In the Library
Phèdre
Jean Racine, 1677
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 60 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Robert Bruce Boswell (1890)
- Original
- Original fr
- Chapters
- Chapters 5
- Length
- Length 14k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
No longer is it love hid in my heart, But Venus in her might seizing her prey.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Euripides
Euripides stages the same female passion turned destructive, but Medea acts where Phèdre confesses.
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy builds the same forbidden desire into a novel, and the shame is just as lethal two centuries later.
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Othello
William Shakespeare
Shakespeare writes the same catastrophe of desire and jealousy, but gives the destructive passion to the man.
£1.99
About the book
She is the granddaughter of the sun, and she cannot bear the light. Phèdre has hidden her love for Hippolytus, her husband's son, until the rumor of Theseus's death loosens her tongue and the confession pours out, fully formed, with nowhere left to go. Then Theseus walks back through the door alive. Jean Racine wrote her ruin in alexandrines so taut they seem to hold their breath, twelve syllables tightening like a noose around a woman who knows an innocent man will die for her and cannot make herself speak the one word that would save him. The genius is in the splitting of her guilt: Venus seeded the desire in her blood before the play began, so the wanting is not her crime, but the silence is, and the silence is what kills. Few tragedies burn this slowly or this clean. Watch her walk into the dark with her eyes wide open, and you will understand why the French call this the most perfect thing their language has made.