The Complete Plays of Jean Racine
Описание книги
As Voltaire famously opined, Athaliah, Racine’s last play, is “perhaps the greatest masterwork of the human spirit.” Its formidable antagonists, Athaliah, queen of Judah, and Jehoiada, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem, are engaged in a deadly struggle for dominion: she, fiercely determined to maintain her throne and exterminate the detested race of David; he, no less fiercely determined to overthrow this heathen queen and enthrone the orphan Joash, the scion of the house of David, whom Athaliah believes she slew as an infant ten years earlier. This boy represents the sole hope for the survival of the royal race from which is to spring the Christ. But in this play, even God is more about hate and retribution than about love and mercy. This is the fourth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays—only the third time such a project has been undertaken. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has rendered these plays in the verse form that Racine might well have used had he been English: namely, the “heroic” couplet. Argent has exploited the couplet’s compressed power and flexibility to produce a work of English literature, a verse drama as gripping in English as Racine’s is in French. Complementing the translation are the illuminating Discussion, intended as much to provoke discussion as to provide it, and the extensive Notes and Commentary, which offer their own fresh and thought-provoking insights.
Отрывок из книги
The Complete Plays of Jean Racine
caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of athaliah (“Play”) are subject to royalty. This Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by Universal Copyright Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, and all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as cd-rom, cd-i, dvd, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying are strictly reserved.
.....
This double flashback, presented from two vantage points, gives us an almost cinematic view of the event, as if caught by two cameras. No actual representation of this scene could offer the stereoscopic depth provided by this dual narrative. (See my Discussion for The Fratricides, where I argue this point more expansively in reference to Creon’s climactic récit in that play.)
The second encounter between Joash and Athaliah, certainly the focal scene of the play, its most original and audacious, has the broad scale, the momentous sense of occasion, of an epic confrontation between good and evil, virtue and corruption. Although no such scene occurs in the Bible, it has its precedents in such famously unequal — or at least apparently so — encounters as David’s with Goliath and Daniel’s with the den full of lions. (It also calls to mind the temptation of Christ in Saint Luke’s gospel.) One might well have misgivings on behalf of a child who is summoned into so daunting a presence as Athaliah’s, especially after having seen her quickly recover from the debilitated state in which she made her first entrance, resuming an implacable, overbearing demeanor which, apart from the momentary accession of pity Joash will engender in her breast later in this scene, she will preserve to the end, becoming ever more brazen, even when she must finally acknowledge defeat. But Joash (like David and Daniel) proves a worthy antagonist for his adversary, their well-matched sparring skills signaled by the prominent use of stichomythia, which by its nature implies a balanced give and take:
.....