Reviews459 The Organization of Corpus Christi festivals in Badajoz usually led to friction between bishops and municipal authorities. There was the ageless question ofhaving "unworthy" professionals portraying holy personages or abstractions, leading in Marcos Alvarez's view to sofismos y soflamas and the eventual prohibition of 1765. In this volume too there are tables and statistical summaries: a gazetteer of the actor's travels, from which town to which town, listing how many pack-animals and how many kilos baggage (Rojas Villandrando evidently exaggerates the volume and weight, 40, n. 11 1); a checklist of named performers known to have worked in Badajoz (Marcos Alvarez has already placed these alongside Genealogía—"Fuentes" II—and Rennert [320]); another of how theatrical families joined the various companies; and an index of named plays (355). With regard to the business aspect of the corrales there is a survey of prices compared with those of certain commodities in contemporary Badajoz (89, n.93). Absent from these documents is anything anecdotal, anything literary, or anything bearing on social history, as we might have anticipated after sampling the riches of Tudela ("Fuentes" XVII). The errata are negligible, Halmiton (89) should be Hamilton, and bocal in a musical context should probably be vocal (57). Alan Soons Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies Suscavage, Charlene E. Calderón. The Imagery ofTragedy. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Cloth. 223 pp. The present study joins the debate about tragedy and its place (or absence ) in Spanish Golden Age theater. As the title suggests, the author proposes to examine the imagery of tragedy or, more specifically, the tragic mythos, represented in a group ofeight plays by Calderón. The introductory chapter, "Timelessness in Time," lays out the theoretical basis for the approach taken, defines terminology to be employed, and offers a brief rationale for the selection ofthese particular plays. The author uses Northrop Frye's definition ofthe tragic mythos, explaining that Frye's perspective "enables us to perceive tragedy not as a static, predetermined idea, but as an ever-developing or always newly emerging entity whose nuances can imperceptibly shade downward from romantic 460BCom, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter 1998) heroism through bitterness to hopeless horror. The narrative core remains the same but the variation played on it varies according to historic-cultural focus and poetic content" (2). Jungian sources are used to explain Calderón's imagery, principally J. E. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a ThousandFaces. Suscavage also summarizes Aristotelian views ofthe hero and the tragic (6-8), then briefly criticizes Gerald Brenan's theories concerning Calderón (8-9). Chapter 2 comprises the longest of the book and deals with half of the plays. Entitled "The Social Tragedy: The Fall of Princes," it proposes that the fall of the prince is "the matter out of which 'true' tragedy is made" since "a ruler not only exists as an individual, but ... his destiny is also seen as the mirror-image of the destiny of his kingdom" (15). In La gran Cenobia Fortune controls the outcome of the lives of the principal characters , while La cisma de Inglaterra shows history as "a recurring series of tragedies." Given the Christian context ofthe latter, however, the fall of the "order-figure" that is Henry VIII represents waste more than fate. The author also claims that "it is obvious at the end ofLa cisma de Inglaterra that the disorder has not exhausted itself . . . [that] tragedy will lead to more tragedy in a demonic parody ofthe natural cycle" (47). By looking beyond the conclusion of the play proper for further confirmation of its tragic core, Suscavage violates the integrity of the dramatic fiction by introducing historical facts extraneous to the literary work. A similar imposition of the historical over the literary "tragedy" occurs in the later analysis ofEl médico de su honra (72). The comments surrounding the character of Semiramis in La hija del aire, I and II, whose fall "can also be viewed as the result of a headlong careening toward a self-destruction caused by her own inner fatality" (60), anticipates the thrust of the third chapter, "The Tragedy of Isolation." The sense of...