Racine’s Tragedies of Tyranny

Nicholas Hammond is Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely, including books on Pascal, Port-Royal, and gossip, and has edited several works. His most recent book is The Powers of Sound and Song in early modern Paris (2019).Paul Hammond is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Strangeness of Tragedy (2009) and Tragic Agency in Classical Drama from Aeschylus to Voltaire (2021).

• ContentsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Racine’s Tragedies of TyrannyNicholas Hammond and Paul HammondPrologue: Sound and Space in Bajazet and MithridateNicholas HammondPart 1: Bajazet1 Staging Bajazet in 1672: Some Problems in Spatial DynamicsMichael Hawcroft2 ‘Fausses fiertés’: Cruel Pleasures in BajazetJoseph Harris3 Roxane ou la compassion monstrueuseJennifer Tamas4 The Sultaness de Johnson, ou l’héritage trahi de RacineTristan Alonge5 Alan Hollinghurst, Derek Jarman, and the Lesson of RacineDenis FlanneryPart 2: Mithridate6 The Vanishing Sentence: La Calprenède and RacineMichael Moriarty7 Racine’s Mithridate: the Orders of CharismaHenry Phillips8 Racine’s Mithridate: the Tragic Course of Political TyrannyRebecca Kingston9 Mithridate and the Temporal Contradictions of HeroismEmilia Wilton-Godberfforde10 Mozart’s Mitridate: ‘une tragédie rectifiée’?Mark AustinEpilogue: Racine’s EndingsPaul HammondBibliographyIndex of NamesIndex of Themes