Manuel Antonio Álvares de Azevedo was born on 12 December 1831 in São Paulo, in what was then the Empire of Brazil. When his family removed to Rio de Janeiro, the adolescent Azevedo, under the tutelage of an Englishman named Dr. Stoll, received the finest education that a Brazilian boy of his social standing could, becoming fluent in French and English, and proficient in Latin. So impressed was Dr. Stoll with the boy’s capacity for learning that, in a letter sent to his father, he exclaimed

“Your little Manuel enchants me ever more: it is without doubt a child of the best expectation in my college […he has] the greatest intellectual capacity that I met with in America in a boy of his age.”[1]

As Stoll’s pupil, Azevedo cultivated a love, even an obsession for, European gothic and Romantic literature. Although at university he studied law, he voraciously read the works of Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine, Musset. His reading of these men’s poetical and dramatic works inspired him, first to imitate them, and then to adapt them. Azevedo also wrote lengthy pieces of literary criticism on European literature. As he wrote to his friend Luíz on a summer break from university:

“I haven’t spent idly these holidays […] In this little space of 3 months I wrote a romance of 200 and more pages; two poems, one in 5 and another in 2 cantos; an analysis of Jacques Rolla, of Musset; and some literary studies of the simultaneous march of civilization and poetry in Portugal, quite voluminous; a fragment of a poem in very in very ancient language […] in the way of The Rowley by Chatterton.”

In 1850, he commenced writing the two works which would eventually be regarded as his finest: a play titled Macário and a novella called Noite na taverna.

It is the first work that comes under our notice today—a Faustian tale wherein Satan emerges as the play’s most magnetic presence. What we have, however, is something akin to a first draft of a play. Never intended to be written for the theatre, Azevedo, in his introduction, stated that “it’s a pale child of those fantasies that take hold of the skull and inspire The Tempest to Shakespeare, Beppo and the Ninth Canto of Don Juan to Byron.” The preface’s references to the gravediggers of Hamlet, the skull of Yorick, and Othello’s “wild rage” promise the reader that a morbid yet fantastical tale lay in store.

Yet this is no horror story. It is philosophy in the medium of drama. The Devil in Macário is a Byronic hero: eloquent, urbane, and intellectually defiant; most importantly he is a figure whose ironical wit and moral insights expose human immorality. The play’s moral centre of gravity thus shifts away from the immoral and cynical Macário and toward Satan, who sees the world’s corruption with clarity and composure. Satan is not so much a tempter but a moral arbiter. Unlike the Mephistopheles of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, he does not offer the riches of the earth but sifts the immoral from it using philosophy and argument.

Brazil during the nineteenth century was sparsely populated. In 1850, when Macário was written, the vast country of 8,515,770 km² had just 7.5 million people (the much smaller United Kingdom, in contrast, had 27.4 million people). Much of the economic and social activity revolved around the three major states (or “provinces” as they were then known) of Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo, and Minas Gerais. The roads between the major cities of those provinces were lonely places. There were no road lights on the major routes and travel on horseback “offered constant dangers,” in the words of Almeida Nogeuira.[2] A traveller might count himself lucky if he came across a roadside inn.

It is to a somewhat ramshackle roadside inn that Macário repairs to after a long night of travelling and where, during a meal and a not so appealing bottle of aguardente, “The Unknown” walks in, and takes a seat beside him. The pair of them strike up a conversation and the man with no name (who is, of course, Satan) reveals that, for the rest of the play, he will serve as Macário’s foil, being the play’s moral centre, in contrast to the debauched Macário.

Macário, just like Faust before him, is a scholar disillusioned with life, with philosophy, and with Romanticism:

“I love women and I hate Romanticism,”

he declares in one part of the play. In another, Macário states that

“Philosophy is vain. It’s a dark crypt leading only to darkness. Man’s ideas fascinate, but they don’t enlighten. In the darkness of the spirit, he cracks his skull in madness or sinks into fatalism or nothingness.”

