Introduction: historicizing the Golden Age -- The Spanish comedia and the resistance to historical change -- Transformations of the Cid -- Allegories of power in Calderón -- The subject of control in Counter-Reformation Spain -- Gracián and the authority of taste -- Desire and authority in the Spanish Golden Age: Oedipus and Don Juan -- The archaeology of desire in Don Quijote -- Secularization and literary self-assertion in Don Quijote -- Instinct and object: subjectivity and speech-act in Garcilaso de la Vega -- Reason and romance.