The comedia nueva, the hybrid form of popular theatre developed in Spain by Lope de Vega and his contemporaries around the turn of the seventeenth century, was peculiarly ready to draw attention to its very status as theatre, as art. The reasons for this are several. The drama drew on a large pool of sources, popular and literary, native and Classical and Italian, and their influence remained evident – indeed, it was often flaunted. The theatre, like Cervantes's Don Quijote and Velázquez's Fábula de Aracne, like much of the art of the Baroque, was conscious of its own origins in earlier art, and of its manufactured status. The huge turnover of generically similar plays also helped self-referentiality and intertextual play to become the norm in the theatre. Additionally, in this period of Spanish history, life itself was theatrical in a sense more mundane than the theatrum mundi metaphor of Calderón's El gran teatro del mundo would suggest. Life and theatre intermingled. The reasons behind this sharply perceived histrionic urge almost certainly have to do with anxieties about identity – an identity that can be broadly termed social. A poor performance could lead to a life devastated. Culturally, breaking the frame can be seen as an expression of one aspect of the Baroque, a reflection of the difficulty of perceiving the difference between appearance and reality, a reaching out to the spectator who is burdened with some of the responsibility of interpretation. The selfconsciousness of Golden-Age drama has been acknowledged by scholars but never adequately explored. This study is primarily an attempt to follow up one of the implications of the overt artistry of the comedia nueva.

The concept of metatheatre is one that has gained a foothold in the study and theory of drama in the forty or so years since the term was coined by Lionel Abel. Abel's work has been seminal: his idea has fertilized many an imagination. However, his concept of metatheatre has been reshaped and appropriated and his own application of the term all but forgotten. Indeed, Richard Hornby has criticized Abel's work on the grounds that metatheatre is ‘never clearly defined’.