French classical tragedy pivots on two basic subjects: passion and politics. Since the audience of 17th-century monarchical France was naturally intrigued by plots that dealt with the succession to a throne, Racine doubled their pleasure in his first successful play, La Thébaide (first performed and published in 1664), by creating two legitimate pretenders who, to complicate matters, are also identical twins. The play centres on the sons of Oedipus who slay one another in mortal combat, one defending, the other attacking, their native city of Thebes. The deep hatred between the two brothers sounds the notes of separation, disunion, and alienation that came to characterize all Racinian tragedy. Though its structure is flawed and its characters lack inflection, La Thébaide was already typically Racinian in several fundamental aspects. It focuses on a tight knot of characters caught in an episode near the end of a mythical or historical story. Much of the physical action is relegated to narrative reports so that the events onstage are condensed and all the more explosive by the time they reach their climax. The audience’s attention is fixed on the interior conflicts of the characters, rather than on exterior events, and language is used for the subtly nuanced and dramatically memorable expression of emotions, not the recital of a plot.
Racine evidently conceived his next play, Alexandre, as his ticket to royal favour, since the audience was sure to see in the portrait of the Macedonian conqueror a reflection of the young Louis XIV. As the play suggests, Louis could surpass Alexander by restraining his aggressive tendencies and becoming a morally superior hero who champions Roman Catholic virtues. Racine was attempting to reconcile the two traditional conceptions of the hero: the violent warrior (as incarnated in Achilles) and the model of civic virtue (as represented by Hector). This dichotomy explains the mixed appreciations of Alexander in the play, for he is often praised for his valour but also criticized—especially by his love interest, Cléofile—for his lust for personal glory. She proposes that he practice clemency, a virtue that Corneille had promoted in his memorable tragedy Cinna; ou, la clémence d’Auguste (first performed 1641, published 1643; Cinna; or, The Clemency of Augustus). Despite Racine’s efforts, posterity has decreed the play a misguided experiment to pour his tragic vision into Corneille’s heroic mold.
In Andromaque (performed 1667, published 1668) Racine replaced heroism with realism in a tragedy about the folly and blindness of unrequited love within a chain of four characters. The play is set in Epirus after the Trojan War. King Pyrrhus vainly loves his captive, the Trojan widow Andromache, and is in turn loved by the Greek princess Hermione, who in her turn is loved by Orestes. Power, intimidation, and emotional blackmail become the recourses by which these characters try to transmit the depths of their feelings to their beloved. But this form of communication is ultimately frustrated because the characters’ deep-seated insecurity renders them self-absorbed and immune to empathy. Murder, suicide, and madness have destroyed all except Andromache by the play’s end, which is original in that Racine overturns the legendary account of the Trojan War and allows a Trojan queen to triumph over the Greeks. Andromaque’s audience was fully aware that it was witnessing a new and powerful conception of the human condition in which passionate relationships are seen as basically political in their means and expression. Andromaque is more skillfully crafted than Racine’s previous efforts: its exposition is a model of clarity and concision; the interplay of love, hate, and indifference is subtly yet compellingly arranged; the rhetoric is forceful but close to normal speech; and the innovative use of the offstage to direct the audience’s attention beyond the visual to the imaginary is remarkable. This last technique became a favourite tactic of Racine’s poetics. Indeed, in Andromaque Racine created an entire second play offstage that erupts into the visible production just after the event-filled intermission between Act III and Act IV. The play was the first of Racine’s major tragedies and enjoyed a public success comparable to Corneille’s triumphal Le Cid 30 years earlier.
The three-act comedy Les Plaideurs (first performed 1668, published 1669; The Litigants) offered Racine the challenge of a new genre and the opportunity to demonstrate his skill in Molière’s privileged domain, as well as the occasion to display his expertise in Greek, of which he had better command than almost any nonprofessional classicist in France. The result, a brilliant satire of the French legal system, was an adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Wasps that found much more favour at court than on the Parisian stage. The conflict of generations that Racine infuses into the comedy seems to anticipate his play Britannicus, about which he was surely thinking while composing Les Plaideurs.
