Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Racine and English Classicism

Racine and English Classicism

Wheatley, Katherine E.

Paperback

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1477307001
ISBN13: 9781477307007
Publisher: Univ Of Texas Pr
Published: Jan 30 2015
Pages: 358
Weight: 1.16
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Literary 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 dénouement, and frequent mistranslation turned Racine's plays into wretched travesties. Two translations of Britannicus, intended for reading rather than for acting, are especially revealing in that they show which Racinian qualities eluded the British translators even when they were not trying to please an English theatergoing audience.

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