Phèdre Reading Order

Phèdre (1677) by Jean Racine is the supreme achievement of French classical tragedy — the play in which Racine's inexorable dramatic logic reaches its fullest expression, and the one work that he himself selected as the culmination of his theatrical career before his retreat into Jansenist piety. The play adapts Euripides' Hippolytus through Seneca's Phaedra: Phèdre, wife of Theseus, is consumed by a guilty passion for her stepson Hippolyte; Hippolyte loves Aricie, a captive princess; Theseus is rumored dead, returns alive, and Phèdre's nurse Oenone accuses Hippolyte of the crime that Phèdre herself has committed. The Racinian innovation is to make Phèdre conscious of the guilt and monstrousness of her passion from the beginning — she does not act in ignorance (as Euripides' Phaedra does) but in full awareness of what she is and what she desires. The Jansenist theological dimension is explicit: Phèdre is the sinner who recognizes her sin, cannot escape it, and knows that the grace she needs will not be granted — the perfect image of Jansenist predestination without election. The verse (alexandrins, rhyming couplets, 12-syllable lines) is the most controlled and concentrated French verse, where a single word ('monstre', 'crime', 'sang') carries the accumulated weight of the entire play.