The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 1: The Fratricides 9780271056692

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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine volume 1: the fratricides

Translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by

geoffrey alan argent

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

All Rights Reserved caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of the fratricides (“Play”) are subject to royalty. This Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by Universal Copyright Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, and all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as cd-rom, cd-i, dvd, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning any of the aforementioned rights should be addressed to Patrick H. Alexander, Director, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 820 N. University Drive, usb 1, Suite C, University Park, pa 16802, www.psupress.org.

Please Note After having received permission to produce this Play, it is required that the translator geoffrey alan argent be given credit as the sole and exclusive translator of the Play on the title page of all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all cases where the title of the Play appears for purposes of advertising or publicizing the production. The name of geoffrey alan argent must appear on a separate line immediately beneath the title line and in type size equal to 50% of the size of the largest letter of the title of the Play and the acknowledgment should read jean racine’s the fratricides Translated into English Rhymed Couplets by geoffrey alan argent Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found in the back of this book.

For Leslie Eric Comens “ntgfmml”

contents

Foreword by Ronald W. Tobin   ix Translator’s Note   xv Translator’s Introduction   xxi

The Fratricides: Discussion   1 Racine’s Dedication   27 Racine’s Preface   29

The Fratricides   31

The Fratricides: Notes and Commentary   99

Selected Bibliography   125

foreword

On June 8 and 9, 2001, a conference was held in Uzès, a small town in southern France in which Jean Racine spent almost two years (1661– 63).1 The  conference title, “Confrontations Raciniennes” (Confrontations Among Racine Scholars), was an appropriate designation for debates about the most controversial dramatist of the past three hundred years of French literary history. (Molière, too, generated decades of heat among those who viewed his plays as dramatized philosophical treatises — the work of Molière the Thinker — and those who principally defined the author of Tartuffe as someone interested only in the production of theatrical spectacles, Molière the Dramatist. Happily, that long-standing antagonism has been put to rest: at last Molière interpreters have come to see the folly of trying to separate what are complementary thrusts of Molière’s oeuvre.) Racine fought with his rivals in the seventeenth century (his prefaces have often to be read as ripostes to Pierre Corneille and his supporters); his plays, which over the centuries have evoked passionate reactions, both negative and positive, often depended on the art of actresses such as Rachel. And the debate was revived around 1960 by three New Critics who challenged the academic approach to the tragedian: Lucien Goldmann and his neo-Marxist perspective; Roland Barthes and an anthropological view of the tragedies; and Charles Mauron, who brought Freudian psychology to bear on the relationship between the author and his work. On the side of traditional scholarship stood Raymond Picard, author of the then standard biography of the dramatist, La Carrière de Jean

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Racine (The Career of Jean Racine), who argued for a more scientific approach, one less vulnerable to purely subjective projections.2 Forty years later, in Uzès, sparks continued to fly. One would have thought that enough had been written about Racine during and after the worldwide celebration of the tercentenary of his death (1999). At least ten colloquiums, from Haifa to Santa Barbara via Paris, were devoted to him, their acta consisting of several thousand printed pages. Nevertheless, two hundred people crowded into a small room in the Cultural Center of Uzès on a warm Friday and Saturday to listen to the views espoused by Georges Forestier, editor of the 1999 Théâtre-Poésie volume of Racine’s works3 and specialist in the borrowings that make Racine’s plays models of intertextuality, who “confronted” Jean Rohou, author of several works on the philosophical influences on Racine, starting with the role that Augustinian theology may have played in Racine’s tragic vision.4 In essence, therefore, we had yet another debate about a French classical writer as either a dramatist or a philosopher. Racine’s dramaturgy became an object of research starting in the early 1990s, when a growing movement among English scholars sought to demonstrate, once and for all, that the tragedian was as much a man of the theater as Molière, and that he made every effort to have a maximal impact on his audience.5 (A careful reading of his prefaces bears this out.) A modern audience should particularly appreciate Racine’s lessons in the art of the theater. But does the content of Racine’s theater still touch us? What is the point of a new — and much better — translation into English of Racine’s complete theater, if he has lost his relevance? One could respond in the first place that Racine draws attention to the passions that move his characters and that occasionally drive them to have recourse to a reaction both ancient and modern: violence. It was Racine’s innovative deployment of the passions as a structural principle, well suited to revealing the feeling of incompleteness and insecurity that haunts his characters, that struck the spectators of the 1660s as a compelling, if somewhat uncomfortable and perhaps too faithful, mirror of humanity. Does the mirror still cast a realistic image of our concerns and weaknesses? From the heart of his rhyming couplets, whose

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organization seems so reassuring, do we not hear cries of despair and madness that are not foreign to our experience? In an attempt to create a spectacle that would cause emotional reactions to well up from the depths of the human psyche, does Racine not display the identity crises of characters in search of “love,” which is often a code word for acceptance, approval, or legitimacy? Is not fragmentation (of relationships, words, even bodies) — that truly postmodern trait — an anthropological principle that one discovers throughout his oeuvre but especially in Phaedra? From Berenice to Esther does one not notice, as a prime motivating factor, a conflict of cultures that involves the confrontation of East and West? Although Racine wrote at a time when rationalism was just beginning to take hold in Europe (Descartes’ Discourse on Method was thirty years old when Andromache appeared in 1667), he nevertheless insists on human responsibility in the crafting of his catastrophe and denouement.6 For that fundamental reason, we are one with Racine’s world. To put it another way, “Phèdre c’est nous” — we are just like Phaedra. While it may appear paradoxical that an author from a monarchical and Catholic century would still be the object of polemics in democratic and culturally diverse countries of our day, and while it is true that Racine is more appreciated by a handful of critics of French theater than by the literate public at large, he continues to attract widespread respect for the kind of poetic tragedy he created and that has marked writers from Voltaire through Ibsen and Heine, to O’Neill and Beckett. The acta of the many Racine tercentenary conferences reveal that a host of topics continue to intrigue scholars seeking to unlock the secret of Racine’s genius, such as his use of history and mythology (two subjects often confused in the seventeenth century); his deft deployment of rhetoric for theatrical purposes; the role of politics, the reflection of a religious culture, and the poetics of space and time in the tragedies; the analysis of the pivotal place of women in his plays; and the contribution of music to the biblical tragedies Esther and Athaliah. There has also been an excited renaissance of interest in the allusive — and elusive — way Racine often borrowed from Greek and Roman sources.7

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Our knowledge of Racine’s life, used so often as the starting point for misguided forays into the relationship between the man and his work, has been dramatically renewed by Georges Forestier’s massive and masterful biography, Jean Racine.8 Drawing upon resources and adopting approaches inaccessible to Raymond Picard, Forestier gives us the portrait of a skilled courtier admired for his manners, his grace, and his eloquence. Relatively little of Picard’s arriviste remains in Forestier’s study, yet both biographers demonstrate skill in unbarring the intelligence and the vast culture of their subject. Forestier’s effort, in tune with current perspectives, is much more than a biography: it is a rich cultural study of Racine’s era. Racine is not, as he has often been portrayed in the past, an exclusively French phenomenon, who defies the appreciation of those outside the hexagon. In the cross-cultural climate of the twentyfirst century, Racine has been presented in English by experimental groups in off-Broadway venues of New York City, as well as in performances in French from Brooklyn to Berkeley. For some decades his main competitor for those with a taste for the tragic genre has been not Pierre Corneille but Shakespeare. The  Bard, who was unknown in seventeenth-century France, now challenges Racine as the consummate tragedian even within France. The time has now come for Racine to return the compliment by becoming accessible for the English-speaking world through the powerful translations of Geoffrey Alan Argent. — Ronald W. Tobin University of California, Santa Barbara

notes 1. Jean Dubu has collected and edited what remains of Racine’s correspondence from this period in Lettres d’Uzès (Nîmes: La Cour, 1991). 2. Raymond Picard, La Carrière de Jean Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). 3. Racine, Oevres complètes, vol. 1, Théâtre-Poésie, ed. Georges Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 4. See, for one example, Jean Rohou, L’Evolution de la tragédie racinienne (Paris: sedes, 1991).

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5. See, to cite but three prominent examples, David Maskell, Racine: A Theatrical Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Richard Parish, Racine: The  Limits of Tragedy (Tübingen: pfscl, 1993); and J. Henry Phillips, Racine: Language and Theater (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1994). The reassessment of Racine’s talents as a dramatist finally put to rest the temptation, initiated by Voltaire and resuscitated in the 1920s, to view Racine as first and foremost a poet. 6. In my Jean Racine Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1999), one finds a discussion of how, in Andromache, decisions reverse the structure of the play and of the world for the characters (52 –54). 7. To appreciate Racine’s manner of reading and annotating Greek tragedy, see the microscopic study of Susanna Phillippo, Silent Witness: Racine’s Non-verbal Annotations of Euripides (Oxford: Legenda, 2003). 8. Georges Forestier, Jean Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

translator’s note

This is the first volume in a series which, when complete, will offer in English translation all twelve of Racine’s plays (eleven tragedies and one comedy), only the third such traversal since Racine’s death in 1699. This traversal, in addition, is the first to be composed in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. My aim has been to reconceive Racine in that pedigreed indigenous English verse form in order to produce a poetic translation of concentrated power and dramatic impact, and to render Racine’s French into English that is incisive, lucid, elegant, ingenious, and memorable. While I have taken particular care to ensure that my translations remain scrupulously faithful to Racine’s text and tone, I have been just as committed to creating a work of English literature. In the Translator’s Introduction I offer an extensive rationale for my approach to translating Racine, a rationale — or, rather, an apologia — necessitated by the absurd, unthinking, yet time-honored contempt for the rhymed couplet as a medium for translating Racine. I believe I have made a wise decision in modeling my translations on the productions of John Dryden and Alexander Pope, two of England’s greatest poets, rather than attempting to imitate a French paradigm that is not viable in English. The main thrust of that Introduction, however, is to urge that these translations be given a reasonable chance to prove their effectiveness in the theater, for I am firmly convinced that the dramatic potency and profound psychological truth of Racine’s plays, as transmitted through vibrant and vital English verse, and purveyed by a committed director and a courageous cast, would make for a compelling theatrical experience.

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This translation is based on the definitive 1697 edition of Racine’s theater as it appears in the 1980 Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition, edited by Raymond Picard. The 1697 texts represent Racine’s final thoughts on his twelve plays. The divergences between that edition and the earlier editions published in Racine’s lifetime are of two orders. The first involves minor, if numerous, changes. As to these, one may confidently assert that virtually all of Racine’s later changes represent improvements over the earlier versions: improvements in diction, concentration, clarity, and impact. To have offered these variants (in translation) would have been pointless and well beyond the scope of any but a French-language definitive edition. The second order of changes involves Racine’s deletions of verses that appeared in the earlier editions, deletions ranging from one or two couplets to whole speeches (and even, in one special case, discussed below, an entire scene). While again, for the most part, these excisions serve the interests of each play, the deleted passages are by no means without merit and deserve inclusion in any edition that aspires to be a reference edition for Racine’s plays in English. Not surprising for Racine’s first play, the deletions he made in Les Frères ennemis (The Fratricides) are quite extensive. The 144 lines subsequently cut from the first edition of his first play will be found in the Notes and Commentary, translated (consistently with the primary text of the play) into rhymed couplets. This is the first time these fascinating verses have appeared in English, and I believe my translations make the best possible case for them. Of Racine’s other plays, his second, Alexandre le Grand, underwent major surgery; Les Plaideurs and Bérénice also went under the knife, but those excisions were less extensive. The most interesting textual deviations occur in Andromaque and Britannicus. Racine significantly altered the last act of Andromaque (eliminating the title character’s awkward reappearance) to produce the version that is read and performed today. Although there are no major textual variants among the published versions of Britannicus, there does exist a lengthy scene between Burrhus and Narcissus (who otherwise never meet in the play), known to us only from its transcription by Racine’s son Louis in his Memoirs of the Life and Works of Jean Racine; originally intended to open Act III, it was jettisoned before the first performance on the

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advice of Racine’s friend, the eminent poet and critic Nicolas Boileau. Subsequent volumes will offer (for the first time) translations of all these deleted passages. The most recent Pléiade edition, from 1999, edited by Georges Forestier, while far surpassing its predecessor in the thoroughness, helpfulness, and insight of its critical material, presents as its primary text Racine’s earliest versions of these plays, relegating to the “Notes et variantes” his later improvements. Although I have drawn upon Forestier’s illuminating and thought-provoking commentary in writing my own Discussions and Notes, his editorial choice of presenting Racine’s first thoughts — certainly a welcome option for French students and scholars — rendered that version inappropriate as a basis for a definitive English edition. The translations of Racine’s dedication and preface are my own, as are the translations of passages from the critical commentaries in the Picard and Forestier editions that appear in the Discussions and Notes. In my own critical commentaries, when I refer to a play or a character, I use the title or name as it appears in my translations. It should be noted, however, that where any other commentators (writing in English) retain the French spellings, I have respected that preference and beg the reader to pardon the discrepancies. On several occasions, succumbing to the exigencies of squeezing a plump hexameter into a pentameter corset, I have transformed one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet. Nowhere, however, have I resorted to hexameters myself: not because I think an effective English hexameter an impossibility (Dryden’s Aeneid is rife with splendid examples), but because such a course appeared to me a slippery slope to trust my “feet” to. If one allows for vowel elisions and feminine endings, my verses are strictly pentametric. One may note that on those occasions when I have treated heaven (which appears countless times in these plays) as a monosyllable (the second syllable reduced to a terminal hum), I have, to clarify the scansion of the line, indicated my intent by spelling the word with the final vowel elided (heav’n). In converting hexameters to pentameters, one must often use all one’s ingenuity in order to pare down the syllable count. (I have, however, avoided Samuel Solomon’ s [see

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Bibliography] Procrustean expedient of lopping off the final ly from adverbs and jettisoning articles to make his lines conform to the pentameter parameter.) In this regard, I should point out that italics have proved my friend, for, by clarifying the meaning of a line, they can sometimes save the translator several extra syllables. I have preserved the scene divisions as they are given in the Pléiade edition (each new scene marking the arrival or departure of one or more characters) and have, likewise, listed the characters participating in each scene just below the scene number; which characters have arrived or departed may be inferred from those rosters. I have not elaborated on Racine’s sparse stage directions. I have, however, taken pains to supply these translations with line numbers (every fifth line being numbered, and the numbering beginning anew for each scene) for ease of reference for readers and actors and to enable me to cite passages precisely in the Discussions and Notes. These line numbers do not conform to those of any French edition, the Picard, for example, providing no line numbers at all and the Forestier using unbroken numbering from beginning to end; besides, as mentioned above, I have sometimes expanded one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet (or even, more rarely, into two couplets), a procedure that would vitiate any line-for-line correspondence. The Discussions prefacing each play are intended as much to promote discussion as to provide it; likewise, the Notes and Commentaries: for in addition to clarifying obscure references and explicating the occasional gnarled conceit, they offer, I hope, some fresh and thought-provoking insights, such as are occasionally vouchsafed the sedulous translator who, in pursuit of an ideal English equivalent for a particularly challenging passage, often finds him- or herself obliged to read over the same passage more often than even the most assiduous scholar or critic. But whatever merit the ancillary critical material possesses, I believe that the enduring value of these volumes will reside in the excellence of the translations. New approaches to studying Racine will undoubtedly be discovered and developed, opponent schools of thought will continue to clash,

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arguments may be challenged or overturned, but I am hopeful that the value of these translations will prove irrefutable. My very warm thanks are due to Professor Ronald  W. Tobin, our preeminent Racine critic and scholar, for the interest he has taken in this project and the almost avuncular encouragement he has offered. Having thought highly enough of my work to have brought it to the attention of the Pennsylvania State University Press, he has now bestowed on it a most gratifying imprimatur in the form of the eloquent and timely Foreword he has graciously provided for this edition. I am very happy to have this opportunity to express my gratitude to my lifelong friend Jerrold Levinson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, who has been so generous with his advice and his time. I would also like to thank my cyber-savvy friends Mioara Canciu and Adrian Ciuperca at Pro Data Inc. for their invaluable assistance. My greatest debt, however, is to Leslie Eric Comens, since it is exclusively to his critical acumen (an acumen that can sometimes be quite blunt) that I have entrusted these translations for ongoing review and feedback. Since the day, about ten years ago, when I first tried my hand at translating Racine, he has been as unflagging in his encouragement of my work as he has been relentless in pointing out its imperfections. But that keen-eyed scrutiny, however irritating at times, has not only served to reduce their number significantly, but has even on occasion functioned like the grain of sand that provokes the oyster to produce its nacreous nugget. In fine, I do no more than justice to the tirelessness of his exertions when I assert that if these translations are pored over as many times in the next ten years by the public at large as they have been in the past ten by him, they shall have a sizable readership indeed.

translator’s introduction: taking up the gauntlet

i Poor Racine! Martin Turnell begins his Jean Racine: Dramatist by quoting François Mauriac: “Of all our authors, Racine is one of the least accessible to the peoples of other countries” (Turnell, 3). Robert Lowell’s preface to his translation of Phèdre opens with this disheartening pronouncement: “Racine’s plays are generally and correctly thought to be untranslatable” (Lowell, 7). Patrick J. Smith, in a New York Times article of January 3, 1999, occasioned by the imminent importation of the Almeida Theater Company’s productions of Phaedra and Britannicus, accurately reports that “it has long been an axiom of Racinian criticism that his works are untenable in translation.” So pervasive is this view, and so often is it resorted to by translators as a preemptive apology, as it were, for the inevitable inadequacy of their versions, that they seem to be offering up not so much the tragedies of Racine as the tragedy of Racine. Strange, if not shocking, to say, I have not found Racine to be untranslatable. Perhaps this is because I have made use of a readyto-hand verse form that, for reasons explained below, is ideally designed to translate Racine’s poetic and dramatic style into English, namely, the “heroic couplet” (or “English couplet,” as I prefer to call it). My decision to translate Racine into rhymed, end-stopped iambic pentameter couplets was prompted by several considerations. Let me introduce the first by quoting from C. H. Sisson’s

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introduction to his Racine translations. He begins, of course, with the usual despondent disclaimer: Nothing can adequately represent in English the movement of the French alexandrine, the rhymed couplets which are the classic French form, and the form used by Racine. To offer as an equivalent some crude version of English heroic couplets — in pentameters — as more than one modern translator has done, is frankly absurd. Even the classic couplets of the real performers in this field, of Dryden or of Pope, would not entirely fill the bill, though they would of course have been the best available form for those two poets, had either attempted a version. A poet-translator has always to start from the forms of his own time, as he has to start from his own language. (Sisson, xvi) In my own case, I chose to use the English couplet as inevitably as Dryden and Pope would have, “had either attempted a version.” Based on my reading and my tastes, I find it as natural to write poetry in rhymed couplets as M.  Jourdain found it to make use of prose when he opened his mouth to speak. The high Augustan poetic style, so decried by A.  E.  Housman and others (see Section  IX below), is the one in which I have most deeply steeped myself. So I believe I can say I have followed Sisson’s prescription and have started from the forms of my own time. But the beautiful ease with which, in translating thousands of them, I found Racine’s alexandrines slip into their English counterparts I attribute not so much to my own poetic predilections as to a natural compatibility between the two verse forms. I never had to strong-arm the alexandrines into English couplets; they always seemed to go willingly. They were more than compatible: they were companionable. For the most part, I had no trouble in maintaining a couplet-forcouplet correspondence with the original; indeed, it was easier to remain faithful to the French than to depart from it. A second consideration recommending the English couplet was its being a verse form that, like the French alexandrine, represents a high point in its language’s poetic development, “a medium,”

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according to Maynard Mack in his introduction to the Yale edition of Pope’s Iliad, “vitally expressive of the poetic sensibility of the age, and the one in which most of the age’s best original poetry had been or would be written” (Pope, VII, xliii). The English couplet is truly a verse form with a noble heritage, a verse form whose compressed power and flexibility have been exploited to produce some of the greatest works of English poetry. Certainly, Pope’s translation of the Iliad (generally held to be its finest) proves the English couplet capable of rendering into verse “the grandeur of the conception, the perfect structure, the irony, the sheer excitement of the action . . . [and] the extraordinary psychological penetration” of Homer’s epic, the very qualities Kenneth Muir finds in the plays of Racine (Muir, vii). Let me offer, apropos of the preeminence of the English couplet in the late seventeenth century, the following quotation, which appeared in the New York Times obituary (September 13, 2002) of Rolf Fjelde, the great translator of the plays of Ibsen: “In an essay, Mr. Fjelde quoted Ibsen on the art of translation: ‘I believe that a translator should employ the style which the original author would have used if he had written in the language of those who are to read him in translation.’ ” Granted, it is not easy to imagine Racine as an Englishman, and still less easy, perhaps, to think of Pope writing Racine’s plays, but had Racine been English, he might very well have found the English couplet, in such wide use at the time he wrote, most congenial to his dramatic disposition.

ii Before proceeding with my discussion of the aptness of the English couplet for translating Racine, I would like to address the arguments of those commentators who, contrariwise, are ever at pains to urge its inaptness. (Indeed, I have seldom encountered one who has not been at such pains.) Derek Attridge, in his stimulating article “Dryden’s Dilemma, or, Racine Refashioned: The Problem of the English Dramatic Couplet,” comes to the conclusion that “the failure of the English dramatic couplet” as a vehicle for drama is

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a case of “the extinction in the evolutionary struggle of a species unfitted for its environment” (Attridge, 76 –77). The  conclusion I arrive at, based on the same historical survey Attridge adduces, is that its failure results more from the lack of any dramatists of Racine’s stature who could have overcome the limitations (to admit such arguendo) of the verse form and forged it into a viable vehicle for their dramatic genius, than from any insuperable liabilities inherent in the form itself. Attridge concedes that even Dryden, great poet that he was, was unable to compensate for the weakness of his dramatic gift by the strength of his verse. Although he tries to argue for the supremacy of blank verse as a vehicle for tragic drama by citing Dryden’s growing dissatisfaction with the rhymed couplet and his eventual “conversion” to blank verse, I would counter by asking whether Dryden’s blank verse dramas have proved any more resilient than his dramas written in English couplets. Indeed, aside from the plays of Shakespeare (surely to be considered sui generis) and a select few by Marlowe and Webster, are there any English dramas in blank verse that enjoy a significantly greater currency than Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe, his last rhymed tragedy? Yet Racine’s plays have held the stage in France since the seventeenth century. Attridge finds that Dryden, in Aureng-Zebe, “comes nowhere near achieving Racine’s dramatic power,” but, though he cites rhyme as contributing to that failure, there is no reason to believe that Dryden’s use of rhyme has any bearing on his also finding that “where Phèdre in the face of death involuntarily gives voice to her thoughts, Aureng-Zebe makes a touching speech” or that “in the play as a whole there are still too many pretty speeches, too many dilemmas, debates, resolves, and renunciations, to create anything like the rising wave of intensity that gives Phèdre its remarkable cohesion” (Attridge, 71–72). These strictures speak rather to Dryden’s shortcomings as a dramatist than to the shortcomings of the English couplet. Dryden may not have been able to write a great play in either heroic or blank verse, but may we not believe that an English Racine might well have done so? And, to pose a correlative question, had not France been blessed with the genius of Corneille and Racine, where would the classic French theater be? Languishing, one may be sure, in the same oblivion that has

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swallowed up the contemporaneous English plays written in heroic couplets and blank verse. It is necessary, too, to point out here, in reference to Attridge’s assertion that the English couplet’s “unsuitability as a dramatic vehicle is a widely accepted fact” (Attridge, 56), that such an assertion is based on remarkably little empirical evidence: how often have contemporary audiences been given the opportunity to assess its suitability or unsuitability? Nor is there evidence of any greater probative value to support the view that the English couplet is an invalid mode for translating Racine’s plays. There are far too few occasions of its having been attempted for us to reach any confident conclusions. At the present time, since one can neither point to an English dramatist, of a genius comparable to Racine’s, whose plays, written in rhymed couplets, have failed to hold the stage, nor adduce many — or, rather, any — examples of performances of foreign-language plays (by Racine or whomever), whose failure can be attributed to their having been given in a translation using English couplets, how can one pronounce with certainty on “their unsuitability as a dramatic vehicle”?

iii Most prior translators of Racine have recoiled from rhyme, and all have avoided the more or less strictly end-stopped couplet (even though both are features of Racine’s poetry), believing that they create a different effect in English. Granted, a different effect, but a no less powerful one. Richard Wilbur writes, in the introduction to his (rhymed) translation of Andromaque: “There are good reasons for not trying to duplicate in our tongue the rhymed couplets of the French tragedy. For one thing, our audiences are better prepared to accept rhymed verse in comedy than in drama” (Wilbur, Andromache, xi). I do not presume to challenge that assertion, but it should be borne in mind that it is not tantamount to saying that audiences are not prepared to accept rhymed verse in drama. While there may be some rhymed translations of Racine that, by the extravagance of their style or the ineptness of their diction, might provoke a snicker

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or a chuckle every so often, there is nothing in the average Augustan rhymed couplet, even given the additional provocation of its being end-stopped, that would prompt an audience to so much as smile. I have never found Pope’s Iliad particularly mirth inducing, nor do I think it likely that my translations of Racine’s plays will invite any inappropriate hilarity. Let us also not forget that, if it be true that “our audiences are better prepared to accept rhymed verse in comedy than in drama,” this was not always the case. At the only time in the history of the English stage when plays written in rhymed couplets did enjoy a reasonable currency, namely, around the time Racine wrote — at no great remove from us in the matter of the development of the English tongue — rhymed verse was deemed inappropriate for comedy: the nobler, loftier tone it was judged to impart made it suitable, if not essential, for serious drama only (hence its designation as “heroic”). Attridge’s sweeping assertion that “the artificiality [that the English couplet] creates is, in fact, comic” (Attridge, 66) is itself difficult to take seriously. I do not recall its ever having been established that artificiality per se suggests the comic. Is the Spenserian stanza comic? Is the Shakespearian sonnet? Certainly, we need not adduce examples to prove that rhyme is not inherently comic. And if we do not construe rhyme as a signifier of the comic, why single out the English couplet to be thus stigmatized? Attridge himself admits, in discussing one of Phèdre’s speeches, that its “opposed connotations produce a bitter irony more commonly encountered in English couplets” (Attridge, 67). I think we may allow that bitter irony is something far removed from comic buoyancy. Attridge further admits that Aureng-Zebe contains “austere phrasing and unwitty antitheses” (Attridge, 71). Certainly, my intention has been, even in my most epigrammatic lines, to produce, not bons mots, but just such “austere phrasing and unwitty antitheses” as Attridge finds in Dryden. Racine’s plays may occasionally feature such sardonic sallies as Orestes’ riposte, “I scorn your charms? Ah! wouldn’t they like to be / Scorned by my rival as they’re scorned by me!” (Andromache  II.ii.84 – 85)  and Nero’s grim play on words, “I’ll clasp my rival, yes — until he’s crushed” (Britannicus IV.iii.10), but these are

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“witticisms” of a very caustic kind, born of jealousy and hate and meant to wound or intimidate, and there is no reason to believe they would create a comic effect in English, any more than they do in French. In discussing Titus and Berenice, Thomas Otway’s contemporaneous take on Racine’s Bérénice, Attridge makes this qualified concession: “Set-pieces . . . lend themselves to couplets, but the rapid exchange of dialogue is . . . another matter” (Attridge, 72). But surely Racine’s plays are composed mostly of such set pieces, the “rapid exchange of dialogue” accounting for far fewer lines of verse. And if, as I illustrate below, such rapid dialogue is particularly well rendered by the English couplet, then it would appear that the English couplet is ideally suited as a vehicle for translating Racine — indeed (to adopt a phrase from my Britannicus translation), “by all measure . . . the worthiest treasure chest for such a treasure” (Britannicus II.iii.54, 56).

iv Playing the devil’s advocate, Wilbur puts forward another argument against the use of rhyme, namely, “that rhyme is less emphatic in French than in the strongly stressed English tongue” (Wilbur, Andromache, xi). Rather than being embarrassed by the greater potency of rhyme in the English couplet, I have tried to exploit its rich possibilities, far richer in English than in French, for while it is much easier to rhyme in French, where so many words, though spelled differently, are pronounced the same (and whose rules governing acceptable rhymes are less stringent than ours), in English, where even more words are spelled the same but pronounced differently, rhyming may be more challenging, but it yields results more rewarding, more memorable, in their potency, piquancy, and sheer variety. Furthermore, as Proust observes, “the tyranny of rhyme forces good poets into the discovery of their best lines,” and nothing in my experience prompts me to challenge that observation. Nor have I shied away from alliteration (which is nothing more than “initial rhyme,” the duplication of sound occurring at

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the beginning, rather than at the end, of words). Of course, there being relatively little descriptive poetry in Racine’s plays, alliteration and assonance are not frequently called into play to mimic or suggest the thing described. There are certain occasions, however, where I have been able to use alliteration to intensify a dramatic moment. Here is an excerpt from Clytemnestra’s scorching tirade, the last of three great consecutive ones (the first two being Iphigenia’s and Agamemnon’s) in Act IV of Iphigenia: Shall this cruel priest, urged by a crueler crowd, Lay criminal hands on her and be allowed To rend her breast and, by his probing art, Consult the heav’ns in her still-heaving heart? (Iphigenia IV.136 –39) The conspicuous cr cluster, repeated four times in the first two lines, is amply suggestive of the remorseless rending that Clytemnestra goes on to imagine in the third line, and the reiterated initial h’s on the last four stressed syllables in the last line evoke, almost too audibly, her dying daughter’s last convulsive gasps. One more example, Orestes’ cautionary words to Pyrrhus in Act I of Andromache, should suffice: “And mistrust lest the serpent in your breast / Should sting the host who’s given it its nest” (Andromache I.ii.26 – 27). Here, seven st clusters and assorted other sibilants and dentals evoke the hissing and the venomous bite of the serpent, while lending Orestes’ words a minatory quality. Wilbur’s decision to employ rhymed couplets in his own Racine translations represents a clear endorsement of their viability, but few other commentators addressing the issue of Racine in translation fail to condemn the “persistent chime that rapidly tires the ear” (Attridge, 73) as a disqualifying liability of the use of English couplets. I contest that judgment on several grounds. First, I have never heard anyone complain, when reading Dryden and Pope on the printed page, that “the persistent chime rapidly tires the ear.” True, the fleshly ear hears nothing when one is reading, but the “mind’s ear” certainly does: rhyme “sounds” when we are reading it, as do the rhythm, harmony, and color of poetry — its music, in

