O tempos! Ó saudades! Machado de Assis espectador de teatro

Machado de Assis was a theater spectator in the Brazilian court of the Second Empire, a position he left a trail of in chronicles, serial novels, censorship reports, short stories and novels. His work as a critic was part of a broad intellectual campaign to cultivate theatre audiences, a mission he would later leave behind out of apparent disappointment over the path his desired reform of the national scene took. From 1865, devoted to fiction, he wrote only occasionally about theatre, making an exception for his hyperbolic reviews of the first Brazilian season (1869) of the Italian actress, Adelaide Ristori, internationally acclaimed as "the queen of the scenes". This essay aims to inventory Machado's ideas on the theater and his habits as a spectator by studying his observations on the actress's work, hitherto disregarded by specialists.