Phaedra

Overview

Phèdre is five acts, about sixteen hundred and fifty lines, and it takes perhaps two hours. It was first performed in Paris in January 1677 under the title Phèdre et Hippolyte, and it was ambushed: a rival playwright, Pradon, opened a play on the same subject two days later at another theatre, backed by aristocratic enemies of Racine, who bought up seats at both houses. Racine’s play looked like a failure for a few weeks and then established itself permanently. He did not write another play for the public stage for twelve years.

Everything about the form is restricted on purpose. French classical tragedy follows the unities, so the whole action happens in one anteroom in Troezen over a single day. Nothing violent is shown; the deaths are reported. The verse is the alexandrine, twelve syllables in rhymed couplets with a break in the middle, and Racine’s vocabulary is deliberately narrow, a few thousand words of the most formal register, with no slang, no local colour and hardly any metaphor that was not already common property.

The effect of all that constraint is the opposite of what you might expect. With nothing to look at and nothing decorative to say, the pressure goes entirely into what people can bring themselves to admit, and the play becomes a sequence of confessions, each one extracted against the speaker’s will. The word most often used of Racine is that his plays are about people who cannot stop talking about what they have decided never to say.

What happens

Act I. Hippolytus tells his tutor Theramenes that he is leaving Troezen to look for his missing father. He gives one reason and then admits the real one: he is in love with Aricia, the last survivor of a royal house Theseus destroyed, whom Theseus has forbidden to marry so that the line will end. Then Phaedra appears, dying by inches, refusing food and light, and under pressure from her nurse Oenone names her sickness: she loves her stepson, she has tried everything to be rid of it, and she means to die rather than say so. News arrives that Theseus is dead.

Act II. Everything is transformed by that news. Aricia learns she may be freed, and Hippolytus, released from his father’s prohibition, declares himself to her with real awkwardness, since he is a young man who has spent his life despising exactly this. Phaedra comes to Hippolytus ostensibly to plead for her son’s inheritance, and in a scene of terrible slow slippage finds herself describing her love as if it were for the young Theseus, and then not as if. He does not understand until she has gone too far. She asks him to kill her with his sword, and when he will not, she takes it and runs.

Act III. Phaedra, humiliated and expecting exile, half hopes. Then the news: Theseus is alive and arriving. Oenone sees what will happen when Hippolytus speaks, and proposes the only defence available, accusing him first. Phaedra does not agree so much as fail to refuse.

Act IV. Theseus, told by Oenone that his son attempted his wife, confronts Hippolytus, who will not name Aricia to clear himself because he will not expose her, and defends himself only by protesting his character. Theseus banishes him and calls on Neptune, who owes him three wishes, to avenge a father. Then Phaedra comes to intercede, and stops when Theseus mentions that his son claims to love Aricia. The jealousy that arrives at that moment is the play’s cruellest stroke, and it ends any chance she will speak.

Act V. Theseus begins to doubt and tries to recall the curse. Theramenes arrives with the long messenger speech that is the most famous set-piece in French theatre: the chariot along the shore, the sea swelling, the monster, the horses bolting, the young man dragged and broken, and his last words asking that Aricia be treated kindly. Phaedra enters, having already taken a poison, says what she has done, clears Hippolytus, and dies. Theseus, left with nothing, says he will take Aricia as a daughter.

How to read it

Decide what you want from the translation before choosing one. Wilbur gives you rhymed couplets and the formal surface; Hughes gives you the violence underneath and abandons the rhyme. If you can read some French, read the great speeches with the original opposite, because the sound is half of what is being praised.

Read Euripides’ Hippolytus first. The differences are the argument. Racine says in his preface that he gave Hippolytus the weakness of loving Aricia because a perfectly virtuous young man would make his death unjust rather than tragic, and that Phaedra is neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent, which is his gloss on Aristotle.

Read the preface. It is three pages, it explains what he changed and why, and it makes the claim that the play’s morality is exactly what the enemies of the theatre had always demanded.

Watch how confessions are staged. Almost every major scene consists of someone telling someone else a thing they have sworn not to say, to a confidant who has pressed them for it. Oenone, Theramenes and Ismene are not decoration; they are the mechanism.

Keep the Jansenism at the edge of your vision rather than the centre. Racine was educated at Port-Royal, where the doctrine of efficacious grace held that salvation is given and not earned, and a well-known remark describes Phaedra as a righteous woman to whom grace was not given. It illuminates the play. It does not exhaust it, and Phaedra’s jealousy in Act IV is not theology, it is observation.

Questions it raises

• Phaedra says Venus has fastened on her. Is the goddess an explanation, an excuse, or the only language available for something she cannot account for?
• She never acts on the desire and is destroyed by it anyway. Is she guilty of anything before Act III?
• Oenone commits the crime that kills Hippolytus, out of love for her mistress. Does the play hold her responsible, and should it?
• Racine gave Hippolytus a love of his own. Does that make him a better character, or remove the strangeness Euripides built the story on?
• Phaedra hears one sentence about Aricia and everything changes. What does the play think jealousy is?
• The unities, the rhyme and the narrow vocabulary are severe restrictions. Does the play succeed because of them or in spite of them?