La Réception de Racine à l'âge classique: de la scène au monument (review)

This set of conference papers from the 1999 tercentenary celebrations is being published surprisingly late, but for reasons completely beyond the control of its valiant contributors. In their Introduction, the editors underline the extent to which the 'Racine' being celebrated was constructed from the playwright's own editions, his son's hagiography, the Comédie-Française, and the classroom (giving its primary sense to the term 'classical'). Alain Viala shows how Racine the writer constantly emphasized the dignity of the tragic genre, and, with Fanny Malterre, chronicles the decline in performances of his plays in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In schools, as Michèle Rosellini demonstrates in her study of l'abbé Batteux's influence, it became more important to develop taste rather than to teach rhetoric. The academic 'Racine', then as now, varied according to taste and ideology. Thus Junga Shin explains how in schools the emphasis was on Esther and Athalie, but certainly not on passion, and Claire Cazanave notes how the luxurious 1801 Didot edition established Racine as a prestigious national monument at a critical time. Other contributions cover a variety of topics. To those who still need convincing, Jonathan Mallinson explains that the distinction between the comic and tragic genres is hardly absolute, and David Maskell shows how Racine placed poetic and dramatic effect before adherence to strict grammatical propriety. Edward Nye outlines some eighteenth-century views of what was understood to be Racine's iconic versification; David Williams revisits the ambiguity of Voltaire's attitude to Racine, most evident in his reaction to Athalie; and Nicolas Cronk and Russell Goulbourne each use the eighteenth century's changing responses to Racine as a pointer to the evolution of taste. Some contributions inevitably stray from under the umbrella of the title's 'âge classique'. François Lagarde considers the reception of Racine after the Revolution, while Kate Tunstall ponders the aesthetic implications of a 1910 film of Athalie together with Saint-Foix's 1769 Iphigénie (also studied by Cronk). The six-year gap between conference and publication does have some consequences, a fact noted resignedly by Henry Phillips in an overview of recent Racine criticism necessarily hampered by this delay. For example, Dinah Ribard's study of Louis Racine's biography of his father would have been benefited from consideration of Georges Forestier's article on the same subject in the Île-de-France tercentenary papers from 2003 (a volume she quotes in another context), while to Bruno Blanckeman's comments on five adaptations of Racine seen at the 1998 Avignon fringe (including a Phèdre performed in a garage for an audience of four), one might have preferred an overview of the rich theatrical production of 1999. That said, the erudition and flair of its contributors means that the volume as a whole holds its own amongst the other sets of conference papers from that memorable year.