The individual's sensibility to any threat to self (or self-image) is the source of the initially (and sometimes wholly) defensive ‘play’ – the retreat and possible subsequent counter-thrust – of the comedia de capa y espada. Role-play of the antisocial type becomes primarily a convenient means of escaping the demands of one's social role, which have become excessive usually as a result of a conflict of love and the related complications of honour. Society's expectations of an individual's future have come to clash irreconcilably with that individual's hopes and desires. In Chapter 3 I shall look at two female characters who, thanks to their quick-witted nature, understand and ultimately undermine patriarchy's expectations of their long-term role. They achieve this by sustaining a use of role-play as a strategic stepping stone to success, but without marginalizing themselves (or at least, like Diana of La boba para los otros y discreta para sí, without appearing to stray from expected female social behaviour). However, in this chapter I shall consider the less calculated, even reflex performances of the protagonists of two Golden-Age comedies: Tirso de Molina's Marta la piadosa (1615), and Lope de Vega's Los locos de Valencia (1590–95).

Both works feature individuals who elect, under severe pressure, to fake a fundamental change to their usual social role, a decision which transforms all their subsequent behaviour, and the expectations other characters have of them. Marta pretends to have taken a vow of chastity in order to avoid marriage to the indiano Urbina, a rich old friend of her father, Gómez, and thus has to maintain a façade of piety which all but persuades her father of her unavailability for marriage. Floriano of Los locos de Valencia is persuaded by his friend, Valerio, to enter an asylum, pretending to be mad, as the only means to escape the inevitable punishment for his apparent murder of his Prince in Aragón, committed in the heat of a clash which resulted from their rivalry in love. Both, then, take a break from the personal blows which life has dealt them by retreating hastily to marginal positions in society – pious, but uninstitutionalized woman, and madman, in an institution which houses the marginal.