Proteu in Teatro do Bairro Alto: The Disguise in Antônio José"s "The Jew" Comedy

• Grant number: 07/07793-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2008
• End date: February 28, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Grantee: Samantha Maria Fantini
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project intends to introduce the researcher in theatre studies, especially in the comedy studies of the Portuguese-Brazilian author Antônio José da Silva (1705-1739), also known as The Jew. It aims to examine the disguise as a fundamental technique of Jew"s theatre project, either in his thematic choices (it"s very frequent, in his comic operas, the appearance of characters pretending to be others, disguised or even metamorphosed as in ANFITRIÃO OU JÚPITER E ALCMENA, or in AS VARIEDADES DE PROTEU, for instance), or in his surprising hybridism, came from the absorption of several tendencies of the seventeenth century theatre, as the Portuguese popular theatre raised by Gil Vicente"s school of thought, the Spanish Baroque theatre, French comedy and the Italian opera or, to sum up, from his specific theatrical language, which joins music and the use of puppets to the comic prose. All these aspects, according to our hypothesis, ably disguises the vigorously revolutionary character of Antônio José"s comedy and allows not only his great success at Teatro do Bairro Alto, in the seventeenth century Lisbon, but also his paper impression already in the decades of 1730 and 1740 (great feat for a Jewish author that, having lives in the inquisitorial times of Portugal"s D. João V, unfortunately could not escape, himself, from the deadly claws of Tribunal do Santo Ofício, which sentenced him to public execution in 1739).