Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia examines how and why playwrights of the period time and again created characters who re-invent themselves by performing new roles and inventing new plots within the larger frame of the play. This book argues that playwrights such as Tirso de Molina, Calderon and Lope de Vega saw role-playing as a means by which they could comment on and criticize the society in which they lived. The study relies on the close reading of a number of play-texts, and makes use of sociological theories of performance as well as other modern critical theory. These approaches help to reveal a drama far less supportive of the social status quo in Golden-Age Spain than is traditionally thought to have been the case.