El médico de su honra is certainly one of Calderón's more suggestive plays. In it, as in all his best work, he invests the stage with an enormous range of functions. The theatrical metaphor of role, the poetic formulae of honor, the intimations of ritual and sacrifice are not merely figurative forms, poetic contrivances. Calderón sees that the stage has the power to make these notions concrete, real, that representation implies a bodying forth of the autistic gestures latent in language and thought. In El médico Calderón envelops the stark brutality of human sacrifice in a religious aura; in so doing, he tempers its raw power. Through Pedro, he solicits responses of reasoned judgment, compassion, and pity. He uses the stage as an arena for embracing these competing reactions. What distinguishes his theatrical “idea” in El médico from the merely “dramatic” ideas prominent in Aristotle's Poetics and its Renaissance avatars is the spatial factor. Only because Calderón understands the capacities and limitations of representational space is he able to bring together the redoubtable set of tensions we find in El médico.

As much as if not more than in El médico, Calderón explores the implications of theatrical representation in his Herod play, El mayor monstruo del mundo. By means of spatial dimensions, Calderón probes the insatiable and seemingly limitless desires of the Tetrarch of Jerusalem. In him Calderón sees the personal consequences of human acquisitiveness, the inward destruction wrought by the will to power and possession.