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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine : Volume 5: Britannicus by Jean Racine; Geoffrey Alan Argent is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Complete Plays of Jean Racine : Volume 5: Britannicus about?

This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, __Britannicus__ being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. __Britannicus__, one of Racine’s greatest plays, dramatizes the crucial day when Nero—son of Agrippina and stepson of the late emperor Claudius—overcomes his mother, his wife Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years” in order to announce his omnipotence. He callously murders his innocent stepbrother, Britannicus, and effectively destroys Britannicus’s beloved, the virtuous Junia, as well. Racine may claim, in his first preface, that this tragedy “does not

Who reads The Complete Plays of Jean Racine : Volume 5: Britannicus?

Author

Jean Racine; Geoffrey Alan Argent

Publisher

The Pennsylvania State University Press

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9780271064062

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Drama, Literary Fiction, Romance