In arguing, as I have done so far, that Calderón's theatre incorporates illusion as a necessary part of the same illusions it criticizes, and that in seeking to limit illusion Calderón proposes its embrace, I have been looking at the different theatrical adaptations of the thematics of illusion in specific comedias of his (e.g. role-playing in social and theatrical terms, theatrical representation as a form of magic, space as endowed with stage-like limitations). There are further forms of illusion, also developed in theatrical terms, which I shall discuss in the chapters to follow: political authority in En la vida todo es verdady todo mentira; the sensory world in Eco y Narciso; the intellect in La estatua de Prometeo; heroic adventure in Hadoy divisa de Leonidoy Marfisa. But I have not yet said much about the origins of Calderón's concern with the thematics, or the theatrics, of illusion. We know, of course, that his work shows a deep engagement with the theatrum mundi conceit, and that there are connections with the Humanist concerns exemplified in Luis Vives' Fabula de homine. But there are also historical conditions bearing very directly on Calderón's involvement with the use and the limits of illusion; these will be my subject here.

If the comedia as a genre can be called a form of collective self reflection, which is to say a way in which a society is able to fashion images of itself, then, beginning in the 1630s, the decade of Calderón's mature work, the genre became a form of official, national self imagining as wēll.