Changing Perspectives: Studies on Racine in Honor of John Campbell ed. by Ronald W. Tobin and Angus J. Kennedy (review)

The seventeen articles in this affectionate Festschrift offer both a snapshot of the current state of Racine studies and a sincere intellectual and personal tribute to the distinguished dix-septiémiste John Campbell. Beyond their shared focus on Racine, the articles vary widely in approach and methodology. This variety helps to illustrate what the collection sets up as some of Campbell's abiding contributions to Racine scholarship: the resistance to any totalizing hermeneutic approach, and above all the reluctance to extrapolate grand claims about 'Racinian tragedy' from a handful of examples culled from an already narrow corpus of texts. Accordingly, one of the strengths of this collection is that it gives due attention to works within Racine's corpus that often lie outside the handful of canonical works. This is most apparent in Jean Emelina's wide-ranging (if necessarily inconclusive) exploration of Racine's uses of irony, which discusses, alongside more famous moments, examples from his satirical verse, his comedy Les Plaideurs, and his correspondence. Racine's less popular tragedies also find their place here. An article each is devoted to Racine's second extant tragedy Alexandre le Grand (whose intertextual relationship to Corneille's Cinna is well explored by Rainer Zaiser), and the various à clef interpretations of his three-act biblical play Esther (in a subtle piece by Mathilde Bombart). Most notably, Racine's first surviving foray into tragedy (La Thébaïde) is discussed at some length by various contributors (Ronald W. Tobin, Michael Hawcroft, the late H. T. Barnwell, Christopher J. Gossip, William Brooks, and Georges Forestier). Given this deliberately inclusive focus, it is a surprise (if simultaneously a relief) to find that the writings Racine produced in his position as historiographe du Roi are scarcely alluded to. In many respects, this is a volume 'about' Racine, in that it often (and increasingly) focuses less on the works themselves than on the different intellectual and aesthetic environments that have surrounded them from their creation onwards. Many articles explore the different ways in which Racine's plays have been received and reinterpreted by successive generations of readers, theatre troupes, and spectators, from Racine's own day (Forestier, Brooks) to the present (Madeleine Bertaud). For example, Guillaume Peureux and Emmanuel Bury trace Racine's gradual construction as figurehead of a certain mythical French 'classicism'. One partial victim of this myth of Racine was Paul Valéry, whose encounter with Racine's poetry — as Paul Gifford illustrates— curiously blends poetic insight and naivety. While articles such as these amply illustrate the historically changing perspectives on Racine, readers keen to have their own perspectives on Racine changed or enriched will find greater interest in earlier pieces—especially Hawcroft's nuanced reading of Racine's practice of scene division, Gilles Declercq's analysis of an undramatic and structurally unnecessary scene in Iphigénie, and John D. Lyons's fascinating piece on the imaginative capacities of Racine's characters. Indeed, if this volume seeks to change perspectives on Racine, it does so subtly rather than dramatically, showing an intellectual integrity and sophistication that only sometimes eclipse the dynamism of Racine's own writing.