Macário also harbours a great many unpleasant attitudes towards women; they are things to be used according to his pleasure. The following reveals something of his attitude here:

Human philosophy is vanity. Here it is, we live side by side, man sleeps night to night with a woman; he drinks, eats, and loves with her, knowing all the signs of her body, and all the contours of her figure. He knows how she moans in the agonies of love, all her fantasies of purity which she dreams of at night, and all the obscene words that escape from her by day.

Macário has in fact committed some foul acts towards poorer women. Satan asks him to recount the experiences that he has had with women and—the play not being for the squeamish—he reveals that one night a young maiden lay dying in her mother’s hovel and he found that

the bed was a mere cot; there was an ageing mattress, much beaten, and appeared frayed by the weight of what had beaten upon it there. I initially was delighted with her. I was some hours. This woman was not beautiful. She was thin and pale. This hovel was filthy. She was cold there but I gave her kisses, though the contact of her softened but corpselike body did not excite in me any sensations, however much I tried to convince myself otherwise […] On another morning I returned but the house was shut up. I knocked. No one answered me. I entered. I came face to face with an old woman so I asked her about the other. ‘Silence!’ she told me, ‘she’s laid there on the floor … she died last night…’ Then with a cynical air [she said] ‘You want to see her? She’s nude … They are going to shroud her’.

The subtext of rape will be apparent to all. The maiden, on the cusp of death, could hardly consent to the sexual acts that Macário commits on her and, after she has been shrouded, he violates her, with his eyes, one last time by peering underneath the shroud.

Satan is taken aback and exclaims

One thing amazes me. You’re twenty years old: you should be pure as an angel yet you’re as debauched as a canon.

Satan jocularly remarks that Macário, in view of his treatment of women, combined with his irreligiosity, might as well become a priest. Macário’s irreligious views and his generally unpleasant attitudes towards women mean that, when Satan finally reveals himself, Macário is ecstatic that the devil has sought him out for

“The biggest disgrace in this world is to be a Faust without Mephistopheles.”

Yet Satan does not conform to Macário’s view of how a Mephistophelian companion should act. “You speak like a book,” Macário retorts after one of the pair’s intellectual exchanges. Satan senses Macário’s surprise at his intelligence, and his appearance, and exclaims:

That was what you were thinking about? You’re but a child; maybe you wanted to see me naked and drunk like Caliban, exuding my traditional sulphurous scent! Blood of Bacchus! I’m the devil himself! No more nor less: because I had fur gloves, English trousers, and Germanic piercing blue eyes! Do you want me to swear by the Virgin Mary as well?

Caliban, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, was the ugly and deformed creature, “not honour’d with a human shape,” and more akin to the kind of man Macário was expecting to meet in the devil. Yet this devil is just like any educated gentleman that Macário might meet in Brazil’s fledgling towns and cities, with his English trousers and Germanic gloves. The respectable appearance matches Satan’s worldview and he is also the character of the play who most disapproves of human debauchery and sin. In a dream sequence Satan takes Macário to the City of Debauchery where a wide cross-section of sinners will be met with. Yet Satan does not hide his disgust at those who live there and on the way he exclaims:

Hell’s pavements are a thousand times better. But the worst of the story is this: the canons and nuns, each time they leave, pick up a rosary and blaspheme—it makes me sick. Do you admire it? Why do you open your mouth amazed? In former times the devil ran after men, now they pray to the devil. Believe that I’m doing you a favour most grand in preferring you to a friar’s girl who’d exchange me for her boy Jesus, and a hundred priests that would give their souls (if they have one) for a canonate.

Satan also despises those religious women who

“know the modern art of interspersing a Hail Mary with a flirt; and dropping a rosary bead to catch a man’s eye.”

