Racine's Late Greek Tragedies

Following three volumes devoted to Jean Racine’s earlier theatre, this volume examines his two late tragedies inspired by Greek myth, Iphigénie (1674) and Phèdre (1677). This international collection of essays by experts in the field covers a wide range of themes and approaches, including mythological, literary and environmental contexts, interpretation of the characters, staging, performance, reception, adaptation, and translation. With Phèdre traditionally having garnered more attention than Iphigénie, this sustained consideration of the two works in tandem with each other throws exciting new light upon a dramatist at the height of his theatrical powers.

Author Biography

Nicholas Hammond is Professor of Early-Modern French Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely, with books on Pascal; memory and education at Port-Royal; an introduction to seventeenth-century French literature; and numerous edited and co-edited books, including The Cambridge History of French Literature (2011). His most recent monographs are Gossip, Sexuality and Scandal in France (1610-1715) (2011), and The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris (2019). He directs the Early Modern Parisian Soundscapes, and is currently writing a monograph on Racine.

Paul Hammond is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Strangeness of Tragedy (2009); Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire (2022); and Shakespeare’s Tragic Language (2025).

Joseph Harris is Professor of Early Modern French and Comparative Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include Hidden Agendas: Cross-Dressing in Seventeenth-Century France (2005); Inventing the Spectator: Subjectivity and the Theatrical Experience in Early Modern France (2014); and Misanthropy in the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to Schiller (2022). He is currently working on suicide in the European Enlightenment.