Jean Baptiste Racine (2/5) Bajazet

BAJAZET..... The time to which this tragedy relates is much later than that of any other of Racine's historical plays. The capture of Babylon (or rather Bagdad) from the Persians by Sultan Amurath IV, on which the catastrophe of the plot depends, occurred only a year before the poet's birth, viz 1638. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY..... Jean-Baptiste Racine (December 22, 1639 – April 21, 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille, as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such "examples of neoclassical perfection" as Phèdre, Andromaque and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young. Racine's plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic (12 syllable) French alexandrine. His writing is renowned for its elegance, purity, speed, and fury and for what American poet Robert Lowell described as a "diamond-edge" and the "glory of its hard, electric rage". Racine's dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------