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Handel's first Israelite oratorio Esther draws on both the biblical story of Esther and Jean Racine's Esther (1688). Jewish tradition associates the biblical Esther story with the carnivalesque festival of Purim, and reads the narrative as satirizing the inept Persian overlords who try unsuccessfully to destroy the Jews with a pogrom. Christian tradition, however, reads the story more soberly, and accordingly Racine presents the threatened pogrom as a challenge to God's power and trustworthiness; Esther, the pious heroine, acts in order to avert the pogrom, safeguard the Jews and facilitate Christianity's subsequent development. The anonymous Handelian libretto of 1718 is based on Racine's treatment, but it highlights God's salvation of the people as a whole, in line with the ‘British Israel’ paradigm. Additions made to the libretto by Samuel Humphreys in 1732 enhance the characters of both Esther and the Persian king Assuerus, thereby supplementing the ‘people's salvation’ theme with implied compliments to George II and Queen Caroline.

The oratorio Athalia, based on Jean Racine's Athalie (1690), was composed for performance during the Oxford Public Act of 1733. The biblical Athaliah story tells how the true Davidic heir Joash is restored to the throne after seven years during which the idolatrous usurper Athaliah has reigned. As such, the story had potentially subversive (Jacobite) political associations, and this chapter considers why it was chosen for use in Oxford. First, the biblical Athaliah material is examined. Then the results of this analysis are considered against Racine's Athalie, and finally Samuel Humphreys' libretto for the oratorio Athalia is compared with both Racine and the biblical text. From this it is possible to see how Humphreys' libretto focuses on God's preservation of his people from unjust and tyrannous rule and defines the true monarch by spiritual credentials rather than by physical lineage. The story's Jacobite associations are thereby overwritten with Hanoverian ones.

In Phèdre, Jean Racine shows us a tragedy of double displacement. In prey to her passion for her stepson Hippolyte, Phèdre herself no longer inhabits space in the ways that other characters do; she moves in her own, strangely-contoured world, and her ventures into the spaces shared by others are catastrophic. This tragedy shows us something which ought to have remained hidden being brought to light, and this is much more than the revelation of a guilty passion. A lamination or intercalation of spaces is at work: a privately imagined space overlaying and qualifying her apprehension of that commonly perceptible space in which others move. And as with space, so too with time: the present is repeatedly disturbed by Phèdre's mind dwelling in alternative scenarios of the past, or parallel versions of the present. The decomposition of Phèdre's self-coherence is mapped as the boundaries keep shifting between the abstract and the physical, offering us multiple readings of this divided individual. In her final speech she speaks of having stained the daylight.

The positive emotional connotations of the word “terror” were enhanced by eighteenth-century theater criticism, which used the standard of terror when judging tragedies. Drawing (often loosely) on Aristotle, writers praised tragedies for instilling terror and pity in spectators and discounted tragedies that failed to stimulate these feelings. Often, however, and particularly in the later decades of the century, theater critics neglected to mention pity in their assessments of tragedy and focused exclusively on terror. There were ethical implications to such judgments, because critics believed that viewing a terror-inspiring tragedy was morally improving. As a term used to praise exemplary works of drama, “terror” had a dignified, elevating feel to it, and it was a compliment to call a playwright “terrible.” Among the playwrights to benefit from the reputation of having instilled terror were the Greek tragedians Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, the seventeenth-century dramatist Jean Racine, and the eighteenth-century playwright Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon.

This chapter examines how war affected interdynastic marriage in seventeenth-century France. By late seventeenth century, the hope for European peace had lost its foundations in a shared sacramentology and confidence in women's intercessions. When discrete national historiographies celebrating nation-states rather than dynasties appeared, their writers cast the women whose marriages bound Europe in a single family as tragic victims of their fathers' ambitions and husbands' infidelities. This chapter analyzes how French drama registered the personal and cultural impact of marriage diplomacy's declining prestige by focusing on Pierre Corneille's Horace and Tite et Bérénice, as well as Jean Racine's Andromaque and Bérénice. It also discusses two treaties, the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees and the 1670 Treaty of Dover.

Examines the consolidation in French tragedy of the early seventeenth century of what Thomas Pavel has described as an “art of distancing” (“art de l'éloignement”) characteristic of French neo-classicism. The conciliatory posture encouraged by the exhortation to extinguish memories of the wars provoked a reorientation of French emotions about the national past, away from a Renaissance Humanist tendency to exploit pathos in the service of political action, and towards a neoclassical aesthetics and an absolutist politics for which emotion frequently functioned as an alternative to political action. By seeking to unify the French around a set of shared emotions, the imperative to forget the violently divisive differences of the period of the Wars of Religion paved the way for the thoroughgoing forgetting of difference that grounded the ideology of absolutism.

Esther is one of the two Biblical plays written by Jean Racine (the other is Athalie) after he had officially retired from composing for the theater. Instead, he had assumed the post of official historiographer of the reign of Louis XIV. Various reasons have been offered for this change of direction. Despite his renunciation of the stage, Racine took up his poetic pen again at the request of Madame de Maintenon, the consort (and secret wife) of the King. His plays are one of the glories of French literature, and of course presumably still form part of the school curriculum. Those who launch accusations of rampant anti-Semitism against French culture, which God knows has contained enough since the French Revolution tore down the gates of the European ghettos, should be asked if they have read Esther. There is no other great classical work in any other European literature that so directly attacks, repudiates, and scorns the anti-Semitic accusations which always have been, and continue to be, leveled against the Jews.

In the story of Alcestis from Euripides, Alcestis volunteers to die in order to save the life of her husband King Admetus. When the hero Hercules discovers that Alcestis has died, he wrestles with Death, wins, and brings back something veiled to Admetus. But what or whom? This chapter follows the polemical texts around this question that appeared in the wake of the 1674 opera Alceste by composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) and librettist Philippe Quinault (1635–88). It considers texts from the champion of the modernists, Charles Perrault (1628–1703) and the defender of the ancients, Jean Racine (1639–99).

Shortly after lauding to the skies the dramatically flawed Ricciardo e Zoraide, and just three weeks after acclaiming the revised Mosè in Egitto, the Naples audience gave short shrift to his newest work, Ermione, an opera Gioachino Rossini knew in his bones to be one of the finest he had yet written. Skillfully adapted from Jean Racine’s Andromaque by his more than competent librettist, Andrea Leone Tottola, Ermione ran for just five performances in late March and early April 1819, with two performances of act I added a fortnight later. Rossini immediately withdrew the score. He would later make use of some of its music, but he became less and less inclined to try to revive the opera itself. It was the defensive action of a wounded man.