The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean Racine · a tragedy in five acts and in alexandrine verse · under two thousand lines in rhymed couplets · first performed in November 1667 and printed in 1668 with a dedication to Madame, Henriette d’Angleterre · scored on Racine’s French in the text of his last revision, the collected edition of 1697, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath; Richard Wilbur’s verse translation (1982) and John Cairncross’s Penguin version for sense
Mode
Tragedy of passion as fate, in which every scene is a demand made of someone who wants someone else, and every death is reported
Mythos
The aftermath of Troy and the house of Atreus; a play arranged around two absences, the dead Hector and the unseen child; Orestes delivered to his Furies
Phase
From Oreste’s embassy and Pyrrhus’s refusal, through the reversals of Pyrrhus’s choice and Andromaque’s stratagem, to the killing at the altar told to the woman who ordered it, her death, and Oreste’s madness
Presentation
Drama for the French classical stage, keeping the unities of place, day and action; five acts; four principals and four confidants, with no other speaking part; all violence off stage, reported in récit
Register
The noble register of the alexandrine couplet, from Andromaque’s elegy for Troy and Hermione’s self-argument to the gallant conceits of the age and Oreste’s hallucination
Scale
One hall in Pyrrhus’s palace in one day, the peace of the Greek victors in question, and behind it the fallen city and the dead
Governing Proposition
The Greeks send Oreste to Epirus to demand the son of Hector from Pyrrhus, and the embassy becomes a lever on a chain of four desires: Oreste loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromaque, who loves Hector, who is dead. The wager of the play is that desire makes the beloved an instrument and the rival a hostage; that the one who loves cannot tell love from hate; and that a passion commands its crime and then disowns it, so that the chain breaks at every link but the last, the widow’s fidelity to the dead.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on an embassy. The Greeks have sent Oreste to Epirus to demand of Pyrrhus the son of Hector, whose mother, Andromaque, is Pyrrhus’s captive. In the first scene Oreste tells his friend Pylade what both already know, the oldest device of the stage, and in telling it he names himself: a man who “se livre en aveugle au destin”
“gives himself up blindly to destiny” (I.1). He loves Hermione, who is in Pyrrhus’s palace and who loves Pyrrhus.
The structure can be given in one line. Oreste loves Hermione, who loves Pyrrhus, who loves Andromaque, who loves Hector, who is dead. The embassy is made the lever of the chain: whatever Pyrrhus answers the Greeks is an answer to Andromaque, and through her to Hermione, and through her to Oreste. The play is the turning of that lever until it breaks every link but the last.
The place is a hall in Pyrrhus’s palace at Buthrot, and it never changes; the action runs inside one day. There are four principals, Andromaque, Pyrrhus, Hermione and Oreste, and four confidants, Céphise, Phoenix, Cléone and Pylade, and no other speaking part. Astyanax, on whom the plot turns, never appears. Racine names his sources: Virgil’s third book of the Aeneid, where Andromache is found at Buthrotum, and Euripides’ Andromache, from which he departs by keeping Astyanax alive and Andromache faithful to Hector.
Movement II
Pyrrhus refuses the Greeks, and the refusal is a suit. He speaks to his captive in the gallant idiom of the age, laid on a Homeric conqueror: he is “brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumai”
“burned by more fires than I lit” (I.4), the sack of Troy turned into a précieux conceit. It is the play’s weakest diction and also its subject in miniature: the victor of Troy has become the captive of his captive, and he offers her the child’s life for her love.
Hermione waits in the same palace, loving Pyrrhus and passed over for his captive. Her line is the play’s first disclosure: “Ah ! ne puis-je savoir si j’aime, ou si je hais ?”
“Can I not know whether I love or hate?” (II.1). Desire here makes the beloved an instrument and the rival a hostage, and it cannot tell itself from its opposite. The alexandrine couplet, two halves weighed against each other, is the grammar of that confusion.
Then the turns. Pyrrhus will give up the child to the Greeks; he will not; he will marry Hermione; he will marry Andromaque. Each of the four changes course on the last thing said to them, and the mechanism can feel wound by the plot. But each turn moves every link at once, and Phoenix speaks throughout for the state Pyrrhus refuses.
