abstract
This article examines the censorship of Nelson Rodrigues’s play Boca de ouro at the beginning of the 1960’s, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The documents then issued by the censors now belong to dossier number 4906 in the Miroel Silveira Archive at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo. The author discusses how moral criteria are inadequate to judge a work of art and exposes the mistakes censors always make every time they try to restrain freedom of artistic creation in the name of conceptions and behavior reputed as “normal” or “adequate”.
Keywords:
Nelson Rodrigues; Boca de Ouro; censorship; freedom of speech