The plot, again, is of the simplest: the Devil, combining the parts of Charon and Rhadamanthus, ferry-man and judge, invites Death’s victims to show cause why they should not enter his boat; and the interest is in the light thus thrown upon the earthly behaviour of nobleman, judge, advocate, usurer, fool, love-lorn friar, the cheating market-woman, the cobbler who throve by deceiving the people, the peasant who skimped his tithes, the little shepherdess who had seen God ‘often and often’, of Count, King,[266] and Emperor, Bishop, Cardinal, and Pope. The first part ends with a noble invocation to the knights who had died fighting in Africa, and the second begins with the mystic jewelled _romance_: _Remando vam remadores_. The comedies and tragicomedies vary greatly. The _Comedia de Rubena_ (1521) is, like _A Winter’s Tale_, quite without unity of time or place (for this primitive humanist, although he might mention Plato, did not ‘reverence the Stagirite’), but is divided into three acts (called scenes) as in a modern play. Cismena, like Perdita born in the first scene, is conveyed by fairies to Crete, where she is wooed and won by the Prince of Syria. The _Comedia do Viuvo_ (1514) is much more compact and has a delicate charm. Don Rosvel, a prince in disguise, serves in the house of a widower at Burgos for love of his daughters. (He is in love with both, but his brother in search of him arrives and marries the second.) On the other hand, the _Comedia sobre a divisa da cidade de Coimbra_, acted before King João III in his ever-loyal city of Coimbra in 1527, is a lengthy, far-fetched explanation of the city’s arms, and the _Floresta de Enganos_ (played before the king at Evora in 1536) is a succession of scenes of pure farce--the deceit practised upon a merchant, the ludicrous predicament to which love reduced the grave old judge who had taken his degree in Paris--with a more serious theme, a Portuguese version of the story of Psyche and Eros. Of the ‘tragicomedies’ two, _Dom Duardos_ (1525?) and _Amadis de Gaula_ (1533), dramatize romances of chivalry: _Primaleon_, that ‘_dulce & aplacible historia_ translated from the Greek’,[267] and _Amadis_.[268] The work is done with skill, for Vicente succeeds here as always in being natural, and in this twilight atmosphere of garden flowers and romance keeps his realism.[269] Both plays contain passages of great lyrical beauty, and _Dom Duardos_ ends with the _romance_ beginning _Pelo mes era de Abril_. Thus in his latter age he successfully adapted himself to pastures new. In his letter dedicating _Dom Duardos_ to King João III he wrote: ‘Since, excellent Prince and most powerful King, the comedies, farces and moralities which I wrote for (_en servicio de_) the Queen your Aunt were low figures[270] in which there was no fitting rhetoric to satisfy the delicate spirit of your Highness, I realized that I must crowd more sail on to my poor bark.’ For us the