Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean Racine was a French dramatist born on the 22nd of December 1639 in La Ferté-Milon, Picardy. He is regarded as one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France alongside Molière and Corneille, and is especially celebrated for tragedies such as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie, which are described as examples of neoclassical perfection.
Racine was educated at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal, a religious institution run by followers of Jansenism, a theology condemned as heretical by the French bishops and the Pope. His immersion in classical studies there, alongside figures including Blaise Pascal, shaped his deep engagement with Greek and Roman mythology and the themes of fate and moral struggle that run through his plays.
The alexandrine is a 12-syllable line of French verse. Racine's mastery of it is considered exceptionally skilful and is regarded as perhaps his greatest contribution to French literature. He restricted his entire dramatic vocabulary to 2500 words, creating a style noted for its elegance, purity, speed, and concentrated emotional force.
Several factors converged. The organised applause of a hired claque pushed a rival version of the Phèdre story by Jacques Pradon to early success, which wounded Racine. He also found himself implicated in a court scandal in 1679, and historians including Warren Lewis have attributed the retirement partly to a revival of his religious conscience. He accepted a position as royal historiographer to Louis XIV around the same time.
Racine returned at the request of Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic second wife of Louis XIV, to write for the school at the Maison royale de Saint-Louis in Saint-Cyr. He produced two plays: Esther in 1689 and Athalie in 1691, both drawn from Old Testament stories and intended for performance by the school's pupils.
Racine died in 1699 and asked to be buried at Port-Royal. After Louis XIV had the Port-Royal site razed in 1710, his remains were moved to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris.