Racine, Jean

▪ French dramatist

Introduction

in full  Jean-baptiste Racine 

baptized December 22, 1639, La Ferté-Milon, France

died April 21, 1699, Paris

 French dramatic poet and historiographer renowned for his mastery of French classical tragedy. His reputation rests on the plays he wrote between 1664 and 1677, notably Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1670), Bajazet (1672), and Phèdre (1677).

Life.

      Racine was born into a provincial family of minor administrators. His mother died 13 months after he was born, and his father died two years later. His paternal grandparents took him in, and when his grandmother, Marie des Moulins, became a widow, she brought Racine, then age nine, with her to the convent of Port-Royal des Champs near Paris. Since a group of devout scholars and teachers had founded a school there, Racine had the opportunity—rare for an orphan of modest social origins—to study the classics of Latin and Greek literature with distinguished masters. The school was steeped in the austere Roman Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism, which had recently been condemned by the church as heretical. Since the French monarchy suspected the Jansenists of being theologically and politically subversive, Racine's lifelong relationship with his former friends and teachers remained ambivalent, inasmuch as the ambitious artist sought admittance into the secular realm of court society.

      Racine spent the years from 1649 to 1653 at Port-Royal, transferred to the College of Beauvais for almost two years, and then returned to Port-Royal in October 1655 to perfect his studies in rhetoric. The school at Port-Royal was closed by the authorities in 1656, but Racine was allowed to stay on there. When he was 18 the Jansenists sent him to study law at the College of Harcourt in Paris. Racine had both the disposition and the talent to thrive in the cultural climate of Paris, where to conform and to please—in Racine's case, to please by his pen—were indispensable assets. One of the first manifestations of Racine's intentions was his composition of a sonnet in praise of Cardinal Mazarin, the prime minister of France, for successfully concluding a peace treaty with Spain (1659). This tribute reveals Racine's strategy of social conquest through literature.

      There were three ways for a writer to survive in Racine's day: to attract a royal audience, to obtain an ecclesiastical benefice, or to compose for the theatre. The first was out of the question for the neophyte Racine, though he would eventually receive many gratuities in the course of his career. In 1661 Racine tried, through his mother's family, to acquire an ecclesiastical benefice from the diocese of Uzès in Languedoc, though without success after residing there for almost two years. He then returned to Paris to try his hand as a dramatist, even if it meant estrangement from his Jansenist mentors, who disapproved of his involvement with the theatre. A reaction from them was not long in coming. In the same month that Racine's play Alexandre le grand (1665) received its premiere, his former teacher Pierre Nicole (Nicole, Pierre) published a public letter accusing novelists or playwrights of having no more redeeming virtues than a “public poisoner.” Though Nicole avoided any direct reference to him, Racine believed that he was the object of Nicole's wrath and responded with a stinging open letter entitled Lettre à l'auteur des ‘Hérésies imaginaires'.

      Racine's first play, Amasie, was never produced and has not survived. His career as a dramatist began with the production by Molière's (Molière) troupe of his play La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis (“The Thebaide or the Enemy Brothers”) at the Palais-Royal Theatre on June 20, 1664. Molière's troupe also produced Racine's next play, Alexandre le grand (Alexander the Great), which premiered at the Palais Royal on Dec. 4, 1665. This play was so well received that Racine secretly negotiated with the Hôtel de Bourgogne (Hôtel de Bourgogne, Théâtre de l')—a rival troupe that was more skilled in performing tragedy—to present a “second premiere” of Alexandre on December 15. The break with Molière was irrevocable—Racine even seduced Molière's leading actress, Thérèse du Parc, into joining him personally and professionally—and from this point onward all of Racine's secular tragedies would be presented by the actors of the Hôtel de Bourgogne.

      Of the three audiences that a dramatist had to win over to succeed in the theatre—the court, the general public, and the scholar critics—Racine doggedly pursued all three, though he had sharp clashes with the third group, who were mostly friends of his great rival, the older dramatist Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre). Racine followed up his first masterpiece, Andromaque (1667), with the comedy Les Plaideurs (1668; The Litigants) before returning to tragedy with two plays set in imperial Rome, Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670). He situated Bajazet (1672) in nearly contemporary Turkish history and depicted a famous enemy of Rome in Mithridate (1673) before returning to Greek mythology in Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; Iphigenia in Aulis) and the play that was his crowning achievement, Phèdre (1677). By this time Racine had achieved remarkable success both in the theatre and through it; his plays were ideally suited for dramatic expression and were also a useful vehicle for the social aspirations of their insecure and quietly driven author. Racine was the first French author to live principally on the income provided by his writings.

