Jean Racine

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Racine was born on the 22nd of December 1639 in La Ferté-Milon, a small town in the province of Picardy in northern France, and he would die sixty years later having written plays that still trouble audiences with the question: can a person see their own destruction coming and be powerless to stop it? Racine lost both parents before he was four years old. His mother died in 1641 and his father in 1643, and the boy passed into the care of his grandparents. When his grandfather also died, in 1649, his grandmother Marie des Moulins entered the convent of Port-Royal, taking her grandson with her. What grew in that austere religious house would mark everything Racine ever wrote. He became one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, alongside Molière and Corneille, yet his path there ran through betrayal, court scandal, a dramatic withdrawal from the theatre, and an unlikely return. American poet Robert Lowell described Racine's writing as a "diamond-edge" with "the glory of its hard, electric rage." Those phrases point toward something that critics have argued about ever since: what exactly makes a Racinian tragedy feel so ruthless, so clean, and so inescapable?

• 2. Port-Royal and the Making of a Poet

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  Port-Royal was no ordinary school. Run by followers of Jansenism, a theology condemned as heretical by the French bishops and the Pope, the convent's Petites écoles shaped the young Racine alongside other figures who would change French intellectual life, among them Blaise Pascal. Racine excelled in the classics there, and the themes of Greek and Roman mythology he absorbed would drive his plays for decades.

  He was expected to study law at the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris, but poetry pulled harder than jurisprudence. His early experiments with verse drew praise from Nicolas Boileau, France's most respected literary critic, who would become his close friend and who later claimed, perhaps immodestly, that he was the driving force behind the young poet's development. Racine moved to Paris and found his way into theatrical circles, though his first play, Amasie, never reached the stage.

  The education at Port-Royal gave Racine a framework he would spend the rest of his life both inhabiting and fighting. The Jansenist sense of fatalism, the idea that human beings are driven toward doom by forces they cannot master, is woven through his tragedies. Yet Racine himself denied any direct connection between his work and Jansenist doctrine, and scholars have disputed the link. When he broke publicly with Port-Royal to pursue his theatrical career, the institution never entirely let him go.

• 3. Betrayal and Rivalry

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  On the 20th of June 1664, Racine's first performed tragedy, La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis, was staged by Molière's troupe at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. Molière put on Racine's second play, Alexandre le Grand, the following year as well. The public response to Alexandre was strong enough that Racine opened secret negotiations with a rival company, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, to stage the play a second time. Their reputation for tragedy was superior, and Racine wanted it. Alexandre premiered again, by a different troupe, just eleven days after its first showing.

  Molière could not forgive the betrayal. Racine made the rupture irreversible by persuading Molière's leading actress, Thérèse du Parc, to become his companion both professionally and personally. From that point on, the Hôtel de Bourgogne performed all of Racine's secular plays.

  The world of 17th-century French tragedy was intensely competitive. Tragedians frequently wrote rival versions of the same classical stories. Michel le Clerc produced an Iphigénie in the same year, 1674, that Racine did. Jacques Pradon wrote a competing Phèdre in 1677, and the organised applause of a hired claque pushed Pradon's version to early success. That episode, among others, contributed to Racine's decision to step back from the theatre. He was also, the historian Warren Lewis has argued, troubled by his own conscience. And in 1679 he found himself implicated in a court scandal that accelerated his withdrawal from public theatrical life.

• 4. A Vocabulary of 2500 Words

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  Racine's plays rest on an extraordinarily narrow linguistic foundation. He restricts his vocabulary to 2500 words, ruling out all everyday expressions on the grounds that what the ancient Greeks could say plainly cannot be said the same way in French. Every character in his tragedies is royal. The number of characters is kept to the barest minimum. Action on stage is almost entirely eliminated; violence and catastrophe happen offstage and are reported back through formal speeches called récits.

  His instrument was the alexandrine, the 12-syllable French verse line, which he handled with a precision that contemporary critics and later poets alike described as exceptional. The qualities associated with his writing are elegance, purity, speed, and a kind of concentrated fury.

  Racine observed the classical dramatic unities more strictly than even the ancient Greek tragedians whose work he adapted. The unity of time confined the action to a single day; the unity of place kept everything in one room or antechamber; the unity of action excluded subplots and all comic interruption. Pierre Corneille, his great rival, had adopted the unities from the time of Le Cid in 1636, but found them a tiresome constraint. Corneille crammed into his plays, as Racine put it, quantities of incidents that could not plausibly have happened in a month. Racine instead built his dramas around fluctuating states of mind brought to crisis by a single new development, and the unities suited that design perfectly. Audiences watching his plays often stopped noticing the formal rules entirely, because the mounting emotional tension made the compressed time feel natural.

