Introduction

Abstract

This book does not aim to be another survey of serious drama in seventeenth-century France. That task has been tackled in one way or another in several recent English books, among them Will G. Moore’s The classical drama of France (1971) and the relevant chapters of Geoffrey Brereton’s French tragic drama in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1973), as well as in Jacques Truchet’s thought-provoking study La tragédie classique en France (1975). The need to reinterpret literature of the past, whether in the light of fresh evidence or because new critics or readers wish to set works in a different perspective, is an important and continuing one. For example, postwar criticism of Racine, often thought of as a difficult dramatist suitable only for the ‘happy few’, has been wide-ranging and innovative, bringing together conventional literary historians, so-called ‘new critics’ and others in-between these extremes. Although often quarrelling among themselves, they have given Racinian scholarship greater depth and breadth than ever before and have opened up whole new areas for discussion. Even the most traditionally-minded reader of Britannicus or Phèdre can no longer ignore the importance of sound—for example, the presence of noise of one kind or another and characters’ awareness of it (or its absence, silence)—nor the way characters’ looks can be more meaningful or deadly than a thousand words.