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short — or what would be their purpose? (And, as I insist in Section XIII below, Racine’s plays, whether in the original or in translation, deserve to be read as well as recited; moreover, they are read, and many more times than they are performed.) And if Attridge’s assertion is meant to apply only to a spoken text, then, again, is it a widely held notion that a spoken performance of one of Dryden’s or Pope’s longer poems would be some form of auricular torture? For my part, I can only say that in the course of my extensive reading and rereading (both to myself and aloud) of Dryden’s and Pope’s poetry, I never once tired of their enthralling couplets or surfeited from an overindulgence in their rhymes; Pope’s Iliad and Dryden’s Aeneid, I find, manage to avoid the intermittent tediousness that afflicts most other versions. Second, there is another aspect of the rhymed couplet that prevents a long succession of them from taking on a singsong quality, namely, the surprising flexibility of the rhythm of the iambic pentameter line. Although, as Wilbur notes, the stresses are more regular, more pronounced, generally speaking, in the English couplet than in the alexandrine, the subtle variances in stress, in pitch, and in phrasing — the shifting aggregations of syllables within the line — ensure that, if one were to examine a succession of, say, one hundred rhymed iambic pentameter lines, hardly two of them would display an identical “musical” profile. Third, I would argue that the very regularity of the succession of rhymed couplets quickly enables the ear to ignore “the persistent chime” and frees the mind to concentrate on the thoughts and emotions being conveyed by the words, especially in the case of Racine’s plays, whose through line is so taut and strong. Samuel Solomon, translator of Racine’s Complete Plays, the only such intégrale undertaken in the past century, opted to compose his translations in a combination of rhymed and unrhymed couplets. Whether one considers such an approach arbitrary and absurd, or believes, as Attridge does, that in his version “rhyme is used for particular effects” (Attridge, 74), I think that such an inconsistent use of rhyme is more likely to call attention to itself than a strict adherence to rhyme. In support of such a strict adherence, Wilbur comes down in the end on the side of the angels: discussing the characters’ speaking “within the artifice of

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rhyming verse,” he advises that “all this is so remote from our contemporary stage that ‘adaptation’ could not possibly bring it near. Our best hope, I think, is to see whether maximum fidelity, in text and in performance, might not adapt us to it” (Wilbur, Andromache, xiii). For my part, I have striven for just this “maximum fidelity” in my translations with that same hope in mind.

v Such adaptation on our part may be facilitated by that strong dramatic through line I mentioned above. Roland Barthes, in “Racine Spoken,” the second part of his On Racine (trans. R.  Howard), elaborates on this through line, observing that “tragic discourse proceeds in great, motionless blocks, stages,” and that “a tirade, for example, exists semantically by only three or four capital articulations” (Barthes, 147). Speaking of the delivery of one actor (Alain Cuny as Thésée) who did not try to “ ‘bring out’ the words, the inflections, the accents,” or “intervene in his own discourse except to manifest its major changes clearly,” Barthes found the result to be that “the Racinian discourse becomes at last fully intelligible, the obscurities of the language, the syntactical distortions imposed by the metric vanish under the massive proportions of the intentions” (Barthes, 147–48). The language of my translations being no more obscure, and their syntax being no more distorted, than Racine’s, I believe the Racinian discourse as rendered in my versions will likewise prove fully intelligible on stage. Concentrating on the message, the audience will ignore the medium. What argues even more forcefully for the viability of the English couplet in the theater, what suggests that its very “artificiality,” if you will, may be no inhibitor, but rather a facilitator, of the dramatic through line is the concept of the English couplet’s existing (as the alexandrine exists) as a precomposed “music,” which “notates” the drama and which need only be “played back” to ensure the undistorted transmission of its message. Barthes puts it this way:

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Classical art is musical; but responsibility for the music is assumed by a perfectly defined technique: the alexandrine. The classical alexandrine openly exploits all the music of the language [as I hope my English couplets exploit all the music of our language], and it is an indiscretion . . . to add to it a secret music proceeding from the actor and not from the “scientific” données of the verse. It is because the alexandrine is defined technically as a musical function that there is no need to speak it musically; it does not invite the actor to be musical, on the contrary it relieves him of the responsibility of being so. . . . The alexandrine is obviously a “distancing” technique, in other words a deliberate separation of the signifier and the thing signified. By what seems to me a real misconception, our actors continually try to reduce this distance, and to make the alexandrine into a natural language, either by making it prosaic or, conversely, by making it musical. But the truth of the alexandrine is neither to destroy nor to purify itself: it is in its distance. (Barthes, 144 –45) The misguided attempt to make Racine sound “natural,” to colloquialize his dialogue, as if his plays were contemporary melodramas, is to succumb to what Barthes dubbed “the myth of Racine,” which “seeks to domesticate Racine, to strip him of his tragic elements, to identify him with ourselves, to locate ourselves with him in the noble salon of classic art, but en famille; it seeks to give the themes of the bourgeois theatre an eternal status, to transfer to the credit of the psychological theatre the greatness of the tragic theatre” (Barthes, 149). Insofar as it may serve as a “distancing technique,” the English couplet may be the very thing needed to restore to Racine “the greatness of the tragic theatre.” To stage Racine today, Barthes proposes, “one must do so seriously, one must go all the way,” one must “renounce looking for ourselves in this theatre: what we find of ourselves there is not the best part, either of Racine or of ourselves. As with the ancient theatre, Racine’s theatre concerns us much more, and much more valuably, by its strangeness than by its familiarity: its relation to us is its remoteness. If we

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want to keep Racine, we must keep him at a distance” (Barthes, 149). Perhaps the “strangeness” of the English couplet will serve to vindicate Barthes’ conception of Racinian drama, and perhaps his conception may serve to validate the use of the English couplet as a viable mode for that drama. But (to take the opposite tack), lest it be thought that the English couplet’s “strangeness” and its affinity for “distancing” are incompatible with an ability to permit a more immediate response to the fervor of the encounters between Racine’s protagonists, I would mention that, reading Racine’s lines in my translations, I have no difficulty responding powerfully to the emotions they express, whether it be Hermione’s jealous desperation, Pyrrhus’s amorous frustration, Clytemnestra’s anguished concern for her daughter, Jocasta’s for her sons, or even Orestes’ final plunge into madness. I think an audience might very well find itself responding with no less immediacy.

vi Having tried to anticipate and refute the usual arguments that are raised against the use of the English couplet in drama, I will resume my analysis of what makes the English couplet eminently suitable for translating Racine. Discussing “other advantages” of the English couplet, Mack mentions its “range”: “In the right hands . . . it could include . . . extreme vehemence, extreme tenderness, and all stages between. It was capable also of speed [italics mine]” (Pope, IX, lxiii). The  “speed” of the English couplet contributes to its being an ideal vehicle to convey the full force of Racine’s tragedies, the essence of which, in Turnell’s words, “is their intense concentration of emotional states. For this [Racine] relies on simplicity of action, tightness of structure . . . and above all the speed [italics Turnell’s] with which the drama unfolds, the couples come and go, which explains why Racine . . . is always performed without an interval, as he should be” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 23). Racine’s range and speed are well exemplified by the scene (Andromache  II.i) in which Hermione, as Wilbur observes in the introduction to his

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translation, “can credibly pass in some thirty lines through six shifts of attitude toward Pyrrhus” (Wilbur, Andromache, xiv). The English couplet’s “range” that Mack mentions is also treated by Turnell in his discussion of the importance of Racine’s exploitation of “tone,” to mark whose changes Racine first establishes a “palace style” (a term Turnell acknowledges borrowing from Valbuena Prat): “It is simple, measured, dignified. . . . It provides a background which throws into relief the contrast between the formal meetings and those scenes in which disappointed lovers and angry rivals let their hair well and truly down. . . . It is not only what people say that counts; it is the tone in which it is said” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 9). The English couplet, by its concision, incisiveness, and clarity, is a very effective transmitter of tone. Andromache provides examples of two extremes. In the first example, Orestes, the Greeks’ ambassador, has been granted an audience with Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus; although they observe a polite, formal, even chivalrous decorum, their carefully calculated choice of words hints at their underlying hostility, and Pyrrhus’s reply is subtly sneering: orestes Before the Greeks address you through my voice, Let me confess I’m flattered by their choice; And here before you I betray my joy To see Achilles’ son, the scourge of Troy. For, like his exploits, we admire your own: He vanquished Hector; Troy, through you, lies prone. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . pyrrhus On my behalf Greece shows too much concern; Of weightier cares I thought I was to learn, And given an ambassador so grand, Supposed a grander project had been planned. Who’d think that such an enterprise would need Great Agamemnon’s son to intercede? (Andromache I.ii.1– 6, 32 –37)

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This slightly stiff “palace style” poses no challenge for the English couplet. In the second example, Hermione, in her only confrontation with Pyrrhus, “lets her hair well and truly down,” even sinking (in the French) to the familiar form of address (signaling her abject state), and her mordant remarks to Pyrrhus, exhibiting the sarcasm that Racine was so adept at conjuring, are also very well served by the epigrammatic bite of the English couplet: In this avowal, of artifice quite free, I’m pleased you judge yourself impartially; That, wishing to revoke our solemn ties, Your crime you make no effort to disguise. Why, after all, should conquerors be cowed By servile laws to honor what they’ve vowed? No, perfidy appeals to you; admit: You’ve come to see me just to boast of it. The Trojan’s lover, whom no vows constrain, Nor duty either, woos the Greek again? .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . You answer nothing? Faithless one! I see You count the moments that you lose with me! Your heart, which longs to see your Trojan bride, Can scarcely bear to linger at my side. You seek her with your eyes, speak with your heart. I won’t detain you, save yourself. Depart. (Andromache IV.v.35 –44, 102 –7) But the English couplet can also capture the tenderly musing, almost halting tones of Agamemnon as he thinks about his doomed daughter: My child . . . It’s not that sacred name alone, Nor yet her youth, nor my blood, I bemoan; No, it’s her virtue, and the love we share, Her sweet devotion and my tender care, Respect for me that nothing can abate, And which I’d hoped to better compensate. (Iphigenia I.i.116 –21)

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Later, in Eriphyle’s cunning, disingenuous reply to Iphigenia’s accusations of betrayal, the English couplet closely tracks the shifting tones of her haughtiness, condescension, flattery, and false modesty: These unjust names are jarring to my ear; They’re not, madame, what I’ve been taught to hear. Even the Gods, for long my enemies, Have kindly spared my ears such calumnies. But, though unjust, we pardon those in love. And what was it I should have warned you of ? How could you think Achilles would prefer To Agamemnon’s child a commoner, Who knows no more than this of her sad fate: Hers is a race he burns to extirpate? (Iphigenia II.v.45 –54) And in the blistering confrontation between Nero and the title character in Act III of Britannicus, featuring one of the most potent deployments of stichomythia in all of Racine, the stinging quality of their exchanges, dripping with sarcasm and as sharp as any poison-tipped épée, is perfectly captured by the thrust and parry of the rhymed couplets: nero Thus destiny has crossed our paths today: Once I had to obey, now you obey. If you’ve not learned to act, sir, as you ought, You’re young yet: we can take care that you’re taught. britannicus Who’ll teach me, then? nero            Rome — nay, the Empire, too. britannicus And ’mongst your rights has Rome accorded you Those of injustice, cruelty, and force,

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Imprisonment, abduction, and divorce? nero Rome shows me her respect: she never pries Into the secrets I hide from her eyes. Imitate her respect, if you are wise. britannicus One knows just what Rome thinks, at any rate. nero She holds her tongue. Her silence imitate. britannicus Nero begins to lose control, I see. nero Nero begins to suffer from ennui. britannicus All men shall bless his happy reign, that’s clear. nero Happy or sad, let it suffice they fear. britannicus I’ve misjudged Junia if such views should raise A smile of pleasure or a word of praise. nero At least, if I can’t please the heart I prize, A reckless rival I can still chastise. (Britannicus III.viii.17–37) None of the unrhymed versions of Britannicus that I have read manages to capture the excitement of this verbal swordplay. I am reminded of a line from Sheridan’s The  School for Scandal: “The malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick.” Here, it

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seems to be the rhyme at the end of the line that makes the sword prick; removing the rhyme is like bating the tip of the sword. On the other hand, one recent (loosely) rhymed version, composed in “alexandrines” of indeterminable length, is too flaccid, too dull, too unwieldy, to inflict an injury, while Solomon’s spasmodically rhymed version features couplets such as the following: “I know ill Junia if you think such views / Will win her smiles and make her Nero choose” (Solomon, I, 342) — an example that goes to prove that rhyme, in and of itself, is no guarantor of acuity. In general, though, the English couplet permits — indeed, encourages — the cultivation of the varied tones, lofty or sarcastic, tender or passionate, that are required to do justice to Racine’s volatile characters. In addition to its speed and range, the English couplet boasts compactness. In the course of translating and compressing thousands of Racine’s hexameters into pentameters, I never ceased to marvel at what a world of thought and emotion one can pack into “the beautiful and blest” (to borrow a phrase from Henry James) iambic pentameter couplet, never ceased to be grateful for its strength, suppleness, and resilience: however heavily one imposes on it, whatever weight of words one asks it to bear, whatever irregularities of shape and stress one requires it to accommodate, it springs back, as taut and tight and trim as ever. When it is functioning at optimal efficiency, one is sometimes tempted to tally up the syllables, so hard is it to believe that so much has been squeezed into two little five-footed lines. When the English couplet is put to the service of translating Racine’s plays, its compactness contributes to that concentration of the drama Turnell speaks of, in the same way that, in Racine’s plays themselves, “the form does not have the effect of damping down the emotional content: it merely concentrates it,” as Muir observes (Muir, xxviii). Lytton Strachey speaks of Racine’s style as being “compact as dynamite” (Strachey, 16). The English couplet can be just as explosive.

vii Another virtue of the English couplet, I found, was that it allowed me to reproduce certain salient characteristics of the original, such as its

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classic poise, its epigrammatic quality, and its sheer “punch,” which are lost in unrhymed or non-end-stopped versions. Furthermore, the English couplet restores to Racine’s plays an element that almost all previous translations have robbed them of, namely, the formal rigor — so characteristic of the English couplet — that is essential to the Racinian ethos. Wilbur, elaborating on this point, validates my own view: “There are good and compelling reasons for taking the risk of rhyming. . . . But the best justification I have found lies in a remark of Martin Turnell’s. The originality of Racine’s drama, he says, consists ‘in the contrast between extreme violence and the tightness of the form, between the primitive passions simmering just below the surface of civilized society and the versification which reflects the outer shape of that society.’ The form is part of the meaning, then” (Wilbur, Andromache, xi–xii). Turnell also observes about the alexandrine — and these observations, too, are equally applicable to the English couplet — that its formalism “is a positive advantage. In the first place it possesses what must be described as a moral value. It creates in a subtle way a standard by which the actions of the characters are seen in perspective and judged” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 336). This characteristically Racinian tension between the constraining form and the tumultuous content (which in turn reflects the struggle between a restrictive society and the rebellious individual, between judgmental morality and libidinous will, between the rational and the irrational, the logical and the psychological, and so forth) is impossible to re-create when there is no constraining form to “fight back.” Racine’s characters need to be kept confined within their couplets, as they are in the French, like so many caged tigers, pacing back and forth, snarling and roaring — or heaving themselves against the bars.

viii Wilbur, in the introduction to his translation of Phèdre, writes: “Where I have used slightly more enjambment than Racine, it is mostly because English meters are more emphatic and less flowing than the French; too long a sequence of end-stopped English lines, especially if rhymed, can sound like the stacking of planks

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in a lumberyard” (Wilbur, Phaedra, vi). While one cannot fail to savor his marvelous simile, my guiding principle has been that if one is translating into an English verse form, then one should try to remain as faithful to that form as possible; exploit its strengths, rather than try to hide its weaknesses; allow it to do what it can do so well, rather than try to bring it into closer conformity with an alien verse form. If “English meters are more emphatic and less flowing than the French,” then allow them to be so. And, after all, as Lowell says of Racine’s verse: “His syllabic alexandrines do not and cannot exist in English” (Lowell, 7). As to Wilbur’s metaphor, I think we may see it in a less devastating light: his image of stacking planks proves an apt one for the construction of Racine’s tirades, for the careful building up, couplet by couplet, of those towering edifices, that is to say, of their inexorable rhetorical force. Racine’s characters, typically placed in situations that produce emotional turmoil, are often pulled in opposing directions, often forced to balancer, to weigh their options. According to Barthes, “Division is the fundamental structure of the tragic universe. . . . Racinian man does not debate between Good and Evil: he debates, that is all; his problem is on the level of structure, not of character” (Barthes, 36). Racine’s protagonists are masters of ratiocination, adept at convincing themselves or others, as the case may be, of whatever seems expedient to them at the time. However intense their emotional state, they still find it necessary to rationalize their actions. Their mode of speech is frequently forensic; they are continually trying to persuade their interlocutors. In Andromache, for example, after Hermione has spent an entire lengthy scene (IV. iii) convincing Orestes to assassinate Pyrrhus, she is able, in Act V, though moved to frenzied fury after learning that the assassination has been successfully carried out, to produce, with the utmost fluency, a barrage of arguments to prove to Orestes that he had no warrant to kill Pyrrhus. She comes down on him — no, not like a ton of bricks, but shall we say? — like a stack of planks: hermione Who bid you arbitrate his destiny? Why kill him? For what crime? By whose decree?

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orestes Gods! did you not, madame, just now, right here, Order his death? Your words were all too clear. hermione Why have believed a mad, insensate lover? My underlying thoughts couldn’t you discover? And didn’t you see that I was so unstrung, With every word my heart belied my tongue? Though I implored, who forced you to consent? Ten times you should have begged me to relent. You should have asked for one more audience Before you struck, or, better, have gone hence. Why not have left my vengeance to my care? What led you to pursue me everywhere? Now see your hateful love’s more hateful fruit: The ill luck that dogged you has me in pursuit! How fatal to us proved your embassy, Which goaded him to wed Andromache. He would have shared his favors ’twixt us two, And loved me — or at least pretended to. (Andromache V.iii.49 – 68) Even the stormiest tirades are built from blocks of argument, however explosive the underlying emotions that threaten to blow them up. Maynard Mack draws attention to “the [English] couplet’s natural bias for debate, assessment, organized eloquence, and persuasion” (Pope, VII, xliii). The rhymed couplet, moreover, has its own inner logic; it is a “valid argument”: the first line sets up the “premise” (the sound pattern to be echoed), the second presents the “conclusion,” inexorably dictated by the first. This conjunction of rhyme and reason in the English couplet confirms its aptness as a vehicle for Racinian discourse, and for several reasons. First, it adds to the impression, mentioned above, of the logical discourse being inexorably built up, layer by layer, to form the larger blocks of Racine’s monumental tirades, producing a “structural momentum” (the product of mass and velocity), at once accretion and

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articulation, that intensifies the irresistible power and propulsive drive of those tirades, while enhancing their self-conscious theatricality. Second, it heightens the tension between the rational and the irrational in Racine’s plays. In this regard, what makes Racine’s plays so unsettling is suggested by Narcissus’s line in Britannicus: “Seldom, my lord, does reason rule a lover” (Britannicus II.ii.58). Most of the time, the forensic skills of Racine’s characters are put to use in effectuating their irrational desires, so that it is more often the lover (or the tyrant) who rules reason than the other way around. And last, while this supremely “reasonable,” balanced verse form reflects eighteenth-century England’s view of the world as benignly ordered, it can still — indeed, for that very reason — serve, as do Racine’s alexandrines, to mock a world in which, as Turnell puts it, “there are no grounds for an optimistic view of life on earth” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 355).

ix There is one further affinity I would like to call attention to (a rather peculiar one) between Racine’s verse and the verse that has served as a model and an inspiration for my own (I mean, of course, the poetry of Dryden and Pope); one might term it a “pejorative affinity.” It is what some critics have seen as the very absence of “true poetry” in both. Turnell cites several French critics’ devastating assessments of Racine the poet. He tells us that Henry de Montherlant, totting up the fragments of poetry to be found in Racine, “put the aggregate at twenty-seven lines for the twelve plays” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 3), and that Jean Dutourd weighed in with this pronouncement: “Those alexandrines of Racine’s are quite absurd: they are 99 per cent rhetoric and 1 per cent poetry” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 4). Derogating the Dryden-Pope school of poetry no less high-handedly, A.  E.  Housman, in his delightfully provocative The Name and Nature of Poetry, comments: “There is such a thing as sham poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a substitute. In English the great historical example is certain verse produced . . . in what for literary purposes is loosely called

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the eighteenth century” (Housman, 175). Montherlant’s metaphor to describe the paucity of poetry in Racine was the lobster, from whose shell, “if you scrape and prod long enough and hard enough, you may get a few tasty morsels” (Turnell, Jean Racine, 3). Housman avails himself of an even less seemly image to make his point, namely, the garbage dump: “Thinly scattered on that huge dross-heap, the Caroline Parnassus, there were tiny gems of purer ray; and the most genuine of Dryden’s own poetry is to be found, never more than four lines at once, seldom more than two, in his early, unshapely, and wearisome poem the Annus Mirabilis” (Housman, 182). And poor Pope, he finds, “has less of the poetic gift than Dryden; in common with his contemporaries he drew from a poorer vocabulary” (Housman, 183). Putting aside the telling reference to the limited vocabulary, an attribute of Racine’s output widely remarked upon in discussions of his work, I believe (while not in any way endorsing the view that Racine and Pope were no poets) that such strictures speak to some fundamental attribute shared by the poetry Racine and the Augustan poets produced.

x In attempting to do justice to Racine through my translations, I have been guided by two principles. First, translating all twelve of Racine’s plays carries with it a special responsibility to be faithful to the originals, to omit and to add as little as possible, since these volumes are likely to serve as reference works and to offer the only viable translations into English of the more obscure plays. With that in mind, I have strived to achieve a couplet-for-couplet correspondence with the original, allowing as few distortions, omissions, and divergences as possible, and have been particularly careful to avoid embellishing Racine’s lines with original, intrusive images or conceits. Occasionally, when Racine has ingeniously compressed an unusually large amount of information into a couplet, I have been constrained to resort to Pope’s expedient of the tercet (which one encounters regularly in his translations of Homer), to ensure that none of Racine’s “data” is lost. In addition to remaining as

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faithful as possible to the textual content, I have tried to preserve and to clarify Racine’s characteristic balances and antinomies and, most important, to convey, in all its variety and subtlety, the wideranging emotional tone of his characters’ utterances. Second — and this is where I significantly differ, at least in intent, from many of my predecessors — I do not subscribe to the assumption that Attridge, for one, makes, that there must be something that “the translator is trying to imitate” (Attridge, 66). My goal has been, not to produce a translation that sounds like bad Racine, but to produce one that sounds like good English. Racine, for the English-speaking reader, can be assimilated only through the medium of the English language, and if a translation sounds like a translation, a ghoulish simulacrum that has no life of its own and, in its timid sense of being foredoomed to failure, lacks any validity as a self-sufficient work of art, it sets up at the outset an insurmountable obstacle to the reader’s understanding and appreciating what the original must have been like. One cannot extrapolate back from prosy, dull, stilted English to imagine what Racine’s thrilling French verse sounds like. Reading a translation that sounds thrilling in English, one should come away with an awareness of much, if not all, of what makes Racine great. What is needed, then, is a translation that is not merely a verbal translation, but a translation in another sense: an English analogue, a rematerialization in English. To accomplish this, I have brought to bear on Racine’s alexandrines all the resources of English prosody, allowing their English counterparts to perform according to their own nature and rules, rather than wrenching them into a superficial semblance of the French couplet. I have done so in order to ensure that these versions will be able to stand on their own as works of English literature.

xi Racine is one of the greatest writers of Western literature. He shares with Shakespeare the distinction of being considered, in his native country, both its greatest playwright and its greatest poet. Barthes calls him “the greatest French author” (Barthes, 9). In England

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and the United States, apart from a clique of enlightened initiates and engagé academics, his oeuvre commands no such admiration; it hardly commands any attention. This is not surprising, given the ongoing reluctance of most translators to venture beyond the same four oft-translated plays (Phèdre, Andromaque, Britannicus, and Athalie — a mere third of Racine’s output) and the dismaying mediocrity of most of the available translations. Almost all of them seem to validate Turnell’s implied admonition to aspiring translators of Racine: “If you try to translate him, everything goes” (Turnell, The Classical Moment, vii). Indeed, they make it quite difficult for an English-speaking reader to discern wherein Racine’s genius lies, for one searches in vain for a vestige of it. Attridge relates that “in the preface to Oedipe . . . Voltaire illustrated how essential rhyme is by rewriting some lines from Phèdre without it” (Attridge, 63). The unrhymed translations I have looked at suggest that rhyme is just as essential for Racine in English: they impress me as being no less prosy and prosaic than those that make no pretense of being in anything but prose. I strongly doubt that someone reading them, with no knowledge of their originals, would find in them anything to suggest that those originals had been composed in verse. Lacking the structure of rhyme and almost devoid of metaphor, they end up drowning in that prose of which Racine “often skims the surface” (Muir, vi). Indeed, Muir himself (whose own translations are in bland blank verse) admits as much: “I am only too well aware that the beauty of Racine’s poetry . . . has largely evaporated in my translation” (Muir, vi). In short, I share the views of Alan Shaw, as expressed in “Phaedra in Tact,” a judicious appreciation of Richard Wilbur’s translation of Phèdre: “But we should now be able to rid ourselves once and for all of the notion that Racine’s couplets can be dispensed with in English, on the grounds that they are merely decorative or musical, that the job they do can be done better by blank verse, free verse, or any other kind” (Shaw, 231). For my taste, then, unrhymed translations are hors concours. Among the rhymed translations that have been produced, those by Richard Wilbur, who has brought his poetic brilliance to bear on Andromaque, Phèdre, and Les Plaideurs (Racine’s lone comedy), certainly stand out as the most estimable. They are characteristically

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fluent and fine, and, being in rhymed couplets, they share certain features with my own work, although they do not aspire, in either form, diction, or tone, to the epigrammatic style of the high Augustan period, which I find so appropriate to Racine’s elevated style. Indeed, the distinction that Robert Lowell makes between his own use of the rhymed couplet and Dryden’s (“I gain in naturalness and lose in epigrammatic resonance” [Lowell, 8]) could as fairly be made between Wilbur’s use of the rhymed couplet and my own.

xii In the conclusion of Jean Racine Revisited, Ronald W. Tobin makes this “incisive” comment: “In the cruel refinement of her language, which she uses like a scalpel, Racine’s Iphigénie becomes more ferocious than any of the murderers and criminals of Corneille. Yet the ritual of bloodshed that marks Racine’s tragedies is transmitted in finely calibrated and rhymed alexandrines” (Tobin, 163). In the other translations of Iphigénie  I have examined there is no question of a scalpel: Iphigénie’s language could not cut butter. But “transmitted in finely calibrated and rhymed” English couplets, her cutting words maintain their razor-sharp edge, as in this slashing denunciation of the treacherous Eriphyle:         Yes, you love him, you ingrate! And that same fury you describe so well, Those arms so steeped in blood, that foe so fell, Those dead, that hate, that Lesbos, and that fire Are etched into your soul by sharp desire; And far from hating their cruel memory, You’re pleased, madame, to speak of them to me. Nay, more than once, beneath your feigned lament, I should have seen — did see — your true intent. But my kind heart would conquer me and I’d Replace the blindfold which I’d cast aside. You love him. What mad error prompted me To embrace my rival with such amity?

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I loved her! Fool! The promises I made! I offered her my faithless lover’s aid! (Iphigenia II.v.22 –36) And here is the poignant, surgically precise jab Iphigenia delivers to her father, even as she reassures him of her love and obedience: Alas! what joy it gave me when I’d name The many countries you were going to tame; And thinking Troy’s defeat would soon ensue, I planned a splendid victory feast for you. I little thought that, ere the assault was led, My blood would be the first you’d have to shed. (Iphigenia IV.iv.32 –37) These two speeches are what I call impressive, that is to say, they make an impression, they leave an impression. Reading Racine, I come upon many such impressive passages, but in virtually no other English translation are they anywhere to be found. (The only exceptions — and they are major ones — are Richard Wilbur’s Andromache and Phaedra, Ted Hughes’s Phèdre, and Robert Lowell’s Phaedra, the last being, however, somewhat extravagant — in its Latin sense, “wandering too far afield” — for my taste.) But perhaps that should come as no surprise, for, in the case of the blank verse translations, it is difficult to make out how they differ, in any significant way, from mere paraphrases (or from each other, for that matter), except that, in attempting not to be mere paraphrases, they only succeed in becoming poorly written ones. (And after all, even Shakespeare’s most famous speeches, subjected to such routine paraphrase, would probably make little impression.) But if every blank verse translation suffers from a fatal — fatal to Racine, that is — unimpressiveness, the rhymed translations (apart from Wilbur’s and Lowell’s) have proved even less fortunate, for there is nothing unimpressive about their slovenly diction, their unintelligibility, and their rhymes so feeble as to be pointless or so forced as to distort both meaning and syntax (like the tail wagging the dog).

