Anatomy of the monster: Francisco José Freire's reproach to the tragicomic poem

Abstract

Francisco José Freire (1719-1773), known as Cândido Lusitano, in the treatise Arte poetica, ou Regras da Verdadeira Poesia em geral, e de todas as suas especies principaes, tratadas com juizo critico (ed. 1748; 2nd ed. 1759), condemns tragicomedy as a hybrid and vicious genre, neither tragic nor comic, without proportion or unity, and Il Pastor Fido, a pastoral tragicomedy composed by Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612), whose first edition was published in 1590, is rejected as a bad work of art. The blame of tragicomedy and of the famous Italian poem is based on the metaphor of the monstrum, presented in the initial steps (vv. 14-31) of the Epistula ad Pisones, the Horace’s Poetics (1st century B.C.). This epistle gives Francisco José Freire the criteria for judging poetry in the Portuguese eighteenth-century. --- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1160

Keywords

• Horácio
• Francisco José Freire
• Giovanni Battista Guarini
• tragicomédia
• monstrum.