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Jean Racine,
the court and Jansenism |
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Orphaned at an early age, Jean
Racine (1639-99) was given a strict Jansenist upbringing
and a superb education. He decided against entering the
Church, and between 1664
and 1677 wrote some of the greatest plays in the French
language. Disappointed with the reception of Phèdre,
he married and retired from the stage, returning to write
the religious dramas Esther (1689) and Athalie
(1691), both masterpieces. Racine's plays are as complex
as their author. With a character described as voluptuous,
uneasy and jealous, Jean Racine was an ambitious courtier,
an astute business man, and a frequenter of innumerable
actresses. But he was also a childhood believer in the Jansenist
doctrine that man is a miserable creature saved only by
God's grace.
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Classics and the stage |
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Jean
Racine was steeped in the ancient
world, which was real and moving to him, as indeed
it was to anyone of good education in the 17th-19th centuries.
To be popular, Baroque plays added pagan
mythology, oriental
splendour, dramatic
events in history, but an overriding concern was structure.
Plays
observed Aristotle's
unities of place, time and action. But where Corneille
expressed heroic sentiments in noble oratory, Racine's restrained,
polished but always appropriate language depicted man's
ferocious passions, savagery and imprudence. Classicism,
with its balance
and wholeness. was retained, with a very correct and
restricted vocabulary, but given an unforgettable force.
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Classical approaches today |
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If somewhat disregarded by the popular press,
classical literature, painting
and theatre are still being practised. Not many will
want to return to the pedagogical exercise of translating
from Latin or Greek to English, and then back again, though
this was how Racine and other great poets came to love the
classics and find a grammar for expressing what is universal
in human nature. Jean
Racine went beyond the ancient myths in devising new terrors
for his characters, but his language remained miraculously
natural. Modernism takes great liberties with expression,
as with social decorum, but Racine's example may explain why
the classics
have never
died out, placing an alternative vision before artists
in the 20th century, even in the popular
arena. |
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Books on Jean Racine and classicism |
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Bibliographies are given in the French Poetry section of
the The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Particularly useful may be P. Butler's Racine: A Study
(1974), G. Brereton's Racine: A Critical Biography
(1973) and J. Lapp's Aspects of Racinian Tragedy (1955).
French classical verse is built on the hexameter, which relies
on a syllabic subtleties that escape English ears. Try On
Reading French Verse by R. Lewis (1982) or French Verse-Art
A Study by C. Scott (1980) to develop appreciation: it'll
pay dividends for reading any French
poetry. Books,
tapes
and CDs can help. If you've forgotten your school French,
then there exist many courses and learning
centres. Students of French literature may find these
sources useful: NASSFCL, CCDSTSI and French
Library. |
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