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I cannot claim that it was my intention, when I began to translate Racine into English couplets, to produce passages that would be “impressive”: it has just turned out that the mode I chose for translating Racine naturally conduces to their production. I would characterize what I have achieved in my translations as a “heightened” style, suitable to the heightened emotions of tragedy. One might liken the “heightening effect” produced by the English couplet to that produced by the cothurnus worn by the actors who trod the boards in ancient Greek tragedies: they both add to the “stature” of the characters. I believe that such heightening, far from interfering with the transmission of the drama, focuses it, projects it, makes us sit up and take notice; the ideas and emotions are distilled, concentrated, made more potent. (And surely, under any such understanding of this effect, it is reasonable to characterize Shakespeare’s language as heightened.) As I suggested above, in plays, as in poetry (and Racine’s dramas are both), it is often not what is being said, but how it is being said, that moves us, that excites us, that makes the work memorable for us. Everyone has felt the same things Racine’s characters feel, but Racine convinces us — and a translator, to be successful, must do the same — that it is only a Clytemnestra, only a Nero, only an Eriphyle, who could have spoken thus. The words a playwright (or translator) puts into the mouth of such monumental characters should be worthy of them. Racine’s characters should speak for us, not like us. I hope and believe that readers and audiences will often have occasion, when these great characters speak to them through my translations, to be “impressed,” whether it be by the redoubtable power of Agrippina’s tirades in Britannicus, the poignant despair of Atalide’s final monologue in Bajazet, the horrific cynicism of Creon’s avowals in The Fratricides, or the breathtaking terror and heartbreaking desolation evoked by Theramenes’ récit in Phaedra. In On Racine, Barthes writes: “Thus the Racinian discourse affords great masses of undifferentiated language, as if, through different speeches, a single person were expressing himself; in relation to such profound utterance, the extremely pure contour of the Racinian language functions as a veritable command; here language

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is aphoristic [italics mine], not realistic; it is expressly intended for quotation” (Barthes, 10). One need not subscribe to Barthes’ interpretation to believe that Racine wrote many quotable verses and to wonder where, in most translations, they are secreting themselves. By “quotable” verses I mean those that are not only potent and striking in context but also sustain interest apart from their dramatic function in situ: verses that, in short, partake of the poetic. Dare I say that, reading Racine in my own translations, I find (with all due credit to Racine!) no dearth of quotable verses? While the strongly aphoristic quality of the English couplet can almost suggest that the lines of verse are already wearing quotation marks or, at least, could slip into them very comfortably — and it is not, perhaps, a coincidence that the third-most-quotable author (according to Bartlett’s), after Shakespeare and the authors of the King James Version, is Alexander Pope — the inherent “quotability” of the English couplet is not at all inconsistent with its being a powerful vehicle for conveying the dramatic and emotional impact of Racine (quite the reverse, as I have suggested). I append the following selections, rife with “quotable” couplets, to demonstrate, better than any arguments of mine, however closely reasoned, can do, the dramatic potency of the English couplet (and also, perhaps, to tantalize readers of this first volume with a taste of what the succeeding volumes — those “high-pilèd books, in charactery, . . . like rich garners” — hold in store). nero [recalling his first glimpse of Junia] Tristful, she raised to heav’n eyes moist with tears, Which glimmered ’gainst the torches and the spears. Lovely, her scant attire served to disclose A beauty barely roused from its repose. Who can say if it was that negligence, Her captors’ fierceness or their insolence, The gloom, the glare, the silence, or the cries, That heightened the sweet shyness of her eyes? (Britannicus II.ii.15 –22) burrhus [admonishing Nero] You still are master here and have free will.

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Virtuous till now, you can be virtuous still. Your way is clear, nor can you be withstood; You need but guide your steps from good to good. But if you heed your flatterers’ advice, You’ll find your course career from vice to vice. Old cruelty new cruelty demands: In blood you’ll have to bathe your bloodied hands. (Britannicus IV.iii.35 –42) agamemnon [ justifying himself to Iphigenia] Your hour has come: you must be reconciled. Think of your noble upbringing, my child. It’s hard for me to obey, but you must try. This blow will kill you, but it’s I who’ll die. (Iphigenia IV.iv.74 –77) clytemnestra [excoriating Agamemnon] Why need you feign, for us, a false distress? You think with tears you prove your tenderness? Where are these wars you’ve waged to save your daughter? Where are the streams of blood and where the slaughter? What havoc can convince me you held out? What corpse-strewn fields forbid me to speak out? .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Is this the way a father ought to feel? At such vile treachery my senses reel! Shall this cruel priest, urged by a crueler crowd, Lay criminal hands on her and be allowed To rend her breast and, by his probing art, Consult the heav’ns in her still-heaving heart? And I, who led her here triumphantly —  Shall I return alone, in agony, Passing through every blossom-scented street Where loving crowds flung flowers at her feet? (Iphigenia IV.iv.90 –95, 134 –43) orestes [confronting Hermione, whom he loves] I begged for death ’mongst many a savage race

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Who shed men’s blood to win their grim gods’ grace: They closed their temples, thwarting my intent, And saved the blood that I’d have gladly spent. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . You claim to hate this man? Madame, admit: The soul can’t quench the flames of love, once lit. These all betray us: silence, speech, and eyes; From ill-damped fires the fiercest flames arise. (Andromache II.ii.15 –18, 98 –101) athaliah [narrating her dream] But a new trouble’s come these last few days, Afflicting my calm mind with deep malaise. A dream (and by a dream am I distressed?) Gnaws at my heart, depriving me of rest; It’s followed me, no matter where I’ve fled. — Midnight had struck, profound, instilling dread; My mother Jezebel appeared to me, As on her death-day, in full finery. Her sorrows had not undermined her pride. The ravagements of age she still defied: With borrowed bloom she kept the years at bay, Repairing time’s irreparable decay. My worthy child, she said, I fear for you: The Jews’ cruel God seeks your destruction, too. I pity you, should you come within His reach. Then, having uttered such a frightful speech, Her shade bent towards me, where I lay in bed. I reached to embrace her, with my arms outspread, But all I found was, in a mangled pile, Black bones and putrid flesh, corrupt and vile, Limbs torn apart and scraps still dripping blood, Which ravenous dogs fought over in the mud. (Athaliah II.v.28 –49) mathan [advising Athaliah to kill the young Joash] He stands condemned while he is to be feared.

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If it should prove he comes of high descent, The swifter shall ensue his punishment; And if he prove to be of lowly birth, What matter if we shed blood of no worth? Must kings attend slow justice’s decrees? Their safety oft demands swift penalties. These scruples might work to our detriment. Once suspect, one’s no longer innocent. (Athaliah II.v.106 –14) mathan [commenting on Athaliah’s distracted state] My friend, she’s not herself these last two days: No longer that enlightened, fearless queen, So far above her sex’s timid mean, Who smote her foes so swiftly, to their cost, And knew the price of just one moment lost. By vain remorse that noble soul is stirred; She’s wavering, weak: a woman, in a word. (Athaliah III.iii.12 –18) athaliah [defiant to the end]         God of the Jews, You win! Yes, Joash lives! To fool myself is vain: The scars my dagger left are all too plain; I see, too, Athaziah’s form and face: They bear the marks of his detested race. David has triumphed, Ahab’s driven out. Pitiless God, ’twas You brought this about. ’Twas You who, flattering me with victory, Set me against myself repeatedly: Now roused to pity for this hapless child, Now by the lure of treasure too beguiled, Afraid to see the flames devour it. Then let him reign, your son, your favorite; And, to inaugurate his reign, ’twere best That he should plant a dagger in my breast. Hear now his mother’s last wish, as she dies.

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Her wish? No! — Athaliah prophesies That, weary of laws that make his soul repine, Faithful to Ahab’s blood, which flows from mine, Shunning his forbears’ influence in vain, David’s abhorrent scion will profane Your altar and defame God’s majesty, Avenging Ahab, Jezebel, and me. (Athaliah V.vi.24 –46) roxane [weighing her options] Doubtless the Sultan, fearful for his reign, Means to condemn his brother once again. Without me, though, they cannot apprehend him; My word is law here. But should I defend him? Which is my master? Amurat? Bajazet? One I’ve betrayed; the other, I fear, may. Time presses; I must clarify all doubt, And act before this precious time runs out. In vain they hide their love. Though well concealed, Love, by some sign, at last will be revealed. Bajazet’s actions I shall scrutinize, And Atalide I shall take by surprise; I’ll find their secret out, sooner or later, And crown the lover, or condemn the traitor. (Bajazet III.viii.16 –29) roxane [convinced at last of Bajazet’s treachery] Ah! with what insolence, what cruelty, Those two exploited my credulity! What joy I felt, believing all their lies! Wretch! you’ve gained no great victory in my eyes, Duping a heart that eagerly believed, A heart that dreaded to be undeceived. You hardly needed half your artifice, And in all fairness I must grant you this: I’m sure you often blushed to contemplate How small a lie deceived a love so great. (Bajazet IV.v.47–56)

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atalide [racked by guilt and despair] Cruel destiny, are you so unforgiving That I, condemned, alas! to go on living, Must bear, to crown my grief, the endless shame That for my lover’s death I am to blame? Yes, my dear prince, your death is due to me, Not Roxane’s rage or Amurat’s decree. ’Twas I alone who wove the fatal cord Whose odious coils choked off your life, my lord. Tormented by such thoughts, can I survive The knowledge that you’re no longer alive? I who, when told of your impending death, Was robbed of reason and bereft of breath! Ah! for what purpose did I love you so? Was it to bring about your overthrow? (Bajazet V.fin.sc.5 –18) phaedra [having confessed to Hippolytus her love for him] You well recall what I was led to do: Not only did I flee, I banished you. An odious mien I tried to cultivate; In order to resist, I sought your hate. My desperate efforts met with no success: You may have hated more, I loved no less. Your sorrows made you seem more charming still. I wept, I burned, I languished, I grew ill. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Trembling lest, through my fault, he be undone, I came to beg you not to hate my son. Too full of what it loved, my heart proved weak: Alas! it was of you I had to speak! Avenge and punish my depraved desire. The worthy son of your heroic sire, Rid the world of a beast so odious. Theseus’ wife dares love Hippolytus! This frightful monster, Prince, must not go free. Here is my heart. That’s where to strike at me. For its vile crime it’s anxious now to pay:

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I feel it swell to meet your sword halfway. Strike. Or if I’m unworthy of your blows, If such an easy death, Prince, you oppose, Or scorn to shed my blood, vile and abhorred, Then let your arm be spared: lend me your sword. (Phaedra II.v.106 –13, 118 –33) phaedra [invoking Venus] O you, who see my shameful, abject state, Remorseless Venus, let your wrath abate! No further can you press your cruelty: You’ve triumphed; all your darts have wounded me. Dread goddess, if you wish to enhance your fame, Then at a more rebellious foe take aim. Hippolytus, who flouts your just decrees, Before your altars never bends his knees, And from your dread dominion, goddess, flees. Your name seems to offend him in his pride; Avenge yourself; our causes are allied. [Phaedra III.ii.1–11] theseus [believing Hippolytus has molested Phaedra] You show yourself before me, wretch? You dare? Monster! too long spared by the Thunderer’s hand, Last of those thieves of whom I purged this land. After the transports of your love have spread Their shame and horror to your father’s bed, You dare present to me your hated face, Here, where the air still reeks of your disgrace, Nor seek some distant shore, ’neath unknown skies, Where Theseus is a name none recognize. Flee, traitor; you had best not brave my hate, And tempt a wrath I cannot moderate. It’s quite enough I bear the eternal blame For having sired a criminal with no shame, Without being blamed for murdering my son And tarnishing the fame my deeds have won. Flee; and if you don’t want a sudden blow

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To add you to the villains I’ve laid low, Take care the sun that lights us does not see You place a foot in this vicinity. Flee: don’t turn back, but, hastening away, Of your vile presence purge my realm today. — And you, Neptune, if my brave arm, of yore, Of infamous assassins cleansed your shore, Recall that, to reward my virtuous zeal, You promised you would grant my first appeal. Locked in that dungeon cell for countless hours, I never called on your immortal powers. Your promised help I jealously conserved; For greater needs my prayers were reserved. Today I beg: avenge an injured sire. I leave this traitor to your utmost ire; Drown in his blood his bold concupiscence: I’ll take your fury for benevolence. [Phaedra IV.ii.10 –43] hippolytus [attempting to vindicate himself ] By such black lies my rancor’s justly stirred; I should tell you exactly what occurred; But since the truth would wound you, I’ll conceal it. Respect the tact which bids me not reveal it. Not wishing to augment the pain you’re in, Think who I am and what my life has been. Some venial crimes always precede the worst. One must transgress the moral order first, Before one can commit atrocities; For, just like virtue, crime has its degrees. When has one witnessed timid innocence Pass suddenly to reckless violence? In one day can a virtuous man be changed Into a beast — incestuous, vile, deranged? [Phaedra IV.ii.54 – 67] phaedra [having learned that Hippolytus loves Aricia] Even now — ah! murderous thought! — they are united

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Against the maddened lover whom he’s slighted. Despite the exile threatening them, those two Have sworn a thousand vows that they’ll be true. I can’t endure their smug felicity; Take pity, Oenone, on my jealousy. Aricia must be ruined. My husband’s hate For her vile race I must reanimate. No gentle sentence will suffice this time: Her brothers’ crimes are nothing to her crime. Yes, in my jealous rage, I’ll ask the King . . . — What am I doing? My wits are wandering. I’m jealous, and it’s Theseus I implore? My husband lives, and I’m still burning for . . . For whom? For whose heart do my prayers ascend? At each word all my hairs stand up on end. My crimes have reached the height of infamy: I breathe in incest, breathe out perfidy. [Phaedra IV.vi.40 –57] oenone [counseling Phaedra] Madame, you must restrain this groundless terror. Look less severely on this venial error. You love. One cannot fight against one’s fate. A fatal charm made you capitulate. Is this a wonder of such magnitude? Is yours the only heart love has subdued? Frailty is a natural human trait. You’re mortal: yield, then, to a mortal’s fate. Why groan, madame, about an age-old blight? The Gods themselves on Mount Olympus’ height, Who, with the thunderbolt, chastise men’s crimes, Have burned with lawless passions too, at times. [Phaedra IV.vi.82 –93] aricia [remonstrating with Theseus] How can you bear to see such calumny Blacken his blameless life so wantonly? So little do you understand his heart?

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Goodness and guilt can you not tell apart? In your eyes must some odious cloud disguise The virtue that bedazzles others’ eyes? By slanderous tongues don’t let him be attacked. Desist. The deadly oath you swore, retract; Fear lest the wrath of heaven you arouse, And cause it, in its hate, to heed your vows. Our offerings stern heav’n oft accepts; ofttimes Its gifts are meant to scourge us for our crimes. [Phaedra V.iii.14 –25] theramenes [narrating Hippolytus’s horrific death] Suddenly, from the ocean’s depth arose A frightful cry, which shattered the repose; And from earth’s bosom there came in reply A thunderous groan, as frightening as the cry. Our blood congealed in us as we gave ear; The attentive horses’ manes stiffened in fear. Meanwhile, there welled up from the liquid plane A billowing mountain, towering o’er the main; The wave crashed down and spewed, before our eyes, Amidst the spume, a beast of monstrous size. From its broad brow ferocious horns projected; With yellow scales its body was protected; Part bull, part dragon, vile and virulent, In tortuous coils its tail bent and rebent. The shore shook with each bellow, each convulsion. Heav’n viewed this savage monster with revulsion. The earth was racked, the very air was blighted, The tide that brought it there drew back affrighted. All fled, and seeing valor would prove vain, Sought shelter in the temple nigh the main. The Prince alone, a hero’s worthy son, Staying his steeds, from ’mongst his spears seized one, Made for the beast, and with a mighty throw, Into its foul flank aimed a riving blow. In rage and pain, the beast, with one huge spring, Fell at the coursers’ feet, still bellowing,

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And, wheeling, from its fiery maw spewed out Flame, smoke, and blood, encircling them about. Impelled by fear, too maddened to restrain, They heeded neither master’s voice nor rein. He fiercely strove, but his attempts proved idle; With bloody foam they stained the straining bridle. Some say in this turmoil they saw a god Goading their dusty flanks with galling prod. Onto the rocks they hurled themselves from fright. The axle screeched and broke. In hurtling flight The Prince’s chariot crashed — splintered and mangled. In the reins he himself became entangled. — Excuse my grief. That image, steeped in woe, Will henceforth cause my tears to overflow. I saw your poor son dragged across the strand By those same steeds he’d fed with his own hand. He screamed to stop them, frightening them the more; They raced, his body soon all wounds and gore. Our cries of anguish echoed through the plane; Their headlong flight at last began to wane: They halted at those ancient tombs nearby, Where those cold kings, his ancestors, now lie. [Phaedra V.vi.20 – 67] phaedra [in her dying confession] By now my life one sword thrust would have claimed, But I couldn’t let the innocent be blamed. To death’s dark realm I chose a slower course, To give me time to express my deep remorse. My burning veins drink in a poisoned draught Medea once prepared with cunning craft. Already the fatal venom’s taken hold, Clutching my heart with an uncanny cold; Already, as through a mist, I scarce descry The husband and the heav’n I horrify; And death, dimming these eyes that cast a blight Upon the day, restores its pristine light. [Phaedra V.fin.sc.40 –51]

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xiii One last point I would like to raise concerns the “propriety” of Racine on the printed page. It was once considered degrading, shocking, scandalous, for a woman to appear on the stage, but in the case of the drama, the opposite holds true: she is stigmatized when she does not appear on the stage. She is condescended to as a faute de mieux compromise when she appears in print. But plays have just as much right to be read as novels, poems, and essays. (Nor should one forget that the great epics of Homer, as well as the many medieval European sagas, which were once transmitted orally by rhapsodes and bards, are, nowadays, exclusively read.) Of course one would be delighted to see any of Racine’s plays staged, in French or English, but the likelihood of seeing a truly worthy production of one of the more famous ones is slight, and the likelihood of seeing any production of one of the less famous is slighter still. Fortunately, as Raymond Picard assures us, “Corneille and Racine can be enjoyed in print”; he maintains, moreover, that “a careful reading may be more rewarding than a poor performance” (Turnell, Jean Racine, vii). I know I have never been disappointed by reading Racine’s plays, only amazed at how consistently absorbing they are. As Patrick J. Smith puts it: “His plays — and not just the best of them — sweep you along from first to last” (New York Times, January 3, 1999). Since we may never get to see a production of Bajazet, Mithridates, or Alexander the Great, it is all the more important that we should have good translations of them available, lest we forget that Racine wrote more than two or three plays.

xiv I entertain the hope, however, that, by means of a powerful new intégrale, the plays of Racine may gain greater currency in our theater and might be adopted as works of English literature, to be studied, savored, even thrilled to — through the time-honored medium of the English couplet — as dramas far more potent, profound, psychologically probing, and accessible than those produced by Dryden and others in that medium or by the Elizabethan and

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Jacobean playwrights in blank verse and prose (with the obvious exception). To give Racine his due, we should trust in the potency of his drama. As Muir remarks, “Racine’s actual drama is . . . robust enough to survive transplanting into a foreign soil” (Muir, vii). Of course, even the finest translation must represent some compromise, but is not Racine’s loss our gain? Should we allow such a great body of literature to lie unappreciated just because it must inevitably remain underappreciated? In view of English literature’s paltry holdings in the area of “classic drama,” whose practitioners Muir derides as “the droning authors of Gorbuduc, the prim Daniel, Addison with his now unreadable Cato, or Congreve with his Mourning Bride” (Muir, xiv), ought not the importation into our literature of such a body of work be cause for celebration? Muir further opines that “even All for Love [Dryden’s take on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra], the masterpiece of the Restoration theatre, is tame indeed compared with any of the greater plays of Racine” (Muir, xiv). Surely, such an oeuvre, so superior to almost any English verse drama after Shakespeare, would provide us at one stroke with the great classic drama we never had. I cannot see how an English reader, encountering Racine in a worthy translation, could fail to be impressed by his power and timelessness. Robert Lowell has written: “No translator has had the gifts or the luck to bring Racine into our culture. It’s a pity that Pope and Dryden overlooked Racine’s great body of work, close to them, in favor of the inaccessible Homer and Virgil” (Lowell, 8). It will be clear to readers of this volume that I have taken up the gauntlet Lowell has, in effect, thrown down. I hope that my translations, instead of being regarded as a compromise with, and a falling off from, the originals, will be seen as having their own artistic integrity, and that, informed and uplifted by Racine’s sublime genius, they will stand as a literary creation to be admired in its own right. Certainly, I shall consider myself satisfied with my work, if it be allowed that what is good is mine, what is great is Racine’s.

the fratricides: discussion

i With The Fratricides, Racine’s first play, we are plunged into a world where human passions, whether ordained by destiny or instigated by the gods, whether resulting from an ancient curse or released by chance circumstances, hold unchallenged sway. But Racine is much less interested in the cause of passion than in its effects. As Martin Turnell observes, “It is of the essence of Racinian passion that it carries all before it. The  normal restraints of civilization merely serve to intensify the violence of the eruption when it comes” (Jean Racine, 33). Turnell echoes Creon’s observation about his nephews, when he likens their violent dispositions to torrential floodwaters: “The more constrained their course, the worse their wrath, / Destroying everything within their path” (The Fratricides  I.v.33 – 34). In The Fratricides, that destructive force is hate. Not only does Racine demonstrate how irresistible, how unstoppable, such hatred is, he even has Eteocles suggest that the brothers’ mutual hatred was “with us from the cradle, and — who can tell? — / May follow us into the tomb as well” (IV.i.23 –24). That suggestion is reinforced in their final confrontation, where Racine, taking his cue from Euripides’ The  Phoenician Women, his source play, has the apparently defunct Eteocles rise up to strike his brother dead as he bends

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down to disarm him. (In Euripides’ version, it is Eteocles who first strikes down Polynices and is then himself stabbed.) But he carries the point one step further in his description of the dead Polynices: Dead though he was, undying was his ire: To attack his brother still seemed his desire. His face, which all the marks of death now bore, Appeared more proud and fearsome than before. (V.iii.106 –9) The more effectively to focus on this mutual hatred, to distill it, to “purify” it of any distracting considerations, Racine jettisons all the extraneous political, mythological, and even psychological elements that informed earlier dramatic versions of this tale. Furthermore, here are to be found none of the loftier issues Pierre Corneille, Racine’s older rival, characteristically treated: we are not allowed to be edified by “the heroic ending of Corneille’s Oedipe” (Tobin, 27). In this regard, A. F. B. Clark’s assessment of the play might better serve as a convenient description of what the play is not about: “Its subject is the typical Cornelian one of great ambitions competing for a great, political object, the winning of a throne. The characters are ‘great souls,’ pursuing their ends with fierce and unyielding determination” (Clark, 113). Jules Brody, in “Racine’s Thébaïde: An Analysis,” rightly dismisses as insignificant the political and mythological elements: “The references to Thebes are also perfunctory. Eteocles evokes the city and le peuple in arguing that his régime has popular support. But this is as far as it goes. There is no mention of the Cadmus legend; the war between the Thebans and the Argives, which had epic importance in Euripides, is reduced to a minor incident. Racine depicts the colourful Thebes of mythology in its most indistinct outlines. In his treatment of Menoeceus’s suicide there is no trace of the civic theme which had loomed so large in Euripides” (Brody, 176).

ii To ensure that neither brother’s hatred will be “tainted” by ascriptions of culpability or of justification, Racine took pains to prevent

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the audience from siding with either. Even the subtitle of the play, Les Frères ennemis (The Enemy Brothers), conjoining the brothers, anonymously, under one designation, discourages us from making any distinction between them. That suggestion of interchangeability is confirmed by the terms of Oedipus’s mandate, as Jocasta relates: Oedipus, when his destined end drew near, Ordained you each should rule, by turns, one year, And, having but one realm to give away, He wished you alternately to hold sway. (I.iii.40 –43) Furthermore, Racine has been careful to indicate, by the only lines that he added to the later edition (IV.i.19 –22), that the two brothers, having fought even in the womb, must be twins, so that neither could take precedence on the basis of age. We can see how shaky are the grounds on which an audience might base a preference between the siblings when we read the following seemingly well-founded opinions. Brody asserts that Racine “took special care to distinguish [Polynices] from his brother, to give him the beau rôle. All the disinterested characters in the play are on his side; they testify frequently and at length to his moral superiority. His aristocratic political orthodoxy is contrasted with Étéocle’s rabble-rousing. Antigone clearly prefers Polynice, who, unlike Étéocle, is capable of fraternal and filial feeling and is not easily excited to violent language and behavior” (Brody, 181). Yet here we have Bernard Weinberg making a similar case for Eteocles: Étéocle appears from the outset as solicitous to his mother, capable of some moderation and reason, endowed with a sense of responsibility to his people, patriotic. . . . Polynice’s character . . . is not by any means comparable. Étéocle early describes him as insolent and proud, as unpatriotic and willing to ally himself with an enemy. . . . As soon as he appears we note the differences. . . . His sharpness and irritation continue, directed not only against his mother but against the people of Thebes, for whom he has nothing but contempt. It

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is on this point, indeed, that he differs most markedly from his brother — and that we are meant to give Étéocle the preference. (Weinberg, 36) Clearly, such moot differences between the brothers do not justify our identifying one or the other as the “hero” or “villain,” as we can so confidently do in the case of the fraternal pairings in Britannicus (Britannicus and Nero) and Mithridates (Xiphares and Pharnaces). Even for Antigone, their own sister, it is only their situational difference that distinguishes them. This is signaled near the end of the play, when Antigone, having learned that Polynices has killed Eteocles (but not that Eteocles has fatally retaliated), transfers her loyalty from one to the other: It’s true, I loved him [Polynices] with deep ardency: I loved his brother far less fervently; And what persuaded me to take his part Was his misfortune and his virtuous heart. Alas! this deed has tarnished his renown; He’s now a criminal, and crime his crown. Now it’s his brother who evokes a tear: He, more ill-fated, has become more dear. (V.ii.31–38) Although here she brands Polynices a “criminal,” when she finally learns that both brothers are dead, she ceases to apportion blame, for, after bemoaning their blind ambition, she exculpates them both, laying the blame elsewhere: “Fatal ambition! Blindness without cure! / Cruel oracle, this is your work, I’m sure” (V.iii.110 –11). Nor, I think, given Racine’s impartially unsympathetic treatment of the two brothers and the “equal eagerness” (V.iii.36) with which we were told they rushed off to engage in single combat, will any reader (or audience) feel disposed to blame one brother more than the other for the tragic consequence. I would further argue, however, that it was Racine’s intent not merely to convince us that the brothers were equally culpable but to convince us, as well, that they were equally

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inculpable. He wishes us to lay the blame elsewhere, as Antigone does. But although she deflects the blame for her brothers’ death from their uncontrollable hatred to the “cruel oracle,” her characterizing their ambition as “fatal” (with its implication of “inevitable”) and her diagnosing their malady as “blindness” (a condition that is neither self-induced nor in any way remediable — the blind, indeed, being incapable, almost by definition, of having any “sense” of what their affliction is, of understanding what they are missing) reflect the position Racine takes in his first theatrical outing, namely, that the violent passions that overpower so many of his greatest characters are just that — overpowering, irresistible — and that mortals, cursed with such overwhelming emotional drives, should be thought of, consequently, as more sinned against than sinning.

iii The indistinguishability of the two brothers, by removing any personal grounds on which to base an animus, already lends their hatred an abstract quality, which is reinforced by the lack of any convincing circumstantial motive for it. Although it would appear that their vying for a throne would amply account for their hostility, clearly, it could not have been for the sake of the throne that, “while in one womb embowered, he and I, / There raged . . . intestine war” (IV.i.20 –21). Most critics agree that their contending for the kingship is not the issue here. According to Turnell, “The throne is a pretext rather than the cause of the brothers’ strife” (Jean Racine, 32), and Roland Barthes concurs: “For the two brothers, the throne is merely an alibi” (Barthes, 63). And Barthes had the insight to realize that it is their very congruity, their mirror imaging, that creates the hatred. “It is a homogeneous hatred, setting brother against brother, like against like. . . . They need each other in order to live and in order to die, their hatred is the expression of a complementarity and derives its force from this very unity: they hate each other for being unable to tell each other apart. . . . Even before their birth, Racine tells us, even in their mother’s womb, already thrust together, the fetuses fought each other. Of this original scene, their

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life is merely a monotonous repetition” (Barthes, 61– 62). Eteocles and Polynices are identical twins in more than just the clinical sense. Because there is nothing to differentiate one brother from the other, each one’s existence renders the other’s superfluous, pointless. But the murderous hatred thus engendered serves, by some miraculous self-regulatory mechanism of the psyche, to compensate them for the futility of their existence by filling the void in their lives and swelling their self-esteem. In regard to the latter, the more virulent the hatred, the more effectively it is able to create an artificial distinction between them, and hence a perceived superiority on either side. And in regard to the former, their mutual hatred provides a raison d’être, however factitious, for their existence, something to occupy their time and on which to expend their life energy. Jocasta, recognizing this quite well, tells Eteocles that, once he has killed his brother, “then you will have no foes left to subdue,  / No challenging objectives to pursue,  / No uncommitted crimes enticing you” (I.iii.76 –78). Furthermore, the final confrontation in which their mutual hatred must unavoidably eventuate not only gives focus to their lives, but also establishes a telos toward which all their thoughts are directed, each believing that this final conflict will result in his own triumph and self-vindication, by providing the ultimate proof of his supposed superiority and, most important, the authentication of his own identity. (Of course, this is just where Racine’s symmetrical denouement will reveal the futility of any such attempt on the part of either to assert his own individuality.) There is a revealing comparison to be made here with another pair of hostile brothers: Nero and Britannicus. The  nexus is signaled for us by Racine’s revision of a line of Creon’s, when he anticipates a fatal meeting between his nephews (“They’ll crush each other in a last embrace” [III.vi.78]), to yield Nero’s more famous version, when he foresees the final clash with his stepbrother, Britannicus (“I’ll clasp my rival, yes — until he’s crushed” [Britannicus IV.iii.10]). In the later play, the mutual loathing is less schematic, less thematic, being embedded within more “realistic,” more complex, characters, who, although they are both motivated by envy, jealousy, and ambition, are so individuated by such traits as naïveté and idealism on one side (Britannicus) and sadism and paranoia on the other (Nero) as to be by no means interchangeable. Racine’s

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modification of Creon’s line is an instructive one, for, whereas in the original version, it is a third party who foresees the brothers’ mutual destruction, in the later version, it is one of the principals who expresses his murderous intentions — and, indeed, the only one of them who could do so, for it is not possible that Britannicus, as Racine has drawn him, would voice such a malevolent desire. On the other hand, Nero’s later line, “As long as he [Britannicus] lives, I half live, at best” (Britannicus IV.iii.13), though certainly in keeping with his character, would be even more telling, more apt, coming from either Polynices or Eteocles. The  impossibility of their sharing a throne is convincingly attested by the latter: Two masters seated there is quite unknown; No throne holds two, however wide the throne: Eventually, one would be dispossessed, For by his other self he’d be oppressed. Judge then, from the disgust I cannot hide, If I could bear to hold sway at his side. (IV.iii.200 –205) Polynices goes further — and farther, much farther — in his retort: “And given my fierce hate, I cannot bear / To share with you the light, the sky, the air” (IV.iii.206 –7). And Antigone delivers the final pronouncement, like an epitaph, on the impossibility of their coexistence: The throne provided you too strait a berth, Nor was there room for both upon this earth; And heaven placed, that no more blood be shed, One ’mongst the living, one amongst the dead. (V.ii.19 –22)

iv While their functioning in the play as mere embodiments of hatred itself, of distilled passion, may make them less interesting as

