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

This volume in honor of John Campbell is superb in its quality and coherence. Its editors bring together sixteen important Racine scholars to pay tribute to Campbell’s body of critical works by exploring the volume’s central ideas, including the enduring fascination with Racine’s theater, the frequent disputes over the plays’ possible meanings, and the various myths and misunderstandings about Racine that have taken shape over time. A prefatory section includes the editors’ assessment of Campbell’s work and a bibliography of his contribution to seventeenth-century French studies.

In the first chapter, Michael Hawcroft analyzes the convention of scene division, in print editions of Racine versus performance, showing that Racine’s complexity appears even in apparently straightforward dramaturgical practice. Ronald Tobin then examines the importance of off-stage, imaginary spaces, showing how with Andromaque Racine came into his own through creative uses of imagined space. John D. Lyons continues the focus on imagination with an inquiry into characters’ “inner vision” and what he compellingly calls the ability of Racine’s characters to “think in images” (23). Taking up the question of space, Ralph Albanese argues that in Athalie the eponymous villainess’s incursion into the temple signals her loss of self-control, whereas Joad’s mastery of space and “la logistique” (40) effectively entraps her there. In a subtle reading exercise, H.T. Barnwell reveals the specificity of several tragedies by testing them against the idea of the tragic circle, a metaphor for dramatic action. Gilles Declercq closely reads scene V.4 of Iphigénie, “une scène inutile” (51), to show how the failure of scenic “dramaticité” promotes off-stage “rhétoricité” in a way that perfectly conjoins the dramatization of the passions with performance itself and refutes the received idea that in Racine the body is absent from the stage.

A number of contributors pursue the critical reflection on irony found in John Campbell’s work. Jean Emelina traces Racine’s multiple, sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful uses of irony in epigrams, letters, prefaces, and even in the tragedies themselves. Guillaume Peureux seeks to nuance a binary opposition of stereotypes concerning Racine’s lines of verse: are they rigid models of classical esthetics or open-ended, fluid constructs? Paul Valéry was sensitive to Racine’s uses of poetic language, and Paul Gifford closely reads Valéry’s journals to reveal a deep kinship of poets across the centuries. A seventeenth-century connection between playwrights is posited by Christopher J. Gossip, who shows how Thomas Corneille’s La Mort de l’empereur Commode reveals a dramatic structure very similar to that of Andromaque, nine years before the latter’s premiere.

A number of the critics in this volume take an interest in Racine’s first two tragedies, which have received less sustained critical attention than Andromaque and the tragedies that followed Racine’s first major critical success. In comparing Alexandre le Grand with Corneille’s Cinna, Rainer Zaiser explains how Racine’s treatment of the sovereign’s unexpected generosity innovatively constructs the character of the gallant leader early in Racine’s career. William Brooks reassesses the archives of the Guénégaud theater to demonstrate that “every play given by the independent Guénégaud company from September 1678 whose title might indicate it to be by Racine was indeed by Racine” (130), something that “[no] one has previously shown […] to be so,” Brooks states. Georges Forestier offers new insights into the relationship that Molière and Racine may or may not have had—“La vraie question est donc de savoir s’ils furent jamais ‘en bonne intelligence’” (140—by looking critically at the writings of Grimarest. Although there are numerous gaps in the historical record, Forestier finds that the banning of Le Tartuffe in 1664 likely had a major impact on the beginnings of Racine’s career...