It has become a critical cliché to talk of the way seventeenth-century European courts were highly theatrical in their self-presentation. The idea of the court as theatre, of the king as the central protagonist in the elaborate ‘stage setting’ of court ceremonial, has been frequently applied to the Habsburg court. It is thus accepted that the court theatre mirrors, in John Varey’s words, the King’s ‘taste, his ambitions, his virtues, his nobility and, above all, his royal power’, and that, in turn, the court’s organizing principle is theatre.

Calderón’s court dramas certainly exhibit what Melveena McKendrick has recently referred to as an ‘extraordinary potent sense of place’. This is evident not only in the ways in which such plays written expressly for the court for performance in the various palace theatres serve to publicize what Margaret Greer has called the ‘text of royal power’, but also in the dramatic settings of the plays themselves. In the majority of court plays written by Calderón part of theaction on stage takes place in a royal palace. In their very staging, therefore, such court dramas dramatize the court setting of the audience: like Chinese boxes, a palace is contained within the stage, which is, in turn, contained within a real royal palace. This visual conceit created by the mise-en-abyme staging raises issues of art, authority and power, and offers, implicitly, a critique of the interdependence and interaction of each.

In those plays in which the audience see a sumptuous palace on the stage the metaphor of the court as theatre is literally realized. In such instances not only does Calderón put the king figuratively on stage (by making his plays refer to their royal performative context or by using them as a means of offering the king advice, criticism and moral guidelines) but he also puts the entire court via its setting on the stage as well. The court, which is dependent on illusion and theatre, watches a play in which a palace is seen to be the product of illusion and theatre.