The Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Jean Racine
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scene between Burrhus and Narcissus that, although of unquestionable authenticity, has never appeared in any English-language edition of Britannicus (I can only speak to the high unlikelihood of its having appeared in any non-English translation), but which Racine originally intended should open Act III, where, in my translation, it is to be at long last found. Commensurate with the momentousness of this reinstatement, I have provided both a brief discussion of the provenance of this scene and an (I hope) irresistibly persuasive rationale for its inclusion in this fifth volume of what I trust will become a reference edition in English of Racine’s theatrical oeuvre. That expansive discussion/rationale, being both too unwieldy and too important to be relegated to a mere footnote, may be found as Appendix B.
The translations of Racine’s dedication and his first and second prefaces are my own, as are the translations of passages from the critical commentaries in the Picard and Forestier editions that appear in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. In my own critical commentaries, when I refer to a play or a character, I use the title or name as it appears in my translations. It should be noted, however, that where any other commentators (writing in English) retain the French spellings, I have respected that preference and beg the reader to pardon the discrepancies.
Speaking of discrepancies, I should note, now that this traversal is nearly halfway toward completion, that the extremely alert reader may begin to notice occasional (and inevitable) discrepancies between lines of verse from any particular play, as cited in earlier volumes, and the revised and (one hopes) improved versions of those verses as they appear in the volume devoted to the complete translation of the play in question. I like to think that so astute a reader would find such discrepancies more interesting than irritating, so I shall not beg her or him to pardon them.
I have preserved the scene divisions as they are given in the Pléiade edition (each new scene marking the arrival or departure of one or more characters) and have, likewise, listed the characters participating in each scene just below the scene number. I have, in addition, furnished these translations with line numbers (every fifth line being numbered, and the numbering beginning anew for each scene), for ease of reference for readers and actors and to enable me to cite passages precisely in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. Be it noted that these line numbers do not conform to those of any French edition, the Picard, for example, providing no line numbers at all and the Forestier using unbroken numbering from beginning to end; besides, I have found it necessary once or twice to expand one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet, or even two of his couplets into three, a procedure that would vitiate any line-for-line correspondence.
I thought it might also be helpful, having myself struggled to disentangle the complex familial relationships among the characters in Britannicus, to provide the reader with a genealogical chart (to be found as Appendix A), beginning with Augustus and his wives and tracing their descendents down to Nero and Britannicus; and in order to better clarify those interrelationships, I have judiciously pruned the family tree to show only those boughs, branches, and twigs that have any bearing on the play, that is, to include only those family members who appear in the play or are referred to therein (thirteen in all), and only such additional relatives (seven of them) whose inclusion on the tree is necessary in order to “connect the dots,” so to speak (for example, Drusus the Elder and Antonia, Claudius’s parents).
The Discussion is intended as much to promote discussion as to provide it. The Notes and Commentary, in addition to clarifying obscure references and explicating the occasional gnarled conceit, offer, I hope, some fresh and thought-provoking insights, such as are occasionally vouchsafed the sedulous translator. But whatever the merit of the ancillary critical material, I believe that the enduring value of these volumes will reside in the excellence of the translations. New approaches to studying Racine will undoubtedly be discovered and developed, opponent schools of thought will continue to clash, arguments may be challenged or overturned, but I am hopeful that the value of these translations will prove indisputable.
I would like to express my warmest thanks to my great friend Adrian Ciuperca, my go-to person (along with his wife, Mioara Canciu) for all things cybernetic, who has done such a beautiful job producing the elegant family tree (now flourishing as Appendix A) that I should really have labeled it Appendix A+.
All that remains (and it is much) is to acknowledge the unflagging support and assistance of Leslie Eric Comens, who has, for the purposes of the present volume, done the unthinkable: succeeded in inculcating in me a genuine interest in history — and Roman history no less (stopping short, however, of cajoling me into reading Tacitus and Suetonius in the original Latin), which has had the gratifying effect of rendering the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary at once so erudite and so entertaining. And, once again, Leslie has acted as the Sixtus Beckmesser (a benign one, of course) to my Hans Sachs: as Merker, “immer bei Sachs,” enthusiastically noting all my many Fehler (fortunately he permits me more than sieben), but just as eager to acknowledge that “ein Lied von Sachs, das will was bedeuten” (a song by Sachs, that counts for something!).
I
Among those plays of Racine that are based on real-life events and people, Britannicus is by far the most deeply anchored in historical data, that data being chiefly furnished by Tacitus’s The Annals of Imperial Rome. Indeed, Racine professes that when he wrote the play he had been “so steeped in reading that excellent historian, that there is hardly a striking effect in my tragedy for which he did not provide me with the idea.” But just as he would rework the raw material of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis to his own purposes, adding characters (principally Eriphyle), refashioning events, and creating virtually new portraits of several of the Greek playwright’s characters, so, too, in Britannicus, Racine has ingeniously transformed Tacitus’s raw reportage into a complexly plotted drama with, in this case, one key character (Junia) created virtually out of whole cloth, alliances among the historical characters realigned, and, most important, Tacitus’s turbulent, eloquent, but hardly edifying account provided with a subtle but powerful tendentious underpinning. John Campbell (130) cites the view of Jean Rohou, who, “in what he calls ‘the Machiavellian conflict recounted by Tacitus,’ finds that Racine substitutes ‘a moral antinomy absent from his sources’ (‘L’anthropologie pessimiste’ 1529).” But how could it be otherwise? Racine had a context within which to place the events Tacitus describes: for him they do not compose a story, but a history. The “decline and fall of the Roman Empire” was a concept unknown to Tacitus and Suetonius, but was a received moral artifact for Racine’s age, just as it still is for anyone reading or seeing Britannicus today.
For The Annals of Imperial Rome paints an unrelievedly grim picture of the movers and shakers of the ancient Roman Empire. (Suetonius’s account, in The Twelve Caesars — consulted more sparingly by Racine — with its almost Grand Guignol approach, occasionally bordering on the surreal or the absurd, may strike the reader, depending on his or her point of view, as rendering the horrors described either more horrific or more hilarious.) Such shafts of light as illumine the pervasive gloom are purely editorial: spontaneous expressions of sympathy, or considered moral sententiae provided by Tacitus himself. The sense one has in Tacitus of stifling, noxious, irredeemable amorality, of benighted souls meandering through a benighted landscape, is something Racine would capture to perfection in Bajazet, his seventh play. There, all is darkness and aimless wandering. Although none of the principals survives at the end of that play (Roxane and Bajazet are brutally killed, Atalide commits suicide onstage, and the doubtful fate of Akhmet, the grand vizier, is rather a matter of indifference to us), Bajazet, as I wrote in my Discussion for that play, “leaves us with a sense of ignoble waste,” rather than stirring our souls by the evocation of any tragic downfall. In order for there to be a downfall, there must be some height from which to fall, and the protagonists of Bajazet can scarcely be considered upright, let alone of noble stature. The death sentence that impends over Bajazet and Roxane is a correlative rather than a cause of the inevitability of their ignominious fate. But The