The role women play in Cueva's dramatic reworking of the legend of the Infantes de Lara and the unconscious logic underlying its dramatic structure and violent ending are related to several factors, including: 1) the exogamous exchange of women, fundamental to the structure of patrilinear society; 2) tensions arising from the ethnic "cleansing" of sixteenth-century Spain; 3) an "aristocratic crisis of the imagination," generated by the transition from feudal society to centralized absolute monarchy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century, which pressured the aristocracy to relinquish its private justice; 4) Senecan influence on sixteenth-century drama, evident in the relationship of the Siete Infantes to Seneca's Thyestes; and 5) women's role in tragedy, a genre by which men define their own position in society.