Iphigenia / Andromache / Britannicus: The Complete Plays of Jean Racine - Volume 1

This is the first volume of what is planned to be a complete traversal in English of Racine's twelve plays. For this new translation, Geoffrey Alan Argent has taken a fresh approach he has rendered these three plays in the verse form that Racine might very well have utilized had he been English, namely, the heroic couplet, a verse form whose compressed power and flexibility have been exploited to produce some of the greatest works of English poetry. The heroic couplet, moreover, as Argent powerfully argues in his Introduction, is particularly well-suited to convey the genius of Racine and is "by all measure, the worthiest treasure chest for such a treasure" (Britannicus, Act II, Scene iii). While his translations are remarkably faithful to Racine's textual content and emotional tone, Argent's aim has been to produce, not something that sounds like bad Racine, but something that sounds like good English. To effect this, he has brought to bear on Racine's alexandrines all the resources of English prosody, allowing their English counterparts to perform according to their own nature, rather than wrenching them into a superficial semblance to the original. Argent hopes that by doing so his versions will be able to stand on their own as works of English literature, as the great classic drama England never produced. Argent's versions of Iphigenia, Andromache and Britannicus succeed in making Racine's greatness apparent to the English reader and should win new devotees for a writer who, like Shakespeare, is widely considered to be his country's greatest poet and playwright. While no translation can perfectly capture all the passion and the poetry of Racine, Argent believes that Racine's loss can only be our gain, and that, after three hundred years, Racine and the English reader deserve to have a worthy translation of his complete plays.