Phaedra

Summary

Phaedra takes place in a single day at Troezen, where Theseus, king of Athens, has left his household while he travels; he has been gone six months and no one knows whether he is alive. His son Hippolytus, the austere child of an Amazon who has always scorned love, announces that he is leaving to search for his father. He confesses to his tutor Theramenes the real reason: he has fallen in love with Aricia, the last princess of the rival house of Pallas, whom Theseus has forbidden ever to marry. Meanwhile Queen Phaedra, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, is dying of a sickness she will not name. She has not slept or eaten for three days. Her old nurse Oenone, threatening to die first, finally drags the secret out of her: Phaedra loves her stepson Hippolytus, has loved him since her marriage, tried to cure herself by sacrifices to Venus, and had him exiled in order to forget him. News arrives that Theseus is dead. Oenone argues that the passion is now no crime, and that Phaedra must live to secure the throne for her own son. Phaedra goes to plead for her child with Hippolytus and, in a scene that begins with politics and slides into confession, tells him she loves him; when he recoils, she demands that he kill her and seizes his sword. Then Theseus returns alive. Terrified that Hippolytus will expose her, Phaedra lets Oenone accuse him first, and the sword left in her hands becomes the evidence. Hippolytus refuses to shame his father by revealing the truth and pleads only his own chaste life and his love for Aricia, which Theseus dismisses as a lie. Theseus calls on Neptune to fulfil an old promise and destroy his son, then banishes him. Phaedra comes to intercede, but on learning that Hippolytus loves Aricia she is seized by jealousy and falls silent; afterwards she turns on Oenone and curses her as the flatterer who ruined her. Oenone drowns herself. Hippolytus plans to marry Aricia in secret at a temple outside the city, but as he drives along the shore a monster rises from the sea, his horses bolt, and he is dragged to death. Theramenes reports the death in the play's most famous speech. Phaedra, already poisoned, comes before Theseus, declares Hippolytus innocent, confesses her guilt and Oenone's slander, and dies. Theseus, disabused too late, resolves to honour his son and adopt Aricia as his daughter. Racine kept the Euripidean outline but added the Aricia plot, which gives Phaedra a rival and makes her jealousy the hinge of the catastrophe, and he transferred the actual lie to the nurse. The result is a tragedy less about a goddess's revenge than about a conscience that sees its sin clearly and is still carried by it.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: two secrets at Troezen

  Hippolytus admits to Theramenes that he flees not Phaedra's hatred but his own forbidden love for Aricia. Phaedra, weak and half-delirious, yields to Oenone's pleading and names Hippolytus as the cause of her wasting. Panope reports Theseus dead and Athens divided over the succession; Oenone persuades Phaedra to live for her son's sake.

• Act II: declarations

  Hippolytus tells Aricia he will restore her rights and, against his own principles, that he loves her. Phaedra comes to plead for her son, drifts into describing Theseus as he looked in his youth, recognizes that she is describing Hippolytus, and confesses outright. When he is horrified she begs him to strike her, takes his sword, and is hurried away by Oenone. Athens chooses Phaedra's son as king; a rumour says Theseus lives.

• Act III: the return of Theseus

  Phaedra, ashamed, still sends Oenone to tempt Hippolytus with the crown and prays to Venus to make him love. Oenone brings word that Theseus has landed. Phaedra wants to die; Oenone proposes to accuse Hippolytus first, and Phaedra, in despair, leaves her fate in the nurse's hands. Phaedra refuses her husband's embrace with ambiguous words, and Theseus finds his whole house fleeing him.

• Act IV: the curse and the jealousy

  Oenone tells Theseus that Hippolytus attempted violence and shows the sword. Theseus confronts his son, curses him in Neptune's name and banishes him; Hippolytus defends his chastity and reveals his love for Aricia, which Theseus calls a pretext. Phaedra arrives to beg mercy for Hippolytus but learns of Aricia and breaks off. Alone and with Oenone she rages, imagines her father Minos judging her among the dead, and drives the nurse away with a curse.

