ABSTRACT
The canon’s anti-theatrical rant reveals how Golden Age historical drama was the very epitome of all that was considered reprehensible about the theatre during this period of recurrent condemnations of actors, invectives against dramatic poetry and bans on the representation of plays. Like most other contemporaneous drama, history plays violated stylistic decorum and standing societal norms mixing the noble personages and serious action of tragedy with the platitudes and frivolities of fictive comic characters. Cascales’ implicit reply to Pinciano’s vindication of poetic invention is clearly interesting as testimony to the existence of a fundamental dividing line in the spectrum of Golden Age theoretical positions on verisimilitude, of general importance to the present examination of the period’s aesthetic-historical culture. The theatrum mundi – conceived simultaneously as human existence and as the representation of this existence on worldly scaffolds – is thus, according to González de Salas, necessarily tragicomic in nature.
