His dramas, written in a combination of Tupi, Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin, were not meant for the stage but for performance by local amateurs in village squares and churchyards. They were traditional in form, written in verse with five-line stanzas, a literary form known as the "auto", a Portuguese devotional drama, following the tradition the Jesuits had developed of using the theater first in classrooms and then for popular instruction. Casts were all male, both native and European, and both groups were meant to learn from the dramas' instruction in Christian morals. They were written for special occasions like a saint's feast day or to mark the arrival of relics in the colony. Scholars have noted that they contain considerable "contextual information", that is references to local events such as village rivalries. For example, Amerindian cannibalism is juxtaposed with the roasting of Lawrence of Rome. Few of his plays survive, but those that do have been praised, despite being crafted for a local audience with a didactic purpose, for their "remarkable feeling for spectacle, calling for the use of body paint, native costumes, song and dance, fights, torches, and processions". A performance might even call for cannon fire from a nearby ship, though the plays were typically "short on action and long on explanations of doctrine" and characters fall clearly into positive and negative types. Anchieta's "auto da pregação universel" of 1567 and published in 1672 is the first dramatic text in Brazilian letters.