The Polis, Romantic tragedy, and untimeliness in Frei Luís de Sousa

Abstract

Almeida Garrett’s dramatic masterpiece, Frei Luís de Sousa (Friar Luís de Sousa, 1844), centers on a wide‐ranging, and intrinsically Romantic, reflection on the connections (and separations) between private bodies and the public sphere of the polis. The author promotes a national theater that conveys the ethical as well as the emotional contradictions of national subjects, intended both as private characters fighting their own personal demons and as public figures caught up in the political arena. This intersection of private and public, emotional and political, is at the center of Garrett’s play, as he reflects on the place of the poet within the polis. The generic hesitation (and combination) between drama and tragedy, explicitly addressed in the play’s crucial preface (“Memória ao Conservatório Real”), offers Garrett the perfect opportunity to return to ancient mythoi in order to connect history and contemporaneity in a story that is simultaneously about Greek myths, Portuguese history, and present‐day politics. No guilt may be attached to any of the characters, yet the tragic events of the play oblige them to act out their situations as untenable conditions in the context of the mundane reality of the “world.” In this fashion, the playwright stages the impossible interconnection of private bodies and national institutions within a modern world from which authentic politics and ethics seem to have disappeared.