is reflected in the contrast of honesty and deception, since deception is one of the means taken to create illusion and hide truth. The style in which these themes are presented is known as culteranismo, or the ostentation of "culture," meaning an affected erudition intended to lend artificial brilliance to literary style with excessive use of classical allusions and mythological references. The style can be seen early in the play with the reference to the "hippogriff," to be discussed below:
It was, in effect, another manifestation of the aesthetic crisis of seventeenth-century Spain, the literary counterpart of the architectural and decorative extravagances of the baroque and the churrigueresque (Colford iii).
The primary theme in the play is reality versus illusion, a theme to which Calder=n returned in his works again and again. For Calder=n, there is an almost inescapable human tendency to confuse truth and illusion. In the play, the efforts of Basilio to escape his fate actually create the circumstances which make that fate come to pass. He is aware from the first of what that fate will be because he has learned the details through astrology. One of the great illusions in the play is that human beings can take such knowledge and make use of it, when in fact they do not have the power to change fate. Indeed, a belief in astrology presupposes a belief in predestination, and so the human being who learns of his fate and tries to change it is challenging his own core beliefs:
In the author's mind, the greatest illusion of which humans are capable is the belief that they may autonomously control their destiny (Magill 305).
Hesse notes the degree of confusion in the play brought about by its emphasis on deception and illusion, producing a series of false impressions as characters fail to see the reality of their situation or of the identities of other characters, or perhaps they deceive themselves about their ...