Racine, Jean-Baptiste

Racine, Jean-Baptiste (1639-1699), French dramatist, considered the greatest writer of French classical tragedy.

Racine was born in La Ferté-Milon, the son of a tax official. He was educated at the Collège de Beauvais, the Jansenist convent at Port-Royal, and the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris. The intellectual, morally rigorous Jansenist philosophy became one of the greatest influences in Racine’s life. Another influence was the Greek and Latin Classics; he was able to read fluently and to annotate his favourite authors, Euripides and Sophocles, in the original Greek.

While a student in Paris after 1658, Racine composed conventional poetry and became friendly with important literary figures, among whom was the French poet Jean de La Fontaine. Under pressure from his family, Racine left Paris in 1661 and began to study for the priesthood in the town of Uzès. He returned to Paris in 1662 or 1663 to resume his literary career and soon gained a place among the most famous French writers of the time, including Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. Racine’s first play, La Thébaïde (The Thebaid), was performed at the Palais-Royal by members of Molière’s company in 1664, and his second, Alexandre, was performed the following year. Convinced that his second work had been badly presented, Racine transferred the play to the rival company at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which thereafter produced all his plays.

During the next ten years, Racine wrote seven tragedies on Greek or Roman themes. These tragedies were Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1670), Bajazet (1672), Mithridate (1673), Iphigénie en Aulide (Iphigenia in Aulis, 1674), and Phèdre (1677). He also wrote one comedy, Les Plaideurs (The Suitors, 1668), a satire on lawyers set in contemporary Paris.

Racine’s success resulted in his election to the Académie Française (see Institut de France) in 1672. However, it was accompanied by a rise to favour at court which made him many enemies, some of whom tried to engineer the failure of Phèdre by organizing support for a rival Phèdre by a lesser French writer, Nicolas Pradon. After this Racine never again wrote for the public theatre. The same year (1677) he was appointed official historian to Louis XIV, a post that involved following the king’s military campaigns. In 1689 he was persuaded by Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Maintenon, who was patron of a girls’ school at Saint-Cyr near Paris, to write a biblical tragedy, Esther, to be performed by the pupils. A similar commission led him to write Athalie (1691), which subsequently entered the public repertoire. Racine died in Paris on April 29, 1699.

Racine’s tragedies convey the power of human passion to undermine reason and will so that the outwardly noble and heroic protagonists of his plays are revealed as fallible human beings caught up in often self-destructive clashes of personality. His aim was to move his audiences to fear and pity in the way Aristotle had defined as the touchstone of authentic tragedy. His mastery of the regular alexandrine verse form of his day enabled him to create dramatic tension and to convey powerful emotion in a way that his lesser contemporaries were incapable of matching. Because of this, the majority of his tragedies are still performed in France, and in translation in other countries (a notable example is Phaedra, 1960, by the American poet Robert Lowell).