From its first appearance in 1635 up through the present, Life Is a Dream has enjoyed acclaim and popularity. It was first printed in Madrid in an edition edited by Calderón's brother José in 1636. Reprinted along with all of Calderón's work by his friend and biographer Juan de Vera Tassis y Villaroel in a reliable and readable edition in the years immediately following his death in 1681, it was readily available in Spain and to translators, even when Spanish drama itself was in decline.

One of the earliest translators of Calderón's work into English was the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose 1822 notebook shows translations from La vida es sueño as well as from other of Calderón's works. In the 1850s, the Irish poet Denis Florence MacCarthy published translations of Calderón's works, and in 1858, Edward...