María de Zayas's works have long been the object of study by scholars, but most serious inquiry has been focused on her prose. Not until recently has her production as a dramaturga become a matter of study in its own right. Her only known comedia, La traición en la amistad , has been analyzed from various perspectives, but no critic has defined precisely what is meant by "friendship," an important topic not only in the work, but in sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature in general. In this paper, I argue that Zayas casts aside the anthropocentric model of friendship, a construct based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and limited to two participants, as unsuitable for women. Instead, she proposes a different type of friendship: one among several women, who in spite of the dangers ever-present to nascent feminine friendships in a male-oriented world, overcome the difficulties they face and achieve their goal.