Convencion y recepcion. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro. By Ignacio Arellano. Madrid: Gredos, 1999. 349 pages. Ignacio Arellano, the driving force behind GRISO (Grupo de Investigaci6n Siglo de Oro, Universidad de Navarra), has authored another provocative and original book on Spanish drama in the Golden Age that will likely elicit much discussion. Convencion y recepcion. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro brings together in a surprisingly coherent fashion nine studies previously published as articles in earlier versions. The point of departure for Convention y reception, as articulated in the Introduction, is an indictment of two fallacies that have plagued recent comedia scholarship. The first of these methodological errors is to place all plays of the period into one group and study them in light of a single code of conventions, without recognizing that the corpus of dramatic works is made up of a number of different subgenres. The second failure noted by Arellano is the tendency to approach Golden Age playtexts with critical anachronism (9), which, while valid, ignores the cultural codes that inform the plays. The purpose of Arellano's study, then, is to reconstruct the conventional and cultural codes that will allow a reader to understand a Spanish Golden Age play. The first of three main sections of the book, Claves y codigos genericos, utilizes the drama de capa y espada as a kind of case study to debunk misconceptions about this subgenre and identify some of its main conventions. One of the consequences of applying global criteria to all Spanish Golden Age drama has been the repeated insistence on its ultimate seriousness of purpose, something that Arellano finds absurd for the cape and sword plays. The essential characteristics of these plays are wit and love. Arellano concludes that the cape and sword plays generally observe the precept of the unity of time in order to stress their lack of verisimilitude and to elicit responses of admiration and suspense in the spectators in the face of ingenious plot entanglements. Other features of the cape and sword plays are their rupture of decorum (54), generalization of comic agents (58), setting in Spanish cities at a present time, use of common names, exploitation of the honor theme as caricature, and a ludic purpose designed primarily to display the wit of the dramatist. In the second part of his book, De Lope a Bances Candamo, Arellano compares and contrasts the reception to date with the actual conventions discovered in his own reading of Lope's early urban comedies, Tirso's Marta la piadosa, Calder6n's El mayor monstruo del mundo, and literary and theoretical works by Bances Candamo. …