Description
Book SynopsisLiterary historians and critics who have written on the influence of Racine in England during the neoclassical period apparently have assumed that the English translators and adapters of Racine’s plays in general succeeded in presenting the real Racine to the English public.
Katherine Wheatley here reveals the wide discrepancy between avowed intentions and actual results. Among the English plays she compares with their French originals are Otway’s Titus and Berenice, Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, and Philips’s The Distrest Mother. These comparisons, fully supported by quoted passages, reveal that those among the English public and contemporary critics who could not themselves read French had no chance whatever to know the real Racine: “The adapters and translators, so-called, had eliminated Racine from his tragedies before presenting them to the public.” Unacknowledged excisions and additions, shifts in plot, changes in
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Part I. Racine Improved
- I. John Crowne and Racine
- II. Thomas Otway’s Titus and Berenice
- III. The Mourning Bride
- IV. Abel Boyer’s Achilles
- V. Edmund Smith and Racine
- VI. Andromaque as the “Distrest Mother”
- VII. Charles Johnson’s The Victim
- VIII. The Sultaness
- IX. The Fatal Legacy
- X. Two Translations of Britannicus
- Part II. Racine and English Classicism
- XI. Neo-Classical Theory of Tragedy in England, 1674–1699
- XII. English Judgments of Racine, 1675–1699
- XIII. Racine and the Critics, 1700–1721
- XIV. Summary and Conclusion
- Index
