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JEAN RACINE - French Dramatist

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The rival of Pierre Corneille for the title of the greatest French tragic dramatist, Jean Racine {rah-seen'}, baptized Dec. 22, 1639, d. Apr. 21, 1699, infused the high style of neoclassicism with the tension of human passion. Often set in ancient times, his plays combine the Greek concept of inexorable fate with a 17th-century metaphysics and an acute sense of human nature, and exemplify a poetic diction at the same time soberly restrained and powerfully evocative. Racine's tightly structured dramas of obsessive and destructive love, particularly in women, remain among the masterpieces of world drama.

Orphaned in early childhood, Racine was raised by a grandmother who subscribed to the extreme doctrine of original sin as taught by Jansenism, a Reform movement within Roman Catholicism. Sent (1655) to the Jansenist school at Port-Royal, Racine was profoundly influenced by their tenets while receiving a thorough classical education; his fusion of the Greek idea of fate with the Jansenist belief in human helplessness later produced unique tragedies of the struggle of the will against the passions.

When, in 1658, Racine left Port-Royal to pursue the study of philosophy in Paris, he subordinated his spiritual interests to the intellectual delights and ambitions of the secular world. Having already composed religious and pastoral poetry, he now adopted the contemporary custom of dedicating poems to potential patrons, and his marriage ode for King Louis XIV, La Nymphe de la Seine (The Nymph of the Seine, 1660), gained him recognition. After a brief absence (1661) from Paris during which he placated his family by feigning interest in a clerical life, he returned to the city, where he published more poems and cultivated the friendship of his great contemporaries Boileau, La Fontaine, and Molière. Moliere, already a noted man of the theater, produced Racine's first plays, La Thebiade (1664) and Alexandre le Grand (1665). Confirmed in his theatrical vocation by the reception accorded these plays, Racine broke with the Jansenists and devoted himself entirely to his art.

Beginning with Andromaque (1667) and ending with his masterpiece, Phèdre (1677), the plays of this decade of Racine's life established him as the peer of the long-renowned Corneille and, in the opinion of many -- especially in the younger generation -- established him as France's leading dramatist. Elaborating on the aftermath of the Trojan War, Andromaque shows Hector's widow, Andromache, caught in the crosscurrents of passion. Her captor, King Pyrrhus, forces a marriage with her, abandoning his fiancee, Hermione, who then instigates his assassination at the hands of her love-maddened suitor, Oreste. In its portrayal of foredoomed love, the play revives classical fatalism; in its analysis of motivation, it foreshadows modern psychology. As great a success as Corneille's Le Cid had been three decades earlier, Andromaque occasioned a great rivalry between the two dramatists that was intensified by Racine's treatment of the Corneillean theme of political strife in Britannicus (1669) and came to a climax with Berenice (1670). Appearing at virtually the same time as a tragedy on the identical subject by Corneille, the latter play established Racine's preeminence.

Encouraged by his triumph, Racine experimented with a contemporary setting in Bajazet (1672) and with an almost exclusively inner, psychological action in Mithridate (1673). Although his success -- symbolized by his election (1672) to the Académie Française -- continued, Racine came under increasing attack from other playwrights. His Iphigénie (1674), a return to Greek material, prevailed over a rival version; but the savagery of partisan attacks on Phèdre, combined with an internal moral crisis, led Racine to retire from theatrical activity and to marry in 1677. He now reconciled his differences with the Jansenists at Port-Royal and, devoting himself to his new duties as royal historiographer -- a position to which he had been called by Louis XIV personally -- he abandoned secular drama. His last two plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691) were on biblical themes, written for performance by students at a school for the sacred and secular education of young women.

Corneille's characters are moral giants endowed with indomitable will. Racine's are intensely human. His contemporary, La Bruyère, put it well: Corneille painted human beings as they ought to be; Racine painted them as they are.

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