photo

Jean Racine

French dramatist
Date of Birth : 21 Dec, 1639
Date of Death : 21 Apr, 1699
Place of Birth : La Ferté-Milon, France
Profession : French Dramatist
Nationality : French
Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great dramatists of 17th-century France, an important literary figure in Western tradition and world literature, along with Molière and Corneille. Racine was primarily a tragedian, creating "examples of neoclassical perfection" such as Phædre, Andromache, and Athalie. He wrote a comedy, Les Pleiders, and a silent tragedy, Esther for young people.

Racine's play Dodecasyllabic (12 syllables) demonstrates his mastery of the French Alexandrine. His writing is noted for its elegance, purity, speed and fury, and what the American poet Robert Lowell described as "a diamond's edge", and "the majesty of its hard, electric fury" of Racine. Dramatism is characterized by its psychological insight, the prevailing emotions of its characters, and the nudity of both plot and stage.

Biography

Racine was born on 21 December 1639 in La Ferte-Millon (Aisne) in the province of Picardy in northern France. Orphaned at the age of four (his mother died in 1641 and his father in 1643), he came into the care of his grandparents. On the death of his grandfather in 1649, his grandmother, Marie des Moulins, went to live in the convent of Port-Royal, taking her grandson with her. He received a classical education at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal, a religious institution that would greatly influence other contemporary figures, including Blaise Pascal. Port-Royal was led by followers of Jansenism, a theology condemned as heretical by the French bishops and pope. Racine's interactions with the Jansenists during his years at this academy would have a great influence on him for the rest of his life. At Port-Royal, he excelled in his studies of the classics, and themes of Greek and Roman mythology would play a large role in his future work.

He was expected to study law at the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris, but instead found himself drawn to a more artistic lifestyle. Experiments with poetry earned high praise from Nicolas Boileau, France's greatest literary critic, with whom Racine later became great friends; Boileau often claimed that he was behind the work of the emerging poet. Racine eventually settled in Paris where he became involved in theatrical circles.

His first play Amasi never reached the stage. On 20 June 1664, Racine's tragedy La Thébeide ou les freres ennémis (Thebans or Enemy Brothers) was produced by Moliere's troupe at the Théâtre du Palais-Royale in Paris. The following year, Moliere also staged Racine's second play, Alexandre le Grand. However, the play was so well received by the public that Racine secretly negotiated with a rival play company, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, to perform the play – as they had a better reputation for performing tragedies. Thus, Alexandre was premiered for the second time by a different cast eleven days after the first performance. Molière never forgave Racine for this betrayal, and Racine only widened the rift between him and his former friend by luring Molière's leading actress, Thérèse du Parc, to become his partner professionally and personally. From this place the Troupe performed all of Racine's secular plays at the Hotel de Bourgogne.

Although La Thébaïde (1664) and its successor, Alexandre (1665), both had classical themes, Racine had already run into controversy and was forced to complain that he was polluting the minds of his audience. He severed all ties with Port-Royal and proceeded with Andromache (1667), which told the story of Andromache, Hector's widow, and her fate after the Trojan War. Among his rivals were Pierre Corneille and his brother Thomas Corneille. Tragedians often competed with alternative versions of the same plot: for example, Michel Le Clerc produced an Iphigenie in the same year as Racine (1674), and Jacques Pradon also wrote a play about Phèdre (1677). The success of Pradon's work (the result of a Clack act) was the event that forced Racine to abandon his work as a dramatist at that time, although his career had been so successful up to this point that he was the first French writer to live almost entirely on the money he earned from his writings. Others, including the historian Warren Lewis, attribute her retirement from the theater to a fit of conscience.

However, a major event that seems to have contributed to Racine's departure from public life was his involvement in a court scandal in 1679. During this time he married the devout Catherine de Romenet and his religious beliefs and devotion to the Jansenist sect. was revived. He and his wife eventually had two sons and five daughters. During his marriage and retirement from the theatre, Racine took a position as royal historian at court.

Style

The quality of Racine's poetry is perhaps his greatest contribution to French literature. His use of Alexandrine poetic lines is considered exceptionally skillful.

Racine's work received much criticism from his contemporaries. One was the lack of historical authenticity in plays such as Britannicus (1669) and Mithridates (1673). Racine was quick to point out that his greatest critics—his rival dramatists—were among the greatest offenders in this respect. Another major criticism of him was the lack of incident in his tragedy Berenice (1670). Racine's response was that the greatest tragedy does not consist in bloodshed and death.

General qualities

Racine limited his vocabulary to 4000 words. He discards all working-day expressions, although the Greeks could call a spade a spade, which he does not believe is possible in Latin or French. Scriptural conventions are strictly observed, as the culmination of a chronic crisis is described. The number of characters, all capitals, is kept to a minimum. The action on stage is all but eliminated. Like Euripides' Hippolytus, the stunned Hippolytus is not brought back. An exception to this is Attalid stabbing himself in front of an audience at Bajajet; But this is acceptable in a play that is conspicuous for its barbarism and oriental color.

The fundamental nature of tragedy

Tragedy shows how people fall from prosperity to disaster. The higher the position the hero falls, the greater the tragedy. Apart from confidants, among whom Narcissus (in Britannicus) and Ennone (in Phaedre) are the most notable, Racine describes the fate of kings, queens, princes and princesses freed from the narrow pressures of everyday life. and able to speak and act without interruption.