With Britannicus (performed 1669, published 1670) Racine warmed to the challenge to fashion a play with substantial political and historical dimensions: tragedy with a Roman setting. Racine portrays the events leading up to the moment when the teenage emperor Nero cunningly and ruthlessly frees himself from the tutelage of his domineering mother, Agrippina, and has Britannicus, a legitimate pretender to the throne, poisoned in the course of a fatal banquet of supposed fraternal reconciliation that takes place offstage in Nero’s chamber. One of the striking features of the tragedy is the number of “oneiric moments” (six in all), when the characters allow their imaginations to take them, dreamlike, into another time and place, thereby momentarily escaping the tragic space that Racine created for all his dramas. The presentation of Britannicus at a royal celebration of January 5, 1670, with unprecedented (for tragedy) intermissions made up of ballet and music reveals Racine’s openness to innovation. Despite the play’s failure when it premiered, Britannicus remains one of Racine’s most frequently produced dramas.
Bérénice (performed 1670, published 1671) marks the decisive point in Racine’s theatrical career, for with this play he found a felicitous combination of elements that he would use, without radical alteration, for the rest of his secular tragedies: a love interest, a relatively uncomplicated plot, striking rhetorical passages, and a highly poetic use of time. In Bérénice Racine demonstrates that the function of both the past and the future in his plays is to crush the present and to render it culpable. Bérénice is built around the unusual premise of three yearning characters who are forced to live apart ironically because of their virtuous sense of duty. In the play, Titus, who is to become the new Roman emperor, and his friend Antiochus are both in love with Berenice, the queen of Palestine. The play’s “majestic sadness,” as Racine put it in his preface to the play, flows from the tragic necessity of separation for individuals who yearn for union with their beloved and who express their sorrow in some of the most haunting passages of Racine’s entire oeuvre. Bérénice is the first in a series of tragedies by Racine, ending with Esther, that involve a conflict of cultures between East and West.
Racine followed the simplicity of Bérénice and its three main characters with a violent, relatively crowded production, Bajazet (first performed and published 1672). The play’s themes of unrequited love and the struggle for power under the unrelenting pressure of time are recognizably Racinian, but its locale, the court of the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, is the only contemporary setting used by Racine in any of his plays, though it was sufficiently far removed in distance and in mores from 17th-century France to create an alluring exoticism for contemporary audiences. In the play, the main characters—the young prince Bajazet, his beloved Atalide, and the jealous sultana Roxane—are the mortal victims of the despotic cruelty of the absent sultan Amurat, whose reign is maintained by violence and dissimulation. Secrecy, a central concern and recourse of the early modern period (c. 1450–1750) and especially as a mechanism for defense and aggression in courtly society, plays an essential role in Racine’s theatre.
In 1673 Racine remained with the theme of the search for truth amid illusion and misrepresentation in Mithridate, which featured a return to tragedy with a Roman background. Mithradates VI, the king of Pontus, is the aging, jealous rival of his sons for the Greek princess Monime. The rivalry between the two brothers themselves for the love of their father’s fiancée is yet another manifestation of the primordial tragic situation for Racine, that of warring brothers. Against the backdrop of this conflict, the play presents the demise of Mithradates, whose inconsistencies make him increasingly conscious of his own eclipse as a heroic figure feared by Rome.
Despite a competing play mounted by his enemies on the same general subject, Racine’s Iphigénie (first performed 1674, published 1675) was a resounding success that confirmed him as the dominant figure in French theatre. It is an adaptation of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, about the prospective sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon. Unlike Euripides, Racine allows Iphigenia to be spared, as he does many of his virtuous characters, out of concern for the sensibilities of his public. Racine’s deft insertion in Iphigénie of the future as an intrusive force determining the present creates a rehearsal of the Trojan War that culminates in a profound moral illumination revolving around the title character. The play’s denouement, typical of Racine’s practice, projects the imagination of the spectators beyond the present action to the future consequences of the acts portrayed onstage and leaves the spectators uneasy about the ethnic cleansing that they know will occur during the Trojan War.