Movement III
Andromaque’s great speech is a memory, spoken to Céphise, of the night Pyrrhus took her city: “Songe, songe, Céphise, à cette nuit cruelle / Qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit éternelle”
“Think, think, Céphise, of that cruel night / which was for a whole people an eternal night” (III.8). Pyrrhus is remembered by the light of the burning city, “les yeux étincelants”
“eyes blazing”. The man who asks for her love is the man who killed her people, and the play’s elevation is here, in a widow’s grief given the full height of the line.
The play stands on two absences. Hector is dead and Astyanax is never seen, and the four living figures are arranged around them as around a tomb and a hope. Andromaque’s fidelity is to a ghost, and the child is the only living thing she can act for; the reason of state that demands his death is answered only through the desires of four people in one room.
Her answer is the stratagem of IV.1, which she entrusts to Céphise: she will marry Pyrrhus, secure the child by the marriage, and die before the marriage can become a betrayal of Hector. The plan is innocent in its means and terrible in its end, and the play never says whether a fidelity kept by death is fidelity. The question has been played every way since: Andromaque as saint, as strategist, as a mother using Pyrrhus’s love as coolly as he has used her son.
Movement IV
Pyrrhus will marry Andromaque, and he tells Hermione so. She answers in a line that holds a whole history of feeling: “Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait fidèle ?”
“I loved you faithless; what would I have done had you been true?” (IV.5). Twelve syllables, balanced on the caesura, give the love that survived his inconstancy and the love it would have been, and the balance is already tipping toward its opposite.
Hermione sends Oreste to kill Pyrrhus, and Oreste, who has given himself up to destiny, goes. The fifth act opens on her alone, before the news: “Où suis-je ? Qu’ai-je fait ?”
“Where am I? What have I done?” It is the soul arguing against itself as it speaks, wanting the death and unwilling to have wanted it, and the play gives no outside voice to settle the argument.
Pyrrhus is killed at the altar, and the killing is not shown. Oreste comes to tell it to the woman who ordered it, and she asks him: “Qui te l’a dit ?”
“Who told you to?” (V.3). Desire refuses to know its own words, and the agent is abandoned by the will he served. This is the centre of the play’s disclosure, and it exists only as speech: what is watched is not the death but its reception.
Movement V
Hermione dies on Pyrrhus’s body, and that too is reported. Oreste, who has lost everything the embassy and the killing were for, thanks the gods: “Grâce aux dieux ! Mon malheur passe mon espérance”
“Thanks be to the gods! My misery exceeds my hope” (V.5), irony made into prosody. Then he sees the Furies: “Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos têtes ?”
“For whom are those serpents hissing on your heads?” The line hisses, and the man who killed at a woman’s word has been delivered to the myth that waited for him. The chain has collapsed back on its first link.
Andromaque is not on stage in the fifth act. She is the one link not broken: she survives as queen, off stage, while the three who acted are destroyed. The absence is the design. The widow, faithful to the dead, is the one who prevails, and the play ends on the madness of the man at the far end of the chain from her.
The play was first performed in November 1667 and printed in 1668, the work of an author of twenty seven who set himself against Corneille on his own ground. It ended Corneille’s command of the French stage, and the next decade of Racine’s tragedies unfolded from it. It has been performed without a break since, among the most played tragedies of the Comédie-Française; Hermione became the test of the tragic actress from Champmeslé on; Ambrose Philips made it The Distrest Mother (1712) and Rossini made it Ermione (1819); and Baudelaire, in “Le Cygne”, wrote “Andromaque, je pense à vous !”
“Andromache, I think of you!”
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds the parts required. Take away any of the four principals and the chain is no longer a chain; take away the embassy and no one is forced to choose; take away the reversals of the second to fourth acts, in which Pyrrhus will give up the child, will not, will marry Hermione, will marry Andromaque, and Hermione’s order to kill has nothing to grow from. Even the confidants bear weight: Phoenix is the voice of the state Pyrrhus refuses, and Céphise is the one Andromaque trusts with the plan of her death (IV.1). The charges are real if light: the confidants are a convention, the exposition of I.1, Oreste telling Pylade what both already know, is the oldest device of the stage, and the turns can feel wound by the plot.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: desire makes the beloved an instrument and the rival a hostage, and the one who loves cannot tell love from hate. “Ah ! ne puis-je savoir si j’aime, ou si je hais ?”
