Erving Goffman was confident that life is ‘a dramatically enacted thing’ (p. 78), that although life is not theatre, nevertheless acting, ‘the presentation of self’, is an inherent and integral part of everyday existence. As a social anthropologist, researching in the Shetland Islands, Goffman was interested in describing the strategies people employed in order to control the reactions of their social audience, ultimately to maintain or improve status. The difficulties Goffman alleged he experienced in casting off the ‘scaffold’ of his extended theatrical analogy, the fact that he found the ways in which ‘the world is not, of course, a stage […] not easy to specify’ (p. 78), need not tempt us away from the common-sense assertion that, whatever its dependence on the theatrical, life attains a level of reality or authenticity which is merely mimicked in the theatre.

However, the theatrical does willy-nilly influence this real life, and at the same time societies created on-stage reflect societies off-stage. The relationship is symbiotic. When a character on-stage creates a play-withina- play, or a role-within-a-role, that character, in performing metatheatrically (in the strict sense outlined by Abel), in revealing the theatricality of life, unveils a knowledge of the importance of role-play to society, society's artificial, constructed nature. The insights provided by metatheatrical heroes and heroines on-stage can enlighten the audience which watches their stage performances (or at least those sections or members of the audience who do not form part of the dominant hierarchy). The spectators too, however unconsciously, can exploit the strategies of these characters and the resultant redefinitions of role which take place in comedy. This is one way that the theatre can influence social change. As I indicated in the Foreword to this study it is difficult to pinpoint precise influences of drama on Golden-Age social life (just as it is today), especially given the comparative lack of socio-historical evidence from the period. What we do have is the continued vocal presence of a lobby opposed to the theatre on the grounds that it influenced the way people lived their lives, and a sense that life itself was theatrical in a way different to today despite some similarity in social norms between the two eras. An obsession with etiquette and social performance is evident in much fictional and non-fictional writing of the Spanish Golden Age.