ABSTRACT
The shift from rational attempts to deal with the crises besetting the Spanish world to religion and the advocacy of saints or the hardening of social lines between those above and those below were of course not unique Spanish phenomena. The chapter deals with the Spanish society in that transition from hegemony to loss of power that became, as represented by the debate over decline, one of the leitmotivs in Spanish society in the seventeenth century. In seventeenth-century Spain, the slow and inexorable economic, social and political decline was not directly reflected in its lively cultural output, but Calderon's work and death in 1681 marked the end of the Golden Age. The chapter discusses two late seventeenth-century plays: Pedro Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream, as well as a later sequel or thematic companion, Bances Candamo's La piedra filosofal. Both of these plays were produced for the court reflecting the cultural and social predilections of the late Habsburgs.