• Act V: the sea monster and the confession

  Hippolytus and Aricia plan to flee and marry at a temple of oaths. Aricia warns Theseus obliquely that he has left one monster alive. Theseus begins to doubt and summons Oenone, but learns she has drowned herself. Theramenes reports Hippolytus' death on the shore. Phaedra, dying of poison, confesses everything; Theseus adopts Aricia.

Characters

• Phaedra, queen, wife of Theseus

  Daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë and granddaughter of the Sun; consumed by a passion for her stepson that she judges as crime from the first scene, yet repeatedly lets others decide for her until her final confession.

• Hippolytus, son of Theseus and the Amazon Antiope

  Proud, chaste huntsman who has scorned love and now loves Aricia against his father's ban; he keeps silence about Phaedra out of reverence for his father, and dies for it.

• Theseus, king of Athens

  Monster-slaying hero with a long record of faithless loves; returns from captivity in Epirus and condemns his son on a servant's word and a piece of evidence, using a god's promise as his weapon.

• Oenone, Phaedra's nurse and confidante

  Devoted to the point of having no conscience but her mistress's survival; she draws out the secret, urges Phaedra to live, devises and carries out the slander, and drowns herself when cast off.

• Aricia, princess of the house of Pallas

  Theseus' captive ward, whose brothers he killed; Racine's addition to the legend, she loves Hippolytus and urges him to defend himself.

• Theramenes, tutor of Hippolytus

  Hippolytus' confidant from childhood, who gives the long eyewitness account of his death.

• Ismene, Aricia's confidante

  Reports the rumours of Theseus' death and encourages Aricia's hopes.

• Panope, Phaedra's waiting-woman

  Brings the false report of Theseus' death and later the news of Oenone's suicide and Phaedra's distraction.

Lessons

• Knowing the good is not the same as choosing it

  Phaedra never excuses her passion: from Act I she calls it crime and wishes to die rather than speak it. Yet at each decisive moment she hands her choice to someone else, to Oenone, to Venus, to circumstance. Racine shows a will that sees clearly and still does not act rightly, a picture readers often set beside Paul's lament in Romans 7 and Augustine's divided will in Confessions VIII, though Racine never preaches it.

  • List the moments where Phaedra says 'do what you will' or its equivalent. What does she gain by not deciding?
  • Is Phaedra less guilty because she hates her own passion, or more guilty because she knows exactly what it is?
  • Where, if anywhere, does Phaedra finally choose for herself?

• The counsellor who serves the passion, not the person

  Oenone loves Phaedra and would die for her, but her love wants only that Phaedra live and keep her reputation. She argues that the king's death makes the passion innocent, that honour outweighs conscience, and finally that the gods themselves sin. Phaedra's curse on her names a danger Racine's court audience would have recognized: flatterers who smooth the path to the sin their master already wants.

  • Oenone says that when reputation is at stake 'all must be sacrificed, conscience itself.' Where else in life is that argument made?
  • Is Phaedra's curse on Oenone just, or is she blaming the nurse for her own consent?
  • What would a true friend have said to Phaedra in Act I, Scene V?

• Rash judgment and the use of power

  Theseus condemns his son within minutes, on a servant's word and a sword, and spends the one favour Neptune owed him on a curse. He refuses Hippolytus' oath, mocks his love for Aricia, and only begins to doubt when it is too late. The play makes a king's haste the instrument of catastrophe, and his final speech admits that his own glory now testifies against him.

  • What evidence does Theseus actually have? What would a just judge have asked before acting?
  • Why does Theseus' past as a faithless lover matter to how he reads his son?
  • Aricia warns that the gods 'chastise us with their gifts.' How does Neptune's promise prove her right?

• Silence that protects and silence that kills

  Several characters keep quiet for good reasons: Hippolytus to spare his father shame, Aricia because Hippolytus asked her, Phaedra at first to keep her passion buried. But each withheld truth lets the slander stand. The play asks when reverence and discretion turn into sharing in a wrong, and it ends with Phaedra speaking at the cost of her life.

