Phedre
A Play
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Print & ebook · February 28, 2000
A lean, high-tension version of a classic tragedy.
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- Who it’s for
- Racine’s classic tragedy meets Hughes’s unrhyming verse in a lean, high-tension collision of desire and restraint.
- Themes
- Obsessive love, Forbidden love, Tragic infatuation
- Pacing
- Fast
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Start with this bookAbout this book
A lean, high-tension version of a classic tragedy. The myth of Phaedra is one of the most powerful in all of classical mythology. As dramatized by the French playwright Jean Racine (1639-99), the dying Queen's obsessive love for her stepson, Hippolytus, and the scrupulously upright Hippolytus' love for the forbidden beauty Aricia has come to be known as one of the great stories of tragic infatuation, a tale of love strong enough to bring down a kingdom.
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In this "tough, unrhyming avalanche of a translation" (Paul Taylor, The Independent), Hughes replaces Racine's alexandrines with an English verse that serves eloquently to convey the passions of his protagonists. The translation was performed to acclaim in London in 1998, and the London production, starring Diana Rigg, was staged in 1999 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "We are still catching up with Ted Hughes's gift for narrative verse after his Tales from Ovid," one English critic observed after the London premiere. "Little needs to happen on stage when there's a swirling action-packed disaster movie-riddled with sex and violence-in Hughes's free verse."
Passion Under Pressure
Racine’s classic tragedy meets Hughes’s unrhyming verse in a lean, high-tension collision of desire and restraint.
Come here for
- A mythic tragedy shaped by obsessive love and forbidden desire
- English verse that carries the protagonists’ passions without rhyme
Expect
- A lean, high-tension play with the force of a classic tragedy
- Passions that threaten to bring down a kingdom
Where it sits
| French Plays | 75% |
|---|---|
| Classical Plays | 74% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- French Plays
- Authors
- Jean Racine
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- February 28, 2000
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Obsessive love · Forbidden love · Tragic infatuation
- Reading lane
- French Plays