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characters, the ever-broadening scope of their enmity evoked by the sequence of “however wide the throne,” “the light, the sky, the air,” and “room for both upon this earth” invites us to consider the mechanism of their hatred (analyzed in Section  III) as a template for the operation of hatred on a more global scale. In that arena, it is unquestionable that, throughout history, the “cause” of many a conflict has been nothing but a “pretext” or “alibi” that serves to provide an illusory sense of identity, of superiority, for both sides, to occupy their time, thoughts, and energy, to justify their existence. Generally speaking, there is little to distinguish between any set of warring factions; indeed, they often pray to the same God for victory. It almost seems as if the more inveterate and fierce their hate, the less there is to distinguish them from each other, a phenomenon Swift allegorized with such scathing wit in Gulliver’s Travels. Like Eteocles and Polynices, such enemies can attain a sense of selfworth, achieve an identity, know themselves, only through the hate that gives meaning to their lives. They can only raise themselves up by putting down (in two senses) their enemies. Ultimately, the unprovoked and self-engendered hatred we have been examining can be seen — and this is as true on the global as on the personal level — as a form of self-loathing. If there is no real distinction between our enemies and ourselves, it follows that the hatred we feel for them must, with equal justice, be applicable to ourselves. In The  Fratricides, both brothers clearly betray their self-contempt. Eteocles owns: “I’d rather lose my life than lose my throne” (III.iv.32), thus acknowledging that his life has no worth apart from what the throne lends it. And Polynices (in one of the passages Racine later deleted) makes the same admission: “They steal me from myself, stealing the throne” (see note 19 for Act IV). Furthermore, it is not even the throne, but merely the furious struggle they must engage in to obtain (or retain) it, that justifies their existence. Polynices alleges no lofty motives for wishing to attain the throne, displays no noble character traits that would make him worthy of it. He scorns the very idea: “The people must obey my every hest, / Though everything I do they may detest” (IV.iii.158 –59). His mother attempts to persuade him to win himself a throne by his own efforts:

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Disdain to do what other kings have done; With your own hands create yourself, my son. Perform brave feats, and crown yourself with them; Let laurel wreaths be your proud diadem. (IV.iii.166 – 69) But her counsel falls on deaf ears: Polynices is too aware that he is a nonentity to believe that he could ever “create himself.” He can only base his claim on “blood”: Let the mob love or loathe us at their choice; Blood sets us on the throne, not their blind voice: What blood bestows on them they mayn’t reject; A prince they cannot love they must respect. (II.iii.31–34)

v But what does “blood” represent in this play? For Racine invests the word with a complex array of symbolic meanings. Before we inquire into the import of this word, however, we should first take note of its importance. The statistics speak to its preeminent importance in this play, where it occurs sixty-nine times (not including an additional seven times in the lines Racine later deleted), more frequently than any other word in any of his other plays. In most of these instances, the word is used in its literal sense (but one should note that the red liquid thus signified, rather than flowing calmly through the veins, has already been spilled or is at risk of being spilled). On a metaphoric level, the word is used (as it so often is in Racine) to signify a close familial relationship (for example, when Jocasta determines to stifle her “pity and love for my own blood” [IV.iii.217]), or, more specifically, a familial bond that determines the right of succession (as in Jocasta’s accusatory remark to Creon: “The precious chance that bond of blood bestows / Makes you find in my sons your greatest foes” [I.v.43 –44]) — the word, in that sense, being constantly on Polynices’ lips. But, obsequious courtier

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though he may have been, Racine the playwright is much less interested in bloodlines as a guarantor of the rightful transmission of the royal crown, than as a guarantor of the transmission of those vicious propensities that so many of his characters display. Thus, when Polynices, insisting on his prerogative to reign, invokes the “blood” that flows in his veins from Oedipus, he is actually basing his claim on just that inherited criminality (Oedipus is a murderer, after all) that makes him so unsuitable to do so. That is one of the great ironies of The Fratricides, that this “blood,” which, in one sense (the family bond), ought to bring the brothers together, which, in another sense (hereditary right), ought to qualify them to rule, is what, in a third sense (congenital depravity), actually drives them apart and prevents them from being good rulers. But perhaps the clue to the real meaning of “blood,” its most fundamental meaning, the one that lends the play the greatest potency, is to be found in what is, not coincidentally, the most potent line in the play, both thematically and theatrically: Creon’s Machiavellian double entendre, “Blood will exercise its wonted sway” (III.v.22), a sanguinary prophecy of doom disguised as a sanguine promise of detente. Theatrically, the line is a brilliant example of Racine’s characteristic use of dramatic irony — here, before the fact, since Creon does not disclose his ulterior agenda until the following scene (but a good actor will be able to convey the malign subtext). Thematically, the line can serve as a motto, not only for this play, but for every one of Racine’s tragedies, if we take “blood” as representing passion, the indomitable psychic force dictating our thoughts, words, and actions, whose “sway” is absolute and whose reign is for life. In Racine’s plays, the passions are the rulers: one may disobey a king, one may flout an emperor, but to rebel against one’s passionate nature is futile. Certainly, for a modern audience, this interpretation of “blood” is more cogent and provides a more believable basis for the interactions between the characters than one that (taking the example of the play under examination) asks us to believe, as Jocasta does (and she takes some comfort in so believing), that the brothers are doomed because “they’re tainted with incestuous blood” (I.i.33), or that, as Eteocles suggests, “heaven, by a dread decree / Wished to chastise our parents’ infamy, / And in our cursed

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blood to illuminate / All that’s most dark and dire of love and hate” (IV.i.25 –28). (In so suggesting, Eteocles betrays a momentary dim hope that heaven might have singled him out to be an exemplar, for the ages, of anything, thereby justifying his existence.) No, the “blood” that “will exercise its wonted sway” is passion, in this case the unquenchable hatred between Eteocles and Polynices. Racine’s preoccupation with passion (encoded, as we have seen, as “blood”), so evident in his very first play, represents a marked departure from the work of Pierre Corneille, his illustrious older rival. And nothing marks more clearly the divergence between the honor-obsessed Corneille and the passion-obsessed Racine than these statistics: in The Fratricides, where sang (blood) is used sixtynine times, gloire (glory), “the by-word of a power-hungry Cornelian hero,” as Brody puts it, is used a mere eight times (Brody, 179). This imbalance, bespeaking a preponderance of passion over politics, will characterize most of the later plays, and even where some of the passion is directed toward attaining or wielding political power, the question of gloire is usually irrelevant. (Berenice represents a distinct anomaly in this respect, for gloire is very much a governing force for Titus; and in the pitched battle between passion and politics, the latter ends up victorious, wherein lies the tragedy of that play and the source of its unique greatness.)

vi The Fratricides has not escaped the censure of critics, who have conscientiously pointed out its various faults, faults considered damaging enough to exclude this play (as its successor Alexander the Great is excluded) from the canon of Racine’s “mature” work (though only two years separate the last-named play from Andromache, universally esteemed as his first masterpiece). These faults mostly have to do with the dramatic structure of the play and the lack of a tragic “focus.” And, indeed, while the title of the play suggests that the dramatic conflict will lie in the opposition between the titular brothers, this turns out to be far from the case as the drama unfolds. Since neither brother makes himself at all agreeable to any of the

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other characters, or, by extension, to the audience, we are indifferent as to which (if either) prevails. Rather, the conflict resides in the opposition the other characters offer to the brothers’ belligerent hatred — or, in Creon’s case, in his malign manipulation of that hatred to effect his own ends. And because no sympathy is aroused in us on behalf of either brother, we readily side with their interlocutors (principally Jocasta and Antigone), who try to reconcile them, or at least to defuse a situation that threatens imminent violence. The structure of the play is clearly based on these (futile) confrontations, which take up the first four acts of the play, and not on the long-deferred rencontre between the brothers (taking place offstage, between Acts  IV and V), who, in fact, meet only once onstage, in the third scene of Act IV. Almost as if in compliance with Oedipus’s command that “you each should reign, by turns, one year” (I.iii.41), his two sons “alternately . . . hold sway” (I.iii.43)  for the first four acts of the play, Eteocles presiding in Act  I ( just as he was called to reign first), where he has to face Jocasta’s onslaught, and Polynices succeeding him in Act II, where he must defend himself against a two-pronged attack by Jocasta and his sister, Antigone. In Act  III, it is again Eteocles who must brave the assaults of both his mother and his uncle, Creon, who, under the guise of attempting to broker a peace between the brothers, is actually trying to precipitate a face-off between them, which he knows will prove fatal, as he later exultingly confesses to his confidant, Attalus: “They’ll crush each other in a last embrace” (III.vi.78). And even when the brothers do meet face to face in Act IV, except for a few direct exchanges, mostly couched in terse stichomythia, the true dramatic confrontation is not between them, but, this time (to balance the Jocasta-Eteocles debate of Act III), between Jocasta and Polynices, who once again do verbal battle. (In Racine’s longer original version, she was provided with reinforcements toward the end of the scene, namely, in the contributions of Antigone and Haemon, who attempt to outflank the beleaguered Polynices.) It is not difficult to account for the initially surprising fact that the only arguments these “enemy brothers” engage in are not with each other, but, individually, with their mother, their sister, their

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uncle, and (in Racine’s longer first version) their cousin Haemon. If, during the course of the play, Eteocles and Polynices never have an extended, or even a brief, conversation, let alone a whole scene together (their only interaction in the one scene in which they both appear being limited to a few terse, hostile exchanges), it is certainly attributable to their indistinguishability. For it is hard to imagine how a scene between them could sustain any interest: they may be at odds, but, as characters, they are even. (This will be elaborated on in the following section.) We must now make note of the fact that these brothers, in addition to never arguing with each other, never argue with themselves. In Racine’s later, greater creations, we will find that his most interesting characters tend to be those who, though in the grip of an overmastering passion, still struggle against it, and that it is they themselves who, understanding only too well its possibly disastrous consequences, offer the greatest resistance to their passion, desperately attempting to suppress it, ignore it, or reason themselves out of it. In The Fratricides, neither brother betrays the slightest ambivalence, self-doubt, or guilt; nor do they show any regard for — or even awareness of — consequences. This explains why neither brother is granted even a brief soliloquy: in attempting to commune with himself, he would have nothing to say. And if neither appears conflicted, they certainly give no signs of being tormented, as are, for example, Agamemnon (in Iphigenia), the three principals in Bajazet, Phaedra, and even Athaliah. (The whole dramatic structure of Andromache is based on the agonized ambivalence of all four protagonists.)

vii Although the brothers never appear onstage together until Act IV, and then only to engage in that brief verbal skirmish, we have ample opportunity to hear them express their diametrically opposed views, as they are forced to explain themselves to Jocasta, their sharptongued and unrelenting assailant. But those views are only apparently opposed, or, rather, they are only apparently views. In truth, they are synthetic, having no organic connection to the brothers’

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personalities (which, as we have seen, are indistinguishable). As with Antigone’s respective attitude toward her two brothers, the opposing ideologies they profess are the result of a situational distinction. Eteocles still occupies the throne of Thebes, having succeeded in winning the support of the people, who, not disposed to fly to ills they know not of, have chosen to retain him as their king and to banish Polynices. Thus, if Polynices assumes the posture of an autocrat, and Eteocles that of a democrat, it is because they have no choice: Eteocles’ only justification for not relinquishing the throne is that he is obeying the will of the people, whereas Polynices’ argument must rest on claims of “blood,” that is, on his hereditary right to the throne, or, at least, to his share of the throne, as ordained by the dying Oedipus. He must vehemently dismiss the will of the people as immaterial, just as his brother must ignore the prerogatives of birth and blood, under color of serving the commonweal. There is nothing in the inherent character of either brother (partially a result of their “having no character at all” [to adapt a phrase from Pope], of their being, after all, rather sketchily drawn, compared with Jocasta, Antigone, or Creon) that would make us believe that, if their positions were reversed and Polynices had ascended the throne first, their political stances would not be reversed as well.

viii It is remarkable that, in the course of Jocasta’s several lengthy discussions with her sons, in which she resorts to such manifold arguments and adopts such diverse strategies in her attempts to placate their furious hatred, it never occurs to her to mention something that she might reasonably expect would defuse, or at least divert, their fury, namely, that their uncle, Creon, is not to be trusted, that he has been fomenting that fury — that, in fact, his hidden agenda has been to destroy both brothers and claim the throne for himself. As early as Act I, Jocasta accuses him of harboring such intentions: Since, at their death, you’ll wield the sovereign power That right of birth accords you from that hour,

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The precious chance that bond of blood bestows Makes you find in my sons your greatest foes (I.v.41–44) It might be regarded as a dramaturgical fault that neither Jocasta nor Antigone, who is present when her mother levels the above accusation and who is also convinced of her uncle’s double-dealing (she refers to Creon as a traitor as soon as he has exited), thinks to warn Eteocles, for whom Creon is a trusted confidant and advisor, of his treachery. But we may well wonder whether, after all, such a disclosure would have any effect on either brother, since Creon’s goal, to bring about the explosive collision of his two nephews, coincides exactly with their most heartfelt desire. Eteocles confesses that it is only in a final showdown that he will achieve the consummation of his life-defining obsession (his hatred for Polynices): “I should regret his ceding me the crown. . . . Indeed, I hope his hatred will not wane, / That mine, thus authorized, may have full rein” (IV.i.33, 37–38). Polynices admits that his goal, too, has been to engage in mortal combat with his brother: “Thus must we settle this inhuman war. / Yes, cruel one, that’s what I came here for. / I wished to challenge you directly, brother” (IV.iii.91–93). Eteocles responds by confirming his earlier avowal: “With joyful heart I welcome your design. / Creon can tell you how I’ve longed for this: / Keeping the throne is nothing to such bliss” (IV.iii.100 –102). And in his Act V récit, Creon describes the exultation with which both rush off, anticipating the long-desired confrontation, the culmination of their lifelong enmity: You saw, madame, the furious intent With which the princes left, on carnage bent; With equal eagerness you saw them run, And never did their hearts so beat as one. (V.iii.34 –37) And, just as Creon’s goal cannot be achieved unless both his nephews are destroyed (thus paving his way to the throne), so, for the brothers, nothing short of mutual destruction will answer their

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most profound needs. For, not only is each brother’s existence made meaningless by the existence of the other, but each one’s existence would also be meaningless without the other, since their hatred, which provided them with a factitious raison d’être, would be deprived of its object. In that light, we can read Eteocles’ earlier speculation about their hatred (“ ’Twas with us from the cradle, and — who can tell? —  / May follow us into the tomb as well” [IV.i.23 –24]) as, rather, a hope. Jocasta, in one of the play’s most poignant couplets (addressed to Eteocles), gives potent expression to the pitifully stunted and sterile existence her sons lead: “O Gods! is loving him [Polynices] a task more trying / Than hating life and being bent on dying?” (III.iv.25 –26).

ix Bernard Weinberg argues that the pattern produced in the first four acts by the unavailing attempts to placate the brothers undermines the drama: “The sense of pattern becomes stronger as the fourth attempt follows upon the other three and since there is no reason why the fourth should be any more successful than the others . . . there is no suspense about the outcome” (Weinberg, 18). While there is some sense of repetitiveness in the pattern produced by the four confrontations that form the centerpieces of each of the first four acts (much the same can be said about Bajazet’s alternating encounters with Roxane and Atalide), these encounters, taken together, offer a grand, a vast, unfolding of Racine’s central theme (central to most of his other plays as well): the absolute dominion of the personality. Over the course of four acts, Jocasta’s arguments (many of which Racine borrowed from his models) range widely over the rhetorical-logical gamut; in the end, however, all her powers of ratiocination prove too weak to oppose the juggernaut that is her sons’ monomania. In this epic battle that Racine stages between passion and reason, reason is like David without a slingshot. But it is possible that the very futility of these recurrent attempts at reconciliation, by convincing the audience that the only possible issue of the brothers’ antipathy will be a final Armageddon (which

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Creon’s insidious machinations, revealed to the audience in Act III, render even more certain), engenders a heightened suspense, as the audience’s frustrated expectations are transformed into an eager anticipation of the inevitable outcome and a piqued curiosity about when and how it will transpire.

x More than one critic has perceived another major structural fault in this play: the inconsequence and inconsequentiality of Act V. Such is Brody’s view: “For all practical purposes everything of importance has been said and done by the end of Act IV, and the final act is, at best, a superfluous and unstable appendage” (Brody, 186). In addressing this criticism, one must first take note that Act  V clearly breaks down into two discrete halves, the first comprising Antigone’s elegiac stanzas, Olympia’s report of Eteocles’ death, and Creon’s lengthy récit (which, taken together, apprise us of the deaths of Jocasta, Eteocles, Haemon, and Polynices), the second comprising Creon’s avowal of love for Antigone and his proposal that she share the throne with him, his premature exulting at the supposed success of his suit and of his political ambitions, the report of Antigone’s suicide, and Creon’s final despairing monologue. It is the first part that is often charged with being inconsequential, the second, with being inconsequent. Far from being superfluous, the first half of Act V contains the thematic climax of the play, the inevitable but nonetheless dramatic resolution of its central concern (the mutual hatred of “les frères ennemis”), a closure as satisfying to the audience as it is to the two antagonists. For four acts the brothers have been circling around each other, keeping their distance, not exchanging blows; now the stage is set for what is in effect their only, their true, confrontation. Although taking place offstage, between Acts IV and V, it is stirringly recounted by Creon in the third scene of Act  V. This encounter, being a nearly wordless one (Polynices responds to Haemon’s death with an oath to avenge him, and later spews out some brief gloating taunts over his moribund brother, which prove to be

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the last words he ever utters), is purified of politics, disencumbered of the irrelevant ideologies that the brothers have paraded throughout the play; here, the real cause of their enmity, pure hatred, is exposed in its most distilled form. Here is enacted, in the form of a mano a mano combat, the clash of unbridled, identical — but all the more murderous — passions (as opposed to the battles of reason versus passion featured in the preceding four acts). The vividness, immediacy, and suspense of Creon’s récit; the storytelling skill he displays; and the sheer length of the narrative (seventy-five lines, interrupted once by Antigone’s one-line expression of dismay) ensure that the denouement will be as fulfilling as the suspense has been long. While suggested by Euripides’ The Phoenician Women, the symmetry of the final outcome plays perfectly into Racine’s grand scheme, as prefigured in the play’s title, which at once defines the brothers and makes no distinction between them. The reciprocal slaughter of Eteocles and Polynices is, after all, the only outcome appropriate for these mutual clones. Since neither brother is allowed to endear himself to the audience or to occupy the moral high ground (in other words, they manage to be equally unsympathetic — certainly not equally sympathetic), the triumph of one over the other would seem arbitrary, would, indeed, be jarring; conversely, were one brother “good” and the other “villainous” (as is the case, to a lesser or greater extent, with the brothers in Mithridates and Britannicus), the resolution Racine offers, the double fratricide, would seem anomalous and unsatisfying.

xi While on the subject of Creon’s circumstantial account of the brothers’ confrontation, I would like to make a few remarks about the convention of the récit, the climactic narrative of certain events that “[have] to take place offstage given the strictures against presenting violence in front of the spectators” (Tobin, 33). (Among Racine’s later plays, there are several other lengthy and noteworthy récits: Britannicus ends with a very atmospheric, suspenseful, and poignant one, Iphigenia with a gripping and, at its conclusion, poetically

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effulgent one; and Theramenes’ account of the death of Hippolytus in Phaedra is the most extravagantly horrific, certainly the most famous, of all.) There seems to be a general and unquestioning assumption that the récit is an unfortunate convention, a faute de mieux compromise that mars the drama, which we could wish had been resolved otherwise. Tobin cites Richard Parish (Parish, Racine: The Limits of Tragedy, 109), whose flippant remark would seem to confirm this attitude: “The audience [for The  Fratricides] finishes up by feeling that if it was also on the ramparts it might be having a better time” (Tobin, 33). But would it? The staged battle scenes stipulated by Shakespeare certainly do not maintain the dramatic heights of the rest of whichever play calls for them, whether those battles are represented within the confines of the proscenium arch or spread across the expanses of a widescreen film adaptation. Were we actually to witness the sequence of events described by Creon, climaxing in the felling of Eteocles and his subsequent mortal thrust at Polynices, could such a spectacle be staged in any way that would not appear feeble, if not risible? How could such a scene, however artfully directed and acted, measure up to Racine’s (that is, Creon’s) thrilling description of it? His grief made him more furious as he fought. And soon gave him the advantage that he sought; The King, pierced through his armor, mortally, Fell in his blood, conceding victory. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . With haughty stride then, having had his say, He approached the King where in the dust he lay; He reached his hand out to disarm his brother. The King, though seeming dead, observed the other: He watched, he waited, while, not fully freed, His soul was poised for some momentous deed. Revenge he was on fire to realize, And this desire delayed his final sighs. He clung to life, but hid its signs with care, Which for the victor proved a fatal snare. And in that moment, when this monster tried

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To wrest from him the sword clutched at his side, He stabbed him to the heart; rapt with delight, His soul, having achieved this stroke, took flight. Then Polynices, with a cry, fell dead; His soul, with fury fraught, to Hades fled. (V.iii.74 –77, 90 –105) Delivered with mesmeric conviction by a fine actor, such lines should produce just the frisson that an enacted version of this confrontation would fail to produce. And how much greater an advantage must the reader derive from Racine’s carefully structured, suspenseful narrative over what he could experience from a set of stage directions, however detailed?

xii Creon’s climactic récit having been delivered midway through the last act (like Theramenes’ in Phaedra, but unlike those in Britannicus and Iphigenia, which effectively close those plays), we are left with the disjunct second half of Act V, whose alleged faultiness (its inconsequence) is more difficult to dismiss than that of the first half. Just as Racine swept aside the most salient antecedent elements of the Oedipus myth and ignored the larger context of the EteoclesPolynices dispute (the campaign of the Seven Against Thebes, treated in Aeschylus’s play of that name), so, at the end of the play, he dispenses with the most famous later aspect of the myth, the conflict between Antigone and Creon, arising from her disobeying her uncle’s decree not to give a proper burial to Polynices, which is the subject of Sophocles’ Antigone (and Jean Anouilh’s as well). He nonetheless seems to have felt the need to round out the saga, and to do so he takes his cue from the oracle, whose pronouncement Olympia reports in Act II: Thebans, thus the immortal Gods ordain: If from these endless wars you would be free,

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The last blood of your royal dynasty Must, by a deadly sacrifice, the earth bestain. (II.ii.7–10) But, in keeping with his freeing “the saga of Thebes” (as the original main title translates) from its mythological moorings and his depoliticization of the dynastic struggle between “the enemy brothers” (as the original subtitle translates), he deliberately ignores the first half of the oracle (lines 7– 8). By the end of the play, everyone (characters and audience alike) has lost sight of the purpose of complying with the oracle’s conditions, of spilling the (ambiguously) stipulated blood — namely, the salvation of Thebes. At the conclusion of Racine’s other plays, one has a clear picture of the political situation, whether that involves the continuance of the status quo (Britannicus, Phaedra), the instauration of a regime temporarily threatened (Bajazet), or the inauguration of a new regime (Andromache, Mithridates, Athaliah). In Racine’s version of the “saga of Thebes,” the fate of that city is not only left unresolved, it no longer holds any interest for us. Although the “blood of your royal dynasty” has been shed to the last drop (assuming Creon’s death or imminent demise), the prospect of “these endless wars” being over seems rather dim, given that, with no lawful pretenders to the throne of Thebes left alive, it is “up for grabs.” But Racine has effectively shifted the focus away from the first half of the oracle to the second (lines 9 –10).

xiii In order for the playwright to ensure the fulfillment of the terms laid down by the oracle and thereby provide some closure, he must manipulate his plot and his characters in such a way as to effectuate — and justify — the removal of the only two representatives of the royal line of Thebes who are still alive: Antigone and Creon. The other four who have already perished met their death as a direct result of their respective passions. In Act  III, we learn

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that Meneceus (who never appears onstage), “by his great love of country nobly led” (III.iv.14), has taken his own life, believing that by doing so he will bring peace to Thebes. At the end of Act IV, Jocasta, having realized that her life passion (as it is portrayed in this play) — her all-consuming love for her two sons — is about to be deprived of its objects, rushes off with the avowed intention of killing herself (“And I, / My cruel sons, will teach you how to die” [IV. iii.218 –19]); and at the beginning of Act V, Antigone lets us know that her mother has proved as good as her word (“Unfortunate Princess . . . Your mother has just died in your embrace” [V.i.1–2]). Shortly afterward, in Creon’s climactic narrative, we also learn of the death of Haemon, Creon’s other son. It was in obedience to the urgent pleading of Antigone, the great passion of his life (earlier, he had confessed “how oft I’d have cut short a life so drear” [II.i.26], had he been deprived of her love), that he threw himself between the battling brothers, which resulted in his being struck down by a stray blow from Eteocles. Hard upon this follows Creon’s report of the mutual slaughter of the two brothers. As Antigone declares to Creon: “Of all our line, there’s now left but we two; / And would to heaven it were only you” (V.iii.112 –13). Even before learning of the death of Polynices (Olympia’s premature account of the outcome of the brothers’ combat having led Antigone to believe that only Eteocles had been killed), she had exclaimed: “My grief ’s so great, and yet I have not died!” (V.iii.63). Once the full extent of her bereavement (the loss of her father, her mother, her two brothers, and her beloved Haemon) smites her, she too, having nothing left to live for, resolves to die, and, minutes after her exit, we learn from Olympia that she has stabbed herself with the same knife her mother used to put an end to her grief. That leaves only Creon, and to account for his being bereft of all desire to live, Racine resorts to the invention of Creon’s deep love for Antigone, thus allowing his death to follow as a consequence of hers. Having just apprised Antigone of the death of her lover and of both her brothers, Creon (with characteristic callousness and a deplorable lack of tact) deems it the ideal moment to sue for her hand, asserting that “the greatest glory high rank can provide / Is offering it [the crown] to such a lovely bride” (V.iii.136 –37). We

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need to credit the sincerity of Creon’s amorous protestations in order to believe that when he learns of Antigone’s suicide his world could be shattered and he could lose all interest in the throne he has so long and so ruthlessly schemed to win. This sudden manifestation of an overriding passion for his niece seems as improbable as it has been inadequately prepared for. Our first hint of it — perhaps a too subtle one — was Antigone’s veiled accusation: “[Your] love of country hides a love more real. / That hidden flame I know and I despise, / And you will keep it hidden if you’re wise” (I.v.95 –97); and Creon’s parting retort to Antigone (“My kindness prompts your scorn; thus, in disgrace, / To my more fortunate son I shall yield place” [I.v.100 –101]), tellingly tinged with an unrequited lover’s bitterness and jealousy, may have helped us to part the veil and catch a momentary glimpse, but we let it drop again immediately, our attention diverted to the urgent colloquy between Jocasta and Antigone that follows hard upon Creon’s exit. And we have forgotten all about Creon’s amorous inclination (if we ever took notice of it in the first place) by the time we are vouchsafed another hint of it (the last we will hear of it until the middle of Act V), by way of his aside that opens the last scene of Act III (and, even here, we must infer the love from the jealousy): But we’ll soon see if proud Antigone Disdains the throne as much as she does me, And if, when heav’n has placed me on that throne, My son can steal her from me for his own. (III.vi.6 –9) But there is an underlying appropriateness, even a grim fatality, about Creon’s love, viewed in the larger context of the Oedipus mythos. For here, in the person of Creon, Racine recapitulates (somewhat belatedly) the two most striking elements of the Oedipus saga: parricide (from the Latin for “kin killer”) and incest. As to the latter, just as Jocasta was drawn (albeit unknowingly) into an incestuous relation with her son Oedipus, so her brother, Creon (quite knowingly) harbors incestuous feelings for his sister’s daughter. And these feelings are incestuous in a double sense, for not

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only is Antigone his niece, but, as the beloved and the intended of his son Haemon, she is also, in effect, his future daughter-in-law. We must concede, then, that from a mythological — if not from a psychological — point of view, the introduction of Creon’s love for Antigone does not appear completely gratuitous. And as to parricide, just as Oedipus killed his own father, Laius, so Creon has killed (in the sense of being responsible for their deaths) his two sons. He acknowledges to Attalus that he was instrumental in causing Meneceus’s death: Today I broke the truce: an altercation, Provoked by me, became a confrontation: Fighting flared up, and lo! my desperate son Lay dead, quelling the combat I’d begun. (III.vi.55 –58) And we can confidently deem that Creon, having machinated the final combat between Eteocles and Polynices, in which Haemon, attempting to intervene, loses his life, is guilty of his death as well. Creon himself acknowledges that twofold guilt in his final monologue (“My own sons, sacrificed so callously / In trying to attain the monarchy” [V.fin.sc.31]), including, in addition, among the victims of his ruthless ambition Polynices, Eteocles, and Jocasta. So that of Creon’s two overmastering passions, the first, his lust for power, succeeds in destroying all that is held dear by the object of the second, his love for Antigone, and, as a consequence, destroys Antigone, as well. Thus, however creaky the machinery Racine sets in motion to dispose of the last remaining principal in the saga of Oedipus’s family, the death of Creon, victim of his own passions (as all Racine’s greatest creations will be) and last avatar of those particularly Oedipal excesses of incest and parricide, provides a fitting, if not wholly satisfactory, conclusion to Racine’s treatment of “the most tragic subject of antiquity” (as he designates it in his preface). But the far more significant “conclusion” that The Fratricides provides is that its playwright is determined to examine unblenchingly “all that’s most dark and dire of love and hate” (IV.i.28). And, in the ten remaining

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tragedies that he was to produce, he would prove so expert at performing such examinations that, as we read, see, or study his plays, we are often moved to ask, with Jocasta (in her invocation to the Sun), “Can you illume such black iniquity, / And see, unhorrified, the things we see?” (I.i.25 –26).

