author
active 1589-1619 Bartolomeu Varela
A shadowy figure from late 16th-century Portuguese letters, he is remembered mainly through a witty collaborative parody of Camões. Even with so little biographical detail surviving, his name is tied to one of the earliest playful responses to Os Lusíadas.
1 Audiobook
Paródia ao primeiro canto dos Lusíadas de Camões por quatro estudantes de Évora em 1589
by Manuel Luiz Freire, Manuel do Valle de Moura, active 1589-1619 Bartolomeu Varela, active 1608 Luís Mendes de Vasconcelos
About the author
Bartolomeu Varela is an early modern Portuguese author whose life is only faintly documented. Library and catalog records identify him as active between 1589 and 1619, but the surviving information about him is very limited.
He is best known as one of the four writers associated with Paródia ao primeiro canto dos Lusíadas de Camões por quatro estudantes de Évora em 1589. Sources connected with that edition describe the work as a parody of the opening of Camões's Os Lusíadas, linked to students in Évora and preserved through later print and digital editions.
Because so little has been firmly recorded about Varela as an individual, his literary profile rests mostly on that shared work and on the glimpse it gives of lively, humorous literary culture in Portugal at the end of the 1500s.