A Tragedy
‘THE masterpiece of the human mind,’ said Voltaire of Racine’s Phaedra, and few critics have disagreed. In part, the play owes its impact to its brilliant construction. The action is driven forward by the usual series of confessions and revelations, with the subtle complication that, at one point, there is a reversal of the process, and the characters try to unsay what they have said. The build-up of suspense is cunningly contrived, and the interlocking of each detail so smooth as to be invisible except to a careful scrutiny.
The initial avowal comes in the very first scene. Prince Hippolytus, the son of Theseus of Athens, but not by Phaedra, his present queen, has always been a foe to love and has reserved his devotion for the hunt. But now ‘all is changed’; and he shamefacedly admits to his tutor, Theramenes, that he has succumbed to the charms of Aricia. His self-reproach at this weakness is heightened by the realization that Theseus is certain to disapprove of his feelings. For Aricia is the last survivor of the former ruling house of Athens, which the usurper Theseus has driven out and destroyed. In order to ensure that the line will die out completely, the king has forbidden Aricia to marry. But Aricia reciprocates Hippolytus’ inclination, and when he allows his secret to escape him, she gives as broad a hint of her love as the proprieties allow.
This romance forms the subplot. The main plot is focused on the guilty and overpowering passion of Phaedra, Theseus’ queen, for Hippolytus, her stepson. Theseus himself has been absent on one of his expeditions for over six months. During this time, Phaedra has fought an unceasing battle against her infatuation. She has managed to lock her dark secret in her breast, but she is now on the verge of death. As she totters on to the stage, half demented, her old nurse, Oenone, appeals to her to reveal the cause of her illness. In the end, Phaedra yields on condition that she is left to die rather than risk living in dishonour. Hardly has she spoken than the news is brought in that Theseus is dead. Oenone now urges the queen to take advantage of her widowhood and see Hippolytus, if only to defend her infant son’s rights to the throne against Aricia, who may try to win back power as the descendant of the original reigning family. But, when Hippolytus stands before her, Phaedra, in a trance-like rapture, makes an involuntary confession of her love, then tries to withdraw her wild words. The prince is horror-struck, but Phaedra, since the truth is out, decides on a second try, and despatches Oenone to offer him the crown. The nurse is soon back with the devastating news that Theseus, far from being dead, has returned in perfect health. This unexpected turn of events forces both Hippolytus and Phaedra to conceal their respective passions (though it does not necessarily oblige the prince to keep silent on Phaedra’s declaration to him).
As it is, he does not betray her. But he is ill rewarded for his generosity. For Phaedra, imagining that he is about to speak out to Theseus, panics and gives Oenone a free hand, and, while lacking the courage to slander the prince herself, throws out dark hints of outrages committed against her. Act IV opens, by a masterstroke of craftsmanship, at the point when Oenone has just poured her poison into Theseus’s all-too-receptive ear. Hippolytus, she whispers, has tried to do violence to Phaedra in the king’s absence.
Immediately after, the sequence of revelations is resumed, and the subplot links up with the main plot to generate an explosion. Theseus accuses his son of the crimes invented by Oenone. Hippolytus, to justify himself, discloses his love for Aricia, which he has kept secret because of Theseus’ ban on the princess’s marriage. This confession fails to convince the king, who calls down the vengeance of the seagod Neptune on the youth. Phaedra, fearing that she will have the prince’s blood on her hands, rushes in and is about to confess the ‘fearful truth’ to her husband when she learns that Hippolytus was not, as she had thought, indifferent to all women but ‘[could] love and loved not [her]’. Consumed by jealousy, she decides to stand by in silence while Hippolytus goes out to meet his death. Neptune’s avenging monster rises from the sea, and the fulfilment of the king’s prayer is duly reported in the last act. The play is rounded off as Phaedra, having taken poison and made full confession of her guilt, creeps on to the stage to die.
Guilt. The conception, the feeling, is new in Racine, and raises problems that have so far almost defied solution, Phaedra is the last of Racine’s plays apart from two religious works written much later. Is his silence linked in any way with the preoccupation with sinfulness so noticeable in the tragedy? The issue is extremely complex, and only the briefest outline is possible here.
Until recently, the external evidence was regarded as conclusive. Louis Racine, in his Mémoires on his father’s life, tells us that about this time Racine felt a return of his religious beliefs – the Jansenism in which he had been brought up – and was eager to retire to the Charterhouse as a monk. The dramatist was only dissuaded from this drastic course by his confessor, who felt that marriage offered a better solution for a penitent of such a lively disposition. And these counsels prevailed. Racine made a marriage of reason (on 1 June 1677). Louis Racine is, it is true, a highly tendentious witness, and has often been caught out, particularly in his attempts to gloss over the less edifying aspects of his father’s life. All the same, it is difficult to believe that he would invent from start to finish the episode of the ‘conversion’. Again, there is Racine’s own statement (in 1698, it is true) that it was his old (Jansenist) aunt who rescued him after fifteen years of dissipation, which would correspond to the years of his vocation for the theatre (presumably from late 1661 to late 1676). His word has been questioned, but rather unnecessarily. And when, writing in early 1677, he suddenly, in his Preface to Phaedra, for the first time raises the question of religion and holds out an olive branch to those persons of piety who have recently condemned the theatre (perhaps the Jansenists), we may be sure that he is moved by a desire not simply to achieve respectability but to be reconciled with the sect to which he once belonged and which he had so grievously offended by his association with the stage.
This is the case for the older view. It is now contended, however, that Racine’s silence is fully explained by his appointment late in 1677 (jointly with Boileau) to the coveted post of Royal Historiographer. This appointment, it is argued, was not the result of his abandonment of the stage, but on the contrary led to it, both because of the stigma attaching to the theatre and of pressure of work.
The fact is that we do not know. The evidence as to the outward sequence of events leading up to the nomination is scanty enough. The data on Racine’s own evolution and motives (as opposed to what his contemporaries thought) are nil. Analogies with other writers such as Campistron who used their craft as a stepping-stone to lucrative posts prove nothing, nor does the fact that Racine’s confrère Boileau was not converted in 1677. Racine was not a nonentity like Campistron and not a prosaic schoolmaster like Boileau. It is equally possible that Racine was first ‘converted’, and, looking around for a new career, was offered that of historiographer by his powerful patrons. At any rate, it is hard to believe that either a desire to conform to the new sobriety of the court, or the duties of his post – however glorious and exacting – could have been sufficient to overpower his consuming passion for the theatre.
His silence is more convincingly explained by a return to Jansenism in 1677 at latest (though not perhaps a conversion in the sense of a flight from the world). This evolution may well have had its origins further back in time, and hence in 1676 when Phaedra was being written. We believe that a careful analysis of the play points in the same direction.
Of the Jansenist traits visible in Phaedra, one has already been mentioned – the obsession with sin. This is typical of any austere sect, and Jansenism is no exception. The feeling of Angst that runs through this but not the earlier works can be equated with the perpetual uncertainty of the Jansenist as to whether he is justified or not. The main but not the only protagonist of this feeling of guilt is Phaedra herself, who is allowed only a few moments’ respite from the conviction that she is ‘rejected by all living things’. It was no doubt this perpetual self-reproach, combined with her fanatical resistance to overwhelming temptation that (if we are to believe the poet’s son, Louis) led the great Jansenist theologian Arnauld to define her as ‘one of the just to whom grace was not vouchsafed’.
Whether apocryphal or not, the description is highly illuminating. Phaedra, whatever her crimes (and they are considerable), undoubtedly is one of the just (or, more exactly, virtuous). She constantly insists on her realization of her guilt. Witness her cry:
I burn with love. Yet, even as I speak,
Do not imagine I feel innocent,
Nor think that my complacency has fed
The poison of the love that clouds my mind.
…
I pined, I drooped, in torments and in tears. (673–6 and 690)
She is the last person to be accused of moral laxity, nor does she shelter, as she might well have done, behind the gods who are responsible for her infatuation.
Not that virtue was absent from Racine’s work up till then. But it is a fairly tranquil approach to life compounded of good breeding, honour, and poise. Iphigenia in the play of that name, and Monime in Mithridate, meet the most testing situations with a serene and measured calm as far removed from the fevered and guilt-laden anguish of Phaedra as night is from day. In Racine’s last secular play, we have entered a new climate. The attitude to passion is new, too. In the previous works, Hermione in Andromache, Roxana in Bajazet, live and act at an almost instinctive level, and set about the conquest of the man they desire with scant regard for the means employed. Phaedra is in a group by herself. With the same devouring passion as Roxana, she has the high moral standards of Monime. The result, within the soul of the Queen of Athens, is a clash of an acuity unprecedented in Racine, and one which he underlines and exacerbates with every device at his command.
For Phaedra’s infatuation is not merely hopeless since quite unreciprocated (this is usual in the frustrated world of Racine). Her love is also adulterous and incestuous – and that is unique in the poet’s tragedies.
Yet he could easily have avoided creating such a scabrous situation by following the example of his rival Pradon, and making Phaedra only Theseus’ fiancée and not his wedded wife. The weight of the romanesque tradition and of the proprieties of the age pointed in that direction. On the contrary, Racine deliberately chose to inflate and darken the offence Phaedra was tempted to commit. Why? This striving for effect was not called for by the dramatic needs of the work. The treatment of the issue by Racine’s two models is significant in this connexion. Seneca, the Roman writer, treats Phaedra as a wanton; Euripides, the Greek tragedian, portrays the queen as resolved to resist an overpowering passion. There are copious references to the magic of Venus, but no mention of incest.
Phaedra’s love for her stepson cannot with certainty be condemned as incestuous on legal or historical grounds. Yet Racine never leaves us in doubt as to his own views. The queen herself declares
I reek with foulest incest and deceit (1270)
while Theseus is equally positive in censuring Hippolytus for his supposed advances to Phaedra.
One is left with the impression that this new preoccupation with guilt on Racine’s part and his determination to heighten Phaedra’s crime stem from a development in the poet’s mind rather than from the demands inherent in the artistic treatment of the subject.
To the heinousness of the offence and the vigour of Phaedra’s resistance, Racine has added, as a final element of tension, the maximum onslaught of passion and the complicity of circumstance. The odds are utterly uneven. Whatever her moral stamina, the queen is not to be allowed any chance of victory, in a universe closed to hope. Phaedra is definitely not among the elect, and circumstance, fate, destiny – whichever label one prefers – is mainly responsible for this. In previous plays, the ‘maleficent concatenation of circumstances’ (Picard) had also doomed its chosen victims. But it had sent them at worst to death or (in the case of Titus and Berenice) to separation. It had never edged them, slowly but inevitably, down the slope to ruin and degradation in addition to death. Fate had never displayed the same measure of heartlessness, trickery, and persistence in encompassing its victims. Struck by the thunderbolt of a completely unexpected passion, Phaedra struggles valiantly with the strange, elusive enemy within. In vain. She hits on the device (effective, if unscrupulous) of blackening Hippolytus and securing his exile to Troezen. Had events granted her a well-deserved respite at this juncture, she might have lived on in peace for the rest of her days. But her husband’s shortsightedness reduces her stratagem to nought.
Brought by [her] lord himself to Troezen’s shores, (302)
the Queen of Athens is once more thrown into the physical presence of ‘her haughty enemy’, and the old torture starts all over again. Indeed, not content with his first blunder, the king goes one better and places his wife in his son’s care before setting out on another of his amorous missions (though this one, Racine is careful to note, is on behalf of a friend, and is embarked on ‘reluctantly’). This is too much for the wretched queen. Worn down by the unremitting struggle, she resolves to die. In the belief that her death is only a matter of hours, she yields to the importunities of her nurse, and reveals her dread secret. Almost at that very moment, by the arm of a coincidence that is decidedly of preternatural length, the report comes in that Theseus is dead. This gives Oenone just the right opening. Phaedra is now, through her confession, vulnerable to her nurse’s advice. Oenone exploits the situation to the full by arguing that her mistress’s obsession has lost its unnatural character. The queen should therefore join forces with Hippolytus against Aricia in defence of her children’s interests. Hardly has the lid of the trap been lifted sufficiently for Phaedra to see the prince, reveal her love to him, and be cruelly rebuffed, than the spring uncoils, and there is no escape for the victim. For Theseus is not dead. The speed with which he has turned up is improbable by ordinary standards. But Racine, as always, extracts the last drop of anguish in the few hours sanctioned by the conventions governing the French classical tragedy.
Even when she has gone so far, Phaedra still has it in her power to confess the truth to Theseus, and thus save what can still be extricated from the débâcle. At this point, fate deals her another, more crushing, blow. As her husband and his son enter, she mistakes the latter’s grim expression for an insolent determination to betray her. She panics, and gives the ever-willing Oenone a free hand. As Professor Pommier observes, the play pivots on the misinterpretation of a look (always of vital importance in the closely controlled and scrutinized action in Racine). The nurse accuses Hippolytus to Theseus of having tried to outrage the queen. This is bad enough, but the situation is still not completely desperate. Phaedra, seeing her husband’s determination to take vengeance on the presumed criminal, decides in the end to confess the truth. As she arrives, Theseus, unfortunate to the last, serves her up the most devastating news that could be conceived. Hippolytus is not, as she had believed, indifferent to all women. He is in love with Aricia. Overcome by this final bludgeoning, Phaedra keeps silent and allows the prince to be horribly done to death. It would be hard to imagine a more diabolically devised sequence of snares. At every turn, what seemed to be the ultimate refinement of cruelty is outdone by an even more ingenious torture. Small wonder that we pity Phaedra as she writhes in the nets of passion and circumstance.
The immediate, if unwitting, cause of her downfall, of course, is the young hunter, Hippolytus. And in no other play, with the possible exception of Bajazet (set in the overheated and amoral atmosphere of the Turkish seraglio), has the tyranny of the body, of irresistible sensuality, reached such intensity. Venus has really, in Phaedra’s own words, ‘settled on her prey’ with vulture-like tenacity.
For it is not just individual passion, but a cosmic force, that has set Phaedra’s veins afire. And it is a force that picks out its victims, however arbitrarily, dooming a whole family in the process. The point is made effectively and repeatedly. Addressing her father, the judge of the dead, Phaedra cries:
Forgive me. Venus’ wrath has doomed your race! (1289)
It is Venus’ hatred of Phaedra’s ‘unblest line’ that has lit in her heart ‘an ill-omened fire’.
Venus was on me with her dreaded flames,
The fatal torments of a race she loathes. (277–8)
The goddess of love looks both back to the cruel gods in The Thebaid who push men to crime but do not excuse them, and forward to the destructive aspect of Jehovah in Athaliah. In particular, the hereditary character of Venus’ devastations can be traced back to their source in the Old Testament, where the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. The idea was not taken from the Greek original. In Euripides’ Phaedra, Venus is offended with Hippolytus because he refuses to do her worship. (Phaedra is only the incidental victim of the goddess’s wrath.) But no reason for Venus’ vindictiveness is given in Racine’s play. The goddess of love in this new version has the same inexplicable cruelty as the gods in The Thebaid, and indirectly, as the severe Jansenist deity himself.
Venus’ intervention can, it is true, easily be understood in purely rational terms without weakening the drama. We can well imagine that Phaedra was smitten by an overwhelming passion by a purely human mechanism. This perfect equation between legendary richness and psychological penetration is the mark of supreme artistry. It also exemplifies, perhaps involuntarily or unconsciously, the Jansenist doctrine that God’s intervention must always appear as a natural phenomenon to the sceptic, who will thus be inclined to doubt its miraculous nature.
But (after fate and passion) it is the third group of forces ranged against Phaedra – her ancestor the sungod, and her father Minos – that most clearly reveals the presence of Christian forces and feelings, under a transparent disguise. From the penetrating eye of the sun nothing can be concealed (any more than from the Jansenist God), while Minos, who ‘judges in Hell the trembling dead’, is the same awesome figure as the Supreme Judge on the Day of Wrath. The implications of these nightmare deities – completely new to the work of Racine – are brilliantly described by Thierry Maulnier, who takes his start from Phaedra’s anguished cry:
Wretch! and I live, and can endure the gaze
Of the most sacred sun from which I spring. (1273–4)
‘From every corner of heaven and earth,’ he goes on, ‘Phaedra sees all the members of her immortal family who people the universe contemplate and condemn her, and first and foremost the most venerable of them all, the sungod, whose symbolic gaze strips her completely and does not even allow her to take refuge among the shades. On all sides, she is exposed naked to the thousand eyes of her sacred ancestors. And, as she tries to flee the mute malediction of all that is divine in the world, on the threshold of the far reaches of transgression and oblivion, it is the judge who is closest akin to her that she must affront, her father… She is forbidden even to betake herself to death, the ultimate habitable region of this world. The universe is now, in every region, nothing but a place of expiation and torture for her.’
The unbearable claustrophobia of Sartre’s Huis Clos seems light-hearted badinage by comparison. The new vision of a hermetically sealed universe with an afterworld in which the Gods sit in judgement on mortal sinners throws into relief the revolution that has occurred in Racine’s treatment of death. In the earlier plays, death comes in the finale. It is an outcome which holds the audience in suspense and which is, so to speak, the sign of a happy or a sad ending. It is the visible resolution of the débâcle. The Preface of Iphigenia suggests that the study of the ancients, and especially of his beloved Euripides, prompted Racine to alter his approach to the question. There he dwells on the pathos to be derived from the portrayal of Euripides’ Alcestis ‘who has the vision of death before her eyes’. And in Racine’s own Iphigenia the threat of death hangs over Agamemnon’s daughter from the first moment. She does, it will be remembered, ultimately escape, though at the expense of another victim.
In Phaedra, however, the heroine is already dying when the play opens. The tragedy consists not in her death in the final act, but in the fact that, as she puts it (speaking to Oenone):
I died this morning worthy to be mourned.
I took your counsel and dishonoured die. (837–8)
Death has become a vital element in a moral tragedy. But in the process the gods have become more, not less, cruel. There is no other instance in Racine’s work of someone being brought back to life, as Phaedra is by her nurse’s blandishments. But, if she is revived, it is not because the maleficent powers have any desire to spare her. It is merely because they have decided that she has not yet drunk her fill of agony. Only when she is utterly ravaged and has sunk to the deepest humiliation and degradation is she permitted to die. And even then the gates of tranquillity in the afterworld are closed to her for ever.
There are still other gods at work in Racine, but they do not form an integral part of the fabric. Neptune is typical of the Racine universe only inasmuch as he willingly responds to a request for a murder, but he and his monster hardly rise above the level of operatic properties. They have no vital link with the heart of the play. They are instruments in the mechanical sense, not emanations of divine justice and vengeance conceived in the core of Racine’s basic belief and imagination.
Phaedra, then, is the victim of divine anger and of her destiny. As Racine observes in his Preface, Phaedra’s crime is ‘a punishment of the gods, rather than an urge flowing from her own free will’. Which means in effect that she is predestined. To this, it is objected that she is responsible for her actions, and that she could at each critical juncture have avoided the catastrophe by resisting just a little more firmly.
The argument is fallacious on several grounds. By a familiar paradox, the Jansenists expected everyone, though probably predestined to heaven or hell, to behave as if he or she was a free moral agent. Secondly, Phaedra is not technically bereft of freedom, but the odds ranged against her are such that her freedom of choice is virtually extinguished. She is free to win her battle in the same sense as an untrained one-armed flyweight is free to beat a world heavyweight champion. And lastly, Phaedra’s failure to resist is not in many cases a moral factor but merely a causative one. Thus, when she reveals to her nurse that she is in love with Hippolytus, she can be accused only of giving Oenone (as it happens, by a quite unforeseeable sequence of events) a chance to prevent her from dying. In the same way, Phaedra’s self-deception in believing that she will live only to defend her children’s interests is a psychological not a moral event. For that matter, her most effective step in defending her virtue and peace of mind was a none-too-moral piece of trickery, whereby she secured Hippolytus’s exile to Troezen. The major cause of her downfall is not her own weakness but Theseus’s departure on a mission, thus leaving her in Hippolytus’s care, and Theseus’s readiness to believe the nurse’s calumnies and to call down vengeance on his son. Phaedra in short is a victim of chance, and only incidentally of her own character. We are helpless unless assisted by grace. Phaedra is one of the just to whom grace has not been vouchsafed.
Guilt, predestination, and death dominate the play from start to finish. If it is permissible to make deductions from this work as to the state of Racine’s soul at the time, it would seem that his amoral attitude to passion had given way to one of guilty horror. And the shadow cast by this emotional crisis provides a plausible explanation of the intolerable intensity of the play.
In any case, the violence of Phaedra has nothing to do with the theatrical and external violence of baroque art. For tragic vision and baroque are incompatible, and there is no more profoundly tragic work than Racine’s masterpiece.
If there is a baroque element in Phaedra, it is secondary, and it is due precisely to the very emphasis laid on the central drama of the heroine which, as it were, deprives all the other characters and action of life. For the battle here is fought out not, as formerly, between two characters or factions, but in Phaedra’s soul. As a result, the layout of the play is profoundly altered.