If, as most believe, Phèdre (first performed and published 1677; originally Phèdre et Hippolyte) is Racine’s supreme accomplishment, that status is due to the rigour and simplicity of its organization, the emotional power of its language, and the profusion of its images and meanings. Racine presents Phaedra as consumed by an incestuous passion for her stepson, Hippolytus. Receiving false information that her husband, King Theseus, is dead, Phaedra declares her love to Hippolytus, who is horrified. Theseus returns and is falsely informed that Hippolytus has been the aggressor toward Phaedra. Theseus invokes the aid of the god Neptune to slay his son, who is torn apart when his own horses are frightened by a monster Neptune dispatches out of the sea. Phaedra commits suicide out of guilt and sorrow, consuming poison that her cousin Medea had brought from Athens to Troezen.
A structural pattern of cycles and circles in Phèdre reflects Racine’s conception of human existence as essentially changeless, recurrent, and therefore asphyxiatingly tragic. Phaedra’s own desire to flee the snares of passion repeatedly prompts her to contemplate a voluntary exile. She is the ultimate exile in a theatre where captives and wanderers of all sorts betray a profound sense of alienation. References to ancient Greek mythological figures and to a wide range of geographical places lend a vast, cosmic dimension to the moral itinerary of Phaedra as she suffers bitterly from her incestuous propensities and a sense of her own degradation. Phèdre constitutes a daring representation of the contagion of sin and its catastrophic results.
Esther (first performed and published 1689) is a biblical tragedy complete with substantial musical choral interludes composed by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who also composed interludes for Racine’s last play, Athalie. Esther concerns the Jewish wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes I), who saves the Jews from a massacre plotted by the king’s chief minister, Haman. With its three acts, its chorus, and its transcendent message that God and truth can be made manifest onstage, the play breaks sharply with Racine’s previous practice in tragedy. Yet, the compelling psychological simplicity of the characters, the edifying message of the triumph of the just over the wicked, and the spectacular effects worked by the collaboration of Racine, Moreau, and the stage designer Jean Berain combined to place Esther among Racine’s best dramatic efforts.
If the temporal duration of Racine’s other plays was always one day, in Athalie (first performed and published 1691) he succeeded in creating the ideal synthesis sought for classical tragedy: the time of the action lasts as long as the time of the performance. In this short span, a situation of human origin must be resolved by divine intervention so that the child Joas, the rightful king of Judah, will be saved from his murderous grandmother Athalie. The title character, though evil, still remains admirable in her titanic struggle against an omnipotent adversary. Of all the characters never seen onstage but who enrich Racine’s texts, from Hector and Astyanax in Andromaque through Venus, Minos, Neptune, and Ariane in Phèdre, the God of the Old Testament in Athalie exerts the greatest impact on the course of dramatic events.
Legacy
Racine has been hailed by posterity as the foremost practitioner of tragedy in French history. His virtuoso treatment of the poetic metre used in 17th-century French tragedy, the alexandrine line, is the basis for his status as the uncontested master of French classicism. Beyond the poetry, his dramas have a sharp impact because he also paid unwavering attention to the properly theatrical aspects of his creations, from actors’ diction and gestures to space and decor. Ultimately, Racine’s reputation derives from his unforgettable characters who betray a sense of their own inferiority in their noble yet frustrated attempts to transcend their limitations. The Racinian view, then, is of a humanity consumed by feelings of incompleteness and by a compensatory drive for acceptance in a world of passionate self-interest. Among the many authors influenced by Racine’s art are Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, François Mauriac, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett. German poet Heinrich Heine hailed Racine as the first modern poet.
Ronald W. Tobin