Spain had declined as a world power by the seventeenth century. A political and economic decay accentuated a spiritual and moral turmoil, causing the country's optimism to yield to bitterness, cynicism and resignation. A mood of desengaño, disillusionment, now prevailed. Yet, if on the one hand this spirit of disillusion encouraged a confrontation with the realities of the Spanish situation, on the other there was still the illusion that the glory of the past would return. A parallel situation occurs in literature with regard to the role of courtly love as the thematic basis of nearly all love poetry. The idealistic social and literary phenomenon of courtly love, now pervaded by reality, was on the verge of dissolution, maintained only by its form and the determination of a few idealists.

A prime social reason for the duration of courtly love was, as Leonard Forster sustains, that it was a game which could be taken seriously or frivolously: