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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.