Phèdre

The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. The action is three speech acts, each drawn out under pressure: the confession to Œnone (I.3), the declaration to Hippolyte (II.5), the confession to Thésée (V.7). Each is made possible by the scene before. The false news of Thésée’s death (I.4) licenses the declaration; his return (III.3) turns it to crime and gives Œnone her opening. Hippolyte’s love for Aricie, often called a concession to gallant taste, bears weight: her line is under Thésée’s ban, and its discovery (IV.5 and 6) turns Phèdre from confession to jealousy and seals his death. The charges are small: the scene of Aricie and Ismène (II.1) and part of the lovers’ scene say in gallant idiom what needs fewer lines, and Théramène’s récit is longer than its news.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a passion can be at once wholly one’s own and wholly alien, and a mind can see it with perfect lucidity and be unable to will against it; knowing does not save. “C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée”
“It is Venus wholly fastened on her prey” (I.3) gives the god’s possession; the same speech gives the self that watches it. The second truth is about speech: here to name is to do. Œnone says the name Phèdre will not say, and later acts the slander her mistress will not order but allows. The third: shame is a relation to the gaze of the father and the sun. Held below the top because the disclosure, however deep, is of one condition in one household; the social world is present only as the throne in question.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Height and frequency are both high, and in a play of some sixteen hundred lines the frequency is the striking thing. The confession of I.3, from “Mon mal vient de plus loin”
“My sickness comes from further back” to Venus at her prey. The declaration of II.5, which begins as a widow speaking of her husband and turns, through the labyrinth imagined, into open avowal, ending at the seized sword. The jealousy of IV.6, where horror at herself rises to the Sun her ancestor and to her father judging the dead. Théramène’s récit of the monster. The death, where her eyes give the day back its purity. Held off the very top only because the gallant scenes of Act II and the plotting of III.3 sit at a lower pitch.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Myth built into the grammar of the play. Phèdre is introduced by lineage before she appears, “La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé”
“the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë” (I.1), and the line carries the inheritance: the Sun as ancestor, the mother’s monstrous desire, the father as judge of the dead, the sister abandoned on Naxos. The labyrinth is not alluded to but reenacted: in II.5 Phèdre takes Ariadne’s place and leads Hippolyte into it. The monster that kills him comes from the sea at a father’s curse, a bull-like thing out of Pasiphaé’s story returning on her house. Venus is a goddess and a symptom; Neptune keeps a promise Thésée should not have asked. Light against darkness is the structure, closed in the last couplet. The particular stays particular: a woman who cannot bear her veils.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The inheritance is Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra, and the doctrine of the rules. The turns are real. The centre moves from the chaste son to the woman, whose interior becomes the action; the gods leave the stage and survive only in her speech; the slander is shifted to Œnone, so that Phèdre’s guilt is consent and silence rather than the deed; Hippolyte is given a love, so that he too carries a fault. The preface calls her “ni tout à fait coupable, ni tout à fait innocente”
“neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent”. The stake was real: an incestuous passion at the centre of a tragedy, before a devout public and a hostile cabal. Held lowest of the gates, a tenth above the bar, because the swerve is made inside the inherited form, which it perfects rather than breaks; Racine’s own larger turn was Andromaque ten years before.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The rules are the instrument: one day and one place make the passion a pressure with no outlet, and bienséance, which forbids blood on stage, makes speech the only action, so that a play about what cannot be said is made entirely of saying. The confession, the declaration and the accusation are the events; the one physical act on stage is a sword taken and not used. The alexandrine couplet, with its caesura and rhyme, holds the most disordered feeling in the most ordered line, and that tension is the play’s subject. The récit is the form’s other instrument: the monster can exist only as told, at the remove of a servant’s grief. Held off the top because the confidant system is partly convention, and Ismène and Panope do little beyond carrying news.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: three and a half centuries of return, and readings that contradict each other without exhausting the text. The Jansenist reading, a just woman denied grace, stands against the preface’s figure of the middle way; the psychoanalytic reading finds the father’s gaze and the mother’s desire; Lucien Goldmann placed it in a tragic vision in Le Dieu caché (1955); Roland Barthes’s Sur Racine (1963) read the Racinian household structurally and began a public quarrel with Raymond Picard over how a classic may be read at all. On the stage the role has been the test of the French tragic actress, and Proust made Berma’s Phèdre the measure of art. The questions stay open: how far Phèdre consents to the slander; whether Hippolyte’s love is weakness or innocence; whose the sin is. Held a step down because they are few and deep rather than many.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is French literature of the seventeenth century, and European tragedy. The intrinsic force is the completion of a form: the play is the proof that the rules of French classical tragedy could carry the deepest passion, and it set the terms by which the form was measured; that is perfection more than reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within France it is decisive and continuous, the model of eighteenth century tragedy, in whose shadow Voltaire and Crébillon wrote, the source of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), the touchstone of French verse and of the tragic actress, read in every French school; beyond France, Lowell’s and Hughes’s versions and Britten’s Phaedra (1975) carried it into English. Held near the bar because the English and German traditions turned from Racine to Shakespeare, and the form it perfected did not outlive the eighteenth century.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Centuries, and the text whole. Form: the play survives entire in Racine’s own printed and revised text, with nothing lost and no question of authenticity; nothing is charged. Presence: performed from 1677, in the repertory of the Comédie-Française since its founding in 1680, taught in French schools without a break, translated into the main European languages and staged in them. Fabric: nothing to charge. The charge is on presence outside French: in the English-speaking world the play lives on the stage in versions and in the academy more than in common reading, and its verse, which is its life, does not travel. Three and a half centuries of unbroken performance in its own language place it high among works of its age; the narrower presence abroad keeps it below the top, and well below the millennial texts.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on Racine’s French. The command is of the alexandrine and of a restricted vocabulary made to do everything: a few hundred words of the noble register, feux, flamme, gloire, jour, sang, placed so that the literal returns inside the figure. “Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent !”
“How these vain ornaments, these veils weigh on me!” (I.3) gives the body’s sickness in the plainest words. The sound bears weight: the line on Minos and Pasiphaé is famous for its music, and the music is the lineage. The construction is exact: each act turns on a reversal of information, and entrances are timed to the line. The dialogue cuts as finely as the speeches rise. Charged only for the récit’s ornament and the stock gallant phrasing of II.2.