• 5. Love as Fatal Illness

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  Phèdre knows from the very beginning of the play that her passion for her stepson is monstrous. She does not discover this at the end, as Oedipus discovers his crimes in Sophocles; she carries the knowledge throughout and can do nothing with it. Racine described love as closely resembling a physiological disorder: a fatal illness with alternating moods of calm and crisis, with deceptive hopes of recovery, the final remission ending in quick death.

  The triangle is Racine's characteristic structure. A young prince and princess are in love; a third figure, usually a queen whose own love for the prince goes unreciprocated, destroys the possibility of their happiness. Phèdre destroys any prospect of marriage between Hippolyte and Aricie. Roxane prevents Bajazet and Atalide from uniting through jealousy. Néron separates Britannicus from Junie. In Andromaque the pattern shifts: here it is a chain of unrequited passions borrowed from tragicomedy, in which Hermione destroys the man who was once her fiancé.

  Racine's most precise statement of this ambivalence appears in a line he gave his characters: "ne puis-je savoir si j'aime, ou si je hais?" The question, which translates roughly as whether love or hatred is the feeling, is for Racine not a momentary confusion but the central condition of his tragic world. His lovers are not blinded by passion in the way that romantic convention suggests. Hermione demonstrates extraordinary lucidity in analysing her own violent emotional states; it is precisely her clarity about her feelings for Pyrrhus, combined with her blindness to his indifference, that leads to the murder she orders and then immediately regrets.

• 6. Court Favour and Religious Return

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  Around the time of his withdrawal from the theatre, Racine married Catherine de Romanet, a pious woman, and his Jansenist devotions revived. He and Catherine had two sons and five daughters. At the same time, he accepted a position as royal historiographer at the court of Louis XIV, working alongside Boileau. He was elected to the Académie française in 1672 and acquired significant power within that institution. Two years later he received the title of treasurer of France; in 1690 he was named an ordinary gentleman of the king, and in 1696 a secretary of the king. Louis XIV later provided for Racine's widow and children after his death, a mark of the esteem in which the court held him.

  Racine returned to the theatre only at the request of Madame de Maintenon, the morganatic second wife of Louis XIV, who asked him to write moral plays for the girls at her school, the Maison royale de Saint-Louis in Saint-Cyr, a commune neighbouring Versailles. The two plays he wrote for those performances, Esther in 1689 and Athalie in 1691, drew on Old Testament stories and are quieter, more formally religious works than his earlier tragedies. Athalie, dealing with the hidden king Joas and the prophet Joad, shows Racine adapting his Old Testament sources carefully; in one instance he drew on a verse in II Chronicles to give Joad prophetic powers the Bible itself does not explicitly assign to the father, only to the son.

  Racine died in 1699 from cancer of the liver. He had asked to be buried at Port-Royal, the convent that shaped his earliest years. Louis XIV had the site razed in 1710, and Racine's remains were transferred to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris.

• 7. Shifting Verdicts

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  Philip Butler of the University of Wisconsin, in his 1974 book Racine: A Study, mapped the reception of Racine's work century by century to show how radically opinion shifted. In Racine's own time, the dominant verdict came in 1674 when Boileau published his Art Poétique and declared Racine's model of tragedy superior to Corneille's. Butler called this period Racine's "apotheosis." It coincided with the broader efflorescence of French culture under Louis XIV: Molière, Jean de La Fontaine, François de La Rochefoucauld, the architectural expansion of Versailles by Louis Le Vau, and the musical revolution of Jean-Baptiste Lully all belonged to the same moment. Racine's work became bound up with l'esprit français, the newly confident French national identity that held French culture superior to all others. Butler argued that this deification eventually suffocated French drama, as playwrights were left to imitate a fixed ideal rather than invent new forms.

  In the 19th century, German writers including Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dismissed Racine as höfisches Drama, courtly drama too confined by royal etiquette to express genuine human passion. Schiller would later translate Racine's work into German despite that reservation. French critics of the same era retreated to Racine for comfort as writers like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert overturned older literary conventions. The British were blunter still, preferring Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and calling Racine didactic and commonplace.

  The 20th century brought a different kind of attention. Critics argued that plays such as Phèdre could be read as realist drama containing characters that belonged to no particular historical moment. Marcel Proust, according to the scholar Jean-Yves Tadié, developed a fondness for Racine early in life and "considered him a brother and someone very much like himself." Antonin Artaud, writing in The Theatre and Cruelty, held that "the misdeeds of the psychological theater descended from Racine have made us unaccustomed to that immediate and violent action which the theater should possess." A.S. Byatt wove the thread forward into the 21st century: her tetralogy beginning with The Virgin in the Garden in 1978 follows a young English woman whose deep appreciation of Racine, and specifically of Phèdre, shapes her inner life across four novels. Geoffrey Alan Argent's translation of The Complete Plays of Jean Racine earned a 2011 American Book Award, a reminder that even the widely held view that Racine's poetry is untranslatable has not stopped poets from trying.