Antônio José da Silva: a dramaturgy made of conventions

Author(s)

Carlos Junior Gontijo Rosa

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2017-04-05

Examining board members

Flavia Maria Ferraz Sampaio Corradin; Joao Roberto Gomes de Faria; Renata Soares Junqueira; Marcio Ricardo Coelho Muniz; Renata Pallottini

• Advisor: Flavia Maria Ferraz Sampaio Corradin

Abstract

This doctoral thesis analyzes the mythological plays written by the eighteenth century playwright Antônio José da Silva, the Jew, whose work owes a great deal to the Spanish tragicomedy of the seventeenth century. Based on his plays, this paper proposes elements for a better understanding of dramatic texts: hybrid reading, which makes use of Literary and Theatre studies; historical contextualization, to avoid anachronism; and character construction, the touchstone in the relationship between Literature and Drama. Because the texts analyzed here are distant from the contemporary reader both chronologically and stylistically, it is advised to use the imagination to reconstruct the scenes described in the text. The reflections about the plays are divided into two Journeys which complement each other, but they are presented separately due to their extension and to the diversity of research outputs. In the First Journey, Antônio José\'s playwriting is considered within the cultural-historical context of its production, by comparing different versions of the Greco-Roman myths and the precepts contemporary with the author. To start with, this paper presents the varied tragicomic precepts of the seventeenth-century Europe and, by doing so, it establishes points of contact and reference in the corpus of this research. After extensive search in Portuguese libraries, a hypothesis about the route linking the construction of mythological characters and the texts of the Jew is proposed. Each of the five plays is analyzed separately and the focus is the main plot - that is to say, the \"tragic\" part of the tragicomedy - and its characters, in great part extracted from Greco-Latin mythological literature. The Second Journey focuses on the construction of the secondary plot - the \"comic\" component which completes the analysis of both parts of a tragicomedy -. Recent interpretative perspectives of dramatic texts about the Spanish Golden Age, developed by a group of Spanish researchers, shed light on the secondary plot. This analysis shows that the secondary plot grows in importance when compared to the main plot. In fact, in the authors last plays, it even affects the main storyline - without overcoming its prominence, though. The secondary plot comprises graciosos and servants (graciosas), and to study these characters, this paper adopts a list of evaluative functions of the characters\' speeches, using the protagonist of each play as a reference. The secondary plot in the plays by Antônio José retains another feature: they are independent from the main one; and from this aspect derives another function, combined to the ones that had already been developed by the Spanish researchers aforementioned. Therefore, each of the mythological plays by the Jew is analyzed separately to demonstrate that both the secondary plot and the low characters perform an important role not only in the structural composition of those plays, but also in the constitution of an interesting unit to please the audience. By ways of conclusion, this paper sets up a conceptual discussion about crucial elements to read and analyze these dramatic texts and others: the hybrid reading, historical contextualization and character construction. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 12/08947-4 - The hero and the valet at the mythologic plays of Antônio José da Silva: example to a analyse guide of theatrical plays.
• Grantee: Carlos Junior Gontijo Rosa
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate