The analyses of Alarcón’s plays contained in this study make frequent reference to an extensive corpus of non-fictional works by his contemporaries and predecessors. My reading of these works in relation to Alarcón’s plays reveals numerous instances where Alarcón appears to be directly indebted to the philosophers, historians, poets and satirists of Classical antiquity on one hand, and to the Fathers of the Church on the other, as well as to the authors of a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works on statecraft, the art of war, the nature of magic, the history of Spain, and other topics of a moral and political character. The profusion of literary influences of this kind may of course represent no more than the intellectual furniture of any comparably well-educated man of his time, yet the presence of such influences in Alarcón’s work does not give the impression of being unconsidered. On the contrary, Alarcón’s grasp of the concepts with which he is working seems so firm and his overall method of argument so systematic as to make it unlikely that he wrote these plays merely, or even mainly, to entertain his audience. What is more probable is that they are designed to argue in favour of the moral and social benefits of adopting a practical scheme of predominantly neo-Stoic virtues, and that they do so in a manner no less cogent than that suggested by King, who compares his technique to:

The cumulative impression made by Alarcón’s erudite but discreet literary allusions, allied to the fact that he appears to have taken some pains to ensure the appearance of his work in print, strongly suggests that, far from being hurriedly written examples of theatrical ephemera, Alarcón’s plays have a studied complexity and an intellectual seriousness which is designed to repay close scrutiny.