Macedo’s dramatic works were neither better nor worse than those of other playwrights of the time. It was the professed object of MANUEL DE FIGUEIREDO (1725-1801) to ‘write plays morally and dramatically correct’. The effect of this didacticism in the fourteen volumes of his _Theatro_ (1804-15) is disastrous. He wrote in prose and verse, but the plays in ordinary prose are to be preferred, since in the others, like M. Jourdain, he made _de la prose sans le savoir_. He wrote comedies, and tragedies in which he is involuntarily comic. Even in _Ignez_ he keeps the even tenor of his dullness, and he warns the reader in a preface that his Inés is not to be considered beautiful since she was probably over thirty, and that her and Pedro’s passion had had time to cool.[648] There is more life in the plays written in a medley of prose and verse by ANTONIO JOSÉ DA SILVA (1705-39), whom Southey considered ‘the best of their dramatic writers’, but it is doubtful whether they would have received any attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of their author’s life. He was born at Rio de Janeiro, the son of Portuguese Jews, his mother had been arrested by order of the Inquisition as early as 1712, and the whole family came to Lisbon, where the father practised successfully as a lawyer. In 1726 his mother was re-arrested, and this time Antonio José with her. He was released after suffering torture and publicly abjuring Jewish doctrines in an _auto da fé_. Eleven years later, after studying at Coimbra and following his father’s profession in Lisbon, he was again arrested, with his wife--he had married his cousin despite the dangerous fact that her mother had been burnt and she herself imprisoned by the Inquisition--and on October 18, 1739, he was first strangled and then burnt in an _auto da fé_ at Lisbon. For some years (1733-8) before his death the people of Lisbon had admired the plays of ‘the Jew’, as they called him, at the _Theatro do Bairro Alto_. Of the eight plays that have survived in print it must be said that they are for the most part very purposeless and ineffective. He attracted his audience sometimes by wit, more often by sheer farcical absurdity; the constant plays on words, the meaningless snatches of verse interpolated, do not increase the interest, which flags on every page because the author has not the slightest power of concentration. The action at least is quick and varied; it shows Silva’s inventive talent and explains the popularity of his _galhofeiras comedias_,[649] however much it may weary the reader. His plays with classical subjects are especially cold and dull, _A Ninfa Syringa ou Amores de Pan e Syringa_,[650] _Os Encantos de Medea_,[651] _Esopaida_,[651] _Amphitrião_,[651] _As Variedades de Proteo_,[652] _Laberinto de Creta_.[652] His best play, _Guerras do Alecrim e Mangerona_ (1737), contains some elements of character-drawing and describes the devices of the starving gentlemen D.