Although Calderón is not almost a German author like Shakespeare, he has experienced a great deal of interest in this country since the first translations by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1803 and 1809): from Goethe and Eichendorff to Schopenhauer and Wagner to Hofmannsthal and Benjamin, Kommerell and Curtius, to name a few.

Henry Sullivan traced the history of Calderón in Germany.

Interest was primarily focused on the Catholic Counter-Reformation author of plays such as “Das Große Welttheater” or “Das Leben ist Traum”, which is theologically and philosophically well versed in the distinction between good and evil in the horizon of divine providence and human free will or between Dream and reality, being and appearance in the horizon of sophistry and skepticism.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries large parts of his extensive work were translated into German.

So it turned out that Calderón has also written many comedies.

Apart from "The Lady Kobold" these have not had any particular fortune in this country compared to Molière's type comedies or Shakespeare's tangled comedies.

However, Simon Kroll has just published a bilingual edition of one of these comedies in the Edition Reichenberger and provided it with expert explanations: "The Entanglements of Chance", created around 1635. Two more volumes are planned, all in the translation by Johann Diederich Gries from the nineteenth Century.

The play shows one reason for the lack of reception: Calderón's comedy makes high intellectual demands that German dramaturges and directors apparently shy away from.

The play is a cloak-and-dagger comedy with the usual intricacies of the genre, developed in two storylines.

In one of them, Felix and Diego, who don't know each other, compete for the same woman, Leonor.

In the other, Juan courts Elvira, who hides her identity from him under a veil.

The two plots intertwine because Elvira is Diego's sister.

The comedy's typical mix-ups, entanglements and conflicts are taken to the extreme when everyone involved comes together in one house.

In the end, the confusion is resolved so that a double wedding can be celebrated at the end.

It's about gambling and love

The eponymous coincidence gives this conventional plot an additional dimension and makes the deep structure of the comic recognizable.

It is introduced in the parallel of gambling and love.

The favorable opportunity and the luck of chance are equally significant for players and enthusiasts.

One level of the play is the argumentative discussion, in which the obligations of honor and love, kinship and friendship are negotiated.

These conflicts between the demands of reason and desire, logic and eroticism, are repeatedly circumvented by ingenious jokes without being resolved.

That keeps the plot going.

Above all, the ingenuity here and generally with Calderón is also a reason for love.

Juan fell in love with the veiled woman

because he has never met a woman "of such a rich spirit" who also "connects laws with respectability / all freedom of taste".

The tension between law and freedom is carried out through ingenuity.