Théâtre Complet De J. Racine (1877)

S$93.00

Théâtre Complet De J. Racine (1877)

S$93.00

Title: Théâtre Complet De J. Racine
Author: Jean Racine, Par M. Auger
Publisher: Librairie de Firmin-Didot Et C., Paris, 1877
Condition: Text entirely in French. Leather, decorated spine with raised bands. Bright gold gilt on all edges. A stain at the bottom of cover at the back of the book. Binding tight. No annotations. Excellent condition for its age.

SKU: racine_1877 Categories: ,

About Racine (from Wikipedia)

Jean Racine (22 December 1639 – 21 April 1699), was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France (along with Molière and Corneille), and an important literary figure in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such “examples of neoclassical perfection” as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie, although he did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young.

Racine’s plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic alexandrine; he is renowned for elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what Robert Lowell described as a “diamond-edge”, and the “glory of its hard, electric rage”. The linguistic effects of Racine’s poetry are widely considered to be untranslatable, although many eminent poets have attempted to do so, including Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Derek Mahon into English, and Schiller into German. The latest attempt to translate Racine’s plays into English earned a 2011 American Book Award for the poet Geoffrey Argent. Racine’s dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both the plot and stage.