The Nature of Greek Tragedy

Greek tragedy, from which Racine borrowed heavily, tended to assume that humanity was under the control of gods indifferent to its suffering and desires. The hero of Dipus Tyrannus Sophocles gradually becomes aware of the terrible truth that, no matter how hard his family tries to avoid the prophecy, he has killed his father and married his mother and must now be punished for this unintentional crime.The same awareness of a cruel fate that leads innocent men and women to sin and demands vengeance on equally innocent children permeates La Thebeide, a play that itself deals with the legend of Oedipus.

Racine's tragic vision

Racine was often deeply influenced by Jansenist fatalism. However, the link between Racine's tragedy and Jansenism has been disputed for a number of reasons; For example, Racine himself denied any connection with Jansenism. As a Christian, Racine could no longer assume, as Aeschylus and Sophocles did, that God is merciless in leading men to a doom they do not foresee. Instead, destiny becomes (at least, in the secular drama) the uncontrolled madness of unrequited love.

Already in the works of Euripides, the gods have become more symbolic. In Euripides' Hippolytus, Venus represents the irresistible force of sexual passion in humans; But closely related to this—indeed, inseparable from it—is the atavistic strain of monstrous perversity that forced his mother Pasiphae to mate with a bull and give birth to the Minotaur.

Thus, Racine's hamartia, which the thirteenth chapter of Aristotle's Poetics declares to be characteristic of tragedy, is not simply an action performed in all good faith that subsequently leads to dire consequences (Depas' killing a stranger on the streets of Thebes, and marrying. After solving the riddle of the Sphinx the widowed queen of Thebes), nor is it simply an error of judgment (as in Seneca the Younger's Hercules Furens killing her husband in order to win back his love); It is a character flaw.

Racine’s concept of love

In a second important respect, Racine is at variance with the Greek pattern of tragedy. His tragic characters are aware of, but can do nothing to overcome, the blemish which leads them on to a catastrophe. And the tragic recognition, or anagnorisis, of wrongdoing is not confined, as in the Œdipus Tyrannus, to the end of the play, when the fulfilment of the prophecy is borne in upon Œdipus; Phèdre realizes from the very beginning the monstrousness of her passion, and preserves throughout the play a lucidity of mind that enables her to analyse and reflect upon this fatal and hereditary weakness. Hermione's situation is rather closer to that of Greek tragedy. Her love for Pyrrhus is perfectly natural and is not in itself a flaw of character. But despite her extraordinary lucidity  in analysing her violently fluctuating states of mind, she is blind to the fact that the King does not really love her (III 3), and this weakness on her part, which leads directly to the tragic peripeteia of III 7, is the hamartia from which the tragic outcome arises.

For Racine, love closely resembles a physiological disorder. It is a fatal illness with alternating moods of calm and crisis, and with deceptive hopes of recovery or fulfilment the final remission culminating in a quick death. His main characters are monsters, and stand out in glaring contrast to the regularity of the plays' structure and versification. The suffering lover Hermione, Roxane or Phèdre is aware of nothing except her suffering and the means whereby it can be relieved. Her love is not founded upon esteem of the beloved and a concern for his happiness and welfare, but is essentially selfish. In a torment of jealousy, she tries to relieve the "pangs of despised love" by having (or, in Phèdre's case, allowing) him to be put to death, and thus associating him with her own suffering. The depth of tragedy is reached when Hermione realizes that Pyrrhus's love for Andromaque continues beyond the grave, or when Phèdre contrasts the young lovers' purity with her unnaturalness which should be hidden from the light of day. Racine's most distinctive contribution to literature is his conception of the ambivalence of love: "ne puis-je savoir si j'aime, ou si je hais?"

The passion of these lovers is totally destructive of their dignity as human beings, and usually kills them or deprives them of their reason. Except for Titus and Bérénice, they are blinded by it to all sense of duty. Pyrrhus casts off his fiancée in order to marry a slave from an enemy country, for whom he is prepared to repudiate his alliances with the Greeks. Orestes' duties as an ambassador are subordinate to his aspirations as a lover, and he finally murders the king to whom he has been sent. Néron's passion for Junie causes him to poison Britannicus and thus, after two years of virtuous government, to inaugurate a tyranny.

The characteristic Racinian framework is that of the eternal triangle: two young lovers, a prince and a princess, being thwarted in their love by a third person, usually a queen whose love for the young prince is unreciprocated. Phèdre destroys the possibility of a marriage between Hippolyte and Aricie. Bajazet and Atalide are prevented from marrying by the jealousy of Roxane. Néron divides Britannicus from Junie. In Bérénice the amorous couple are kept apart by considerations of state. In Andromaque the system of unrequited passions borrowed from tragicomedy alters the dramatic scheme, and Hermione destroys a man who has been her fiancé, but who has remained indifferent to her, and is now marrying a woman who does not love him. The young princes and princesses are agreeable, display varying degrees of innocence and optimism and are the victims of evil machinations and the love/hatred characteristic of Racine.

The major roles in Racinian tragedy

The king (Pyrrhus, Néron, Titus, Mithridate, Agamemnon, Thésée) holds the power of life and death over the other characters. Pyrrhus forces Andromaque to choose between marrying him and seeing her son killed. After keeping his fiancée waiting in Epirus for a year, he announces his intention of marrying her, only to change his mind almost immediately afterwards. Mithridate discovers Pharnace's love for Monime by spreading a false rumour of his own death. By pretending to renounce his fiancée, he finds that she had formerly loved his other son Xipharès. Wrongly informed that Xipharès has been killed fighting Pharnace and the Romans, he orders Monime to take poison. Dying, he unites the two lovers. Thésée is a rather nebulous character, primarily important in his influence upon the mechanism of the plot. Phèdre declares her love to Hippolyte on hearing the false news of his death.