This book shows how the Aristotelian Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship operates as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Donald Gilbert-Santamaria traces the trajectory for such a poetics through key prose and theatrical genres culminating in an analysis of Don Quixote where friendship emerges as an important formal influence in Cervantes' novel. With chapters covering several important genres from the period including the pastoral novel and the comedia, the book explores the relationship between friendship and other key problems associated with literary representation in the period: subjectivity, exemplarity and imitatio, among others.