      Within several months of the appearance of Phèdre, Racine married the pious and unintellectual Catherine de Romanet, with whom he would have two sons and five daughters. At about the same time, he retired from the commercial theatre and accepted the coveted post of royal historiographer with his friend Nicolas Boileau (Boileau, Nicolas). Racine's withdrawal from the stage at the height of his prestige as a professional playwright probably sprang from a combination of factors. The preface he wrote for Phèdre leads one to believe that he was seeking a reconciliation with the Jansenists. He was, at the same time, leaving the socially disadvantageous situation of a playwright for the rarefied atmosphere of the court of King Louis XIV. Having to quit the theatre to assume his new duties near the king, Racine could now afford to effect a rapprochement with the Jansenists. He may also have found it difficult to continue to respect the cardinal principle of classical art—unity. In Phèdre there is fragmentation at significant levels: cosmic, social, psychological, and physical. Since fragmentation is a subversive notion in classical art, perhaps Racine abandoned a genre to whose classical tenets he no longer subscribed.

      As one of the royal historiographers, Racine chronicled Louis XIV's military campaigns in suitable prose. In 1679 he was accused by Catherine Monvoisin (called La Voisin) of having poisoned his mistress (Poisons, Affair of the) and star actress, the Marquise du Parc, but no formal charges were pressed and no consequences ensued. Racine's official duties culminated in the Eloge historique du Roi sur ses conquêtes (1682; “The Historical Panegyric for the King on His Conquests”). He also wrote the Cantiques spirituels (1694) and worked hard to establish his status and his fortune. In 1672 he was elected to the French Academy, and he came to exert almost dictatorial powers over it. In 1674 he acquired the noble title of treasurer of France, and he eventually obtained the higher distinctions of ordinary gentleman of the king (1690) and secretary of the king (1696).

      In response to requests from Louis XIV's consort Madame de Maintenon (Maintenon, Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de), Racine returned to the theatre to write two religious plays for the convent girls at Saint-Cyr: Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). His other undertakings during his last years were to reedit, in 1687 and finally in 1697, the edition of his complete works that he had first published in 1676, and to compose, probably as his last work, the Abrégé de l'histoire de Port-Royal (“Short History of Port-Royal”). Racine died in 1699 from cancer of the liver. In a codicil to his will, he expressed his wish to be buried at Port-Royal. When Louis XIV had Port-Royal razed in 1710, Racine's remains were transferred to a tomb in the Parisian church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

Works.

      French classical tragedy pivots around two basic subjects: passion and politics. Since Racine's audience was naturally intrigued by plots that dealt with the succession to a throne, he doubled their pleasure in his first successful play, La Thébaïde, by creating two legitimate pretenders who are also identical twins. The play centres on the twin 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 would characterize all Racinian tragedy. Though its structure is flawed and its characters lack inflection, La Thébaïde 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 on stage 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 King Louis XIV of France who, as the play suggests, could surpass Alexander by restraining his aggressive tendencies and becoming a morally superior hero who champions Roman Catholic virtues. Posterity has decreed the play a misguided attempt by Racine to pour his tragic vision into Corneille's heroic mold.

      In Andromaque (1667) Racine replaced heroism with realism in a tragedy about the folly and blindness of unrequited love among a chain of four characters. The play is set in Epirus after the Trojan War. 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 of them except Andromache by the play's end. Andromaque's audience was fully aware that they were 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 are subtly yet compellingly arranged; and the rhetoric is forceful but close to normal speech. The play was the first of Racine's major tragedies and enjoyed a public success comparable to Corneille's Le Cid 30 years before.

      The three-act comedy Les Plaideurs (The Litigants) of 1668 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' (Aristophanes) The Wasps that found much more favour at court than on the Parisian stage.

      With Britannicus (1669) Racine posed a direct challenge to Corneille's specialty: 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 fraternal reconciliation. Despite its failure when it premiered in 1669, Britannicus has remained one of Racine's most frequently produced dramas, especially in the 20th century.

