Manuel de Figueiredo, atento leitor de Aristóteles e Corneille ou de como o desejo de verdade pode naturalmente conduzir ao inverosímil

“I want to write useful and verisimilar plays”, that was the first and the last intention of Manuel de Figueiredo, successively repeated during twenty years of activity and fourteen volumes of plays and texts about theatre, reading the Ancients and the Moderns (1756?-1777). But how many contradictions and hesitations hidden by this constant intention! We must considerer that Figueiredo was not a very well-known writer (even if Francisco Coelho de Figueiredo managed to publish his work after his death). His plays (with one calamitous exception) were never put on stage. He is often considered an academic writer, an imitator of Aristotle and the French Classicism. And yet to him, Aristotle and Corneille were not only a conventional source of knowledge, but the lever of a precocious way of thinking the relation between Inverisimilitude and Truth, Art and Reality, Literature and Dramaturgy