El secreto como hilo dramático que enmaraña una acción trágica: Lope y Calderón

The present article considers, on the one hand, the secret as a generator of tragic plots and, on the other, theatre as the creator of «dark spaces» that supply actions, seemingly insoluble, which produce dramatic tension. In their plays, and particularly in their tragedies, Lope and Calderón create a world in which day-to-day communication compromises the unambiguous transmission of information, so that the language exchanged among characters loses its communicative function and becomes instead a medium of «discommunication». The approach to the plays studied here derives from a theatrical reading of the dramatic text, where words contain stage-directions which the printed page conceals.