The topic of this popular song is the central issue of many major works of European literature in the Baroque era of the 15th and 16th centuries, a time which many see as a forerunner of modern Western consciousness. Using two of the greatest plays in Spanish and English, Calderon de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the course will investigate the question of what it might mean socially and morally if all human reality were indeed illusory. What if human actions had no consequences? What if power over people and things had no limit? These troubling questions are raised by these texts. Answers are developed in the historical context of the works and their authors, couched in the literary conventions of the day.