In its sybaritic appeal, in its festive character, in its very subject matter – so often drawn from myth or imitative of the romances of chivalry – Calderón's courtly theatre can be described in a phrase: self-conscious spectacle. Jean Duvignaud finds the style characteristic of the European Baroque: “The theatre becomes celebration, visual delight, the representation of mysterious forces that have been freed, a visual delirium from the very moment when the spectacle is enclosed in a box, shut behind a ‘closed door,’ with a partition that seems artificially and clandestinely left open, by chance, to the eyes of the audience.” Yet precisely where theatrical form is determined in a crucial way, Calderón's later theatre breaks the mould. Despite the increasing use oitrompe l'oeil scenery, his pageant worlds do not open clandestinely to the spectators; they do not work by chance; they are avowedly self-conscious of their own illusory status and entail a critique of the same superficiality which they flaunt. If we are to make anything of Duvignaud's metaphor, it must be revised: in the theatre of Calderón's last decades, audience and actors find themselves together behind closed doors, both within an essentially empty box. The “power of the scenic image built within [this] empty box … which vies with the world” (ibid., p. 285) stems from the concerns of self-affirmation and critique advanced by audience and players both. As never before, Calderón's later work is inscribed within a close-knit courtly context. This was a theatre which the royal coterie used in order to fashion images for itself.