corpus Christi procession in Lisbon in 1504, is the work most often named as the first true auto sacramental, and the date is repeated confidently in tertiary sources. It is also, on a closer reading, a doubtful claim: the play has no allegorical characters of the kind that came to define the genre and does not itself dramatize the Eucharist, the very feature the term names. Historians who make this point trace the form's real roots further back, to the plain devotional tableaux documented in Spain from the thirteenth century, well before any surviving text gives the genre the allegorical, doctrine arguing shape it would later carry.

Whatever its true beginning, the mature form is unmistakable. Its characters are personifications rather than named people: Faith, the Church, the World, Sin, arguing out a point of Catholic teaching on the Eucharist through allegory rather than biography. Municipal councils across Spain and its American colonies commissioned and funded productions each Corpus Christi, and the genre grew steadily more elaborate across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, right up to the moment a single playwright came to own it almost entirely.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca did not merely write autos sacramentales; for more than three decades he was effectively the only person in Madrid permitted to. Calderon is credited with more than seventy autos across his career, and from 1647 until his death in 1681 his were the only ones the city's Corpus Christi festivities staged, an arrangement without real parallel elsewhere in the history of the form. His plays used the genre's stock of personified abstractions with unusual philosophical ambition: El Gran Teatro del Mundo, The Great Theatre of the World, casts the Author, understood as God, assigning roles of Rich Man, Poor Man, King, Beggar and Beauty to the human cast of a single day's performance on the stage of the world itself, arguing through allegory that the roles fortune assigns matter less before God than how honestly each is played.

That very ambition and spectacle became the genre's undoing. As productions grew more theatrically extravagant, so did the machinery, the special effects and the frank crowd appeal that came with them, and by the eighteenth century critics both inside and outside the Church argued the form had drifted from sacred instruction toward secular entertainment merely wearing religious costume, a charge made harder to answer once its central subject was literally the sacrament. King Charles III's government issued a royal decree in 1765 banning autos sacramentales outright, citing exactly that disrespect for the Eucharist, and public performance of the form ended in Spain that year and did not return. Alexander Parker's 1943 study The Allegorical Drama of Calderon remains the standard English language account of how the plays built doctrine out of allegory during the genre's final and most accomplished century.