Theatre
The Ship of Hell
Auto da Barca do Inferno
Gil Vicente · 1517
Synopsis
On the bank of a river beyond the grave, two boats wait, one steered by a devil, the other by an angel. The dead arrive one by one and think they know where they are going: a nobleman followed by a page carrying his chair, a usurer, a simpleton, a shoemaker, a friar with his mistress, a procuress, a Jew, a corregidor and a lawyer, a hanged man. Each pleads his case before the angel, and the devil answers him.
Context
Written in homage to Queen Leonor, widow of John II, and performed on her orders before King Manuel in 1517, the play opens a series of three ships, completed in 1519. Its author had served this queen since 1502, when he had recited his first text in the chamber of Queen Maria, who had just given birth to the future John III. Unlike most of his plays, which appeared only in 1562 in the collection compiled by his son, it was printed in his lifetime, as a broadsheet, around 1518, in a text he had revised. The second edition of the collection, in 1586, was mutilated by the Inquisition's censorship.
Who it is for
A short play in verse, with no plot and no division into acts; the satire targets sixteenth-century social estates which a glossary helps to identify.
Prizes and reception
The most famous of his morality plays, compulsory reading in the ninth year of Portuguese schools, and one of the fifty essential works of the Diário de Notícias.
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