Jean Racine - Böcker

Fedra och Andromaque a?r Jean Racines mest bero?mda tragedier. Ha?r publiceras de i o?versa?ttning av Anders Bodega?rd som o?verfo?rt fransk-klassicismens stra?nga alexandrin till en modern och levande svenska. Magnus Florin har skrivit ett fylligt efterord och dessutom tas den kritiska receptionen upp genom nyo?versa?ttningar av texter av ta?nkare som Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes och Jean Starobinski.

Jean Racine (16391699) är den främste representanten för franskklassicismen och hans betydelse för fransk teater kan knappast överskattas. I denna volym presenteras två av hans berömda tragedier Britannicus och Bérénice, i översättning av Göran O. Eriksson och med förord översatta av Jan Stolpe. De följs av utdrag från en av 1900-talets mer inflytelserika texter om Racine: två kapitel ur Roland Barthes Sur Racine för första gången på svenska av Sofia Warkander, som också skrivit ett initierat efterord.

Strongly influenced by Classical drama, Jean Racine (1639-99) broke away from the grandiose theatricality of baroque drama to create works of intense psychological realism, with characters manipulated by cruel and vengeful gods. Iphigenia depicts a princess's absolute submission to her father's will, despite his determination to sacrifice her to gain divine favour before going to war. Described by Voltaire as 'the masterpiece of the human mind', Phaedra shows a woman's struggle to overcome her overwhelming passion for her stepson - an obsession that brings destruction to a noble family. And Athaliah portrays a ruthless pagan queen, who defies Jehovah in her desperate attempt to keep the throne of Jerusalem from its legitimate heir.

This new Penguin volume includes the 'greatest hits' of French classical theatre, in vivid and acclaimed English translations. The plays in this volume - Cinna, The Misanthrope, Andromache and Phaedra - span only thirty-seven years, but make up the defining period of French theatre. In Corneille's Cinna (1640), absolute power is explored in ancient Rome, while Molière's The Misanthrope (1666), the only comedy in this collection, sees its anti-hero outcast for his refusal to conform to social conventions. Here also are two key plays by Racine: Andromache (1667), recounting the tragedy of Hector's widow after the Trojan War, and Phaedre (1677), showing a mother crossing the bounds of love with her son.John Edmunds' translation of Phaedra was originally broadcast on Radio Three with a cast including Prunella Scales and Timothy West, and was subsequently praised by Harold Pinter. This is the first time it has been published.Often hailed as the father of French tragedy, PIERRE CORNEILLE made his name with the tragicomedy Le Cid in 1637. His best-known works include the tragedies Horace (1640) and Cinna (1641). MOLIÈRE founded the 'Illustre Théâtre' troupe and wrote numerous comedies, including Tartuffe (1664), which was banned, Le Misanthrope (1666) and L'Avare (1668). JEAN RACINE became known as one of the period's leading playwrights, with such tragedies as Andromaque (1667), Britannicus (1669) and Phèdre (1677). After a varied career as an actor, teacher, and BBC TV national newsreader, JOHN EDMUNDS became the founder-director of Aberystwyth university's department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. JOSEPH HARRIS is Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (2005).

Jean Racine (1639-99) remains to this day the greatest of French poetic dramatists. Britannicus (1669), the first play in this volume, takes its themes from Roman history: the setting is bloody and treacherous court of the Emperor Nero. Phaedra (1677) dramatizes the Greek myth of Phaedra's doomed love for her stepson Hippolytus. Athaliah (1691), Racine's last and perhaps finest play, draws on the Old Testament story of Athaliah, Queen of Judah and worshipper of Baal, who is threatened and finally forced to concede victory to Joash, a son of the house of David and survivor of Athaliah's massacres.Racine's tragedies portray characters wrestling with ambition, treachery, religion, and love. In this translation, specially commissioned for The World's Classics series, C.H. Sisson has captured admirably the lucidity of Racine's language, both analytic and passionate, and the rhythm of his four-part Alexandrine, a combination that previous translators have consistently failed to achieve. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translations are the illuminating Discussions and the extensive Notes and Commentaries Argent has furnished for each play. The Discussions are not offered as definitive interpretations of these plays, but are intended to stimulate readers to form their own views and to explore further the inexhaustibly rich world of Racine’s plays. Included in the Notes and Commentary section of this translation are passages that Racine deleted after the first edition and have never before appeared in English.The full title of Racine’s first tragedy is La Thébaïde ou les Frères ennemis (The Saga of Thebes, or The Enemy Brothers). But Racine was far less concerned with recounting the struggle for Thebes than in examining those indomitable passions—in this case, hatred—that were to prove his lifelong focus of interest. For Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular brothers), vying for the throne is rather a symptom than a cause of their unquenchable hatred—so unquenchable that by the end of the play it has not only destroyed these twin brothers, but has also claimed the lives of their mother, their sister, their uncle, and their two cousins as collateral damage. Indeed, as Racine acknowledges in his preface, “There is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end.”

This is the first volume of a planned translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—a project undertaken only three times in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed "heroic" couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translations are the illuminating Discussions and the extensive Notes and Commentaries Argent has furnished for each play. The Discussions are not offered as definitive interpretations of these plays, but are intended to stimulate readers to form their own views and to explore further the inexhaustibly rich world of Racine’s plays. Included in the Notes and Commentary section of this translation are passages that Racine deleted after the first edition and have never before appeared in English.The full title of Racine’s first tragedy is La Thébaïde ou les Frères ennemis (The Saga of Thebes, or The Enemy Brothers). But Racine was far less concerned with recounting the struggle for Thebes than in examining those indomitable passions—in this case, hatred—that were to prove his lifelong focus of interest. For Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices (the titular brothers), vying for the throne is rather a symptom than a cause of their unquenchable hatred—so unquenchable that by the end of the play it has not only destroyed these twin brothers, but has also claimed the lives of their mother, their sister, their uncle, and their two cousins as collateral damage. Indeed, as Racine acknowledges in his preface, “There is hardly a character in it who does not die at the end.”

This is the second volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken in the three hundred years since Racine’s death. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach: he has rendered these plays in rhymed “heroic” couplets. While Argent’s translation is faithful to Racine’s text and tone, his overriding intent has been to translate a work of French literature into a work of English literature, substituting for Racine’s rhymed alexandrines (hexameters) the English mode of rhymed iambic pentameters, a verse form particularly well suited to the highly charged urgency of Racine’s drama and the coiled strength of his verse. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which clarify obscure references, explicate the occasional gnarled conceit, and offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.Bajazet, Racine’s seventh play, first given in 1672, is based on events that had taken place in the Sultan’s palace in Istanbul a mere thirty years earlier. But the twilit, twisting passageways of the Seraglio merely serve as a counterpart to the dim and errant moral sense of the play’s four protagonists: Bajazet, the Sultan’s brother; Atalide, Bajazet’s secret lover; Roxane, the Sultaness, who is madly in love with Bajazet and dangles over his head the death sentence the Sultan has ordered her to implement in his absence; and Akhmet, the wily, well-intentioned Vizier, who involves them all in an imbroglio in the Seraglio, with disastrous consequences. Unique among Racine’s plays, Bajazet provides no moral framework for either protagonists or audience. We watch as these benighted characters, cut adrift from any moral moorings, with no upright character at hand to serve as an ethical anchor and no religious or societal guidelines to serve as a lifeline, flail, flounder, and finally drag one another down. Here, Racine has presented us with his four most mercilessly observed, most subtly delineated, and most ambiguously fascinating characters. Indeed, Bajazet is certainly Racine’s most undeservedly neglected tragedy.

This is the third volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.In Iphigenia, his ninth play, Racine returns to Greek myth for the first time since Andromache. To Euripides’s version of the tale he adds a love interest between Iphigenia and Achilles. And dissatisfied with the earlier resolutions of the Iphigenia myth (her actual death or her eleventh-hour rescue by a dea ex machina), Racine creates a wholly original character, Eriphyle, who, in addition to providing an intriguing new denouement, serves the dual dramatic purpose of triangulating the love interest and galvanizing the wholesome “family values” of this play by a jolt of supercharged passion.

As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier. This boy represents the sole hope for the survival of the royal race from which is to spring the Christ. But in this play, even God is more about hate and retribution than about love and mercy.This is the fourth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.

This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Britannicus, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not concern itself at all with affairs of the world at large,” but nothing could be further from the truth. The tragedy represented in Britannicus is precisely that of the Roman Empire, for in Nero Racine has created a character who embodies the most infamous qualities of that empire — its cruelty, its depravity, and its refined barbarity.

The King is missing, presumed dead. His warrior son is braced for inheritance but is betrayed by his heart. Phaedra, the tormented Queen, has a terrifying secret that will shake Athens to its core.Based on Euripides' Hippolytus, Racine's Phaedra reveals the devastating potential of love and the brutality of human nature.Phaedra, in this new version by Frank McGuinness, premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in April 2006.

The critical event in Berenice, the death of Titus's father, the Emperor Vespasian, happens a week before the play opens. Thereafter Titus knows that his separation from Berenice is inevitable. The breaking off of a great love affair involves too the hopes of Antiochus, himself long in love with Berenice. The play pushes all three of its principals to the brink, not of revenge but of self-murder, before in her sublime last speech Berenice redeems and directs them all in an act of collective abnegation.Many tears are shed, but not a drop of blood. The effect is unconventional, and profound: the pained acceptance of the irreconcilable in human affairs, and the surrender, by each of the main characters, of the person they most love.Bajazet is Racine's most violent drama; it ends, like Phèdre, with a female character's on-stage suicide, here the culmination of a vividly described sequence of off-stage murders. The setting, in a claustrophobic space within the harem at Constantinople, menaced from both without and within, seems to license a violence of emotion as well as of deed.Violent too are the repeated reversals of fortune, and the terrifying acceleration of the play towards its inexorable catastrophe.Alan Hollinghurst's translation of Berenice premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in October 2012 and Bajazet, at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 1990.

Racine's masterpieces--Andromaque, Britannicus, Phedre, and Athalie--are translated into English verse. The introduction and notes by Mr. Lockert guide the reader to a greater understanding of the plays. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Translated into English rhyming verse, with introductions, by Lacy Lockert, the four plays included in this volume are Berenice, Bajazet, Mithridate, and Iphigenie. They are significant for their inherent excellence, and for what they reveal about the development of a great dramatist. Originally published in 1958. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Translated into English rhyming verse, with introductions, by Lacy Lockert, the four plays included in this volume are Berenice, Bajazet, Mithridate, and Iphigenie. They are significant for their inherent excellence, and for what they reveal about the development of a great dramatist. Originally published in 1958. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Racine's masterpieces--Andromaque, Britannicus, Phedre, and Athalie--are translated into English verse. The introduction and notes by Mr. Lockert guide the reader to a greater understanding of the plays. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A critical edition by Michael Hawcroft and Valerie Worth of Racine's 1665 tragedy.