Ferreira, António

Abstract

António Ferreira was a Portuguese poet and dramatist whose work, written entirely in Portuguese, is representative of the High Renaissance in Portugal. He was educated at the University of Coimbra, at a period when it was open to foreign influence. Later he moved to Lisbon where he became a judge. His work demonstrates clearly the clash of competing ideologies in the Renaissance. Especially in his Senecan tragedy, Castro, Ferreira shows the difficulty of maintaining a consistently Stoic philosophical stance in the face of adversity. In the same work, he shows himself to be aware of the classical and especially Senecan concept of a deterministic fate, but he rejects it, so that the catastrophe of Castro becomes the consequence of ill-considered moral choices made by a number of characters.

In 1598, many years after his death, the final version of the tragedy was published, in a volume, entitled Poemas Lusitanos, which also contained Ferreira’s collected lyric poetry. In this large body of verse, he rejects entirely the medieval poetic tradition of Portugal. However, his classicism was tempered by his Christian faith. In his odes, for instance, the evocation of a pastoral landscape in the Greco-Roman tradition is tempered by the need for Stoic restraint and a Christian concern with proper preparation for the inevitability of death. Yet his Stoicism, too, is subject to an awareness of his own human failings, such as the fear of the consequences of speaking too openly in an increasingly intolerant and oppressive society.