10 or 11 p.m., the actors having to play first at two other private houses. So great is the interest that not only is the house crowded and its door besieged but the throng in the street outside is so thick that the players have much difficulty in forcing their way through it. The owner of the house had given 10 cruzados for the play[73]. Vicente's Auto da Festa was similarly acted in a private house. The most interesting of all the facts recorded by Chiado is the eagerness of the people. Uninvited persons from the crowd outside kept pressing in at the door. Thus we can easily understand how the people could give their own name to a play, fastening on words or incident that especially struck them. The Farce of the Poor Squire became Quem tem farelos?[74], the author's name for the Auto da Mofina Mendes was Os Mysterios da Virgem (I. 103), the Clerigo da Beira was also known as the Auto de Pedreanes[75]. Therefore when we come upon a new title of a Vicente play unknown to us we need not[Pg xxviii] conclude that it is a new play.

Of the seven Vicente plays[76] placed on the Portuguese Index of 1551 four are known to us. The Auto da Vida do Paço may be identified with some probability with the Romagem de Aggravados[77]. If we may not identify the Jubileu de Amores with the Auto da Feira its disappearance must be accounted for by the wrath of the Church of Rome, which fell upon it when produced at Brussels in 1531[78]. The remaining play O Auto da Aderencia do Paço can scarcely be identified with the Auto da Festa on the ground that the vilão says (1906 ed., p. 123):

Quem quiser ter que comer
Trabalhe por aderencia:
Haverá quanto quiser.
Vosoutros que andais no paço....

especially as there was scarcely anything for the Censorship to condemn: merely the mention of the Priol's two sons (p. 111) and the ease with which the old woman obtains a Bull from the Nuncio (pp. 120, 124). There is far more reason, 'in my simple conjectures,' for believing that A Caça dos Segredos altered its name before or after it was produced and became A farsa chamada Auto da Lusitania. In the burlesque passage concerning Gil Vicente in this play (III. 275-6) we learn that he was instructed for seven years and a day in the Sibyl's cave and informed by the Sibyl of the secrets which she knew about the past:

E ali foi ensinado
Sete anos e mais um dia
E da Sibila informado
Dos segredos que sabia
Do antigo tempo passado.

If the Trovas ao Conde de Vimioso were written in 1525, the seven years during which Vicente hunted for secrets bring us to 1532, the date of the Auto da Lusitania. The necessary allusions to the birth of the Prince were inserted, but the play had been ready long before[79].