Ain’t You Got Home Trainin’?

In Life is a Dream, by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, there are two essential, opposing perspectives of human nature. One view is that humans live and react based upon their wishes and what they want. This view is furthered in that the only way to control this pursuit of individual happiness is to govern people and their individual ways of acting with laws and reasoning: basically, society’s overall regulations on how we are …

…who had been taught how to behave well? Of course not! We have all been taught the way we are supposed to act and respond. A trained person is far superior in the area of societal norms than a person who can only rely on their innate ability to act as they wish. Thus is so with Segismund, he could not have been expected to act “normal” within the court without knowing what normal is.