Today I will be writing about Portugal’s only two known playwrights: Gil Vicente (1463 - 1536) and Almeida Garrett (1799 - 1854), that despite being born in different eras they are both playwrights who shaped my country and whose uninteresting lives are taught at school.

Gil Vicente was not a writer but a goldsmith who decided to be remembered for eternity, the only two plays he wrote are:

• Auto da barca do inferno: Do you know those Youtube videos where you swipe left or right to find the best girl? this is the same, but the “girls” are random people of the middle ages who arrive in boats, and they swipe to see if you go to hell or heaven, yes, that is all, at least it is easy to understand.
• Farsa de Inês Pereira: A young girl who cant find the ideal man to marry so she does a mistake and marries an abusive but attractive man who then dies in the war, then she marries again with some random farmer.

This is all I know about Gil, at least he was the namesake for a football club I like, instead of writing scripts for teenage dramas he could continue making monstrances and gold.

And now its the turn to talk about Almeida Garrett, a man who was forced to exile in the boring island of Terceira in the middle of the Atlantic, thanks Jean-de-Dieu Soult for your effort but it wasnt enough to stop Almeida, and it wasnt only that, he then managed to survive the portuguese civil war and the liberal revolution, probably god wanted him to publish his only known work: Frei Luís de Sousa.

This play (that happens in the XVII century) is about a girl who thinks that her husband is dead, so she marries another man and has a daughter, this may look like another book of a cheating wife but its full of crazy subliminal messages and references that makes this play impossible to understand. Almeida was known for being everything: a soldier, an actor, a politician… but I think that writing was the only exception…