In most of Racine’s works, the main characters fall into two contrasting groups – a touching or unhappy woman, and one who is neither; and a determined, mature, or unscrupulous man against one who is weak, passive, or inexperienced. In Phaedra this grouping is dropped, and the resultant balance sacrificed. All the light and shade, the qualities and defects, and all the guilt and the pathos are centred on the tragic queen, who alone ‘receives the privilege of variation, which is really that of life’. Compared with her, the other characters fade into the background. Aricia and Hippolytus are precious in the extreme. Phaedra and he seem to come from two entirely separate worlds, even though he is a pale double of the heroine with a similar guilt-laden approach to love. And on the one occasion when he bursts into poetry and comes alive, he seems to borrow Phaedra’s fire. Moreover, he is not marked out by death from the start, like the queen, and his demise, when it does come, leaves the spectator cold. Aricia is not without a certain grace, but ‘she is frozen in her dignity’. She resembles nothing so much as a well-brought-up young lady whose only concern in life is to make sure that she is properly married to Hippolytus before she elopes with him. Theseus, too, not only suffers from too frequent reminders of his less glorious deeds (of amorous conquest), but also blunders his way through the play with such remarkable consistency as to verge at times on the comic. There is therefore undoubtedly a marked effect of contrast between Phaedra and the rest of the cast, but it is hardly one to be commended to aspiring playwrights.
Not only this. The unbalance leads to other disproportions. Since Phaedra absorbs the spectator’s interest, the play might well have ended just before the curtain of Act IV, at line 1294, when she winds up her last great speech with the lament:
I end upon the rack a life of pain.
She knows that Aricia and Hippolytus will love each other for ever. Pain holds no further terrors for her. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the rest of the tragedy should pall. The short remainder of Act IV is merely a loose end, which Racine had in a file labelled ‘Borrowings from the ancients that might come in handy’; he could not resist the temptation to drag in this passage at what is really a most inappropriate stage.
Act V, with its uninspiring meeting between Hippolytus and Aricia and its long and laboured account by Theramenes of the young man’s death, scarcely adds to Racine’s dramatic laurels; and it is straining our credulity to ask us to believe (even after making the fullest allowance for the poetic elasticity of time) that between line 1410 and line 1488 (or considerably less than is allocated to Theramenes for his verbal marathon), the unfortunate young prince could have organized his flight, sallied forth from Troezen, been struck down by the monster, and sent his tutor back to Theseus to report his fate.
Nor are we entirely satisfied by the expeditiousness with which Racine arranges for Phaedra to reappear (without having been told of Hippolytus’ death) at the precise moment when her arrival is needed to round off the play. It was merely that, on moral grounds, Phaedra had to reappear, express repentance, and announce her suicide (an act of self-punishment).
The weakness of the last act also undermines the vitality of the mythological element which, as already noted, tends to degenerate into operatic description. In particular, the whole episode of Hippolytus’ destruction by the monster fails to come to life. Even in the rest of the play, much of the legendary material comes near to being decorative arabesques.
In part, Racine was held back, understandably, by the rationalism of his age. Thus, by a deliberate decision on the poet’s part (cf. his Preface), the ruler of Athens does not in the play go down to Hades but merely to
… sombre caves profound
Nearby the shadowy kingdom of the dead. (965–6)
And, even if the rumour alleges that Theseus really
Beheld Cocytus and the sombre shores, (384)
this version is carefully prefaced by the assertion that
The tales told of his death are past belief. (380)
This is a very different Theseus from the legendary figure conjured up by Phaedra’s demented imagination in her idealized description of her husband as she gazes at Hippolytus. In her delirium, Theseus is not only the very credible leader of the Argonauts and victor over the Minotaur, but also, this time, ‘the ravisher of Pluto’s couch’. In fact, it is only when Phaedra is on stage that the presence of the gods (her gods) adds a new dimension to the tragedy and poetry of the play. For by virtue of her guilt and anguish she lives and moves naturally in the world of Venus’s hatred, the searching rays of the sun, and the reprobation of all-judging Minos.
The play can be seen in its proper perspective only if we look across the subsequent fourteen years to Athaliah, an explicitly Jansenist play, written when Racine had long returned to his faith, and was not merely groping his way towards it. Gone is the curious and slightly disturbing contrast between the Greek gods and the Jansenist feelings informing the tragedy. In Athaliah, subject-matter and religious attitude are perfectly in tune. But there will be many who prefer the uneven and problematic, but intensely human tragedy of Phaedra to the more grandiose, external, and balanced presentation of the higher politics of religion that we are to encounter in Athaliah.