This paper situates a reading of Calderón de la Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea within current discussions in Hispanism concerning the relationship between art and the production of ideology. In this analysis, I contend that a rhetorical strategy of contradiction between visual image and textual commentary results in the active participation of the spectator in the "reading" of scenes on the stage, in the same way that the wonder-producing relationship between the three rhetorical components of the emblem- pictura, inscriptio and subscriptio -results in the interpellation of the reader into the construction of "difficult" meanings. Contradiction, then, instead of being the unintentional by-product of a mass-oriented cultural artifact, actually becomes the very means through which the ideological effect of the play is transmitted. The theoretical frame of this essay combines a reading of sixteenth and seventeenth century emblem theory with post-structural semiotic theory, specifically that of Jacques Lacan. (BJN