Satan’s disapproval has no effect upon Macário; upon hearing the tales of the city’s sin he exclaims that he cannot wait to

“Fondle their breasts […] kiss them on their heaving bosoms; [feel] the stirring of your cross on their lap while squeezing their waist.”

Although Satan tries to put Macário off by saying that

“very few times do the lasses have good teeth,”

and that their

“faces are emaciated, their eyes languid, their breasts cold … and their bodies are filthy,”

it is to no avail. Macário would rather experience the pleasures of Mohammed’s Paradise. Truly,

“in former times the devil ran after men, now they pray to the devil,”

or they run after the devil, just as Macário did when he was excited to gain his very own Mephistopheles to do his bidding.

Satan was actually showing Macário the City of Debauchery in the vain hope that he might mend his ways. He does not. Failing this, Satan shows Macário a vision of a woman, the personification of lust, whose touch withers all who come into contact with her. For a moment there is hope; Macário is so disgusted with the vision of Lust that he wants no association with Satan any longer. At this point, Satan becomes more of a stereotypical devil, issuing infernal laughs, as the boatman does in Barco do Inferno, as Macário relates the disturbing vision:

MACÁRIO: No—the echo’s still repeating. Do you hear it? It’s a wail of agony—a human voice! Who moans like this at such an hour? Who writhes in death’s convulsions?

SATAN (giving a laugh): ah! ah! ah!

MACÁRIO: What an infernal laugh! Don’t you see I tremble? That the wind which carries this wail makes my hair stand on end? Feel you not the cold sweat dripping from my forehead?

SATAN (laughing): ah! ah! ah!

Then Macário wakes up, safe in a room at the inn, though his experience of meeting the devil himself has shocked him. And this was no dream—black hoof marks remain on the floorboards although Satan is nowhere to be seen.

For a time, Macário does mend his ways especially when visiting Italy and coming across another foil in the person of the melancholy Penseroso (a nod to John Milton’s poem of the same name). Penseroso is a good and virtuous man with whom Macário has many an interesting conversation on philosophy and Romanticism—much as he did with Satan—and who never takes strong drink. Yet, like a dog to its vomit, Macário falls into his old ways and expresses anew his lustful desires:

I feel my heart reopening to the love of women. It seems that if that beauty with her black eyes and hair, with her arching and floating neck, would let me rest my head on her breasts, I could still live and want to live, and have enough breath to faint there in the pure voluptuousness of a spasm, in the vertigo of a kiss. What stirs my fibres is still voluptuousness […] the unquenchable thirst for joy.

It is here that Satan reappears and tells Macário

“You are mine. I’ve marked you on my forehead with my finger. I won’t let you out of my sight.”

Satan then transports Macário to a Saturnalia. Mesmerised by the erotic sight before him, and in spite of Satan’s attempt to counsel against desiring to experience it, Macário responds with “Shut up!”

The play ends there. The implication is clear. Macário will go to hell after his short-lived enjoyment of worldly pleasures. The misogynist, drinker, and all-round arrogant prick will be no more. Satan has played the part of removing another sinner from the world. The devil has, in his own way, performed God’s work, which is perhaps why he was so disgusted with the friars and nuns who “blasphemed” against God with their lifestyles. In this sense, Azevedo’s Satan continues the intellectual irony of Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Milton’s Satan, yet transforms it for intellectual world of nineteenth-century, a society already more corrupt than Hell itself.

References

A conference paper delivered at the “Medievalisms in Time and Space,” International Society for the Study of Medievalism, 14–15 November 2025

[1] Domingo Alzugaray, Luiz Carta e Ignácio de Loyola ‘A vida de Álvares de Azevedo’, in Noite na tavern e Macário, ed. by Domingo Alzugaray, Luiz Carta e Ignácio de Loyola (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Tres, 1973), pp. 1–16 (1). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

[2] Almeida Nogueira, A Academia de S. Paulo, Tradições e Reminiscencias, III (S. Paulo, 1908), 3