      Bérénice (1670) 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. Bérénice is built around the unusual premise of three characters who are ultimately forced to live apart 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.

      Racine followed the simplicity of Bérénice and its three main characters with a violent, relatively crowded production, Bajazet (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, and 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 secrecy.

      In 1673 Racine presented 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 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 King Mithradates, who becomes 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 en Aulide (1674) was a resounding success that confirmed him as the unrivaled master of French theatre. It is an adaptation of a play by Euripides about the prospective sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but contains a happy ending in which Iphigenia is spared. 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 spectator beyond the present action to the future consequences of the acts portrayed on stage.

      Phèdre (1677) is Racine's supreme accomplishment because of 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 destroy his son, after which Phaedra kills herself out of guilt and sorrow. A structural pattern of cycles and circles in Phèdre reflects a 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. 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 (1689) is a biblical tragedy complete with musical choral interludes composed by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who would serve in this same role for Racine's last play, Athalie. The play shows how Esther, the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus (Xerxes I), 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 on stage, Esther breaks sharply with Racine's previous practice in tragedy. It is not one of his major works, despite the beauty of its choruses.

      In Athalie (1691) Racine reverted to his customary approach. Within the one day that is always the temporal duration of his plays, 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. Athalie is a typical Racinian drama except for the fact that fate is replaced in this instance by divine providence. The title character, Athalie, though evil, still remains admirable in her titanic struggle against this superior adversary. Of all the characters never seen on stage 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.

Assessment.

      Racine has been hailed by posterity as the foremost practitioner of tragedy in French history and the uncontested master of French classicism. He became the virtuoso of the poetic metre used in 17th-century French tragedy, the alexandrine line, and paid unwavering attention to the properly theatrical aspects of his plays, from actors' diction and gestures to space and decor. Ultimately, Racine's reputation derives from his unforgettable characters who, much like their creator, betray an inferiority complex 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. Racine's art has influenced French and foreign authors alike, among them Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, François Mauriac, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, and Samuel Beckett.

Ronald W. Tobin

Additional Reading

The standard critical edition of Racine's collected works remains Raymond Picard (ed.), Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (1950) and vol. 2, rev. ed. (1966), both vol. reissued together (1981–85). A convenient edition of the plays in one volume is Jacques Morel and Alain Viala (eds.), Théâtre complet (1980). The only complete English-language collection of the plays is Samuel Solomon (trans.), Complete Plays, 2 vol. (1967); but C.H. Sisson (trans.), Britannicus; Phaedra; Athaliah (1987), with only three of the plays, has much to commend it. The first computerized concordance of any French author was devoted to Racine: Bryant Freeman and Alan Batson, Concordance du théâtre et des poésies de Jean Racine, 2 vol. (1968).The classic biography is Raymond Picard, La Carrière de Jean Racine, new ed. rev. and augmented (1961). Geoffrey Brereton, Jean Racine: A Critical Biography (1951, reprinted 1973), is also worth consulting. A popularized treatment is Alain Viala, Racine: la stratégie du caméléon (1990). Racine's central place in the history of French tragedy is discussed in Jacques Truchet, La Tragédie classique en France (1975). Critical studies accessible to the general reader include John C. Lapp, Aspects of Racinian Tragedy (1955, reissued 1978); Odette de Mourgues, Racine; or, The Triumph of Relevance (1967); Claude Abraham, Jean Racine (1977); David Maskell, Racine: A Theatrical Reading (1991); Edward Forman (ed.), Racine: Appraisal and Reappraisal (1991); Richard Parish, Racine: The Limits of Tragedy (1993); Henry Phillips, Racine: Language and Theatre (1994); and Derval Conroy and Edric Caldicott, Racine: The Power and the Pleasure (2001). The most controversial interpretations of Racine (anthropological by Roland Barthes, Marxist by Lucien Goldmann, and psychoanalytical by Charles Mauron) are reviewed with many others by Jean Rohou, Jean Racine: bilan critique, ed. by Alain Pagès (1994). Roy C. Knight, Racine et la Grèce, 2nd ed. (1974); and Ronald W. Tobin, Racine and Seneca (1971), elucidate Racine's vast knowledge of Greco-Roman antiquity. The rhetoric of the plays has been studied by Michael Hawcrowft, Word as Action: Racine, Rhetoric, and Theatrical Language (1992).

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