In Chapters 2 and 3, in four comedies, we have seen how the position of the individual in society can be scrutinized through metatheatrical roleplay – indeed how the ruling ideology's excessive attempts to control the individual are undermined by what amounts to a refusal to play the socially expected role. In some comedies the antisocial elements even exploit their control over the roles and behaviour of their would-be masters. Comedy, in performing its serious social function, redefines role and prepares society for the return of the marginalized individual. Marta is allowed to marry for love, not her father's pleasure and financial gain; Floriano discovers a path to true love, escaping the jealous hostility of the Prince, and Erífila eschews an unwelcome arranged marriage; Ángela avoids a life of isolation as a social outcast, an impecunious widow; Fenisa also marries for love and avoids a May-December union. In each case society is forced to yield to the wronged individual, or at least compromise in order to persuade the individual to reintegrate. I have described this social concern of comedy with recourse to role-theory and metatheatre: by seeing that in a hierarchical society social life depends on playing out a role, the heroes and heroines of comedy hijack a role which does not belong to them, and even foresee and control the role-play of other social creatures who do play their roles predictably, with Bergson's comic raideur. Comedy allows self-expression – often discovered through antisocial role-play (the only way an individual can find a new voice) – at the expense of the social status quo. It has a broadly carnivalesque function. The audience sees a reflection of itself (i.e. the comedia society) portrayed as inflexible and witnesses itself undermined at one remove. These comedies ‘play’ with matters, not of life and death, of transcendent significance, but of a parochial, mundane nature.

Not all Golden-Age theatre, however, dramatizes the rewards for those individuals who transgress the boundaries of their social roles, who successfully assert their new-found sense of self. An investigation of roleplay in the comedia would be incomplete without a look at the restrictions on antisocial role-play, the points beyond which a character may not stray.