Racine lived almost wholly on tragedy income—then quit the stage
Jean Racine (1639–1699) stands with Molière and Corneille among seventeenth-century France's great playwrights. Master of the twelve-syllable alexandrine, he packed Phèdre and Andromaque with furious passion—then walked away from secular theatre after scandal and a rival's claque, having lived first almost solely on writing fees.
Orphaned by four, he grew up at Port-Royal under Jansenist teachers who drilled Greek and Roman myth into him for life. Poetry won praise from Nicolas Boileau; law studies lost out to Paris theatre. Molière's troupe staged La Thébaïde in 1664 and Alexandre le Grand in 1665, but Racine snuck the hit to the Hôtel de Bourgogne eleven days later and drew away actress Thérèse du Parc. Molière never forgave him. Andromaque (1667) made his name while critics accused him of corrupting minds and he severed Port-Royal ties.
Earnings from scripts made him France's earliest writer to subsist chiefly on literary income, yet Pradon's competing Phèdre in 1677 and a 1679 court scandal helped push retirement. Marriage to pious Catherine de Romanet brought two sons and five daughters; Louis XIV made him royal historiographer beside Boileau, Académicien in 1672, and later gentleman and secretary of the king. Madame de Maintenon lured him back for Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), biblical pieces for Saint-Cyr schoolgirls. He died of liver cancer in 1699; after Port-Royal was razed in 1710 his remains moved to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.
Vocabularies stay tiny—about 2,500 words—with classical unities kept strict and onstage action nearly erased. Kings and queens fall from height; destiny in the secular plays is unrequited love's frenzy more than merciless gods. Phèdre knows her monstrous desire from the start, lucid where Oedipus learns late. Racine denied a Jansenist fatalism link even as critics heard it. Bloodshed, he answered when Bérénice seemed too quiet, is not tragedy's only measure.
Source: Jean Racine