  • Was Hippolytus right not to tell his father the truth? What did his silence cost?
  • Compare Phaedra's silence in Act I with her silence in Act IV, Scene IV, when she learns of Aricia. Are they the same kind of silence?
  • Why does Racine have Phaedra confess publicly rather than leave a letter (Panope says she wrote and tore up three)?

• Alexandrines under pressure

  Racine's tragedy uses a small vocabulary, one place, one day and almost no action on stage; everything violent is reported. The pressure falls on speech: Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus moves from a widow's plea to a fantasy of leading him through the Labyrinth before she realizes what she has said. Even in Boswell's blank verse the shifts of address and the broken lines carry the drama.

  • Trace the Labyrinth speech in Act II, Scene V. At what line does Phaedra stop talking about Theseus?
  • Why does Racine report Hippolytus' death through Theramenes rather than showing it? What does the long narrative do to the audience?
  • Boswell translates rhymed couplets into mostly unrhymed lines but keeps rhyme at some scene endings. Find two and say what the rhyme adds.

Context

Phèdre was first performed by the troupe of the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris on 1 January 1677, under the title Phèdre et Hippolyte; Racine shortened the title to Phèdre in the collected edition of 1687. Its sources are Euripides' Hippolytus, Seneca's Phaedra, and Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses. In his preface Racine defended the play on moral grounds, saying that in it the passions are shown only to display the disorder they cause and that vice is painted so its ugliness can be known and hated, and he expressed hope that tragedy might be reconciled with the many learned and pious people who condemned the theatre. That hope was addressed partly to Port-Royal, whose leading figures, including Pierre Nicole, held that plays corrupted the soul.

Composition

Written in 1676 in rhymed alexandrine couplets, five acts, observing the unities of time, place and action. Racine altered his sources: Euripides' Phaedra slanders Hippolytus in a letter before hanging herself, whereas Racine gives the lie to Oenone and makes Phaedra die confessing; he invented the love of Hippolytus for Aricia (drawing a hint from Virgil and from ancient tradition that Hippolytus loved a woman of that name) partly, as the preface says, to make Hippolytus less perfect than a hero who had never loved. The library's text is Robert Bruce Boswell's English verse translation, published in the nineteenth century and reprinted in the Harvard Classics; it does not include Racine's preface.

Reception

A rival Phèdre et Hippolyte by Nicolas Pradon opened two days later at the Hôtel Guénégaud, backed by a court faction around the Duchesse de Bouillon, and for a time the quarrel overshadowed Racine's play. Phèdre was soon recognized as his masterpiece. Racine wrote no more for the public stage; later in 1677 he married and was named royal historiographer, and he was reconciled with Port-Royal (an often repeated story, which may be embellished, has Antoine Arnauld approving the play). The title role became the summit of the French tragic repertory, played by La Champmeslé at the premiere and later by Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt.

Comparisons

• Medea and Other Plays

  The Medea volume includes Euripides' Hippolytus, Racine's main source. Euripides frames the story with Aphrodite and Artemis, makes Hippolytus' contempt for Aphrodite the offence, and has Phaedra herself write the false accusation; Racine removes the goddesses from the stage, gives the lie to Oenone, and makes Phaedra's conscience rather than divine spite the centre.

• Heroides

  Heroides IV is Phaedra's letter to Hippolytus, a seductive argument that their love would be no crime. Racine's Phaedra makes almost the opposite speech: she loves as Ovid's does but never stops calling it crime, and the Labyrinth fantasy in Act II echoes the Ovidian heroine's family history of Ariadne and Pasiphaë.

• Metamorphoses

  Ovid's Book XV has Hippolytus himself tell how the bull from the sea wrecked his chariot before he was restored to life as Virbius. Racine keeps the monster and the dragging death in Theramenes' narrative but allows no resurrection; the death is final and the father must live with it.

