The three works in this volume established Racine as a playwright who enjoyed high favour both with the public and at the court of Louis XIV and presented a growing challenge to the older writer Corneille.

Andromache; Britannicus; Berenice

Literature & Fiction

RACINE, JEAN

Dramas & Plays

Penguin Classics

Four of the greatest French plays, in new translations Here are four plays that continue to define French theater over three centuries after they were written. Corneille’s Cinna (1641) explores absolute power in ancient Rome. Molière’s comedy The Misanthrope (1666) sees its antihero reject society for its hypocrisy. Racine’s Andromache (1667) recounts the tragedy of Hector’s widow after the Trojan War, and his Phaedra (1677) shows a mother crossing the boundaries of love with her stepson. This edition features new verse translations undertaken with performance in mind, and a wealth of supplementary materials for students and actors. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Four French Plays: Cinna, The Misanthrope, Andromache, Phaedra

CORNEILLE, PIERRE

Molière, Jean-Baptiste

Phaedra is consumed with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson. Believing her husband dead, she confesses her love to him and is rebuffed. When her husband returns alive, Phaedra convinces him that it was Hippolytus who attempted to seduce her. In his interpretation, Racine replaced the stylized tragedy with human-scale characters and actions. Introduction by Richard Wilbur.

Phaedra, By Racine

Ecco

Jean Racine (1639-99) remains to this day the greatest of French poetic dramatists, having brought an exceptional knowledge of Greek and Latin literature to bear on tragic masterpieces that rivalled and surpassed those of his famous contemporary, Corneille. Britannicus (1669), Phaedra (1677), and Athaliah (1691) portray characters wrestling with ambition, treachery, religion, and love. In this new translation, C. H. Sisson captures admirably the lucidity of Racine's language, both analytic and passionate, and the rhythm of his four-part Alexandrine.

Britannicus; Phaedra; Athaliah

Oxford University Press

Jean Racine remains to this day the greatest of French poetic dramatists. This volume brings together three of his most important plays in an entirely new translation. C.H. Sisson captures the clarity, passion, and rhythm of Racine's language as he portrays characters wrestling with ambition, treachery, religion, and love.

Britannicus, Phaedra, Athaliah (The ^AWorld's Classics)

Jean Racine (1639-99) remains to this day the greatest of French poetic dramatists. Britannicus (1669), the first play in this volume, takes its themes from Roman history: the setting is bloody and treacherous court of the Emperor Nero. Phaedra (1677) dramatizes the Greek myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus. Athaliah (1691), Racine's last and perhaps finest play, draws on the Old Testament story of Athaliah, Queen of Judah and worshipper of Baal, who is threatened and finally forced to concede victory to Joash, a son of the house of David and survivor of Athaliah's massacres. Racine's tragedies portray characters wrestling with ambition, treachery, religion, and love. In this translation, specially commissioned for The World's Classics series, C.H. Sisson has captured admirably the lucidity of Racine's language, both analytic and passionate, and the rhythm of his four-part Alexandrine, a combination that previous translators have consistently failed to achieve. About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Britannicus, Phaedra, Athaliah (Oxford World's Classics)

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Oeuvres Completes De Jean Racine (French Edition)

History

Wentworth Press

This is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translations are the illuminating Discussions and the extensive Notes and Commentaries Argent has furnished for each play. The Discussions are not offered as definitive interpretations of these plays, but are intended to stimulate readers to form their own views and to explore further the inexhaustibly rich world of Racine’s plays. Included in the Notes and Commentary section of this translation are passages that Racine deleted after the first edition and have never before appeared in English.The full title of Racine’s first tragedy is La Thébaïde ou les Frères ennemis (The Saga of Thebes, or The Enemy Brothers). But Racine was far less concerned with recounting the struggle for Thebes than in examining those indomitable passions—in this case, hatred—that were to prove his lifelong focus of interest. For Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular brothers), vying for the throne is rather a symptom than a cause of their unquenchable hatred—so unquenchable that by the end of the play it has not only destroyed these twin brothers, but has also claimed the lives of their mother, their sister, their uncle, and their two cousins as collateral damage. Indeed, as Racine acknowledges in his preface, “There is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end.”

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 1: The Fratricides

Penn State University Press

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, Vol. 1: The Fratricides

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 2: Bajazet

This is the second volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed “heroic” couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which clarify obscure references, explicate the occasional gnarled conceit, and offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.Bajazet, Racine’s seventh play, first given in 1672, is based on events that had taken place in the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul a mere thirty years earlier. But the twilit, twisting passageways of the Seraglio merely serve as a counterpart to the dim and errant moral sense of the play’s four protagonists: Bajazet, the Sultan’s brother; Atalide, Bajazet’s secret lover; Roxane, the Sultaness, who is madly in love with Bajazet and dangles over his head the death sentence the Sultan has ordered her to implement in his absence; and Akhmet, the wily, well-intentioned Vizier, who involves them all in an imbroglio in the Seraglio, with disastrous consequences. Unique among Racine’s plays, Bajazet provides no moral framework for either protagonists or audience. We watch as these benighted characters, cut adrift from any moral moorings, with no upright character at hand to serve as an ethical anchor and no religious or societal guidelines to serve as a lifeline, flail, flounder, and finally drag one another down. Here, Racine has presented us with his four most mercilessly observed, most subtly delineated, and most ambiguously fascinating characters. Indeed, Bajazet is certainly Racine’s most undeservedly neglected tragedy.

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