Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving… Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-81) was a soldier, a priest and a prolific writer. He wrote more than 120 plays and over 70 autos sacramentales, or allegorical religious plays with subjects from mythology and the Old and the New Testaments. He was born in Spain and educated at a Jesuit college in Madrid. When he was in his thirties, he became the foremost dramatist of the time in Spain. He was popular both with the public and with King Philip IV, who first made him a knight of the order of Santiago and later, in 1663, chaplain of honor. One of his best known plays is La Vida es Sueno (Life Is a Dream, 1635), the story of a prince who has been kept a prisoner all his life because of a… prophecy that he will conquer his father. When the king drugs him and brings him to court to test the prophecy, the prince becomes so frenzied, he is returned to prison and convinced that the experience was a dream. When he is later released, he is confused about what is real, but ultimately, because he has learned to control his passions, his father cedes him the crown. Other memorable works include El Alcalde de Zalamea (1643) and El Magico Prodigioso (1637).