Having now read a couple of plays of Jean Racine (1639 – 1699), I would not put him in the first order of dramatists. That he is an exceptionally correct poet in French (analogous to Alexander Pope in English), I have little doubt. I also feel that he excels at taking the abstract machinery of human drama and creating striking rhetorical situations and highly compacted rhetorical outbursts using it; on the other hand, it feels like exactly that: machinery. Racine’s characters aren’t really people so much as they are abstract psychological entities with no frictional human graining; Bajazet’s dead, but so what? He wasn’t terribly interesting as a character anyway. In a moment he could think this, the next moment he could think the opposite. He’s artificial; he has no definite qualities. Why should the reader mourn?
Whereas Hamlet: he is unexpected, unpredictable, incalculable; he’s like a real person. When Hamlet ends, you care about Hamlet. When Bajazet ends, you don’t fret much about Bajazet.
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