Score: 9.6 / 10

One law governs the whole: what is hidden in the blood comes to the light, and the light kills. Take the two most distant elements: Hippolyte’s gallant avowal to Aricie (II.2), in the idiom of the salon, and the sea monster of V.6, out of archaic myth. They obey the same law: his hidden love, revealed, turns Phèdre to silence; the monster is the hidden curse, spoken, made flesh. Hippolyte’s “Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon cœur”
“The day is not purer than the depths of my heart” (IV.2) and Phèdre’s last couplet, restoring the day’s purity by her death, are one figure answered. Gods and psychology are one physics: Venus never appears and is never doubted. Held below the top because the range is narrower than a larger form covers, and the lovers’ gallant register is where the law is felt as the age’s convention.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Judged on what a single tragedy holds, and it holds more than its size suggests. Consciousness, at the highest pitch. The family: a father, a son, a stepmother, a nurse who is a second mother, the dead mother and sister present in speech. The state: the succession of Athens is a live question in the first two acts, with Phèdre’s son, Hippolyte and Aricie, heir of the Pallantides, as claimants, and Thésée returns as a king. The sacred: Venus, Neptune, the Sun and Minos, the oath and the curse. The natural order: the forests Phèdre longs for, the horses, the sea. They are integrated through one house and one day. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the people, history and the world beyond the palace are absent, and the state is a question of inheritance, not of governing.

Score: 7.7 / 10