How should critical thought respond to the ructions and turmoil, the clamour and confusion that have characterized Brazilian political life in recent years? Erupting with the urban protests of 2013, from the seeming sunlit placidity of mildly social-democratic pt rule—beneath which, new pressures were building—this discontent then drove the rise of a rabid new right, while a self-isolated Dilma government stuck to its austerity playbook as Brazil’s economy tanked. The combined prosecutorial, congressional and media assault upon her in 2016, the government of unelectables under Michel Temer (on a 7 per cent approval rating) and the imprisonment of Lula then cleared the path for the rise of Bolsonaro, the chaos of the pandemic—and the sudden reversal of juridical wisdom in March 2021, annulling Lula’s convictions and allowing him to fight this October’s election.

Is it possible, in these conditions, for critique to be as radical as reality itself? Roberto Schwarz’s reply is an epic comi-tragedy, Rainha Lira, which, in addition to the Queen of the title, features a popular uprising, a jailed King, a thuggish Thing and the Queen’s three daughters, a neoliberal, a nationalist and a former guerrilla. Schwarz, as nlr readers may know, is among the world’s finest living literary critics and a political commentator of rare insight and acuity.footnote¹ At the heart of his literary essays is the elucidation of relations—interchange, conflict, dislocation—between classes in peripheral countries and those of the metropolitan centre, in art and in social life. Since those contrasting positions are the poles of a capitalist system, the essays are not only dialectical but characteristically tense. Schwarz starts from the present, but is alert to the perdurance of the archaic, be it in economic and political structures or in literary modes of expression. His avowed affiliations are with the European Marxist critical tradition, but also with the work of the great Brazilian critic Antonio Candido and the early-sixties Capital seminar at the University of São Paulo, in which professors and students came together to study Brazilian backwardness as an integral part of the system of capitalist reproduction in the country.

Schwarz’s critical writing owes much, as well, to biographical circumstances. Born in Vienna in 1938, he was taken to Brazil by his parents when still a baby. Jewish and Communist, they fled Nazism, settling finally in São Paulo. Moving between two languages, German and Portuguese, Schwarz studied social sciences at usp, then critical theory and comparative literature with René Wellek at Yale, returning to help Candido launch the usp Department of Literary Theory. Caught up in the mounting struggles that led to the military coup of 1964, he was an active participant in the cultural effervescence of the left, until it was crushed by the decisive hard turn of the dictatorship in 1968. At that point, Schwarz was forced into exile, spending the next ten years in Paris, where he continued his study of the novelist Machado de Assis, earning a doctorate from the Sorbonne. This was the making of a committed intellectual, who seeks to situate himself in a cosmos where the national and international interpenetrate, each shaping and illuminating the other: an incomer, amazed by the backward-yet-modern configuration of a peripheral country; and a Brazilian who, even in the academic centres of capitalism, is not deceived by metropolitan appearances.

Less well-known is Schwarz’s artistic side. The translator of Bruckner, Schiller and, above all, Brecht, Schwarz has also published two books of poems, Bird in the Drawer (1959) and Veteran Hearts (1974), which retain the colloquialism of Brazilian modernism; humorous, sometimes obscene, resorting to prose at times; not directly political. Politics moved to the fore in his first play, The Dustbin of History, written in 1968–69 and published in 1977. The idea for The Dustbin came to him as he hid from the political police in the home of a friend with a good library. There he re-read Machado de Assis’s short story, ‘The Alienist’, which Schwarz would later adapt for the stage, and Machiavelli’s Prince. Both served as the basis for the political slapstick of The Dustbin. The play shared the restlessness of the cultural movements in Brazil at the time, such as Glauber Rocha’s Cinema Novo and the Tropicalismo of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. It also undertook a critical-historical investigation of the Brazilian situation. Machado’s unabashed descriptions of nineteenth-century class configurations remained highly relevant, Schwarz showed, while the staging of black puppets, which the characters kicked and punched, asserted the undischarged freight of the slave-owning past.

So perhaps it should not be a surprise that Schwarz has responded to the wild political lurches of today’s Brazil with the publication of Rainha Lira. It is a far more complex work than The Dustbin because it explodes the interpretive schemas inherited from the past—notions of populism or neo-fascism, threadbare from over-use—to stage instead a contradictory, chaotic present. As in Arnold’s Dover Beach, ‘we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.’ Rainha Lira’s title, of course, summons up King Lear, and the play features a Court in disarray, with a Fool to point the lesson. But the aim of the borrowing is strictly contemporary, as is the other major reference, to Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards. Both plays help Schwarz expose the concrete clashes of classes today. It is political reality, mediated by the language of the new work, that gives pertinence to the classic drama. For a Brazilian audience, its relevance to what has occurred in the past ten years is paramount.

Rainha Lira has sixteen scenes and dozens of characters. One of the innovations of the play is that—as never before in Brazilian literature with such intensity—it gives voice to the poor, who not only speak but act. They participate in a huge revolt against the royal order. However, they do not speak as a melodic choir and do not behave as a united class. There are conformist and rebellious characters; militants and prudent ones; teachers and students; people with clarity and others blind to reality; militiamen and bandits; even a black-bloc militant, Joey Riot.

The play opens in a small, working-class household in which a young man, Progressio, is arguing with his mother, Rita, a former communist. She is satisfied with the life the family leads: