Jean Racine
Jean-Baptiste Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille, as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young.
Racine's plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic French alexandrine. His writing is renowned for its elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what American poet Robert Lowell described as a "diamond-edge", and the "glory of its hard, electric rage". Racine's dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage.
Biography
Racine was born on 21 December 1639 in La Ferté-Milon, in the province of Picardy in northern France. Orphaned by the age of four, he came into the care of his grandparents. At the death of his grandfather in 1649, his grandmother, Marie des Moulins, went to live in the convent of Port-Royal and took her grandson with her. He received a classical education at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal, a religious institution which would greatly influence other contemporary figures including Blaise Pascal. Port-Royal was run by followers of Jansenism, a theology condemned as heretical by the French bishops and the Pope. Racine's interactions with the Jansenists in his years at this academy would have great influence over him for the rest of his life. At Port-Royal, he excelled in his studies of the classics and the themes of Greek and Roman mythology would play large roles in his future works.He was expected to study law at the Collège d'Harcourt in Paris, but instead found himself drawn to a more artistic lifestyle. Experimenting with poetry drew high praise from France's greatest literary critic, Nicolas Boileau, with whom Racine would later become great friends; Boileau would often claim that he was behind the budding poet's work. Racine eventually took up residence in Paris where he became involved in theatrical circles.
His first play, Amasie, never reached the stage. On 20 June 1664, Racine's tragedy La Thébaïde ou les frères ennemis was produced by Molière's troupe at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, in Paris. The following year, Molière also put on Racine's second play, Alexandre le Grand. However, this play garnered such good feedback from the public that Racine secretly negotiated with a rival play company, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, to perform the play – since they had a better reputation for performing tragedies. Thus, Alexandre premiered for the second time, by a different acting troupe, eleven days after its first showing. Molière could never forgive Racine for this betrayal, and Racine simply widened the rift between him and his former friend by seducing Molière's leading actress, Thérèse du Parc, into becoming his companion both professionally and personally. From this point on the Hôtel de Bourgogne troupe performed all of Racine's secular plays.
Though both La Thébaïde and its successor, Alexandre, had classical themes, Racine was already entering into controversy and forced to field accusations that he was polluting the minds of his audiences. He broke all ties with Port-Royal, and proceeded with Andromaque, which told the story of Andromache, widow of Hector, and her fate following the Trojan War. Amongst 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 Iphigénie in the same year as Racine, and Jacques Pradon also wrote a play about Phèdre. The success of Pradon's work was one of the events which caused Racine to renounce his work as a dramatist at that time, even though his career up to this point was so successful that he was the first French author to live almost entirely on the money he earned from his writings. Others, including the historian Warren Lewis, attribute his retirement from the theater to qualms of conscience.
However, one major incident which seems to have contributed to Racine's departure from public life was his implication in a court scandal of 1679. He got married at about this time to the pious Catherine de Romanet, and his religious beliefs and devotion to the Jansenist sect were revived. He and his wife eventually had two sons and five daughters. Around the time of his marriage and departure from the theatre, Racine accepted a position as a royal historiographer in the court of King Louis XIV, alongside his friend Boileau. He kept this position in spite of the minor scandals he was involved in. In 1672, he was elected to the Académie française, eventually gaining much power over this organisation. Two years later, he was given the title of "treasurer of France", and he was later distinguished as an "ordinary gentleman of the king", and then as a secretary of the king. Because of Racine's flourishing career in the court, Louis XIV provided for his widow and children after his death. When at last he returned to the theatre, it was at the request of Madame de Maintenon, morganatic second wife of King Louis XIV, with the moral fables, Esther and Athalie, both of which were based on Old Testament stories and intended for performance by the pupils of the school of the Maison royale de Saint-Louis in Saint-Cyr.
Jean Racine died in 1699 from cancer of the liver. He requested burial in Port-Royal, but after Louis XIV had this site razed in 1710, his remains were moved to the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church in Paris.
Style
The quality of Racine's poetry is perhaps his greatest contribution to French literature. His use of the alexandrine poetic line is considered exceptionally skilful.Racine's work faced many criticisms from his contemporaries. One was the lack of historic veracity in plays such as Britannicus and Mithridate. Racine was quick to point out that his greatest critics – his rival dramatists – were among the biggest offenders in this respect. Another major criticism levelled at him was the lack of incident in his tragedy Bérénice. Racine's response was that the greatest tragedy does not necessarily consist in bloodshed and death.
General characteristics
Racine restricts his vocabulary to 2500 words. He rules out all workaday expressions since, although the Greeks could call a spade a spade, he does not believe that this is possible in Latin or French. The classical unities are strictly observed, for only the final stage of a prolonged crisis is described. The number of characters, all of them royal, is kept down to the barest minimum. Action on stage is all but eliminated. The mangled Hippolyte is not brought back, as is the Hippolytus of Euripides. The one exception to this is that Atalide stabs herself before the audience in Bajazet; but this is acceptable in a play conspicuous for its savagery and Oriental colour.Fundamental nature of tragedy
shows how men fall from prosperity to disaster. The higher the position from which the hero falls, the greater is the tragedy. Except for the confidants, of whom Narcisse and Œnone are the most significant, Racine describes the fate of kings, queens, princes and princesses, liberated from the constricting pressures of everyday life and able to speak and act without inhibition.Nature of Greek tragedy
Greek tragedy, from which Racine borrowed so plentifully, tended to assume that humanity was under the control of gods indifferent to its sufferings and aspirations. In the Œdipus Tyrannus Sophocles's hero becomes gradually aware of the terrible fact that, however hard his family has tried to avert the oracular prophecy, he has nevertheless killed his father and married his mother and must now pay the penalty for these unwitting crimes. The same awareness of a cruel fate that leads innocent men and women into sin and demands retribution of the equally innocent children, pervades La Thébaïde, a play that itself deals with the legend of Œdipus.Racine’s tragic vision
Racine is often said to have been deeply influenced by the Jansenist sense of fatalism. However, the link between Racine's tragedy and Jansenism has been disputed on multiple grounds; for example, Racine himself denied any connection to Jansenism. As a Christian, Racine could no longer assume, as did Æschylus and Sophocles, that God is merciless in leading men to a doom which they do not foresee. Instead, destiny becomes the uncontrollable frenzy of unrequited love.As already in the works of Euripides, the gods have become more symbolic. Venus represents the unquenchable force of sexual passion within the human being in Euripides' Hippolytus; but closely allied to this – indeed, indistinguishable from it – is the atavistic strain of monstrous aberration that had caused her mother Pasiphaë to mate with a bull and give birth to the Minotaur.
Thus, in Racine the hamartia, which the thirteenth chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics had declared a characteristic of tragedy, is not merely an action performed in all good faith which subsequently has the direst consequences, nor is it simply an error of judgment ; it is a flaw of character.
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, 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 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.