António Ferreira (1528 – 29 November 1569) was a Portuguese poet and the foremost representative of the classical school, founded by Francisco de Sá de Miranda. His most considerable work, Castro, is the first tragedy in Portuguese, and the second in modern European literature. His life Ferreira was a native of Lisbon. His father held the post of escrivão de fazenda (estate clerk) in the house of the Duke of Coimbra at Setúbal. In 1547, he went to the University of Coimbra, and graduated with a bachelor's degree. He took his doctor's degree on 14 July 1555, an event which was celebrated, according to custom, by a sort of Roman triumph, and he stayed on as a professor, finding Coimbra, with its picturesque environs, congenial to his poetical tastes and love of a country life. Ferreira was intimate with princes, nobles and the most distinguished literary men of the time, such as the scholarly Diogo de Teive, and the poets Bernardes, Caminha and Corte-Real. In 1558, at the age of 29, he married D. Maria Pimentel. After a short and happy married life, his wife died. On 14 October 1567, he became Desembargador da Casa do Cível, and had to leave the quiet of Coimbra for Lisbon. His verses tell how he disliked the change, and how the bustle of the capital, then a great commercial emporium, made him sad and almost tongue-tied for poetry. The intrigues and moral twists of the courtiers and traders, among whom he was forced to live, hurt his fine sense of honor, and he felt his mental isolation more, because his friends were few and scattered in that great city which the discoveries and conquests of the Portuguese had made the centre of a world empire. In 1569, a terrible epidemic of carbunculous fever broke out and carried off 50,000 inhabitants of Lisbon, and, on 29 November, Ferreira, who had stayed there doing his duty when others fled; fell a victim. His works Ferreira wrote the Terentian prose comedy, Bristo in (1553), at the age of twenty-five, and dedicated it to Prince John in the name of the university. It is neither a comedy of character nor manners, but its vis comica lies in its plot and situations. The Cioso, a later product, may almost be called a comedy of character. The death in 1554 of Prince John, the heir to the throne, drew