Literary categories and labels are useful in a paradoxical way, and more so in the aftermath of poststructuralism. Frames allow for typologies and for groupings of texts, yet if similitude is a point of departure, difference — differentiation, distinction, divergence, deviation — ultimately will inform the critical or analytical act. Take the case of the (for many) ‘first modern novel’, Don Quijote, which is easy to classify and even more likely to resist, or to defy, classification. It serves as an example of realism, as contrasted with the idealistic fictions of sentimental, chivalric, and pastoral romance, but it has more in common with modernist and postmodernist responses to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century narrative realism than with the objectives and conventions of the authors cataloged as realists. Not only is realism relative, dependent on a significant ‘other’ to shape its identity, but it also is compromised from the start, separated from the signified in the mediating space of words that attempt to capture things. In Don Quijote, Cervantes breaks from idealism in an ironic way. His realism is inflected by an antithetical force, that of metafiction, which takes the narrative in an opposing direction that substitutes self-reflexivity for mimesis. It is not realism or metafiction but the dialectics of realism and metafiction that defines the rhythm, movement, and tone of Don Quijote. In the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias and in his dramatic works themselves, Lope de Vega balances comedy and tragedy in a variety of forms. In those plays that veer toward comedy, the threat to honour and the potential for catastrophe yield to the upside-down perspective of saturnalian inversion; happy endings (often punctuated by multiple marriages) result from breaking rules in ways that would not be sanctioned in ‘real’ society. In the more serious plays, the dénouement frequently illustrates tragedy averted and acknowledgment of the guiding principles of society. El castigo sin venganza (1631), one of Lope's later works, is particularly interesting in generic terms, given that the playwright categorizes the text as a tragedy. By Lope's own criteria, that denomination must be qualified.

Derived from the Phaedra myth and from literary and historical variations on the theme, El castigo sin venganza centres on the Duke of Ferrara, a profligate who, under pressure from his constituents, arranges to marry the noblewoman Casandra.