The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine

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      After completing Phaedra, Racine underwent a self-imposed retirement from the theater and only resumed his career as a playwright a dozen years later at the persuasive, if not peremptory, request of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, who solicited a play to be performed by the schoolgirls of Saint-Cyr, the school she had recently established for daughters of the impoverished nobility. Instructed to choose a subject without a strong love interest (the schoolgirls’ performance of the too torrid Andromache had convinced their patroness of the necessity for this precaution), and probably considering a biblical subject as most appropriate to the venue, Racine produced Esther, which was successful enough to have induced the king, at his wife’s urging, to demand another. The resultant play, Athaliah, which was to prove his last, finds Racine at the top of his form, more than one critic, both then and now, judging it Racine’s supreme masterpiece.

       Unlike the plot of Esther, whose general outline is taken intact from the biblical book of that name, Athaliah’s broad narrative arc (most notably its conflation of the Bible’s accounts of Athaliah and Joash) and all the details of its plot and characterization were fashioned by Racine (who, somewhat misleadingly, labeled the play “a tragedy drawn from sacred scripture”) from the merest hints in the biblical passages relating to its protagonists. Considering that for his last two plays Racine chose biblical subjects and that his earlier abandonment of the theater was partially motivated by a renewed religious fervor, which would have precluded writing plays as too worldly an occupation, we might be disposed to assume that those two plays are in some strong sense “religious” plays, perhaps even meditations on God, faith, and providence. And there are indeed some critics who, however ready they may be to dismiss as irrelevant the role of the heathen gods in Racine’s other plays, regard Jehoiada’s God as an unseen but potent presence in the play under consideration, directing the proceedings and impinging on the action, as does Sultan Amurat in Bajazet. But whereas in that play the sultan’s decree has determined the outcome even before the action commences, here one can make no case for any direct interference by the God so often invoked, any more than one can do for such interference on the part of the Greek gods in The Fratricides or Iphigenia. True, the characters in those plays are ever ready to hold “heaven” (a metonymy for those gods) accountable for the reverses they suffer. In The Fratricides Jocasta instructs her daughter in its malignant ways: