Racine's Tragedies of Tyranny: Essays on Bajazet and Mithridate - Hardcover

by Nicholas Hammond (Volume Editor), Paul Hammond (Volume Editor)

In Bajazet and Mithridate Racine depicts the tragedies of characters who either wield tyrannic power or are subjected to tyranny. This international collection of essays deploys cutting-edge research to illuminate the plays and their contexts.

The contributors to this volume examine Racine's stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.

Author Biography

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).