Von der Liebestragödie zur Tragödie der Liebe: Jean Racines Phèdre

Abstract

From Love Tragedy to the Tragedy of Love: Jean Racine’s Phèdre The article focuses on Jean Racine’s last secular tragedy Phèdre and argues that the drama is based, on the one hand, on the French concept of love tragedy, established in the 1630s and reconfigured in the 1650s as a gallant tragedy. On the other hand, Racine radicalises this dramatic concept and fulfils it by combining different models of this dramatic concept in one tragedy. Instead of a modern gallant love tragedy, like Nicolas Pradon’s Phèdre et Hippolyte, Racine stages a tragedy of love that ends with the decline of two (royal) families, produced by the revenge of the goddess of love, Venus. According to this, Phèdre is not an exemplary tragedy of French classicism but rather a radical endpoint of French tragedy in the 17th century.