Jean Racine
1639 – 1699 · aged 60
French dramatist (1639-1699)
- Born
- 22 Dec 1639 · La Ferté-Milon
- Died
- 21 Apr 1699 · Paris
Life timeline
Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.
- 22 Dec 1639BornBorn in La Ferté-Milon
- 1672 – 1699RoleMember of the Académie française
- 21 Apr 1699DiedDied in Paris
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Meanwhile in the world
Major world events during their lifetime (1639 – 1699).
- 1642 – 1651English Civil War
Biography
Jean-Baptiste Racine ( rass-EEN, US also rə-SEEN; French: [ʒɑ̃ batist ʁasin]; 22 December 1639 – 21 April 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.
Text from the Wikipedia article Jean Racine, CC BY-SA 4.0
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