racine’s dedication

To His Grace, the Duc de Saint-Aignan, Peer of France Your Grace, I present to you a work which is perhaps noteworthy only for the honor of having pleased you. But in truth that honor is something so important to me that if my play had offered me no other benefit, I would be able to say that its success had surpassed my hopes. And what could I have hoped for more glorious than the approbation of one who knows how to estimate so justly the value of things, and who is himself the admiration of the whole world? Thus, your Grace, if La Thébaïde has received some fair amount of praise, it is indubitably because none have dared contradict the judgment you have given in its favor; and it seems as if you may have bestowed on it the same gift of pleasing that distinguishes all your actions. I hope that, though it is now stripped of the ornamental trappings of the stage, you will not cease to look favorably upon my play. If so, whatever enemies it may have, I need have no fears on its behalf, since it will be assured of having a Protector whom no enemy ranks have ever succeeded in overthrowing. It is well known, your Grace, that if you have a perfect knowledge of all that is beautiful, you champion great works of art with a courage no less fervent, and that in you are united both these excellent qualities, each of which, separately, has distinguished so many great men. But I ought to be cautious, lest my praises prove as tiresome to you as yours have proved advantageous to me: and all the more so, since

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I would only be telling you things that are well known to all the world, and that you alone wish not to know. Let it suffice, then, that you permit me to tell you, with profound respect, that I am, Your Grace, Your very humble and very obedient servant, Racine.

racine’s preface

The reader will permit me to beg a little more indulgence for this play than for the others that follow it. I was quite young when I wrote it. Some verses that I had produced at that time fell by chance into the hands of certain persons of good taste. They exhorted me to write a tragedy and proposed as its subject the Saga of Thebes. This subject had been treated earlier by Rotrou under the title of Antigone.1 But he had the brothers die at the beginning of the third act. The rest of the play was in effect the beginning of a new tragedy, in which entirely new interests were introduced. And thus he had combined in a single play two different actions, one making use of the material of Euripides’ The Phoenicians, the other, that of Sophocles’ Antigone.2  I believe that this twofold action may have harmed the play, which was otherwise replete with many beautiful passages. I modeled my play more closely on The Phoenicians of Euripides. As for the version of La Thébaïde that appears in Seneca, I am rather of the opinion of Heinsius, and hold, with him, that not only is it not a play of Seneca’s, but that, rather, it is the work of a rhetorician, who had no understanding of what a tragedy should be. The catastrophe of my play is perhaps a bit too bloody. Indeed, there is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end. But, then, that is the Saga of Thebes — which is to say, the most tragic subject of antiquity.3 Love, which ordinarily plays such a large part in tragedy, plays almost none here. And I suspect I would not allow it a greater one if I had it to do over again. For it would require either that one of

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the brothers be in love, or that they both be. And how would it look to give them any interests other than that of the famous hatred that entirely preoccupies both of them? Or else, one would have to relegate the love interest to one of the secondary characters, as I have done. And then that passion, which becomes irrelevant to the subject, can only produce the most mediocre effects. In a word, I am persuaded that the tenderness or the jealousy of lovers could find no place amid the incest, the parricides, and all the other horrors that make up the history of Oedipus and of his unfortunate family.4

notes 1. Jean de Rotrou (1609 –1650), an intermittently brilliant playwright of the French neoclassical school, whose work was quite influential on Racine. His Antigone was first staged in 1637. 2. Much the same criticism has been leveled at The Fratricides (see Section X of my Discussion). In Rotrou’s play, however, although the action of the play may be twofold, the playwright allots to each phase of the action two and a half acts in which to develop and resolve its conflicts, whereas Racine, who keeps his brothers alive through Act IV and devotes the first half of Act V to reportage about their final confrontation, is left with only half an act to develop and resolve the “entirely new interests” that he introduces (Creon’s love for Antigone and his proposal that she should share the throne with him) — too little time for Creon’s ardent avowals and protestations, and his sudden frenzied grief over the loss of Antigone, to seem at all convincing. 3. Racine begins his preface to Iphigenia with another sweeping pronouncement: “There is nothing more famous among the poets than the sacrifice of Iphigenia.” 4. See note 1 for Act II for some of my own strictures concerning the Antigone–Haemon love interest. And here, Racine himself as good as acknowledges that his first play would undoubtedly have been improved if he had allowed love to play no part. (It would not be until Racine’s last play, the “sacred drama” Athaliah, that he would entirely eliminate the love interest.) Although Racine’s remarks seem to disregard it, Creon’s love for his niece, however inadequately established and developed (see note 2 above), is not quite “irrelevant to the subject,” having some tenuous thematic connection to “the history of Oedipus and of his unfortunate family” (as I point out in Section XIII of my Discussion).

The Fratricides

1664

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cast of characters eteocles, king of Thebes polynices, brother of Eteocles jocasta, mother of these two princes and of Antigone antigone, sister of Eteocles and Polynices creon, uncle of the princes and the princess haemon, son of Creon, in love with Antigone olympia, confidant of Jocasta attalus, confidant of Creon A soldier in Polynices’ army Guards The scene is at Thebes, in a chamber of the royal palace.

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act i Scene i [jocasta, olympia] jocasta They’ve left, Olympia?1 — Ah! these mortal woes! I’ll pay with weeping for one hour’s repose! Six months my open eyes have stared through tears, And does sleep close them just when danger nears? Would that the hand of death might seal them tight And hide a crime so heinous from my sight! — Have they engaged? olympia            From the high gate I espied Battalions ranged, well armed, on either side; All round I saw the steel swords scintillate; To warn my queen, I left the lofty gate. I spied Eteocles, broad blade in hand; He marched in front, and firing up his band, He showed the bravest how to face the foe. jocasta They’re bent on butchering themselves, I know. Go, warn the Princess, send her here to me; I’ll wait. — Just heav’n, sustain my frailty! We must pursue these heartless foes and try To separate them or, at their hands, die. We’ve come, alas! to this most hateful day, Mere dread of which has filled me with dismay!2 In vain the prayers I’ve said, the tears I’ve cried: The wrath of Fate had to be satisfied.

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O Sun, whose bright rays bathe the world in light,3 Would that you’d left it in profoundest night! Can you illume such black iniquity, And see, unhorrified, the things we see? But they no longer shock you: Laius’ race,4 Alas! has made these horrors commonplace. You view my sons’ crimes and are not aghast, Since by their parents’ crimes they’re far surpassed. You’re not astonished at their wicked ways, Or at the murderous fury each displays: Knowing they’re tainted with incestuous blood, You’d only be astonished were they good.5

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Scene ii [jocasta, antigone, olympia] jocasta My child, you’ve heard about our desperate plight? antigone I’m told my furious brothers mean to fight. jocasta Come, dear Antigone, let’s try to stay Their murderous hands, uplifted for the fray. Let’s make them see what they should hold most dear; We’ll see if our appeals they’ll deign to hear, Or if they’ll dare — so angry have they grown —  To spill our blood that they may shed their own. antigone It’s over now: the King himself is here.

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Scene iii [jocasta, antigone, eteocles, olympia] jocasta Olympia, hold me up: I’m faint with fear. eteocles Madame, what is the matter? And what woes . . . ? jocasta My son, what are those bloodstains on your clothes? Who’s wounded? Is it you? Is it your brother? eteocles It’s neither my blood nor is it his, mother. No: Polynices stays well out of sight; He cowers in his camp and will not fight. ’Twas just an Argive band, who recklessly Tried, at our gates, to oppose my troops’ sortie:6 I made them bite the dust — foolhardy crew! — 7 And it’s their blood that has so frightened you.

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jocasta But to what sudden fury did you yield? What urged you, all at once, to take the field? eteocles Madame, it was high time that I did so; My glory suffered by my lying low.8 The people, fearing famine’s imminence, Have been complaining of my indolence; Regretting that they gave the throne to me,9 They claim I wear my crown unworthily. They must be satisfied; and, come what may, Thebes will not be held hostage one more day.

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My soldiers gone, she’ll be unoccupied; Who shall prevail, I leave her to decide. I’ve troops enough to take the field and fight; And if fair fortune vindicates my right, Proud Polynices and his haughty band Will leave Thebes free or perish by my hand. jocasta O heav’ns! you’d let such blood defile your arms?10 The kingly crown, then, holds for you such charms? If but by fratricide it can be won, At such a price you’d wish to reign, my son? You can, though, if by honor you’d be led, Bring peace to Thebes without blood being shed, And, mastering your anger and your pride, Placate your brother and reign at his side.

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eteocles You call it reigning, then, to share my throne, And weakly cede what justice makes my own? jocasta You know, my son, that blood — and justice too —  Give him the right to reign as well as you. Oedipus, when his destined end drew near, Ordained you each should reign, by turns, one year, And, having but one realm to give away, He wished you alternately to hold sway. To these conditions you deigned to agree. You were called first to reign by destiny; You took the throne, nor did he once complain: And you’d deny him now his chance to reign?11 eteocles His title to the throne I don’t admit: Thebes weighed that scheme but never sanctioned it;

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And when he claimed the kingly eminence, ’Twas Thebes, not I, madame, that drove him hence. His brutal power has she less cause to fear, Having endured it now for half a year? You think she’d welcome such a heartless lord, Who threatens her with famine and the sword; Accept as king this slave of Mycenae, Who hates the Theban people heartily And abjectly submits to Argos’ king,12 Bound to our proud foes by a wedding ring? When that same king gave him his child to wed, He hoped to see Thebes fall amongst her dead.13 No love lit up their shameful wedding night; Sheer hatred set the wedding torch alight. Thebes crowned me king to avoid that tyrant’s chains; She hopes I’ll put an end to all her pains: If I have broken faith, she is to blame;14 I am her slave, her king only in name. jocasta Ungrateful, savage heart, why not admit: Your sole concern’s the crown and keeping it. But no, I’m wrong: the throne is not your goal; It’s crime alone that gratifies your soul.15 Well then, since your lust must be satisfied, I offer you a double parricide: Go, shed your brother’s blood; if you crave more, Go on to shed your mother’s, I implore.16 Then you will have no foes left to subdue, No challenging objectives to pursue, No uncommitted crimes enticing you; And with no envious rival for the throne, You’ll reign, the greatest criminal, alone. eteocles Well, I shall have to satisfy you, mother:17

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I must yield up the throne and crown my brother; I must, to second your unjust design, Bow down before the throne that once was mine; To maximize your happiness today, To his mad rage I must become a prey. My death must then . . . jocasta            Ah heavens! you’re so stern! What’s hidden in my heart you’ve yet to learn! I do not wish to wrest your crown away: Continue as our king, my son, I pray. But if you’ve pity for my misery, If you have filial feelings left for me, If honor holds some meaning in your heart, Then in your sovereignty let him take part. It’s but an empty honor he’ll procure;18 Your reign will thus be sweeter, more secure. Your people, struck by so sublime a deed, Will want no other ruler to succeed;19 Such virtue, far from weakening your right, Will make you great and noble in their sight. But if you’re stubborn and oppose my views, If peace at such a price you still refuse, If you’re o’ermastered by the lust for power, At least console me with one peaceful hour; Concede this favor to your weeping mother. Meanwhile, my son, I’ll go to see your brother: Perhaps he’ll prove less pitiless than you; If not, at least I’ll bid my last adieu. Let me leave now, with no more argument; I’ll go alone to seek him in his tent. I hope my sighs will move him when I appear. eteocles Madame, you’ll see him without leaving here; If you think meeting him has such sweet charms,

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Let him agree, and we’ll lay down our arms. Right now your wishes shall be granted you: Here in this palace hold your interview. I’ll go still further; and that you may see He’s wrong to accuse me of base treachery, And that I’m not a tyrant to be hated, By Gods and men let me be vindicated. If they would crown him king, I will obey; But he must yield, if they drive him away. I shall exert no influence, I swear: Whom Thebes would have as king, let her declare.20

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Scene iv [jocasta, eteocles, antigone, creon, olympia] creon All’s in disorder, Sire, at your sortie: Thebes, fearing your demise, weeps bitterly. Horror and dread run rampant at this hour; Behind the walls the people quake and cower. eteocles Without delay I’ll calm these vain alarms. Madame, I must rejoin my men-at-arms; Meanwhile you can accomplish what you want: See Polynices; further an entente. Creon, the Queen rules here while I’m away; Make certain, please, that one and all obey; I wish to leave Meneceus, your son, To assist her and to see her bidding’s done. The honor and the courage he displays Will still the objections that our foes may raise: His virtue will provide their surety. Command him, madame. [to Creon] And you, come with me.

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creon What? Sire . . . eteocles         Creon, my mind’s made up, I say. creon And thus you abdicate your sovereign sway?21 eteocles Whether I do or not shouldn’t trouble you; Do as I bid; come, without more ado.22

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Scene v [jocasta, antigone, creon, olympia] creon Madame, how have you managed to incite Eteocles, the victor, to take flight? This counsel will lead to our ruination. jocasta This counsel will make certain Thebes’ salvation. creon What, madame? in the state we’re in, just when, Enforced by nearly seven thousand men, Fortune seems poised to grant all Thebes’ demands, The King lets slip the victory from his hands?23 jocasta Victory, Creon, is sometimes less than sweet: Shame and remorse oft turn it to defeat. When two armed brothers battle head to head, To let them do so is to wish them dead.

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How deal the victor a blacker injury, Than to allow him such a victory? creon Their wrath’s too great . . . jocasta              It can be mollified.

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creon Both wish to reign. jocasta          And so it shall betide. creon Madame, one cannot share imperial reign; It’s not a boon one cedes, then claims again. jocasta The interests of the State they’re furthering. creon The interests of the State demand one king, Who, governing his lands with constancy, Subdues his realm to his authority. When two kings rule in interrupted reign, Two tyrants, not two kings, is what we gain. With one decree oft challenging another, One brother’s work would void that of his brother; You’d see them plotting to retaliate, And every year they’d redesign the State. The more curtailed the reign that you impose, The more unchecked the ruler’s violence grows. By turns they’ll fill the people with dismay: Just like those torrents lasting but a day,

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The more constrained their course, the worse their wrath, Destroying everything within their path.24 jocasta Rather, by their ennobling deeds, we’d see Them vie for Thebes’s love and loyalty. Confess, though, Creon: you only complain As peace will render your ambitions vain, Secure my sons the throne you hoped to win, And loose the snare you planned to trap them in. Since, at their death, you’ll wield the sovereign power That right of birth accords you from that hour, The precious chance that bond of blood bestows Makes you find in my sons your greatest foes; And your ambition, envying their success, Inspires a hate for both you can’t suppress. Your dangerous counsels hold the King in thrall: You’re serving one so that they both may fall.25 creon I don’t feed on such fantasies, I fear. My reverence for the King is deep, sincere; And my ambition is to maintain the King Upon the throne you think I’m coveting. My sole concern is the monarch’s majesty; I hate his foes: that’s all my treachery, Believe me. But, from what I see, madame, Not everyone’s as treacherous as I am.26 jocasta They are my children; if I love his brother, I love the King as fiercely as the other. Let craven courtiers hound him with their hate; A mother’s nature is inviolate.

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antigone Your interests and our own here coincide: With some of the King’s foes you are allied. You are a father, Creon; I suppose You know your son must number ’mongst those foes. Haemon is Polynices’ staunchest friend.27

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creon I know it well, on that you may depend: The special place he holds I can’t ignore, But, madame, that just makes me hate him more; And in my righteous wrath I hope that you Are moved to hate him no less than I do.

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antigone After the valorous deeds that he has done, Your views will not be shared by everyone. creon I grant that, and it troubles me, it’s true, But I know what his treason bids me do; And all those brave exploits that you admire: They’re what provoke my hatred and my ire. Disgrace o’ertakes a traitor in due time; His bravest action is his gravest crime: His matchless guilt his matchless feats declare, For there’s no glory when no king is there. antigone Does nature’s voice evoke no empathy? creon The dearer that the criminal is to me, The more I must resent the injury.

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antigone But can a father’s rancor run so wild? You’re too vindictive. creon            And you are too mild. You shouldn’t take up a traitorous son’s defense.

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antigone It’s always right to champion innocence. creon I know what makes him guiltless in your eyes. antigone And why you hate him so, I realize.28 creon Love makes us see things in a different light.

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jocasta You take advantage of our present plight, Thinking you can’t be touched; but fear my ire: For you, Creon, such license will prove dire. antigone His heart is heedless of the common weal, And love of country hides a love more real. [to Creon] That hidden flame I know and I despise, And you will keep it hidden if you’re wise. creon I shall, indeed; and now I think I’ll go: My presence seems to irritate you so. My kindness prompts your scorn; thus, in disgrace,

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To my more fortunate son I shall yield place.29 The King requires me and I’m overdue. Bid Haemon and your brother come. Adieu. jocasta They’ll both come, wicked creature, and you’ll find They’ll thwart the insidious schemes you have in mind.

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Scene vi [jocasta, antigone, olympia] antigone This traitor’s insolence is unsurpassed! jocasta His haughty words will end in shame at last. Soon now, if heaven answers our petition, Peace will avenge us on his high ambition. But we must hurry, every hour is dear: Quickly, call Haemon and your brother here. The surest guarantees I shall provide: All their requirements shall be satisfied. O heav’n, if you are wearied by my woes, Toward peace, then, Polynices’ heart dispose, Second my sighs, give tongue to all my tears, Make eloquent my torments and my fears! antigone [lingering behind her mother] O heaven, mindful of an innocent flame, Send Haemon back to me, in pity’s name, Faithful as ever, and let me recover His precious love, when you send back my lover!

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act ii Scene i [antigone, haemon] haemon What? you’d absent yourself from me again After a year of loneliness and pain? And have you, madame, bid me meet you here Just to withhold from me a boon so dear?1 antigone Would you have me abandon my own brother, Or not go to the temple with my mother? Is this, then, Haemon, what you’d have me do: Give up the cause of peace to placate you? haemon Why need my bliss be thwarted or delayed? They can consult the Gods without our aid. Let my heart read your eyes for auguries And learn its fate from those fair deities. May I inquire of them, without being bold, If they shine sweetly on me as of old? Do they approve my amorous ardency? Do they regret they’ve used me cruelly? While we were painfully apart, did you Hope I’d remain as loving and as true? Did you fear that, afar, death’s hand might seize A lover doomed to perish at your knees? Ah! when one’s wounded by a face so fair, When a heart dares aspire to one so rare, How sweet those features are to gaze upon! But how one suffers, madame, when they’re gone! Each hour away from you seemed like a year; How oft I’d have cut short a life so drear,

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Had I not hoped that, till I could return, My absence proved the love with which I burn, And that the thought of my obedience Would speak on my behalf while I was hence, Convincing you, by my staying away, Just how much one must love, to thus obey.2 antigone Yes, I assumed that such a faithful heart Would suffer cruelly while we were apart; And if my sentiments must be made plain, I hoped, dear Haemon, that you’d feel such pain, That, being far from me, some bitterness Would make the dreary days seem to regress. But don’t complain: my heart was wishing you Nothing that, fraught with grief, it didn’t feel too. Especially since this war was first begun, And by your troops this land was overrun, O Gods! my heart’s had to endure such woes, Seeing its fondest friends the fiercest foes!3 A thousand horrors tore my insides out; Within our walls I saw them and without; A thousand blows assailed me in every fray; I suffered death a thousand times each day. haemon But have I not, in this calamity, Done just what my dear princess asked of me? I followed Polynices, as you bid: ’Twas at your absolute command I did. Thenceforth I was his friend, devout and true. I left my homeland — left my father, too, Drawing his anger down upon my head; But, worst of all, I left you when I fled! antigone Haemon, I know, and thank you gratefully:

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Serving my brother, you were serving me; Loving him then no less than I now do, The kindness shown him, I was touched by too. Since childhood we’ve grown fonder every day, And o’er his heart I’ve wielded sovereign sway; His every wish ’twas bliss to gratify; What grieved the brother made the sister sigh.4 If only he were still obedient, He’d love the peace on which my heart’s intent. Our shared misfortune would be mollified: He’d be here now, and you’d stay by my side. haemon This frightful war he hates to contemplate: I’ve seen him sigh, despondent and irate, When, to reclaim the scepter of his sire, He’s forced to adopt a course so cruel and dire. Let’s hope that heaven, pitying our woes, Will swiftly placate these fraternal foes. In their proud hearts may friendship once more reign, And in their sister’s heart let love remain! antigone Alas! that last task, I anticipate, Will be far easier than to quell their hate. I know them both, dear Haemon, and must own My brothers’ hearts are harder than my own. Sometimes heav’n works such miracles, though. Scene ii [antigone, haemon, olympia] antigone                      Well? Speak up: what do the oracles foretell? What must we do?

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olympia          Alas! antigone             What is their will? Does this mean war, Olympia? olympia               Ah! worse still! haemon What evil does their anger prophesy?

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olympia To judge of that, Prince, hear their stern reply:    Thebans, thus the immortal Gods ordain:    If from these endless wars you would be free,    The last blood of your royal dynasty   Must, by a deadly sacrifice, the earth bestain.5

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antigone O Gods, what has it done, this wretched race, That you would wipe it out without a trace? Not happy with the death of my dear sire, You must shed all our blood to slake your ire? haemon This sentence, madame, need not make you quail: ’Gainst such a fate your virtue will prevail. The Gods can recognize the innocent. antigone For my sake I don’t fear their vengeful bent. Upon my innocence I can’t rely: As Oedipus’s child I’m doomed to die. I await that death, await it undismayed;

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And if I must confess why I’m afraid, It is for you I fear, Haemon, for you: Our cursed blood contaminates you too; The wrath of heav’n will likewise mark you out For this ill-fated honor, I’ve no doubt, And make our Theban princes wish they’d sprung From mankind’s lowest, not its highest, rung.

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haemon Can one regret to play so brave a part? So noble a death inspires my valorous heart; From royal blood it’s glorious to be bred, Though, soon as it’s received, it must be shed.

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antigone You think, when we’ve committed some offense, Heav’n must avenge itself at your expense? A father and his children don’t suffice? Heav’n seeks out innocents to sacrifice? No, for our family’s crimes, it’s we must pay: Punish us, Gods, but spare the rest, I pray. My father, Haemon, murders you today; Perhaps, though, I’m your murderer more than he. Heav’n punishes you and your family For his crimes and for your being loved by me; Yes, for our ill-starred love you will have died, More than for incest or for patricide.6 haemon Our love ill starred, madame? No, that’s not fair! Is it a crime to love what’s rich and rare? And since you don’t take umbrage at my flame, In what way does it merit heaven’s blame? In my sighs who else shares an interest? Whether those sighs offend you, you know best. For them your judgment is omnipotent,

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To deem them criminal or innocent.7 Let heaven sentence me as it sees fit; To either doom I’ll happily submit: It’s glorious to die in my king’s cause, But more so still to die under your laws.8 What would I do with all my loved ones gone? Could I resign myself to living on? In vain the Gods would postpone my demise: What they wouldn’t do, my grief would realize. Perhaps, though, after all, there’s naught to fear; Let’s wait . . . — Your brother and the Queen are here.

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Scene iii [jocasta, polynices, antigone, haemon] polynices By heav’n, don’t hold me back, madame. It’s plain That all attempts to establish peace are vain. I hoped that heaven’s boundless equity Would take my side against his tyranny; That, weary of the killing and the gore, To each his rightful rank it would restore. But since for lawlessness heav’n takes a stand, And with base criminals works hand in hand, In a rebellious people should I trust, When heaven’s in the wrong, to do what’s just?9 Can I abide that rabble judging me, Who serve a proud usurper slavishly, And whom, craven and selfish as they are, He incites to mischief, even from afar? The populace don’t bow to reason’s sway: To their reproofs I’ve often fallen prey; And far from being glad that I’ve returned, They see a tyrant in the prince they spurned. Honor is something they cannot conceive:

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All men aspire to vengeance, they believe. The people’s hatred nothing can abate: When once they hate, they never cease to hate. jocasta But given the contempt, the fear, they’ve shown, And that Thebes dreads to see you mount the throne, Why, by such bloodshed, do you seek to reign Over this stubborn folk you woo in vain? polynices What! shall the people choose who wears the crown? As soon as they’re displeased, must he step down? Is it according to their love or hate That kings ascend the throne or abdicate? Let the mob love or loathe us at their choice; Blood sets us on the throne, not their blind voice:10 What blood bestows on them they mayn’t reject; A prince they cannot love they must respect. jocasta But as a tyrant you’ll be vilified.

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polynices For rightful kings that term is misapplied; That odious name my just claims obviate: Tyrants are not made by their subjects’ hate. It’s to Eteocles that term applies. jocasta He’s loved by all. polynices          Madame, they idolize A tyrant who through baseness would maintain The rank that force first helped him to attain; Now pride has rendered him, beyond recall,

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His brother’s tyrant and his people’s thrall. To reign alone, he reigns obediently, And lowers himself to make them all hate me. That they prefer a traitor is no surprise: They fear a master, but a slave they prize. But I’d betray a king’s true majesty If o’er my rights I gave them sovereignty. jocasta Discord and death, then, hold for you such charms? You’re restless, having just laid down your arms? Is there no way to stem, midst all our woe, The tears I shed, the blood you cause to flow? Can’t you take pity on a weeping mother? My daughter, if you can, restrain your brother: Some love for you this cruel one may still feel. antigone Ah! if his soul is deaf to your appeal, What can I hope from our past amity, Which absence has eroded gradually? No, from his memory I’ve been blotted out; Now shedding blood is all he cares about. Don’t seek in him that prince who, at one time, Showed such a noble horror of all crime, Whose soul was sweet and generous and true, Who cherished me and who respected you. From nature’s bonds he’s long since broken free: Now he despises you and disowns me; This ingrate, steeled by pride against our pleas, Takes us for strangers, nay, for enemies.11 polynices These charges wound my soul, nor are they true: Rather, it’s you who’ve changed, my sister, you; The base usurper has, with cunning art, Usurped the place I once held in your heart.12

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I know you still, though we’ve been kept apart, And I am still the same, whate’er I’ve done.

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antigone You love me just as I love you, cruel one? Then how can you ignore my plaintive sighs, And on my sorrows turn unseeing eyes? polynices But is this how you show your love for me, By putting forward such an unjust plea, Which robs me of my chance to be Thebes’ ruler? Gods! could Eteocles be any crueler? You’re taking that outrageous tyrant’s part. antigone No, it’s your interests that I have at heart! Don’t think these tears betoken treachery: They’re not conspiring with your enemy. That peace I seek would cause me grievous pain If it meant Polynices could not reign; The only favor I ask for, brother dear, Is that I might retain you longer here. If, for my sake, you could prolong your stay For a few days, we’d try to find some way That your ancestral rank could be restored, Without my brother falling ’neath your sword. So modest a request can you deny, Seeing your sister weep, your mother sigh? jocasta But what fears are still gnawing at your heart? Why with such haste, my son, must you depart? What? was the truce not meant to last all day? Must it end when it’s scarcely under way? Your brother lays his arms down, as you see;

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He wishes us to speak — you won’t agree. antigone Yes, unlike you, who will not yield, your brother Seemed softened by the weeping of his mother; Today our tears disarmed his enmity.13 You call him cruel, but you’re more cruel than he. haemon Sire, you can let the Queen and the Princess Pursue this course without uneasiness: Grant their desire the whole day if they need; Let’s see if their design cannot succeed. Don’t let your brother claim the right to say That, but for you, we’d have made peace today. Your sister and your mother will be pleased, Your honor satisfied, your conscience eased. — But here’s some soldier. What can this betoken?

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Scene iv [jocasta, polynices, antigone, haemon, a soldier] a soldier They’re up in arms, Sire, and the truce is broken.14 Creon and Thebes, heeding their king’s decree, Attack your troops, and prove their perfidy. Hippomedon bravely strives, while you’re away,15 To countervail their force as best he may. He bid me hasten here to let you know. polynices The traitors! Quickly, Haemon: we must go. [to the Queen] That’s how he keeps his word! But since he’d fight, Then, madame, I must answer might with might.

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jocasta Stay, Polynices . . . ! But he doesn’t hear: To neither shouts nor sighs he lends an ear. Run, stop this madman, child, I beg of you; At least, bid Haemon separate these two. I’m helpless now; I’d fly to him, but I, Alas! have only strength enough to die.

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act iii Scene i [jocasta, olympia] jocasta Olympia, go: see what dread scenes transpire; See if some obstacle has curbed their ire, Or if some plea has moved them to relent. They say Meneceus left with that intent. olympia I don’t know what his courage may devise: Heroic ardor blazed forth from his eyes. But, madame, keep your hope unwavering.

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jocasta Make haste; then come and tell me everything: Swiftly resolve my sad uncertainty. olympia I leave you here alone reluctantly. jocasta Go: I’d prefer to be alone now, please, If I can be, midst all these miseries! Scene ii [jocasta, alone] jocasta Will my unending torments ne’er be eased? Will heaven’s fury never be appeased? Is cruel, recurring death, then, heaven’s doom,

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Without the blest oblivion of the tomb? Your harshness, heav’n, I’d have no cause to dread, If your bolts merely struck the guilty dead! How infinite your wrath, how unforgiving, When those you punish have to go on living! Since that ill-fated day I was undone, When I learned I had married my own son, The least of my heart’s torments, you know well, Is worse than what the damned endure in hell. But why, O Gods, direct your wrath at me, For crimes committed all unwittingly? I knew him not, this ill-starred son I wed; ’Twas you who led him to my arms, my bed. You cruelly guided me to the abyss. A splendid sample of our Gods’ justice, this! They lead us to the brink of crime, inflame us To perpetrate misdeeds, and then they blame us! Do they derive such pleasure from our crimes, From rendering us misfortune’s paradigms? Can they not seek out, when their anger ignites, Criminals whom the thought of crime delights?1

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Scene iii [jocasta, antigone] jocasta Well, is it done? Has one son or the other, With noble fervor, murdered his own brother?2 Speak, daughter: is one son a fratricide? antigone The oracle’s fulfilled, heav’n’s satisfied. jocasta What do you mean? Are both my sons, then, dead?

