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Racine’s Roman Tragedies: Essays on ‘Britannicus’ and ‘Bérénice’ . Edited by Nicholas Hammond and Paul Hammond

2023; Oxford University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knad027

1468-2931

Katherine Ibbett,

French Literature and Criticism

This stimulating and seriously useful volume draws together a wealth of scholarly perspectives on Racine’s Roman plays, Britannicus and Bérénice. The editors’ Introduction, ‘Racine’s Imagined Rome’, suggests that the volume also allows for a reappraisal of the relations between Racine and the work of Pierre Corneille, and indeed this sometimes tired parallel is given new life in many of the essays here, and particularly in Michael Moriarty’s triangulation between the two playwrights and the work of Roland Barthes, exploring the different versions of the law imaginable in and via the work of each writer. The volume is divided into five parts, building on the scholarly strengths of the editors and also on the conversations dominant in a largely UK-based academic world: ‘Defining Tragedy’; ‘Sound, Metatheatre, and Theatrical Space’; ‘Ambiguity, Concealment, and Duplicity’; ‘Racine and His Rivals’; ‘Sources and Translations’. Paul Hammond’s thoughtful essay on ‘The Paths Not Taken in Racine’s Bérénice’ traces that play’s production of counterfactuals. Of course, the same is always true of edited volumes: there are other ways this could have been done, but these sections represent a dense and engaging five acts to occupy the reader. A number of these essays will shift the terms of my teaching: John D. Lyons’s stylish and pacy essay (one of two by him) on the tragic family and the problem of the hero in Britannicus; Michael Hawcroft’s characteristically careful explosion of sloppy assumptions in an essay parsing the spatial dynamics of the two plays; Paul Scott’s piece on homoerotic Antiochus; Hélène Bilis’s reappraisal of not just the Corneille–Racine querelle but more broadly of the historiography of ‘La Bataille des Bérénice’. Suzanne Jones’s observation (in an elegant piece on the translation of emotion between Racine and Thomas Otway) that translation is also an affective response will stay with me, too; and in affective response I was delighted to learn, in Jan Clarke’s rich account of Pradon and the ‘Parodie de Bérénice’, that a character might be dressed ‘en Bérénice’ (p. 292). The volume is full of similar gems. Lastly, I was stirred by Denis Flannery’s reading of ‘The Place of Breath in Alan Hollinghurst’s Berenice’, which draws together a close reading of Hollinghurst’s translation and the troubled breathing of our own political moment, via Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s closeted Esther and the psychoanalyst Michael Balint’s ‘spare and moving’ work (p. 363). The real insight granted by Flannery’s work on atmosphere suggests how crucial it is for us to change scholarly and sometimes over-specialized air. I would have loved to see Scott and Jones respond to Flannery — perhaps a follow up conference is in order? The volume is dedicated to the late Richard Parish, and the Introduction describes some of his contributions to Racine studies. This collection is properly in the spirit of Parish’s work, at once learned and accessible, ideally pitched both for the old friend of the text or the student new to the field.