“Can I not know whether I love or hate?” (II.1). The second truth is harder: a passion commands its crime and then disowns it. Hermione orders Pyrrhus’s death, and when Oreste reports it done she asks “Qui te l’a dit ?”
“Who told you to?” (V.3), desire refusing to know its own words and abandoning the agent who served it. The third is political: the conqueror of Troy is the captive of his captive. Held just below the top because it is drawn on one narrow plane, and the subject is the oldest of the stage.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Racine’s elevation is restrained: no storm, no ghost, and long passages of argument in couplets. But the play rises, and higher as it goes. Andromaque’s night of Troy (III.8): “Songe, songe, Céphise, à cette nuit cruelle / Qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit éternelle”
“Think, think, Céphise, of that cruel night / which was for a whole people an eternal night”, with Pyrrhus remembered “les yeux étincelants”
“eyes blazing” by the burning city. Hermione’s monologue at the opening of the fifth act, “Où suis-je ? Qu’ai-je fait ?”
“Where am I? What have I done?”, the soul arguing against itself as it speaks. Oreste’s madness at the close. Three summits, one in each late act, terror among them; the arguing scenes hold the axis off the top.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is inherited: the aftermath of Troy and the house of Atreus come ready made. What is built is the arrangement. The play stands on two absences, the dead Hector and the unseen child, and the four living figures are placed around them as around a tomb and a hope; Andromaque’s fidelity is to a ghost, and the one who prevails at the end is the widow. And Oreste is made into Orestes before our eyes: a man who “se livre en aveugle au destin”
“gives himself up blindly to destiny” (I.1) ends by killing at a woman’s word and seeing the Furies. The archetype is load-bearing. A tenth is charged for the gallantry laid on Homeric figures, Pyrrhus “brûlé de plus de feux que je n’en allumai”
“burned by more fires than I lit” (I.4), a précieux conceit on the sack of Troy.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The instrument was inherited whole: the alexandrine, the five acts and the unities came from Corneille’s stage and the doctrine of the 1630s and 1640s, and the play changes no form. The swerve is in what the form is for. Corneille’s tragedy turns on the will mastering passion, and on admiration; here passion is the fatality and the will its instrument. The stake was public: an author of twenty seven, after the failure of his first tragedy and a modest second, set himself against the reigning master on his own ground, and was attacked for it. The departure cut against the source as well: Racine kept Astyanax alive and Andromache faithful to Hector, against Euripides, and said so. A turn of the whole French stage; held below the top because the instrument was not changed.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The unities are a rule, and a rule can contain a play without knowing anything. Here the rule knows. One hall, one day, and four people who cannot leave it: the closed room is the closed chain, and every scene is a demand made of someone who wants someone else. The alexandrine couplet, two halves weighed against each other, is the grammar of a love that cannot tell itself from its opposite. The récit is form as knowledge: the killing at the altar is not seen but told, by Oreste to the woman who ordered it, so that what is watched is not the death but its reception. An open stage with the deaths shown would lose exactly that. Held below the top by the plotted reversals of the third act, which turn on mechanism as much as on form.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The play is more lucid than deep: once the chain is seen it can seem to explain itself. But three and a half centuries of performance and reading have not fixed it. Andromaque is played as a saint, as a strategist, and as a mother who uses Pyrrhus’s love as coolly as he uses her son; Pyrrhus as a brute and as the one man in the play who acts. Hermione has been the test of the French tragic actress since Champmeslé. The stratagem of IV.1, to marry Pyrrhus, secure the child and die before the marriage becomes a betrayal, opens a question the play never closes: whether a fidelity kept by death is fidelity. Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, in Sur Racine (1963), found different plays in it. It yields, though less than the plays at the very top.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the French tragic stage of the 1660s, and European tragedy after it. The intrinsic force is high: the play established the Racinian tragedy, passion as fate in pure verse, and ended Corneille’s command of the French stage; the next decade, Britannicus, Bérénice, Bajazet, Mithridate, Iphigénie and Phèdre, unfolds from it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the model of French classical tragedy through Voltaire; Ambrose Philips’s English version, The Distrest Mother (1712), a stage success in its century; Rossini’s Ermione (1819); the chain of unrequited love as a structure later comedy and fiction keep reusing; and Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne”, which joins Virgil’s widow and Racine’s in modern poetry. Held just under the force because the reach is mostly within French, and much of it passes through Phèdre.