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antigone Another blood, madame, had to be shed In order to restore peace to the State And render your tormented soul sedate, Blood worthy of the kings from whom it flows: A hero gave his life to end our woes. I ran to placate Haemon and my brother,3 But by the time I left, they’d vanished, mother. They could not hear my doleful cries; in vain I screamed their names to call them back again: They’d rushed off to rejoin the bloody fray; To the high ramparts I then made my way, Whence all the people observed the impending fight, Horror-struck and, like me, frozen with fright. Just at that fatal hour strode up apace4 Our youngest prince, pride of our realm, our race: It was Meneceus, Haemon’s worthy brother, Creon his sire — he well deserved another! Showing his patriotic fervor, he, ’Twixt the two camps, forged forward fearlessly, And making Greeks and Thebans both pay heed, Desist, he said, desist, inhuman breed! Cowed by this outburst, no one dared protest; The soldiers, by this startling scene impressed, Suspended their black rage at once, and then The Prince pursued his discourse once again: Learn now, he told them, the decree of Fate, Whereby you’ll see your torments terminate. I am the last blood from your kings descended, Which, as the Gods ordain, must be expended. Receive this blood my hand sheds liberally; Receive the peace you never thought to see.5 And with these words he struck the fatal blow; The Thebans, seeing this brave youth brought low, As if their welfare had become their woe,6 Observed this sacrifice with grave dismay.

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I saw the grief-struck Haemon make his way To embrace his bloody brother where he lay. Creon threw down his arms and then, likewise, Approached his dying son with streaming eyes; Both camps, to their example forced to yield, Have ceased hostilities and quit the field; And I, with stricken soul and blood congealed, From such a dreadful object turned aside, So moved at the heroic way he died. jocasta I, too, am moved, but still more horrified. O Gods, after this wonder, can it be That Thebes will not henceforth thrive peacefully? Will not this noble death appease your rage, Since my sons have been moved to disengage? Can you ignore a gesture so sublime? If virtue touches you as much as crime, If you mete out rewards as you chastise, What crimes can his dear blood not neutralize? antigone Yes, yes, such virtue heaven will repay: Meneceus has enriched the Gods today. A hero’s blood they know how to revere; A thousand criminals’ blood they hold less dear.7 jocasta Heav’n’s deadly spite, my child, you little know:8 It always grants some easement to my woe; Alas! just when its aspect seems most fair, Its deadliest stroke it hastens to prepare. It made a respite for my tears last night, So that I’d wake to see men armed to fight. If with some hope of peace it flatters me, An oracle ordains it must not be.

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It brings my son back home: a generous act; But for such joy what price it must exact! That stubborn son won’t heed a word I say; It lures him off and leads him to the fray. Thus, always cruel, always full of ire, It acts appeased, then shows itself more dire, Holds back its blows to strike more forcefully, Withdraws its arm to better batter me.

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antigone Let’s hope this miracle will change our fate. jocasta Nothing can overcome my sons’ fierce hate.9 While Polynices, in his stubbornness, Demands his rights and will accept no less, Eteocles, who’s deaf whene’er I plead, To Creon and to Thebes alone pays heed;10 Yes, selfish, craven Creon wrests from us The blood-stained prize won by Meneceus. To save us all this brave prince died in vain: Though our great boon, his sire’s a greater bane. This faithless father of two young heroes, who . . . antigone Ah! here he is — the King, my brother, too. Scene iv [jocasta, eteocles, antigone, creon] jocasta My son, is this, then, how you keep your word? eteocles Madame, I’m not to blame for what’s occurred:

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’Twixt Greeks and Thebans a dispute arose;11 They traded insults first, then traded blows; Soon — somehow — all the troops joining the fray, Fierce fighting sprang up from a mere mêlée. This quarrel would have grown much worse, I fear, And would have settled our dispute right here, When Creon’s dauntless scion took his life, And the combatants withdrew from the strife. This prince, our royal line’s last progeny, Thought he was doomed by that dread augury; And to yield up his life at once he sped, By his great love of country nobly led. jocasta Ah! if his love of country made this boy Indifferent to life’s sweetness and its joy, My son, can’t that same passion move you too, And conquer the ambition mastering you?12 So noble a deed should be an inspiration. We don’t demand your death or abdication; Cede but a small part of your rank instead:13 That would help more than all the blood he shed. Just cease to hate your brother, I implore: You’ll do more than his death has done — much more. O Gods! is loving him a task more trying Than hating life and being bent on dying? Could that prince shed his blood so readily, Yet to preserve your own you can’t agree? eteocles I too am moved by his brave selflessness; So noble a death I envy, I confess; Nevertheless, madame, I have to own, I’d rather lose my life than lose my throne:14 Glory must oft be gained at life’s expense; Few kings win glory by obedience.

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The Gods desired his blood; to serve the State He had no choice but to capitulate;15 But Thebes, who claimed his life, demands I reign, And my high rank she insists that I retain. Until she bids me leave, I have to stay: She need but ask, I shall at once obey; And Thebes shall see me, if the need arise, Descend the throne and hasten my demise. creon Heav’n’s claimed one life and is content with one: Don’t blend your blood with that of my dead son; And since he shed it to have peace restored, Accede to all our just desires, my lord.

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eteocles What! Creon seeks the peace he spurned before? creon For having loved too well this barbarous war, You see heav’n’s weighed me down with this new woe: My son is dead. eteocles         You must avenge him, though. creon On whom? I’m helpless midst my miseries. eteocles Your enemies are Thebes’s enemies. Avenge her and yourself. creon             On Thebes’s foes? Your brother and my son are two of those!16

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Must I spill my son’s blood or shed your brother’s? Cause one son’s death just to avenge another’s? My blood is precious; yours is sacred. Say: Shall I be guilty of lèse-majesté? The bonds of nature, Sire, shall I betray? Besmirch my hand with blood that I revere? Assassinate a son to make it clear That my paternal feelings are sincere? So cruel a remedy’s no consolation; That would not be revenge, but ruination. The only consolation for my pain Is that, at least, my woes may serve your reign, And that my son, whose loss I so deplore, Might, by his death, bring calm to Thebes once more. Heav’n’s promised peace to honor my dead son; Accomplish what Meneceus has begun; Grant him this precious prize he strove to gain, And let his blood not have been shed in vain.17 jocasta Ah! since our miseries have touched you too, There’s nothing that Meneceus’ blood can’t do. Let Thebes take heart from an exploit so great: Since it has changed you, it will change her fate. Henceforth, peace is no hopeless fantasy: Since Creon wants it, it’s a certainty. Those hearts of steel will soon be mollified: What vanquished you can vanquish my sons’ pride. [to Eteocles] Be touched, disarmed, by how much he’s been changed; Renounce, my son, a hatred so deranged; Console poor Creon and relieve your mother: Give him his son and give me back your brother. eteocles But that’s to let him lord it over me!

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You know my brother craves such mastery: He claims, above all, the supreme command, And won’t return without the scepter in hand. Scene v [jocasta, eteocles, antigone, creon, attalus] attalus Sire, Polynices begs an interview: So says the herald whom he’s sent to you. You may go there, or, should you so decide, He could come here. creon           Perhaps he’s mollified, Or not so fiercely ambitious as before, And wants to terminate so long a war. Today’s engagement may have made him see That you’re at least as powerful as he. The Greeks are weary of serving his fierce ire; And I’ve just learned the King, his spouse’s sire, Preferring peace to all this quarreling, Keeps Mycenae, and makes him Argos’ king. Brave though he be, he would be satisfied If he could just retreat, yet save his pride. He must want peace, since he has asked to meet; This day will see its triumph or defeat. Second all his proposals; urge your own; Promise him everything — except the throne.18 eteocles Except the throne? But that’s his sole request. jocasta Just see him.

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creon        Yes, consent: that would be best. We failed, but all alone you’ll find a way; And blood will exercise its wonted sway.19

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eteocles I’ll seek him out. jocasta         By the blest deities, My son, let him come here to see you, please!20 eteocles Very well, bid him come; I swear that he Shall be accorded every surety. Come.

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antigone [to Creon]     Ah! if Thebes’s peace should be restored, It will have been your handiwork, my lord.21 Scene vi [creon, attalus] creon [aside] Your interest is not in Thebes’s weal,22 My haughty princess: though you, with such zeal, Disguising the disdain you must still feel, Suddenly flatter me, your true concern Is not for peace, but for my son’s return. But we’ll soon see if proud Antigone Disdains the throne as much as she does me, And if, when heav’n has placed me on that throne, My son can steal her from me for his own.

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attalus Who wouldn’t admire so rare a change of heart? Creon himself at last takes peace’s part!

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creon You think it’s peace for which I strategize? attalus I do, Sire, though it comes as a surprise. Seeing the noble impulse you’ve obeyed, I admire the generous effort you have made To finally lay your long-held hate to rest. Of all your son’s brave deeds, the last was best; Who quells his hate to serve the fatherland Would yield his life as well if it demand. creon Ah! doubtless, he whom generous thoughts impel23 To love his enemy can love death as well.24 My plans for vengeance must I then forswear And to my foe’s defense devote my care? What? Polynices robs me of my son, And I should shield him after what he’s done? But if I could renounce this deadly hate,25 Would my desire to reign evaporate? No, no, I shall, with fervent constancy, Abhor my foes and love my majesty. My dearest wish was to be king one day, For where my forebears reigned I blush to obey.26 I burn to see myself upon their throne; Since birth I have had eyes for that alone.27 For two years now that’s been my inspiration, And seeking empery my sole occupation. My nephews’ fury I have catalyzed; By my ambition theirs is authorized.28

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Eteocles’ injustice I supported, And Polynices’ claim was thereby thwarted. To gain the throne I’ve plotted since that day; And if I’ve let Eteocles hold sway, It’s been in order to drive him away. attalus But if this conflict has for you such charms, Why have you made their men lay down their arms? And since their discord’s what you have in view, Why have arranged a meeting ’twixt these two?29 creon This war’s been worse for me than for my foes, And heaven’s wrath has made me feel war’s woes. It’s turned against me everything I planned, And now my breast is pierced by my own hand: The war had just commenced when, grievously, Haemon took Polynices’ side ’gainst me. To make these brothers foes was my design; But, at the same time, it’s made Haemon mine. Today I broke the truce: an altercation, Provoked by me, became a confrontation: Fighting flared up, and lo! my desperate son Lay dead, quelling the combat I’d begun. But I’ve one son left who is dear to me, Though he’s a rebel — nay, my rival he. I wish my son to live, my foes to perish: I’d pay too dear, losing two sons I cherish. The princes’ hate is too strong to relent; Trust me: to peace it never will consent. I’ll feed that hate and fill their hearts with bile, So that they’d rather die than reconcile. When strangers hate, it’s not of long duration; When nature’s bonds, though, suffer violation, Nothing, dear Attalus, can bind again

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Those whom such potent ties could not restrain. When brothers hate, it’s always to excess; But when they’re kept apart, their hate grows less: However much we hate an enemy, We but half hate a foe we never see. Now you know why I urged this confrontation: I hope their meeting sparks a conflagration, And that, hate welling forth when face to face, They’ll crush each other in a last embrace.30 attalus It’s only you yourself you need fear now, For, with the crown, remorse may bind your brow. creon Once on the throne, our cares are so increased That of those cares remorse concerns us least. A soul drunk with the joy of holding sway From all his past life turns his thoughts away, And distanced from all else that he’s attained, Believes he never lived until he reigned. But come. By vain remorse I’m undismayed; Of crime my heart no longer is afraid: They cost us dear, our first iniquities, But those that follow we commit with ease.31

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act iv Scene i [eteocles, creon] eteocles Yes, Creon, he’s supposed to meet us here; Together we can wait for him to appear. Let’s see just what he wants; this meeting, though, Will not accomplish anything, you know. I know my brother and his stubborn pride; I’m sure his hate has not been mollified; Its headlong course no barrier can stay;1 And I shall hate him till my dying day. creon But should he cede his sovereign majesty, That would appease your hate, it seems to me. eteocles A hate so heartfelt nothing can placate. It’s not his pride, it’s he himself I hate. Our mutual hatred’s obstinate, I fear: It’s not, Creon, the work of just one year; Born at our birth, its poison, from the start, Entered, with life itself, each brother’s heart.2 We have been foes from tenderest infancy; Nay, ere our birth was born our enmity. Fatal effect of an incestuous tie! While in one womb embowered, he and I, There raged within those loins intestine war, Warning our mother of the feud in store.3 ’Twas with us from the cradle, and — who can tell? —  May follow us into the tomb as well. It seems that heaven, by a dread decree,

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Wished to chastise our parents’ infamy,4 And in our cursed blood to illuminate All that’s most dark and dire of love and hate. And now, Creon, while I await him here, Don’t think my hate grows any less severe: He seems more odious as he draws nigh, And doubtless my disgust will strike his eye. I should regret his ceding me the crown: He must, he must take flight, not just back down. I do not wish to hate him partially;5 I fear his ire less than his amity. Indeed, I hope his hatred will not wane, That mine, thus authorized, may have full rein; And since my heart will never deviate, I want him to hate me, that I may hate. You’ll see, Creon, his rage has not calmed down, And that his heart still hungers for the crown. He’ll always hate me, always wish to reign. He can be conquered; coaxing him is vain. creon Then conquer him, if he remains unbowed. He’s not invincible, however proud; Since reason cannot move his heart, my lord, See if it’s swayed by your unvanquished sword. Indeed, though peace, for me, may have its charms, I’ll be the first once more to take up arms; And if I’ve wanted you to end this war, I want you to retain your throne still more. Let war break out, blaze forth, and never cease, If Polynices reigns when there is peace.6 Let no one ever praise sweet peace again; War’s horrors please us if, with them, you reign.7 The Theban people implore you, Sire, through me: Don’t doom them to this prince’s tyranny. Like me, they think peace is a precious thing;

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But if you love them, let them keep their king. Meanwhile hear what your brother has to say. Your anger, though, ’twere best not to betray; Pretend . . . But someone comes.

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Scene ii [eteocles, creon, attalus] eteocles                They’re drawing near? They’ve come, Attalus? attalus            Yes, my lord, they’re here. They met the Queen and Princess on the way, And should be with you, Sire, without delay. eteocles Admit them. — As he nears, my anger grows. At their approach, ah! how one hates one’s foes!

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creon [aside] He’s here! O Fortune, let my plans now thrive: Their furious wrath let neither one survive! Scene iii [jocasta, eteocles, polynices, antigone, haemon, creon] jocasta Thus have my fondest wishes now come true,8 Since heav’n at last has reunited you. After two years, you brothers meet once more,9 And in this very palace where I bore The two of you.10 Whoever thought I’d press Both my sons to my breast? What happiness!

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This precious union you must ratify; Let each acknowledge the fraternal tie. Your own traits in your brother you may trace;11 To better judge, you should be face to face. Let your blood speak and do its office — please.12 Come, Polynices; come, Eteocles . . . What’s this? Far from approaching, you draw back? Whence comes this cold constraint, these looks so black? Is it that each, with soul irresolute, Waits for the other ere he will salute; And, scorning to bestow the first embrace, Waits to be last, in order to save face? Strange contest, this: vying for who is worse, Where he’s deemed most polite who’s most perverse! The victor in such a fight should blush with shame; The first to yield deserves the most acclaim. Let’s see who’ll prove the braver of the two: Who can control his anger, he or you?13 What? you don’t move? It’s you who should give in; Coming here from afar, you must begin: Please, Polynices: come embrace your brother, And show . . . eteocles        What good are all these gestures, mother? What we have need of is not courtesy: Let him explain himself, and leave us be.

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polynices What’s this? Must I explain my thoughts again? From all that’s passed, have they not been made plain? The battles fought, the blood, the butchery: All argue that the throne belongs to me.14 eteocles Those very battles, and that selfsame war, The earth that’s strewn with limbs and soaked with gore:

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All argue that the throne is mine alone, And while I live, you’ll never mount that throne. polynices Injustice keeps you there: you can’t deny it.15 eteocles That’s fine, provided you don’t occupy it.

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polynices You may still fall, if you don’t abdicate. eteocles And if I fall, you may well share my fate. jocasta O heavens! how deluded I have been! Have I so pressed to arrange this fatal scene, Only to see their enmity increase? My sons, is this how one discusses peace? Give up such tragic thoughts, I beg of you. Your past disputes and discords don’t renew. You’re not on an inhuman battlefield; Have I supplied the weapons that you wield? Are your hard hearts not softened when they see This room which witnessed your nativity? It’s here you two first saw the light of day; Love, kindness, peace are all it should convey. Your sister censures you; these princes, too; And I, who always took such pains for you, Who’d sacrifice, for those she holds so dear . . . Alas! they turn their heads and will not hear! In such hard souls no tenderness can grow; The voice of nature they no longer know.16 [to Polynices] And you, whom I believed more brotherly . . .

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polynices I only want what he has promised me: If he retains the throne, he breaks that trust.17 jocasta When justice is too strict it’s oft unjust.18 The throne is yours, my son, as you contend, But you may topple it if you ascend. With all this war, this waste, are you not sated? Your homeland you have cruelly devastated; Why raze an empire that you wish to gain? Over a pile of corpses would you reign? Thebes rightly fears a ruler at whose hand Rivers of blood now inundate her land. Would she obey you, who’ve done such a thing? You’ve proved her tyrant ere you were her king. If one becomes worse while becoming great, If, gaining power, one’s virtues dissipate, What will you be, alas! when you have gained it, If you’re so cruel, not having yet attained it? polynices Ah! if I’m cruel, I’m forced to be that way: In all my actions have I any say? I’m horrified by what I’ve had to do; The people’s fear of me is quite undue.19 But now my country must be comforted; My soul is troubled by the tears she’s shed. Innocent blood’s been spilled here every day: The course of these misfortunes I must stay; No further harm must come to Thebes or Greece. With him who caused my woes I must make peace, And so, today, his blood or mine must flow. jocasta Your brother’s blood?

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polynices           Yes, madame, even so. Thus must we settle this inhuman war. Yes, cruel one, that’s what I came here for. I wished to challenge you directly, brother; I was afraid to speak to any other: They’d all have censured what I planned to do, Refusing to announce my intent to you. Thus I announce it. Now it’s time to see If you can keep what you have stolen from me. Prove yourself worthy of a prize so fine. eteocles With joyful heart I welcome your design. Creon can tell you how I’ve longed for this: Keeping the throne is nothing to such bliss.20 You’re worthy of the crown now, I admit; At my sword’s deadly point I proffer it. jocasta Make haste: let the first breast you pierce be mine; With me begin your barbarous design! Give no thought to the fact that I’m your mother; Think only that I gave birth to your brother. If it’s his hateful blood you seek to shed, Then seek it in my heart, its fountainhead. Of both I am the common enemy, Since both of you received your life from me: Your foe, without me, would not be alive; If he dies, is it right that I survive? Ah! have no doubt, I’ll share death with my son: The both of us must die, or neither one. Do not be cruel or kind halfheartedly: You must kill me or spare your enemy. If virtue or if honor can inspire, Blush, monsters, to commit a crime so dire;

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Or if crime is so pleasing to each son, Then blush, you monsters, to commit just one. But it’s not love that stays your hand, I’d say, If, sparing me, you murder him today: You know, cruel ones, that if I ever dared To keep you from the throne, I’d not be spared. My son, is this the way to treat a mother?21

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polynices I spare my country. jocasta          And you slay your brother. polynices I punish crime. jocasta        And with his death you’ll be More criminal, more culpable, than he. polynices This traitor must I crown with my own hand, Then seek a master in some foreign land; Forsake my country, wander all about, Observing laws that he is free to flout? For his crimes must I pay the penalty? And is the crown the prize for perfidy? What laws has he not treated with disdain? But I’m exiled and he’s allowed to reign!22

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jocasta The throne the King of Argos offers you . . . polynices What! elsewhere, then, would you have me pursue

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A crown that blood gives me a title to? Must I go there with nothing of my own, And owe my rank to his goodwill alone? My rightful throne must I be forced to flee, And win a prince’s heart by flattery? No, no: to foreign kings I’ll not bow down; To him who gave me life I’ll owe the crown.

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jocasta Bestowed by your bride’s father or your own, A crown is much too precious to disown.23 polynices There’s a great difference, by my reckoning: One makes a slave of me, the other, a king. What? owe my grandeur to my wife? My soul Would blush with shame at such a servile role. Without love, then, I seek a throne in vain? Unloved, there is no way for me to reign? I mean to ascend the throne, or let it be; Mounting it, I must mount in majesty. The people must obey my every hest, Though everything I do they may detest. I wish to master Fate, not be its thrall: I’ll reign by right, madame, or not at all. Let my blood crown me, or, if that should fail, The assistance of my sword may yet avail. jocasta Do more: use all your matchless bravery, And let that sword achieve your legacy; Disdain to do what other kings have done; With your own hands create yourself, my son. Perform brave feats and crown yourself with them; Let laurel wreaths be your proud diadem. Triumph and reign, and let there be allied

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The royal purple and the hero’s pride. What! could you really limit your ambition To reign one year and then bow in submission?24 Win for your heart, which nothing can subdue, Some throne that no one else may mount but you: A thousand other crowns may grace your head, Without your brother’s precious blood being shed. Then would your triumphs bring me happiness; Your brother, too, will further your success.25

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polynices You’d have my heart, duped by such flattery, Let a usurper wrest the throne from me?

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jocasta Fine: if you bear your brother so much hate, Then let him keep this throne accursed by fate, A throne that’s always been a perilous pit: Crime festers there and lightning threatens it. Your father and all those who wore the crown No sooner mounted it than were cast down. polynices Though heaven’s loudest thunder should resound, I’d sooner mount there than crawl on the ground. My heart, so jealous of those ill-starred men, Would rise like them, though but to fall again. eteocles From such a futile fall I’ll rescue you. polynices Believe me, you will fall before I do. jocasta His reign goes well.

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polynices          It’s hateful, though, to me. jocasta He has Thebes’ love. polynices           And heaven’s enmity. eteocles The Gods wished to withhold this rank from you, Since it was me they gave the scepter to.26 They knew quite well when they had to decide: One can’t give up a throne one’s occupied. Two masters seated there is quite unknown; No throne holds two, however wide the throne: Eventually, one would be dispossessed, For by his other self he’d be oppressed.27 Judge then, from the disgust I cannot hide, If I could bear to hold sway at his side.

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polynices And given my fierce hate, I cannot bear To share with you the light, the sky, the air.28 jocasta Go, kill yourselves, then; I won’t hinder you. To this cruel combat I consign you two. My arguments can’t alter you, I see; Destroy each other, while avenging me. By your own crimes uphold our family pride;29 Prove yourself brothers by joint fratricide. The worst of crimes gave you the light of day; An equal crime must now take it away. I don’t condemn the rage with which you’re filled; Pity and love for my own blood I’ve stilled.

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You’ve taught me not to cherish it, and I, My cruel sons, will teach you how to die.30 [She rushes off.] antigone Madame . . . Alas! they’re quite unmoved, I see.31

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haemon Nothing can quell their staunch ferocity. antigone Princes . . . eteocles       Let’s seek some spot to fight nearby. polynices At once. Farewell, Princess. eteocles              Sister, goodbye. antigone My brothers, stay! Guards, do not let them go! Let’s join our sorrows in this time of woe. It’s cruel to them to let them have their way.

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haemon Madame, there’s nothing that would make them stay. antigone Ah! generous Haemon, I rely on you; If virtue moves you, if your love is true, And if you can arrest their fatal swords, Then, please, to save me, save these savage lords.

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act v Scene i [antigone, alone] antigone Unfortunate Princess, whatever shall you do?1 Your mother has just died in your embrace:2 The path she took can you now trace, And, with your death, cut short a life that tortures you? Would you subject yourself to new and greater woes? 5 Your brothers are at arms and nothing can oppose The fate that hangs above their head. Their actions should encourage you to pierce your breast; No other tears but yours are being shed: It’s blood that’s being shed by all the rest. 10

Which of my woes will end this dire extremity? What recourse have I? Whither can I fly? Must I endure, or must I die? A lover holds me back, a mother summons me: In the tomb’s shade I see her waiting for me now. What reason dictates, love, alas! will not allow, And my desire for death gives way. What ample cause I have to cut short my existence! But how we wish to live another day, When love compels us to with such persistence!

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Yes, my scarce-breathing soul, O Love, you would revive; My cruel conqueror’s voice I recognize: Though in my heart my last hope dies, You still live there and wish me to remain alive. You say my lover would pursue me to the grave, 25 And that my own unhappy life I’m bound to save, To save the life of him I love. Haemon, you see the power your love has over me:

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For me, my life is not worth thinking of, But for your sake I’ll guard it carefully.

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If you have ever doubted I requite . . . — But here is news of their ill-omened fight. Scene ii [antigone, olympia] antigone Olympia, were you a witness to this crime? olympia In vain I ran there: I was not in time. Down from the ramparts people came in swarms, Racing about, in tears, calling for arms. To explain their fear, madame, I need but say, The King is dead; his brother’s won the day. They say that Haemon, with courageous heart, Strove mightily to keep those two apart, But all his efforts in the end proved vain: Thus much wild rumors let me ascertain. antigone Ah! Haemon’s virtue cannot be denied: By crime his heart was always horrified. I begged him to avert this tragedy; If anybody could have, it was he. Alas! their furious rage no curb could stay: In bloody streams it had to flow away.3 Unnatural princes, you are satisfied: By death alone could you be pacified. The throne provided you too strait a berth, Nor was there room for both upon this earth; And heaven placed, that no more blood be shed, One ’mongst the living, one amongst the dead.4

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So worthy of our pity, hapless pair! But less unfortunate than I, I swear, Since, of the woes you’ve suffered, you feel none, While I have been condemned to feel each one!5 olympia You’d have been more afflicted, I dare say, Had Polynices perished in this fray. This prince claimed all your care and tenderness; The welfare of the King touched you far less. antigone It’s true, I loved him with deep ardency: I loved his brother far less fervently; And what persuaded me to take his part Was his misfortune and his virtuous heart. Alas! this deed has tarnished his renown; He’s now a criminal, and crime his crown. Now it’s his brother who evokes a tear: He, more ill-fated, has become more dear.6

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olympia Here’s Creon. antigone        And his situation’s dire: The King being dead, he fears the victor’s ire. He’s the curst cause of all that has occurred.7 Scene iii [antigone, creon, attalus, olympia] creon Madame, arriving here, what news I heard! Is it true that the Queen . . . ?

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antigone              Yes, she is dead. creon Heav’n’s! tell me how a fate so strange and dread Consigned her living flame to endless gloom? olympia The Queen herself, my lord, unlocked her tomb; And in an instant, having seized a knife, She ended all her miseries — and her life.

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antigone Her son’s sad fate, thank heav’n! she never knew.8 creon Madame, the Gods have been unkind, it’s true . . . antigone You yourself killed the King: you and no other; ’Twas not the wrath of heav’n that killed my brother. Yes, you involved him in this fatal strife: He heeded your advice and lost his life. Thus kings prove victims of base flattery; Their crimes approved, they fall more readily. It’s you who cause our kings to lose their crown; But when they fall they drag their flatterers down.9 You’ll find his downfall just as ruinous As it is cruel and sorrowful for us. In killing him, heav’n is avenged on you, And you perhaps will have to shed tears too. creon It’s true; harsh destiny has claimed its prey: You mourn two brothers, I, two sons, today.

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antigone Two sons! Two brothers! Gods! explain this please! Who else has died besides Eteocles?10

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creon You’ve not yet learned of this grim tragedy? antigone I’ve learned of Polynices’ victory, How Haemon tried in vain to intervene. creon This combat proved more cruel than we’d foreseen. You still don’t know what each of us has lost; Then learn, alas! the catastrophic cost.

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antigone Stern Fortune, what more can your wrath impose? Ah! doubtless, here’s the last of your fell blows. creon You saw, madame, the furious intent11 With which the princes left, on carnage bent; With equal eagerness you saw them run, And never did their hearts so beat as one. The thirst to shed a brother’s blood could do What blood had ne’er before been able to: Their mutual hate bound each one to his brother; They seemed good friends, though poised to slay each other. They chose the field where one of them should fall, A spot near the two camps, beneath the wall. There they, rekindling their first furious fire, At last commenced their combat, fierce and dire. With threatening gestures, seeming quite possessed, Each sought a spot to pierce the other’s breast; So swiftly did their arms rain down fierce blows,

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They wished to outstrip Death, one might suppose. My son, whose suffering soul sighed in distress, And mindful of your orders, dear Princess, Threw himself ’twixt them, scorning to obey Their strict commands, which kept us all at bay.12 He pushed them back and bid them end this strife; In separating them he risked his life. Their headlong rage he tried to stem in vain: Those madmen always came to blows again. Undaunted, he held firm, though sorely tried; A thousand mortal blows he turned aside, Till the King’s sword, with a more deadly one, Seeking his brother, or my hapless son, Struck him to earth, where he lay stupefied.

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antigone My grief ’s so great, and yet I have not died!13 creon I ran to him and gently raised his head; He recognized me: I am dying, he said, Too glad to perish for my sweet princess. In vain you aid me with your tenderness: It’s to those furious foes that you must fly. My father, placate them and let me die. With these words, he expired. This barbarous sight Did nothing to defuse their fearsome fight; ’Twas only Polynices seemed to care: Haemon, you’ll be avenged, he said, I swear. His grief made him more furious as he fought And soon gave him the advantage that he sought; The King, pierced through his armor, mortally, Fell in his blood, conceding victory. Then both camps let their feelings overflow: The Greeks expressed their joy, our troops their woe; The people, affrighted by their king’s demise,

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From Thebes’ high towers let forth their plaintive cries. But Polynices, proud of his vile action, Observed his victim’s death with satisfaction; Nay, in his brother’s blood he seemed to swim: You’re dying and I shall reign, he said to him. The empire’s in my hands, and victory; Go writhe in hell with shame and jealousy; And, traitor, to enhance your suffering, Die knowing you’re my subject, I’m your king. With haughty stride then, having had his say, He approached the King where in the dust he lay; He reached his hand out to disarm his brother.14 The King, though seeming dead, observed the other: He watched, he waited, while, not fully freed, His soul was poised for some momentous deed. Revenge he was on fire to realize, And this desire delayed his final sighs. He clung to life, but hid its signs with care, Which for the victor proved a fatal snare. And in that moment, when this monster tried To wrest from him the sword clutched at his side, He stabbed him to the heart; rapt with delight, His soul, having achieved this stroke, took flight. Then Polynices, with a cry, fell dead; His soul, with fury fraught, to Hades fled.15 Dead though he was, undying was his ire: To attack his brother still seemed his desire. His face, which all the marks of death now bore, Appeared more proud and fearsome than before.16 antigone Fatal ambition! Blindness without cure! Cruel oracle, this is your work, I’m sure.17 Of all our line, there’s now left but we two; And would to heaven it were only you, And that despair, forestalling heaven’s wrath, Had made me trace at once my mother’s path!

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creon It’s true the Gods’ fierce hate, when they conspired To extirpate us, seems to have expired; For, as you see, their harsh hostility Has seared my soul no less unmercifully.18 Losing my sons . . . antigone           Ah! Creon, you now hold sway; Your grievous loss the throne will surely allay. But grant me now a little solitude, And on my anxious grief do not intrude. You’d be infected by my misery; Elsewhere you’ll find more pleasant company. The throne awaits, the people summon you; Taste the delights of your new rank. Adieu. Further discourse would only cause us pain: I wish to weep, Creon; you wish to reign. creon [restraining Antigone] Ah! madame, reign, and mount the throne with me: Such rank befits the proud Antigone.

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antigone And on that throne it’s time you took your seat: The crown is yours. creon          I place it at your feet. antigone If the Gods offered, I’d say no to them; And you dare offer me the diadem! creon The greatest glory high rank can provide Is offering it to such a lovely bride.

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I know that I’m unworthy of such a fate; But if one dared aspire to that blest state, If one could earn it by some noble deed, What would that be, madame?

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antigone               Follow my lead.19 creon For such a prize there’s nothing I’d not do! I need but learn the task you’d put me to: I’m ready . . . antigone [as she leaves]        We shall see. creon              I’ll wait right here. antigone Yes, wait.

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attalus      You think that she’ll grow less severe And that she will consent? creon             I think so, yes. Nothing can equal my great happiness, And you shall witness, on this day of days, Ambition on the throne, love crowned with bays. I begged heav’n for the Princess and the throne:

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I’m now the King, Antigone’s my own. To crown my head and hopes successively, It’s armed both love and hate to fight for me. For me it’s made contrary passions burn: It’s made the sister soft, the brothers stern. It’s made their anger sharper, hers less so; Her heart, their throne, the Gods at once bestow.20 attalus It’s true fate favors you, and were you not A father, yours would be a happy lot. Ambition, love, have nothing to desire; But nature calls forth tears and sorrow, Sire. You’ve lost two sons . . . creon             And their loss saddens me: I know the duties of paternity; I’ve been a father, but was born to reign; And I’ve lost much less than I hope to gain. Father is but a vulgar appellation, A gift the Gods give with no hesitation. A joy so common has no charm for me: True happiness must foster jealousy. In granting thrones, heav’n is not generous; Such high rank separates mankind from us; Few men receive a gift of such great worth: There are more gods in heav’n than kings on earth. Besides, my Haemon worshipped the Princess, And for the Prince she felt great tenderness; If he had lived, her hand he would have won: Heav’n rids me of my rival with my son. But from our talk let’s banish misery; Let me indulge my great felicity; From thoughts of death and hell let us refrain; Don’t tell me what I lose, but what I gain.

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Speak of my reign, speak of Antigone; I have the throne, she’ll soon belong to me. Life’s been a dream whence I’m awakening:21 Once father, subject, now I’m lover, king. The throne, the Princess, captivate me so . . . But here’s Olympia.

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attalus           See how her tears flow! Scene v [creon, olympia, attalus] olympia You wait in vain. The Princess, Sire, is dead.22 creon She’s dead? olympia       Ah! vain regrets! All hope is fled! She’d hardly reached her room, when, with the knife The Queen had rashly used to take her life, Before her desperate hand I could arrest, This proud princess had pierced her lovely breast. My lord, she dealt herself a mortal blow, And sank down suddenly, her blood aflow. Judge what I must have felt at such a sight! Her gentle soul was poised to take its flight: Haemon, I do this for your sake, she sighed; And in that instant my sweet mistress died. Her limbs grew cold as in my arms she lay; I thought my soul would join hers straightaway: Far happier if my mortal sorrow might Plunge me with her into the tomb’s black night!23

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Final Scene [creon, attalus] creon Thus do you flee a lover you despise, And quench, cruel one, the light of your fair eyes! You sternly seal those eyes I so adore In order not to see me anymore! Though loving Haemon, you sought death, I see, Much less to follow him than flee from me.24 But though you still retain your animus, And even in Hades find me odious, Though after death your anger still lives on, I’ll follow, heartless one, where you have gone. There you will see the object of your hate; The grief I feel my sighs shall iterate, To soothe your soul or aggravate your pain; Nor, to avoid me, can you die again. Then let me die . . . attalus [and the guards, snatching his sword]          Ah! Would you wantonly . . . ? creon To save my life now is to murder me! Love, frenzy, rage, come to my aid, I pray; Don’t make me live another loathsome day; The efforts of these cruel friends frustrate. Your oracles, O heaven, vindicate: The last curst drops of Laius’ blood reside In me: kill me, cruel Gods, or be belied. Take back, take back this empire I detest; You’ve claimed Antigone, claim all the rest. The throne and all your gifts arouse my ire; Your thunderbolts are what I now desire.

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Do not refuse them to my crimes, I implore; To all your many victims, add one more. Why need I plead, though? I already share All the fierce pains that I’ve made others bear. Jocasta, her two sons, Antigone, My own sons, sacrificed so callously In trying to attain the monarchy, So many other wretches whom I’ve harmed, Act as my executioners, well armed. But stay . . . My death will swiftly avenge you all; The earth gapes wide, the forkèd lightnings fall; By countless torments I am now oppressed; In Hades, then, my soul shall seek some rest. [He falls into the arms of the guards.]25

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the fratricides: notes and commentary

act i 1. The opening scenes of most of Racine’s later plays immediately launch into lengthy, detailed exposition; in this play we find ourselves in medias res and need time to get our bearings. Only the title of the play provides a hint regarding whom Jocasta means when she poses this question. (Racine’s original title read: La Thébaïde ou les Frères ennemis [The Saga of Thebes or The Enemy Brothers].) It is those brothers, then — Jocasta’s own sons, Eteocles, King of Thebes, and Polynices — to whom she refers. The “crime so heinous” (line 6) may be inferred from my title: Jocasta has been dreading that one (at least) of her sons might kill the other. Polynices, having been banished from Thebes a year before the action of the play begins, has returned with an army furnished by his father-in-law, Adrastus, King of Argos, and has been holding Thebes under siege for “six months” (line 3). 2. This couplet confirms that we are in “crisis mode.” All of Racine’s plays take up the action at its most critical juncture, and the unstable situation that exists at the beginning of the play must, in accordance with “unity of time” — that classical imperative — be resolved within twentyfour hours. 3. In this famous apostrophe, Jocasta, sensing the impending crisis, gives vent to epic outrage at her sons’ behavior. (In Iphigenia, Clytemnestra, too, desperately unburdens herself to the Sun when she believes her daughter’s death is imminent [Iphigenia V.iv.23 –26].) Jocasta’s invocation, originally four lines longer (see note 5 below), gives Olympia time to

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obey her mistress’s instruction to summon her daughter, whose appearance signals the beginning of the following scene. 4. Laius is Oedipus’s father, who an oracle prophesied would be killed by his own son. Years later, Oedipus unwittingly fulfills that prophecy. To compound his crime, Oedipus, again unknowingly, marries Jocasta, Laius’s widow and, thus, his own mother, as the same oracle had further prophesied. Polynices and Eteocles are the offspring of that union. These misfortunes are most famously dramatized in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. 5. In the first edition (1664), this invocation continued for another four lines. These were cut by Racine for subsequent editions, the first of many passages Racine deleted after the first edition. (See Translator’s Note.) Racine did well to excise these lines; somewhat dry and uninspired, they seem anticlimactic after the sardonic, stinging couplet (lines 33 –34) that now concludes her speech: This blood, in offering them the heavens’ light, Gave them a taste for crime as their birthright; Their hearts, whence this dread poison circulates, Ignoring reason’s voice, heed only hate’s. See note 16 for Act IV. 6. These Argives are the soldiers sent by Adrastus, King of Argos, to help his son-in-law Polynices wage his campaign against Thebes. 7. “Bite the dust” is a literal translation of Racine’s “mordre la poudre.” 8. After this couplet, the first edition continued with the following eight lines: Too long I’ve languished here, behind these gates, Pining for those brave fields where war awaits. When midst such risks one’s mettle might be tried, A noble heart’s ashamed to stay inside. I’m tired of Polynices taunting me, With upraised voice, for my base lethargy, Crying to Thebes, her loyalty to gain, That I am killing those who let me reign. 9. As Jocasta later informs us (lines 40 –45), Oedipus arranged that his sons were to reign by turns, one year at a time; Eteocles acceded to the throne first “by destiny” (line 45) — actually, by a drawing of lots. So when he says that Thebes “gave the throne to me,” he means that when his term was over, the people of Thebes chose to retain him as their sovereign, driving Polynices into exile. 10. Jocasta’s speech was originally preceded by the following eight lines:

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Heav’n save you from so vile a victory! So black an action Thebes would hate to see. Leave Thebes alone and think of her no more; A peace so frightful makes one long for war. Let cruel warfare rage and overwhelm With fatal flames this desolated realm! Prolong our woes, increase our miseries, Rather than such a crime should grant us ease! 11. After Jocasta’s speech the first edition continued with this exchange between son and mother before Eteocles’ reply (beginning at line 48): eteocles I promised I’d obey my father, it’s true, But for a throne what won’t one swear to do? One promises the world, madame, to gain it; Once there, though, one thinks but how to retain it. Then, as a subject, I had to obey, But I wield sovereign command today. I am not bound by what I did before: A subject’s duties monarchs may ignore. As soon as he is seated on the throne, A king’s own person is no longer his own. The public’s interests now predominate: He owes naught to himself, all to the State. jocasta He owes his honor something still, my son, And with its claims a king is never done. Though from old laws by his new rank released, He must maintain his word to kings, at least. (Note: In the original version, Eteocles names his brother in line 48, making clear that he is not referring to the generic king they have been discussing.) Eteocles’ speech, displaying an arrogant egoism operating under the guise of — or, rather, by means of — a humble altruism, marks him as the accomplished demagogue. He begins by insisting on the incontestable prerogatives to which his kingly rank entitles him (“I wield sovereign command”), but then professes that, as king, he is so bound by considerations of the public weal that his very “person is no longer his own.” Although Racine chose to remove this revealing self-portrait, there are, fortunately, several other “speaking likenesses” elsewhere in the play. Indeed, Eteocles’ very next speech ends with his assertion that “I am her [Thebes’s] slave,

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her king only in name” (I.iii.67) — a perfect “miniature.” And Polynices “captures” his brother quite well with these few deft strokes: Now pride has rendered him, beyond recall, His brother’s tyrant and his people’s thrall. To reign alone, he reigns obediently, And lowers himself to make them all hate me. That they prefer a traitor is no surprise: They fear a master, but a slave they prize. (II.iii.43 –48) This likeness may be less flattering than the self-portrait his brother offers in the speech Racine deleted, but the “sitter” is clearly the same in both paintings. 12. Adrastus was the leader of the famous Seven Against Thebes, the storied band of warriors (immortalized in Aeschylus’s play of that name) who laid siege to Thebes and whose number included Polynices. Euripides’ The  Phoenician Women, Racine’s acknowledged source play, devotes considerable space to Adrastus and to the history of the assault upon Thebes by the Seven. 13. In Euripides’ version of this story, Adrastus gave his daughter Argeia in marriage to Polynices in obedience to an oracle’s cryptic instruction, not because “he hoped to see Thebes fall amongst her dead.” 14. What Eteocles means is: If I have broken faith with Polynices, it is because Thebes wishes me to be her king and I must obey her wishes. 15. A key couplet; as Roland Barthes observes, “For the two brothers, the throne is merely an alibi: they hate each other absolutely” (Barthes, 63). 16. Cf. Agrippina’s similar desperate taunt to her son, Nero, after she learns he has killed his stepbrother, Britannicus: “Your hand has shed the lifeblood of your brother,  / And  I foresee your blows won’t spare your mother” (Britannicus  V.vi.28 –29). The  final couplet of Jocasta’s speech (lines 79 – 80) also anticipates the climactic couplet of Agrippina’s denunciation: “In times to come the mention of your name  / Will make the cruelest tyrants blush for shame” (Britannicus V.vi.44 –45). 17. As is so often the case in Racine, the tone clarifies the tenor of a character’s words. Although Eteocles professes an intention to accommodate his mother’s request, it is clear that his embittered and sarcastic “concession” represents no actual acquiescence to his mother’s pleading on Polynices’ behalf. 18. Can Jocasta really believe that Polynices would be content with “but an empty honor” or is she just temporizing with Eteocles? If the latter, does she imagine Eteocles could believe that his brother would settle for anything less than plenary power?

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19. We can well imagine (if Jocasta, perhaps, cannot) that Polynices, as if he would not be gratified enough by the “empty honor” Jocasta proposes that Eteocles offer him, would be even more gratified by the fervent love and admiration for their king that “so sublime a deed” would inspire in Eteocles’ subjects, who, consequently — and, undoubtedly, to Polynices’ ineffable delight — “will want no other ruler to succeed.” 20. Eteocles is confident about assuming this democratic stance, since he knows very well “whom Thebes would have as king” (him), just as Polynices will later insist on the primacy of hereditary prerogative (II.iii.31–32), since he too knows “whom Thebes would have as king” (not him). 21. Creon fears that Eteocles’ agreeing to a parley might result in his acceding to Polynices’ demand that he be allowed to take his turn as king, thus ending the hostilities Creon hopes will claim both their lives. 22. Perhaps Creon is stung by Eteocles’ supercilious retort; in any case, he pays no heed to Eteocles’ injunction, remaining behind for the duration of the entire lengthy scene that follows and only then recalling his obligations: “The King requires me and I’m overdue” (I.v.102). 23. This indication of the superiority of Eteocles’ army to that of his brother serves, according to Georges Forestier (1256), “to underline the generosity of Eteocles, who agrees to a peace conference when he is in the stronger position.” But is it not just as reasonable to conclude that, being in the superior position, he can afford to agree to peace talks, knowing that, regardless of their outcome, he can still, as Creon later advises (IV.i.45), “conquer him, if he remains unbowed”? Furthermore, in view of his earlier obdurate stance and his later undiminished belligerence, it is clear that his only objective in agreeing to a peace conference could be, certainly not to make any concessions, but to use the leverage of his stronger position to exact them from his brother or, at least, earn for himself some goodwill through this public relations ploy. 24. This is a rare instance of an extended metaphor in Racine’s plays. 25. Here, relatively early in the action, Jocasta exposes Creon’s hidden agenda; as a result, for the rest of the play we can understand and appreciate his hypocrisy. Unlike the earlier plays Racine used as models, in his version Eteocles never learns of Creon’s malevolence and duplicity, and perhaps it is a flaw of the play that neither Jocasta nor Antigone thinks to enlighten him. 26. The meaning of this wry remark is: I hate the King’s enemies; if you choose to consider that treachery, then let me say that, unfortunately, many people are less “treacherous” than I, since they do not hate the King’s enemies as much as I do (and as much as they should). 27. Antigone advises Creon that his interests would also be served by not treating Polynices as Eteocles’ mortal enemy, since his own son is “Polynices’ staunchest friend.” Creon quickly points out the faultiness of

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her inference, explaining that he has no wish to protect Haemon, whom he considers a traitor. 28. This heated exchange (lines 81– 89) is Racine’s first use of stichomythia: a technique adopted from the classical drama, it consists of rapidfire alternating dialogue, a verbal thrust and parry (to switch metaphors) most often employed to focus and intensify the conflict between two characters. It will be called into play several times in the climactic confrontation between the two brothers (IV.iii). 29. Antigone’s vague reference to “une autre flamme” (another flame) is the first hint we are given of Creon’s infatuation with his niece, Antigone (which will not be explicitly disclosed until Creon’s aside that begins III.vi), but Racine provides a more telling one in the sarcastic, querulous tone of Creon’s reply, which bespeaks the scorned and jealous lover — and Racine’s psychological acuity.

act ii 1. This is Racine’s first attempt at a love scene between the “jeunes premiers” (the young leads or the young lovers) and it is far from successful, for several reasons. First, there intrudes from time to time a somewhat mawkish and heavy-handed “galanterie” (e.g., lines 11–24). Second, as Raymond Picard (1063) observes, “this precious manner is not the expression of a love of a tragic dimension in which the viewer can truly take an interest.” As a character, Haemon, particularly, has none of the originality and the complexity of Britannicus, of Xiphares (in Mithridates), or, especially, of Hippolytus (in Phaedra). Third, their love is too tangential to the main theme of the play, which is the unrelenting hatred between the two brothers. (This point Racine concedes in his preface.) Fourth, it is a stagnant scene: it does little to advance the drama and much to delay it. (One is vastly relieved at Polynices’ very dramatic entrance, which cuts Haemon off in midsentence.) And last, these faults are compounded by the unwarranted length of this colloquy, which, after Olympia’s brief intrusion to deliver the “stern reply” of the oracle, continues for several more pages through the end of the following scene. (We should bear in mind, moreover, that in the original version it ran for forty more lines, which Racine judiciously pruned for later editions.) 2. Here is a paraphrase of this precious periphrasis (lines 26 –32): I was so unhappy that I would have killed myself, but I hoped, all that time, that my obediently staying away would prove how much I loved you, since it was at your command that I did so. 3. In the first edition, there followed this passage:

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When by an unknown hand some blow is aimed, Our fear knows no reserve, our hate’s untamed: Its feelings unconstrained, the heart is free To hate the thing it fears wholeheartedly. But though I saw it raised against my land, Against my brother, I still loved your hand. Seeing just my brothers, just you, my fond heart, While fearing all of you, still took your part. Her point, that she can fear, but cannot hate, the hand of a brother or a lover, though raised against her land and her loved ones, is valid, but her expression of it is involute and prolix. 4. Her remarks suggest that these siblings are alter egos, twin souls. She attests (in lines 58, 60, 63, 64) that they feel as one, that their feelings are identical. If we juxtapose line 61 (literally translated: We’ve loved each other from tenderest infancy) with Eteocles’ later remark (“We have been foes from tenderest infancy” [IV.i.17]) — both lines end with “dès la plus tendre enfance” —  we may marvel at such contrary consequences of “indistinguishability” (see my Discussion). Here, the first edition continued with another line for Antigone and Haemon’s digressive reply, after which Antigone resumes her line of thought: antigone I loved him always, though I’d been forgot. haemon You think his love for you has waned, but it has not. He cherishes you still, but can’t ignore The love I have for you is worth much more. Although his fondness for you is quite rare, He knows a brother’s love cannot compare. Next to the passion smoldering in my breast, The warmest love’s a tepid one at best. The last six lines of this speech are puzzling, if not disquieting. Why should a brother’s love become less demonstrative, why should it have to yield to that of a sister’s lover, unless its ardency is of a nature to suggest that Polynices has inherited a disposition toward incest? 5. This oracular pronouncement comes as something of a surprise, since the audience has not been previously advised that an oracle was being consulted. The two possible interpretations of this deliberately ambiguous oracle are (1) that peace will be attained and Thebes saved if the blood of

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the last representative of the royal race is shed and (2) that those desirable results can be achieved only if the blood of the royal race is shed to its last drop. The action of the play is bisected according to which of these two distinct interpretations predominates. We can trace the clear progress of the first interpretation (which virtually names Meneceus, Creon’s youngest son, as the intended victim) as it affects the action of the play. It should first be noted that in Euripides’ The Phoenician Women the oracle’s pronouncement admits of only one interpretation (the first), which the seer Tiresias proceeds to reveal, cogently and at length, to the horror-stricken Creon. In Racine’s version, however, all justification or rationale for the sacrifice of Meneceus has been expunged. But so fervent is Meneceus’s patriotic spirit that he takes it upon himself to carry out the “ordre fatal” of the oracle, as he understands it, and kills himself (as narrated by Antigone in III.iii.19 –37). Once this interpretation, which has really been nothing but a red herring, has played itself out, the other interpretation effectively takes over. Now it will become clear that the operative word in the oracle is “blood,” and Creon’s canny prediction that “blood will exercise its wonted sway” (III.v.22) will be tragically fulfilled. Blood will, in fact, prove to be, not only the effect of the oracle’s message of doom, but, more significantly, its cause as well. Haemon, Eteocles, Polynices, Jocasta, Antigone, and Creon — the whole “royal dynasty” — will all be sacrificed because of blood: not the “tainted blood” of Laius’s race, but the blood that, for Racine, represents our passions, the passions that relentlessly drive us and over which we have no control. 6. This gnarled argument, which errs in the opposite direction from the misplaced galanterie that manifests itself in Haemon’s response (lines 45 –56), contains more truth than Antigone knows, since it will be Haemon’s love for her that will prove his undoing, when he rushes off at her urging to “arrest their [her brothers’] fatal swords” (IV.iii.230), with fatal consequences to himself. 7. In the original version, this scene was further distended, after this line, by the following lengthy exchange, rife with the grotesque commingling of the precious and the pedantic that mars these scenes of the lovers’ tête-à-tête: And when my love for you I dared make clear, Your eyes alone assailed my soul with fear. I trembled more to offend your slightest charm Than to offend those Gods I’d done no harm. antigone Your error, like your passion, is immense, And your offense is worse than my offense. Though you quailed at the sternness I displayed,

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My eyes approved a love the Gods forbade. Yes, those Gods, foes of my whole family, Regard my father’s child with enmity. The object of their ire is dear to you; Thus, Haemon, you have earned their hatred too. That is what makes your love so dangerous; Flee, Haemon, flee the child of Oedipus. To please the Gods, stop loving, if you can, The child, the sister, of such a criminal clan. Burdened with crime . . . haemon             Ah! madame, all their crime Just serves to make your virtue more sublime! Your goodness rouses heaven’s jealousy, For nothing else shines forth so brilliantly. 8. Racine deleted the four lines that originally followed this line, the final deletion he made in the lovers’ colloquy: Please heav’n your faithful lover might create Some further provocation for its hate, And, meriting heav’n’s wrath for loving you, Might, to atone for your love, perish too! The meaning of this sentence is: Heaven, you say, seems bent on punishing us for our love; that being the case, I wish I could provoke heaven into being even more angry with me than it is now, so that the punishment it would mete out to me would be so great that it would atone, not only for my loving you, but also for your loving me; thus, you would be spared. 9. The opening words of Polynices’ speech let us know that he is fleeing his mother’s restraining grip, making for a very theatrical entrance; and from lines 9 –10 we can infer that his mother has been urging him to accept Eteocles’ offer of a referendum (I.iii.121–24) to determine “whom Thebes would have as king.” 10. Underlying Polynices’ insistence on the prerogative of “blood” is the more potent implication of what Polynices’ “blood” really destines him for: not to raise him up to a throne, but to strike him down to the ground, felled by his own brother. See note 5 above. 11. Antigone’s speech originally concluded with these four lines: He’s come back — but to torture us, dear mother; Here’s Polynices, yet I see no brother.

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In vain he shows himself, for, tragically, I do not know him, nor does he know me.

12. After this line, the original version continued as follows: Your change of heart this traitor has devised: Hating me, he wants me to be despised. But your example I choose to ignore: Your hate for me just makes me hate him more.

The somewhat elliptical second couplet means: At my brother’s instigation, you have come to hate me, but I shall not follow your example of changing your feelings toward me; you may hate me, but that will not make me hate you, it will only make me hate him more. 13. As mentioned before (see note 17 for Act I), Eteocles’ capitulation was only a nominal one: first, he did not agree to let his brother ascend the throne in his due turn; second, what he did agree to was a referendum that he must have known could only further his own interests. 14. As we will learn later (III.vi.55 –56), Creon himself engineered this disruption of the truce in order to ensure the ongoing hostilities between the armies and the ongoing hostility between the brothers. 15. Hippomedon was one of the Seven Against Thebes (see note 12 for Act I).

act iii 1. When Jocasta contrasts herself with conscious criminals “whom the thought of crime delights,” we might well believe she has her sons in mind, especially when we recall her earlier attack on Eteocles: “It’s crime alone that gratifies your soul” (I.iii.71). About Jocasta’s soliloquy Picard (1065) writes: “The ‘tragic’ that Jocasta protests against is that of the ancient tragedies: it is gratuitous. The characters are the prey of divine vengeance: they are passive. Their tragic nature is without psychological justification. The tragic element in Racine will be, precisely, in most of the plays from Andromache on, completely different.” While Jocasta might be thought of as a passive “prey of divine vengeance,” since hers were “crimes committed all unwillingly” (one might think of her as a “crimeless victim”), her sons are driven to crime by the “blood” of passion; they glory in taking full responsibility for their mutual hatred. There is no less “psychological justification” for the brothers’ murderous hatred than for, say, Hermione’s destructive love for Pyrrhus (in Andromache). Certainly, for a modern audience, the concept of a character’s being “a prey of divine vengeance” is merely distracting.

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2. After this couplet, the original version continued with these lines: Perhaps he gloats over a deed so great? Which of them must I pity, and which hate? Or have not both, dying so willingly, Confirmed, with their own blood, heav’n’s prophecy?

The second couplet anticipates the transition from the first interpretation of the oracle (see note 5 for Act II) to the second; it also renders lines 4 –5 below redundant. 3. That is, Haemon and Polynices, who ran off at the end of the last act upon learning that the truce had been broken. 4. This grand set piece, which marks the culmination of the first interpretation (whose effects, however, will continue to be felt in the following scene), reflects Racine’s dissatisfaction (expressed in his notes on The Phoenician Women, cited by Forestier [1262]) with Euripides’ perfunctory account of Meneceus’s death: “This death deserved to be narrated at greater length, instead of his describing the shields.” (On the other hand, although Euripides allots only a subordinate clause to his death, he compensates by making Meneceus a full-fledged character, giving him a lengthy and beautiful monologue before he goes off to his death.) Antigone’s narration, however, serves the more important purpose of developing Racine’s theme: that the “blood feud” raging between the two brothers cannot be controlled by any outside influence, however well intentioned, and that, like those torrents Creon described earlier (“The more constrained their course, the worse their wrath, / Destroying everything within their path” [I.v.33 –34]), it will fulfill its own destiny and vindicate its own inherent “oracle,” claiming several more lives as collateral damage in the process. 5. Meneceus’s speech smacks of the same hubris that characterizes Oedipus (in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King) when he confidently undertakes to rescue Thebes from its plague; and Meneceus’s presumptuous and selfaggrandizing belief in the first interpretation of the oracle’s pronouncement will, likewise, be rebuked when it becomes clear, soon enough, that his impetuous act has brought Thebes’s hopes for “the peace you never thought to see” no closer to being realized. But, looking forward to the end of the play, by which point the oracle’s demands (even according to its more exacting terms under the second interpretation) would seem to have been answered, one will be left wondering whether the oracle has acted in good faith, since the dutiful fulfillment of those very demands — the utter annihilation of Oedipus’s clan — has left Thebes with no presumptive ruler, and her affairs in so chaotic a state as must bode ill for a swift and stable restoration of peace. 6. This line must be understood as modifying “observed” in the following line, and not “seeing” in the preceding; thus, it means: The Thebans

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appeared distressed by Meneceus’ death, even though they ought to have rejoiced, since it meant (as they then believed) that peace would be restored and their city saved. 7. In the first edition, Antigone continued: It was they who subdued them, who appeased Those hostile camps, by equal fury seized; And if with so much blood they’d not been sated, They would have left such fury unabated. The “they” refers back to “the Gods” (line 60), whose benignity Antigone seems to damn with faint praise. 8. This powerful speech evokes the brutal, unpredictable reverses of life, which it often seems counterintuitive to believe are not the acts of some perverse outside agency. And Racine shows great understanding of the equally unpredictable workings of the human mind and heart — of how the same circumstances can, according to the angle of view or the frame of mind, raise one’s hopes or drown one in despair — when he shows us Jocasta confident one moment that Thebes will “henceforth thrive peacefully” (line 52) and convinced the next that “nothing can overcome my sons’ fierce hate” (line 80). 9. After this line, Jocasta’s speech originally continued thus: In vain mere mortals try to wear it down: In their own blood they are resolved to drown. Both wish to reign, so one of them must perish; One, justice favors; one, the people cherish. 10. Jocasta understands that her sons are equally intransigent; and it is misguided on our part to contend that either is the more accommodating, the more susceptible to familial feelings, the more “human” — in short, to look for any meaningful differences between the brothers, whether political or psychological. 11. See Creon’s admission later in this act (III.vi.55 –56) and note 14 for Act II. 12. Her moving but futile question (to which in her heart she already knows the answer) epitomizes the theme of the play: if her son were Meneceus, and thus not enslaved by an overmastering hatred, he could do what Meneceus did, but being Eteocles, he cannot. 13. Again, she suggests an arrangement so vague and impractical as to be meaningless. See I.iii.94 –95 and note 18 for Act I. 14. These four lines (29 –32) provide a crushing reply to Jocasta’s earlier question (lines 17–18), discussed in note 12 above.

