What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

This line is from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Spanish Golden Age play *La vida es sueño* (*Life Is a Dream*), first published in 1635 and commonly dated to the early 1630s. It is spoken by Segismundo, the prince of Poland, who has been imprisoned since birth because of a prophecy that he would become a tyrant. Briefly released to test his nature, he behaves violently and is returned to captivity and told the episode was only a dream. The speech crystallizes the play’s baroque preoccupation with appearance versus reality, the instability of worldly power, and the moral question of how to act when experience itself may be deceptive.

The passage compresses a skeptical, almost metaphysical despair into a moral insight: if life is as insubstantial as a dream—“illusion,” “shadow,” “story”—then conventional measures of “the greatest good” (status, pleasure, triumph) are fragile and ultimately inadequate. Yet in the drama this recognition is not merely nihilistic; it becomes a spur to ethical self-governance. If one cannot be sure what is real, one should still choose restraint and justice, acting as though one’s deeds will matter beyond the shifting surface of experience. Calderón thus turns baroque disillusionment into a practical ethic: humility before fortune and responsibility in action despite uncertainty.