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Jean Racine
Jean Racine

Jean Racine

French dramatist Jean Racine, the greatest tragedian of the seventeenth century, was born in 1639 in La Ferté-Milon. He was orphaned at a young age, and his grandmother sent him to a Jansenist school at Port-Royal. While attending the Collège de Harcourtin in Paris, Racine began writing plays and poems and met Molière, who produced his first plays, LA THÉBAÏDE (1664) and ALEXANDRE LE GRAND (1665). These early plays were similar to the tragedies of the great playwright Corneille, but with his next play, ANDROMAQUE (1667), Racine rejected the elaborate plots of Corneille’s plays in favor of his own style. His plays, based on classical Greek and Roman subjects, used simple plots, allowing him to focus on the characters’ expression of tragedy. In 1668, he wrote his only comedy, LES PLAIDEURS, followed by his celebrated tragedies BRITANNICUS (1669), BÉRÉNICE (1670), BAJAZET (1672), MITHRIDATE (1673), IPHIGÉNIE EN AULIDE (1674), and his masterpiece, PHÈDRE (1677). Racine was elected to the Académie-Française in 1673, and in 1677, after retiring from the theatre, was appointed Royal Historiographer to Louis XIV. The king’s wife, Mme de Maintenon, commissioned Racine to write his final plays, the biblical tragedies ESTHER (1689) and ATHALIE (1691), for performance at her school at Saint-Cyr. Racine died in Paris on April 21, 1699.

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