• Bérénice

  Bérénice (1670) is Racine's tragedy without a death, in which an emperor and a queen renounce love for duty and part. Phèdre reverses it: duty is known from the start and love will not be renounced. Reading them together shows how far Racine's late work moved toward a darker view of the will.

• Pensees

  Pascal, writing in the same Port-Royal circle that educated Racine, describes a humanity that knows its greatness and its misery and cannot free itself by reason alone. Phaedra's lucid self-condemnation without power to change is often read as a dramatic case of that diagnosis; whether Racine intended a Jansenist play remains disputed.

• Confessions

  Augustine's account of two wills in Book VIII, one wanting chastity and the other not yet, offers a Christian vocabulary for the state Phaedra describes in pagan terms as Venus seizing her prey. Augustine's will is freed by grace; Racine's pagan heroine has only death and confession.

• The Theban Plays

  Oedipus also discovers that his household has been ruined by a hidden incestuous bond and suffers through a curse and an oracle. Sophocles' tragedy turns on ignorance and discovery, Racine's on full knowledge from the first act; Oedipus does not know what he has done, Phaedra knows exactly what she wants.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Phaedra's passion is staged as an illness with physical signs: Theramenes calls it a 'dire disease' of which she will not speak, Oenone reports three nights without sleep and three days without food, and Phaedra describes pallor, blushing, dimmed sight and alternating cold and burning at first sight of Hippolytus. These signs match the long medical and literary tradition of lovesickness (amor hereos) inherited from ancient physicians and Ovid, and are useful for teaching how early modern culture located passion in the body. Phaedra's self-starvation and wish to die, Oenone's drowning and Phaedra's poisoning make suicide a structural element of the plot; modern readers sometimes describe Phaedra's state in Act I as depressive, but that is a retrospective reading of a figure Racine presents through the categories of passion, sin and divine persecution.

• Act I, Scenes I–III

  Theramenes and Oenone describe the queen's unnamed wasting illness; she has not slept or eaten for three days, rises restless, wants air, and is oppressed by her veils and ornaments.

  Sleep Insomnia Starvation Nutrition Mind Body
• Act I, Scene III

  Phaedra's account of the physical symptoms of her passion at first sight of Hippolytus and of her failed attempt to cure it by sacrifices; she says she wished to die keeping the secret.

  Mind Body Suicide
• Act V, Scene V

  Panope reports Oenone's drowning and Phaedra's agitation: alternately embracing and repelling her children, wandering, not recognizing her attendants, writing and destroying letters.

  Suicide Grief
• Act V, Scene VII

  Phaedra has taken a poison brought to Athens by Medea and describes its chill and the dimming of her sight as she confesses and dies; Theseus resolves to mourn his son.

  Pharmacology Poisons Suicide Grief

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the letter Phaedra began and destroyed three times in Act V, Scene V, as she might have written it before deciding to confess in person.

• Dialogue

  Write the scene Racine leaves offstage: Oenone alone with Theseus in Act IV, Scene I, but with Theseus asking the questions a careful judge would ask. Does Oenone's story survive?

• Essay

  Racine's preface claims that in Phèdre vice is painted so that its ugliness may be known and hated. Using at least three scenes, argue whether the play achieves that aim or whether it makes the passion more attractive than its consequences.

• Classroom

  Read Theramenes' account of Hippolytus' death aloud in small sections, with one student marking each change of pace. Then compare the speech with Euripides' messenger speech in Hippolytus.

Further Reading

• Hippolytus, Euripides

  Racine's principal source; included in Medea and Other Plays.

• Phaedra, Seneca

  The Roman version, in which Phaedra herself declares her love to Hippolytus.

• Phèdre (verse translation), Richard Wilbur

  A modern translation in rhymed couplets closer to Racine's form than Boswell's.

• Phaedra (verse translation), Robert Lowell

  A freer English version in heroic couplets.

• The Hidden God, Lucien Goldmann

  Reads Pascal and Racine together as expressions of a tragic, Jansenist world-view.

• On Racine, Roland Barthes