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Centuries, and the text whole. Form: the play survives entire in Racine’s own revised text, with nothing lost and no question of authenticity. Presence: printed, performed and taught without a break since 1667, among the most played tragedies in the repertory of the Comédie-Française, and read in every French school. Fabric: nothing in it is fixed to its moment except the précieux turns, and they have not dated the play. The charge is on presence outside French: Racine is famously resistant to translation and is played abroad far less than he is read about, and the presence beyond his language is narrower than that of Sophocles or Shakespeare. That places it in the lower part of the range for works that have lasted centuries.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged on Racine’s French. The vocabulary is small by design, the couplet unvaried in form, and some of the gallant diction is formula; but the command of the alexandrine is one few poets in any language have had of any line. The syntax runs through the caesura and the rhyme without strain, the speeches are built as arguments that turn on a single word, and the music never decorates. “Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait fidèle ?”
“I loved you faithless; what would I have done had you been true?” (IV.5) holds a history of feeling in twelve syllables balanced on the caesura. The dramaturgy is as exact: each act ends on a reversal the next act pays for, and the fifth passes the stage from Hermione to Oreste to his madness without a slack scene.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs the whole: every figure wants the one who wants another, and every act is a demand on someone whose answer depends on a third. Take the two most distant elements, Andromaque’s elegy for Troy in III.8 and Oreste’s hallucination of the Furies in V.5. They obey the same law: the widow’s grief is fidelity to the dead link at the end of the chain, and the madman’s vision is the chain collapsing back on its first link. Politics, motherhood and eros run on the same physics; the embassy’s demand for the child is answered only through the four desires. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: there is no comedy, no low voice, no second plot, nothing that tests the law by being unlike it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on what a single tragedy holds, and a play of this size cannot hold what an epic or a long novel holds; the figure describes the form. Within it the orders are many and integrated. The aftermath of a war and the treatment of the vanquished. The state: the Greek embassy, the reason of state that demands the death of Hector’s son, Pyrrhus’s sovereignty over Epirus. The family: a mother and an unseen child, a dead husband’s claim. Eros in four forms. The sacred: the oath at the altar, the temple where Pyrrhus dies, the Furies who take Oreste. History: Troy as memory and the Greek order as its consequence. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, the common people and the natural world are absent.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Made at 9.2, with The Inevitable, The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.9. A text whole and unbroken in performance for three and a half centuries; a command of the alexandrine in which a history of feeling is balanced on one caesura; a chain of four desires from which no link can be taken; and a form in which the one hall is the closed chain and the killing exists only as it is received.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, held by the vessel: one hall and one day, with labour, the common people and the natural world absent. Below the rest, The Bottomless Well at 8.7, because the play is more lucid than deep and its chain, once seen, can seem to explain itself; and The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, because the instrument was inherited intact and the reach lies mostly within French.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Bottomless Well at 8.7, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Racine’s Andromaque, tragedy in five acts and in alexandrine verse, first performed in November 1667 and printed in 1668 with a dedication to Madame, Henriette d’Angleterre. It is scored as a text for performance, in the text Racine last revised for the collected edition of 1697; the first edition of 1668 differs from it chiefly in the fifth act. Racine’s prefaces are context and are not scored. Productions are evidence of the play’s life, and none of them is the work. Every axis is judged on Racine’s French. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath, and cited by act and scene; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · Richard Wilbur’s verse translation (1982), the best English poem of the play, and John Cairncross’s Penguin version, for sense. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the play. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day, place and cast of the first performance, the exact length of the text in lines and the number of scenes in each act, the content of the fifth-act scene of 1668 that Racine later cut, a contemporary parody of the play, and a later French opera on it, are not given.