Editorial Note by Maria João Brilhante

This is a collection of a hundred texts written and almost all published between 1971 and 1995. Several of them are the result of a teaching career that saw the university and its players as a workshop for the collective transformation of knowledge.

The texts that make up this book vary greatly in size, depending on where they were published or the function they were intended to fulfil. There is a predominance of texts on theatre or dramatic literature. Gil Vicente is the object of choice and undoubtedly the most fertile contribution of Osório Mateus’ critical work. His studies on the autos are unavoidable today and, in the second half of the 20th century, he proposed restoring the original conditions of their theatrical existence. This perspective has, in fact, presided over the way we understand the study of what we call dramatic texts from an early stage, and many essays today are presented as a place for theorising about theatre in its many forms. Theory, criticism and history are the fields that each of the texts crosses, even those that are about a performance and that we would think are tied to the circumstantiality of the theatrical event.

In their own way, each one of them manages to be a sure gesture towards a history of theatre that has yet to be made, making visible commonplaces or inaccuracies that need to be identified, opening up places of questioning, summoning appropriate instruments for the immense work that awaits to be done. In their clarity and economy, they refer to a universe of readings and knowledge that transcends textual limits and contributes to radiating the web of connections proposed in them to the places and experiences of each reader.