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15. These lines still conform to the first interpretation of the oracle. Although they turn out to be misapplied in this play, they would apply in the Euripides version, since there the oracle does demand Meneceus’s life in expiation, and his death actually does “serve the State.” 16. The measure of Creon’s duplicity can be taken from the complete volte-face these two lines represent: earlier, when Antigone raised this very objection to him (I.v.61– 64), he brutally repudiated all paternal interest in Haemon. Now, when his interests require that he pacify Eteocles and prevent any further combat, he expediently urges the primacy of his fatherly instincts. 17. Creon’s rhetoric is so passionate, polished, and persuasive that even Jocasta, so antipathetic toward him until now, is completely convinced of, even exhilarated by, his change of heart. But Racine understood so well that cogency is no guarantor of trustworthiness. Indeed, Jocasta, having participated in the scene referred to in the prior note, should have been alert to the insincerity of his arguments. 18. An absurd qualification, as Eteocles at once points out. Fortunately for Creon, Jocasta comes to his rescue with the vague and tentative “Just see him,” which suggestion Creon eagerly seconds and reinforces with an equally vague, but potent, bit of self-deprecatory flattery (lines 20 –21). 19. Although it is only in the following scene that Creon will fully disclose his agenda, the audience, as previously noted, should be distrustful enough of Creon by this time to give full weight to the dramatic irony of this powerful and profound line. A very sinister double entendre, it is the most thrilling, most significant, line in the play. (In great theater, those two adjectives often go hand in hand.) This is not the “blood” that Polynices believes entitles him to a throne, nor is it the “tainted” blood Jocasta believes has foredoomed her sons: it is the “blood” of passion, the passion, in this case, of virulent hatred, which every character, including the brothers themselves, finally acknowledges cannot be repressed, transformed, or pacified. 20. One reason for Jocasta’s insistence on Polynices’ coming to Eteocles (putting aside the practical consideration that Racine will thus be enabled to preserve “unity of place”) will be made clear in the scene of their grand confrontation in Act IV: she wishes the meeting to take place in “this room which witnessed your nativity” (IV.iii.52), hoping that it will exercise its wonted sway. 21. Like Jocasta, Antigone has been duped into a state of optimism by Creon’s newly pacific views, so much so that she retracts her earlier accusatory remarks (I.v.96 –97), only to revert later to her first opinion: “He’s the curst cause of all that has occurred” (V.ii.41). 22. This echo of Antigone’s charge (I.v.94) — even more marked in the French, where the two lines begin, respectively, “L’intérêt du public”

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and “L’intérêt des Thébains” — alerts us to two other commonalities. The  first is that these are the only two occasions when any reference is made to Creon’s love for Antigone until the middle of the last act, when we are granted “full disclosure.” The second is that, in both instances, the character who impugns the sincerity of the other’s patriotism proceeds to expose the other’s “real interest” as a love interest: in the first instance, Creon’s love for Antigone herself, in the second, Antigone’s love for Creon’s son, Haemon (and it is from Creon’s manifest jealousy of his son that we infer his love for Antigone). 23. Picard (1067) observes: “The two last tirades of Creon [lines 20 –42 and 47–78] are full of maxims and moral analyses, which explain Creon’s psychology without serving the action. Racine, from Andromache on, will avoid these longueurs.” But is this not the very “psychological justification” of which Picard (see note 1 above) laments the absence in the plays written prior to Andromache? Why need we deem these revelations of a character’s psychology longueurs, especially when that character is probably the most monstrous Racine ever created? Furthermore, they are relevant to the action, since they explain Creon’s motives for promoting the confrontation between his two nephews — the focal scene of the play — and account for Creon’s actions after their death. 24. Following this couplet, the original edition included these somewhat problematic lines: With less reluctance I would abnegate My own well-being than I would my hate. By courting death, my glory’s guaranteed; But, unavenged, I’d be denied that meed. The first couplet recalls Eteocles’ earlier avowal: “Nevertheless, madame, I have to own, / I’d rather lose my life than lose my throne” (III.iv.31–32). Thematically, each of these two couplets would be more apt coming from the opposite speaker: his hate is what Eteocles cannot bear to give up, just as for Creon, the throne is his raison d’être. As Forestier puts it (1264): “Ambition as pure passion is left to Creon.” (See note 27 below.) The hollow sentiments expressed in the second couplet (which Creon continues to mouth through line 25) are belied as the scene progresses: his professed determination to avenge Meneceus’s death gives way to his more pressing desire to eliminate the two obstacles standing in his path to the throne, namely, his nephews (thus vindicating Jocasta’s accusations of I.v.41–44), who he hopes will “crush each other in a last embrace” (line 78). 25. After his brief but extravagant protestations of his desire for revenge, he makes this subtle, almost coy, segue (“But if I could renounce”) into the more expansive discussion of his real desire: to rule.

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26. Creon was a descendent of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. 27. The distinction made between Eteocles’ ruling passion and Creon’s in note 24 above is reinforced when one compares this couplet with Eteocles’ avowal to Creon in the first scene of Act IV: “We have been foes from tenderest infancy; / Nay, ere our birth was born our enmity” (IV.i.17– 18). The “two years” in the following line is the time that has elapsed since Eteocles assumed the throne upon the death of his father, Oedipus. 28. The sense of this line is: My ambition, in order to effectuate its own ends, made me stimulate their ambition. As the conclusion of this speech reveals, Creon has been an éminence grise during Eteocles’ reign. 29. Only in the last four lines (75 –78) of Creon’s lengthy and circuitous reply (a maudlin, specious self-justification), does he actually answer Attalus’s questions (lines 43 –46). 30. This line is often cited as the precursor of Nero’s more famous line, in which he confesses his murderous intentions toward his stepbrother, Britannicus: “I’ll clasp my rival, yes — until he’s crushed” (Britannicus IV.iii.10). 31. Creon’s “curtain couplet,” at once sententious and bloodcurdling, may call to mind Pope’s similarly cynical observation about mankind: Vice is a monster of such frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with its face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace. (An Essay on Man, Ep. II, 217–20)

act iv 1. Cf. I.v.32 –34. 2. Cf.  Bajazet’s description of his and Atalide’s mutual and longstanding love, which also results in their death: “This love, so tender and so true,  / Which, born when we were born, grew as we grew” (Bajazet II.v.49 –50). 3. These four lines (19 –22) were, uniquely, added by Racine to the 1697 edition, the last to be published during his lifetime. Perhaps still in a biblical frame of mind after writing Esther and Athaliah, Racine may have thought that the scriptural precedent of Jacob and Esau striving with each other in Rebecca’s womb (“And the children struggled together within her” [Genesis 25:22]) would authorize his use of an image that might otherwise have been deemed indecorous. It is an image that powerfully reinforces his theme: the truly innate nature of the brothers’ hatred. 4. Picard (1067) suggests that “the hatred of Eteocles and, likewise, the love of Phaedra, possess something sacred and supernatural: they are the

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work of the Gods, relentless in their punishment. . . . Eteocles, like Orestes [in Andromache] or Phaedra, divinizes his passion, even while he gives in to it.” But Eteocles’ remark is rather perfunctory, and nowhere else is it suggested that Eteocles is being punished or that he believes he is. When one is punished, one suffers, and one never senses, as one does with Phaedra and Orestes, that Eteocles is tormented, any more than one does with his brother. That partially accounts for the somewhat surprising fact that neither of “the fratricides” is given a soliloquy, as are Jocasta, Antigone, and, effectively, Creon (the final scene of the play consisting of his lengthy monologue, interrupted once by half a line from Attalus). 5. Cf. Creon’s dictum: “However much we hate an enemy, / We but half hate a foe we never see” (III.vi.73 –74). The link between that couplet and Eteocles’ declaration is more apparent in the French, since the rhyme word in the former is “demi” and in the latter “moitié,” both meaning “half.” If one were to construct a syllogism from Creon’s and Eteocles’ statements, the third part, the logical conclusion, would be: Therefore, I [Eteocles] must get near Polynices (thus “proving” that the brothers are on a collision course). 6. Cf. Jocasta’s similar outburst (one of the passages Racine deleted), cited in note 10 for Act I. In that instance, its function is essentially rhetorical; here, Creon is quite serious about preferring a continuation of hostilities to a reconciliation between the brothers. 7. In the first edition, after this line Creon continued as follows: A tyrant’s rage is like a frightful war; Whoe’er displeases him is seen no more; Of our most precious blood he drains the State; Though small the offense, the casualties are great. That is, if Polynices is allowed to reign, his tyranny will prove just as devastating as actual warfare. (Sadly, Creon’s astute observation has been borne out all too horrifically over the past century or so, from the reign of Stalin to the present day.) 8. Jocasta’s opening remark segues neatly from her brother’s closing couplet of the prior scene: where he prayed that his “fondest wishes” would come true, she expresses her gratification that hers already have (or so she believes). They both wish for the same thing, namely, that the brothers should meet, but, of course, with differing hopes for the outcome. 9. The “two years” are the year of Eteocles’ legitimate reign and the succeeding year of Polynices’ banishment. 10. Racine deviates from his predecessors (Euripides, Seneca, Garnier, and Rotrou), in whose versions this climactic confrontation takes place on the battlefield, witnessed by the opposing armies; in Racine’s version,

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this crucial scene takes place strictly en famille, which tellingly narrows the focus from the political to the psychological. 11. To trace his own traits in his brother is exactly what is most heinous to each: the other’s existence makes his own superfluous, since there is nothing to distinguish them (in either sense of the word). As Roland Barthes’ observes: “They hate each other for not being able to tell each other apart” (Barthes, 61). This odious, unbearable sense of their being carbon copies accounts for their marked reluctance to face, or even approach, each other. 12. Cf. Creon’s chilling double entendre: “And blood will exercise its wonted sway” (III.v.22). 13. While this competition in etiquette may seem inappropriately precious for such a dramatic scene, psychologically, it is brilliantly apt: Jocasta, quite nonplussed, tries to hide her discomfiture with this forced playfulness, making a little game of it, as if her sons were still small children. Clearly, she is the only one who responds to the aura of “this room which witnessed your nativity” (line 52 below). See note 20 for Act III. 14. Although perhaps lacking forensic rigor, Polynices’ adduction of battles, blood, and butchery to support his claim to the throne — an “argument” Eteocles resorts to in his reply (lines 35 –37)  as an equally irrefragable one to justify his own position — is more to the point than all the more apparently cogent lines of argument they pursue throughout the rest of this scene. 15. The brothers’ anger erupts in this short burst of stichomythia (lines 39 –42). 16. In the first edition, Jocasta continued thus: The proud ambition reigning in their hearts Hears only the fierce counsels wrath imparts. Their very blood, where deadly humors breed, Speaks only of hate: all else they do not heed. Cf. the second of these two couplets to the second of the two that Racine deleted from the original version of Jocasta’s invocation to the Sun (cited in note 5 for Act I): they are very close paraphrases, a good reason for deleting one, if not both, of these passages. (Translated literally from the French, line 3 of the earlier passage reads: And their hearts, infected with this fatal poison; line 3 of the later passage reads: Their very blood, infected with its [fury’s] deadly breath.) 17. Polynices’ succinct statement of his case opens the floodgates for a spate of arguments, most of them Jocasta’s, designed to dissuade him from pursuing his claim. Racine adopted several of them from his sources (Euripides, Seneca, Rotrou), and such extensive borrowing may reflect his lack of concern for the niceties of these prolix demonstrations, which are

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ultimately irrelevant to his main theme. If Polynices comes off as “autocratic” and Eteocles as “democratic,” if the former insists on the claims of “blood” and the latter on the will of the people, it is not because of any ideological or psychological difference: it is because neither has a choice. The only argument Polynices can make at this time is based on “blood” (that is, hereditary right or “justice”). Likewise, Eteocles’ insistence on his right to retain the throne cannot be based on either of those concepts, but must be based on the popular mandate. See note 20 for Act I. Furthermore, the fact that Polynices bears the brunt of his family’s expostulations in this expansive scene need not be attributed to his being the less reasonable, the more wrongheaded brother; rather, it may well be the result of pragmatic considerations: everyone fears that if Polynices were to assume the throne, it would lead to turmoil, perhaps even to open rebellion, whereas if Polynices can be persuaded to go away quietly, everyone can look forward to a peaceful resumption of the status quo ante. 18. This gnome derives from Cicero, as Forestier (1266) points out. The paradoxical but potent truth it encapsulates is enlarged upon in the rest of Jocasta’s speech, one couplet in particular (lines 69 –70) achieving an impressive epigrammatic eloquence. But in his reply Polynices begs the question: he admits the truth of Jocasta’s charges, but insists that, having justice on his side in the first place, he was forced to take such measures. 19. After this line, the original edition continued: In this dark hour, my soul is not my own; They steal me from myself, stealing the throne. Thus, self-estranged, my self I can’t restrain; In order to be virtuous, I must reign. Sounding like some thorny conceit in a Donne poem, this agonized avowal encloses a kernel of Racinian truth: that passion, taking over a part of one’s total being, puts the other part in a helpless position, whence it can observe, but not control, what passion makes one do. (The fourth line has a modernistic ring: the neurotic’s “cure” for his neurosis is to give in to it.) 20. Cf. Eteocles’ earlier line: “I should regret his ceding me the crown” (IV.i.33). 21. Cf. Clytemnestra’s line: “Is this the way a father ought to feel?” (Iphigenia IV.iv.134). 22. After this speech, the original version continued with this threepronged attack by Polynices’ browbeaters: jocasta To blameless exile how can you oppose A crown which guilt bestains, which guile bestows?

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Your banishment will make you glorious; The throne, my son, would make you odious. The crime’s another’s, if you yield the throne, But if you don’t, the crime is yours alone. Preserve your fame. antigone           Ah! can you really be Intent on carrying out this infamy? Thus you abandon honor and renown? O Gods! is it so sweet to wear a crown? And just to add that item to your dress, You’d cast off all the virtue you possess? If in your soul true virtue e’er held sway, You’d sacrifice it to the throne today? If so, its value you scarce realize: The victim’s worth more than the god you prize. haemon Without your yielding to this dark desire, Heav’n offers you just what you long for, Sire: You can, without one drop of blood being shed, Ascend a throne, a crown upon your head: The throne the King of Argos offers you . . . (Haemon’s last line, introducing the Polynices-Adrastus nexus, was necessarily transferred to Jocasta when Racine made his revisions.) The  sense of Antigone’s last couplet is: If you are capable of sacrificing virtue to the throne, you do not understand their relative value; the victim you are sacrificing (virtue) is worth more than the god (the throne) to whom you are offering up the sacrifice. 23. This couplet was originally given to Haemon, and Polynices addressed his reply to him (“Haemon, the difference is too great for me”). In assigning it to Jocasta in the later editions, Racine deprived Haemon of his last contribution to this rather lengthy scene, except for two lines near the end (lines 221, 227). 24. Here, Jocasta makes a flattering appeal to her son’s noble nature, which, she suggests, would scorn to submit to the ignoble constraints of such an arrangement. But her appeal, whether one deems it ingenious or ingenuous, is utterly futile (as all her prior appeals have proved to be), and for several reasons. First, it looks forward to a contingency dependent on two impossible premises, namely, that Eteocles will have been persuaded to relinquish the throne, and that Polynices would submit to the ignoble

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constraint of doing so himself at the end of a year — the impossibility of this second premise being implicit, moreover, in Jocasta’s very appeal. Second, and of more fundamental thematic import, such forward-looking arguments and appeals carry no weight with Polynices; to him they are insubstantial, even meaningless, for, as the play has hinted all along, Polynices’ real goal is not to reign, but to consummate, through the spilling of blood, his hatred for his brother. We may be sure that, just as Eteocles, in the opening scene of this act, confesses to Creon that “I should regret his ceding me the crown” (IV.i.33), Polynices would, with equal fervor, regret Eteocles’ ceding him the crown; and we may be equally sure that, just as Eteocles, earlier in this scene, on hearing Polynices challenge him to single combat to decide who will reign, exults, “Keeping the throne is nothing to such bliss” (IV.iii.102), Polynices would just as certainly derive less bliss from acceding to the throne than from engaging in the mortal combat that might allow him to do so. 25. The futility and absurdity of this suggestion have been established earlier by Eteocles’ assertion: “I fear his [Polynices’] ire less than his amity” (IV.i.36). 26. Since it was by chance that Eteocles ascended the throne first, his inference is somewhat suspect, unless he believes the gods took an active part in the drawing of the lots. 27. With one phrase, “un autre soi-même” (another himself ), Racine certifies the brothers’ redundancy and their indistinguishability. 28. Such an all-encompassing hate, reaching farther than those hypothetical kingdoms Jocasta advises Polynices to conquer for his own, not only precludes the possibility of their sharing a narrow throne, but ensures that, ultimately, there will not be “room for both upon this earth,” as Antigone will have cause to lament in the last act (V.ii.20). 29. The French translates literally as: Surpass, if possible, the crimes of your parents (a less sarcastic challenge than in my rendition). The original provides a clearer echo, a more pointed revision, of Jocasta’s earlier remark (addressed to the Sun): “You view my sons’ crimes and are not aghast, / Since by their parents’ crimes they’re far surpassed” (I.i.29 –30). 30. Given that Jocasta’s driving passion throughout this play has been her blind love for her two sons, her furious repudiation of that love represents a denial of her very essence. Whether one regards this shocking act as the effect of psychic trauma or as an expiation exacted by “the gods, relentless in their punishment” (Picard, 1067), it is a brutal “deRacination” of the passion that is the raison d’être of any Racine character. At the end of the play, this repudiation of family will be reversed, albeit on a less epic scale, when Creon ( Jocasta’s brother, let us recall), who has shown himself to be far more cynical than susceptible where family feelings are concerned, experiences, in his last moments, a sense of loss for the family

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that he has betrayed, invoking, in two lines, all six members: Polynices, Eteocles, Jocasta, Antigone (these four names making up one alexandrine), and his two sons, “sacrificed so callously” (V.fin.sc.31–32). 31. In Racine’s original version, this line was shared between Creon and Antigone. Creon began the line with the malignant “Fortunate fury!” (clearly an aside, referring to the brothers’ fury, as manifested in their last firebreathing exchange [lines 204 –7]); Antigone concluded the line with “Alas! nothing moves them,” meaning that not even their mother’s parting challenge does so. (I say parting to conform to the stage direction [“She rushes off”] I felt warranted in adding: Jocasta’s final line has all the flourish of an exit line, and her remaining on stage would be both pointless and absurd.)

act v 1. Racine, still under the influence of his predecessors Corneille and Rotrou, follows their example in opening this act with a spacious set of stanzas, elegiac in tone, but rigorously developing a theme. There are other departures from the strict sequence of rhymed alexandrines in Racine’s plays (two letters in Bajazet, brief oracular pronouncements in the play under discussion and in Iphigenia, Jehoiada’s entranced utterances in Athaliah, and the lengthy choral odes in that play and in Esther), but Racine never again allotted to one of his characters such a lyrical effusion. He judged well, however, in placing Antigone’s strophes here, since they provide an interlude (perhaps suggesting the passage of time during which her brothers’ fate is being decided) after the tempestuous last scene of Act IV and before the torrent of bad news that sweeps over Antigone moments after she has concluded her self-communion. The line following the third stanza is poised to become the first line of a fourth (it conforms to the length — an alexandrine — of the first line of each stanza), but it is checked by the arrival of Olympia and subsumed as the first line of a regular couplet (lines 31–32). 2. This line at once confirms that Jocasta has made good the threat she uttered at the end of Act  IV (IV.iii.218 –19)  and provides Antigone with her theme, neatly encapsulated in line 14: “A lover holds me back, a mother summons me.” 3. Cf. I.v.32 –34. 4. This turns out to be an erroneous inference on her part; Creon’s corrective report will, rather, tend to bear out Eteocles’ earlier surmise, namely, that the mutual hatred between him and his brother “may follow us into the tomb as well” (IV.i.24). 5. After this line, the original version of this speech continued as follows:

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When we’re entombed, our torments find some ease; When we’re enraged, our very crimes can please. Death puts an end to our worst suffering; Fury can’t feel, but grief feels everything. A victim of this living grief, I feel The crime of one, the other’s last ordeal. The fate of both tears up my heart, and I Mourn for the dead, and for the living cry. How shall I welcome him? My brother, he, But he has killed my brother wantonly. Nature’s confused and cannot speak today: She can’t acknowledge him, nor turn away. Forestier (1270) finds that these verses “rest entirely on a series of oppositions whose excessively rhetorical character diminishes the expression of the grief they are, on the contrary, supposed to underline.” These lines certainly warrant such a stricture; the first four suffer, in addition, from a confusion of oppositions. Is being entombed the opposite of being enraged? Death puts an end to our suffering, but so, also, does fury? When we’re enraged (or furious), “our very crimes can please,” yet “fury can’t feel”? All in all, a wisely deleted passage. 6. When it is revealed that both brothers have died, and at each other’s hands, the symmetry will be restored, and they will become as indistinguishable in death as they were in life. 7. This accusation corrects her earlier misplaced confidence in Creon (III.v.27–28). When she learns of the death of Polynices and of Haemon, however, for which she believes he is not accountable, she will lash out and indiscriminately blame, first, her brothers’ “fatal ambition” and, in her very next line, the “cruel oracle” (V.iii.110 –11). 8. Another instance of Racinian dramatic irony (again, slightly before the fact): knowing only of Eteocles’ death, she is momentarily enjoying a modified version of the blissful ignorance in which her mother died. 9. Forestier (1270) points to Britannicus and Esther as plays wherein Racine treats the theme of “bad counselors of kings.” It is a theme also touched on in Iphigenia, Phaedra, and Athaliah. In the last, Jehoiada, the high priest, warns Joash, the future King of Judah, against “fawning, flattering voices” (Athaliah IV.iii.86). In Phaedra, the “evil counselor” is Phaedra’s hapless nurse, Oenone, whom she numbers among those “vile flatterers” who “cravenly appease / Their princes’ whims and feed their frailties, / Pushing them toward those evils their hearts crave” (Phaedra IV.vi.109 –11). 10. One would think that Creon’s prior couplet, though it names no names, was explicit enough to apprise Antigone of who had died: after all, she has only two brothers and Creon only two sons; but apparently

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the truth does not sink in. Given that she is still in the dark, and that her question is a rather pressing one, she shows great patience in waiting a full fifty-five lines to learn that Haemon is dead and another thirty-five lines or so to learn that both her brothers are dead as well. 11. In Euripides’ version an anonymous messenger is the bearer of these ill tidings. Seneca’s version, being incomplete as it has come down to us, contains no confrontation to report on. (See Racine’s preface for his view regarding the authorship of the Seneca version.) While Robert Garnier follows, in his Antigone, Euripides’ practice, the more innovative Jean de Rotrou, in his Antigone, personalizes the messenger and limits the dramatis personae by assigning the task to Haemon (obviously not the ill-fated intercessor he is in Racine). Since introducing an anonymous, uninvolved messenger would have gone against Racine’s tendency toward dramatic concentration (and the choice of Haemon clearly not being an option), he assigned this enormously long récit, faute de mieux, to Creon. That master of duplicity betrays no hint of his satisfaction at the death of Eteocles and Polynices; one is only surprised that he sheds no crocodile tears over the death of his own son (or, for that matter, over the death of Eteocles, whose staunch partisan he professed to be). The “barbarous sight” of Haemon’s death, he recounts, “did nothing to defuse their [the brothers’] fearsome fight” (70 –71), but no more does the recollection of it do anything to impede the flow of his narrative or alter the impassivity with which he delivers it. (Cf. Theramenes’ récit in the last act of Phaedra: halfway through he must pause to collect himself, so overcome is he by the memory of Hippolytus’s horrific end.) 12. Perhaps Creon insinuates that she is somehow responsible for Haemon’s death so that, when he sues for her hand (as he will do later in this act), her guilt may move her to compensate him for the loss of a son by providing him with a wife. 13. Cf. Clytemnestra’s outcry: “Do I still live, who’ve died so many times?” (Iphigenia V.iv.7). 14. As Forestier (1271)  reminds us, this is in accordance with the epic-heroic tradition (stretching from Homer’s Iliad to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) of the victor’s stripping the arms from his vanquished foe. 15. Forestier (1271) also points out that this is an “adaptation of a formula hallowed since the death of Hector in the Iliad” (“To the dark realm the spirit wings its way,” in Pope’s translation [Book XXII.455]); Forestier goes on: “It was celebrated in the seventeenth century under the Latin form . . . [namely,] the last line of Virgil’s Aeneid” (“And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound,” in Dryden’s translation, one of his many marvelous hexameters [Book XII.1377]). 16. This physiognomic persistence of his furious hatred even after death seems to bear out his brother’s earlier forecast that it “may follow us into the tomb as well” (IV.i.24).

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17. See note 7 above. 18. Creon’s remark is logically unsound: he concludes that the wrathful gods, who were determined to kill them off, must be satisfied, since all the others are dead and his soul and Antigone’s are so sorely afflicted, but affliction is not tantamount to death. 19. This laconic line (“M’imiter” — Imitate me) makes up for its brevity with its brutality: its two innocuous-sounding words are fraught with baleful implications. Since, in her soliloquy that opens this act, Antigone made it clear that it was only in order “to save the life of him I love” that “my own unhappy life I’m bound to save” (V.i.27, 26), and since she now knows that Haemon is dead, one can readily surmise, from this line, that she has determined to kill herself. And simultaneously with that inference on our part comes the realization that Antigone, as if in an aside, or as a last, macabre private joke, is really saying, “Kill yourself too.” (Indeed, the line makes sense only if its two unspoken meanings are conjoined.) The oblique manner in which she “announces” her resolve to kill herself takes on added interest when we recall that Jocasta had announced her intention to kill herself in a strikingly similar, if less subtle, manner, leaving the stage with this parting shot: “I, / My cruel sons, will teach you how to die” (IV.iii.218 –19) — in other words, “Imitate me.” 20. The fourfold repetition of “It” (referring to “heaven”) occurs in the French as well, where that word begins each of lines 9 –12. Racine occasionally employed such insistent repetition for its obsessive effect; here, it creates an incantatory one, as Creon savors, with quasi-religious awe (these lines have the rhapsodic fervor of the Psalms), the singular favor heaven has shown in furthering his interests. 21. This remark confirms the observation he made earlier to Attalus, before he had attained the throne: “A soul drunk with the joy of holding sway . . . / Believes he never lived until he reigned” (III.vi.83,86). 22. “You wait in vain” derives its ironic pungency from Antigone’s earlier exchange with Creon as she went off to her death (Creon: “I’ll wait right here.” / Antigone: “Yes, wait” [V.iii.144 –45]). 23. Cf. Zaïre’s final couplet in Bajazet (the last in the play) after the death of her mistress (Atalide): “Ah! madame . . . She is dead. God! in my grief, / Can I not, dying too, find some relief ?” (Bajazet V.fin.sc.29 –30). 24. Cf. Achilles’ bitter taunt to Iphigenia when she, piously resolved to allow her father to offer her up as a sacrifice, refuses to let Achilles rescue her: “Bear to your father a heart that, I can see, / Shows less respect for him than hate for me” (Iphigenia V.ii.84 – 85). 25. Whether or not Creon actually dies at the end of the play has been a vexed question. Certainly, his death would provide a satisfying sense of closure, fulfilling the (second) interpretation of the oracle. But it is not the fulfillment of the oracle that interests Racine. Rather, at the outset

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of his career, he wishes to demonstrate, by having all his protagonists fall victim to their passions, the inevitable psychological destiny that all his characters will fulfill. To borrow a phrase of Achilles’: “More certain is this than Calchas’ [the priest’s] augury” (Iphigenia, III.vii.37). The question of Creon’s death raises another intriguing question: what happens to these characters after they die — or, at least, what do they believe will happen to them? Eteocles surmises that the brothers’ mutual hatred may live on after their death (see notes 4 and 16 above), and Creon observes of the dead Polynices: Dead though he was, undying was his ire: To attack his brother still seemed his desire. His face, which all the marks of death now bore, Appeared more proud and fearsome than before. (V.iii.106 –9) Just as he seems to suggest that the brothers’ hatred may survive death, after he learns of Antigone’s suicide, he professes to believe that her hatred for him and his love for her will not perish, but will torment them both in Hades: Though after death your anger still lives on, I’ll follow, heartless one, where you have gone. There you will see the object of your hate; The grief I feel my sighs shall iterate, To soothe your soul or aggravate your pain; Nor, to avoid me, can you die again. (V.fin.sc.9 –14) But Creon, shifty to the end, abandons such grim visions a few lines later, now anticipating, in his final utterance, a death that will swiftly put an end to love and ambition, guilt and retribution: “By countless torments I am now oppressed; / In Hades, then, my soul shall seek some rest” (V.fin. sc.38 –39). Such repose, however ill deserved, is consistent with Racine’s dramatic viewpoint: he is not interested in seeing crime punished, only in seeing it, tout court. He does not share Jocasta’s (self-exculpatory) view of the gods’ injustice: “They lead us to the brink of crime, inflame us / To perpetrate misdeeds, and then they blame us!” (III.ii.19 –20). He knows that human beings are perfectly capable of every crime and depravity with no provocation from heaven, but he also knows that they need not wait for the torments of Hell to suffer their punishment.

selected bibliography

I include in this Selected Bibliography only those works to which I refer in the Translator’s Introduction, the Discussion, or the Notes and Commentary. (In the case of the volumes of translations listed below, it is only their critical material that I have made use of.) There are countless other studies available, in English and French; a helpful selection may be found in the bibliography of Ronald W. Tobin’s Jean Racine Revisited. As Roland Barthes’ Sur Racine is one of the most important and thought provoking, I thought it expedient to refer the reader to the English-language edition.

primary sources Racine, Jean. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Forestier. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. ———. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Raymond Picard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

secondary sources Attridge, Derek. “Dryden’s Dilemma, or, Racine Refashioned: The Problem of the English Dramatic Couplet.” Yearbook of English Studies 9 (1979): 55 –77. Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1963. Brody, Jules. “Racine’s Thébaïde: An Analysis.” In Modern Judgements: Racine, ed. R. C. Knight, 174 – 88. Nashville: Aurora, 1970.

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Clark, A. F. B. Jean Racine. New York: Octagon Books, 1969. Housman, A. E. The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989. Parish, Richard. Racine: The Limits of Tragedy. Tübingen: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1993. Pope, Alexander. Poems of Alexander Pope. Vols. 7 and 9. New York: Yale University Press, 1967. Racine, Jean. Andromache. Trans. Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. ———. Britannicus, Phaedra, Athaliah. Trans. C. H. Sisson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———. Complete Plays of Jean Racine. 2 vols. Trans. Samuel Solomon. New York: Random House, 1967. ———. Five Plays. Trans. Kenneth Muir. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. ———. Phaedra. Trans. Richard Wilbur. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1986. ———. Phaedra: A Verse Translation of Racine’s Phaedra. Trans. Robert Lowell. London: Faber and Faber, 1961. Shaw, Alan. “Phaedra in Tact.” Hudson Review 40, no. 2 (1987): 225 –32. Strachey, Lytton. Books and Characters. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. Tobin, Ronald W. Jean Racine Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Turnell, Martin. The Classical Moment. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947. ———. Jean Racine: Dramatist. New York: New Directions Books, 1972. Virgil. Aeneid. Trans. John Dryden. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Weinberg, Bernard. The Art of Jean Racine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.