Jean Racine

Phèdre

Phèdre was a 1677 play by Jean Racine, based on both the play Hippolytus by Euripides, and a later Roman play Phaedra by Seneca the Younger. Due to its negative reception in the popular press, Racine abandoned writing for the public theater after this play (although later in his career he did write additional works on a royal commission). It is generally considered his finest work; it was chosen for inclusion in the Harvard Classics. Phèdre is the last secular tragedy of Racine before a long silence of twelve years, during which time he devoted himself to the service of King Louis XIV and to religion. In Phèdre, Racine again chose a subject already treated by Greek and Roman tragic poets. In the absence of her husband, King Thésée, Phèdre falls in love with Hippolyte, son of Thésée of a preceding marriage.

Every aspect of Phèdre was celebrated: the tragic construction, the depth of the personages and the wealth of the versification. In contrast to Euripides in Hippolytos kalyptomenos, Racine puts off Phèdre's death until the end of the play. In this way, she has time to learn of Hippolyte’s death. Phèdre, at once guilty of causing misfortune and being victim to it, is most remarkable among Racine's tragic heroes and heroines.

Jean-Paul Satre (1905 – 1980)

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, dramatist, novelist and critic.

Nausea

Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote La Nausée in 1938 while he was a college professor. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher in a town who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea. Fresh from several years of travel, 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin settles in the French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a "sweetish sickness" he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys -- his research project, the company of "The Self-Taught Man" who is reading all the books in the library, a pleasant physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved ... even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre's theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

No Exit

Originally published in French in 1944 as Huis Clos, the play features only four characters (one of whom appears for only a very limited time), and one set. No Exit is the source of the famous Sartreian maxim, "Hell is other people".

The play begins with a bellhop leading a man named Garcin into a hotel room (the play portrays Hell as a gigantic hotel, and realization of where the action is taking place dawns on the audience in the opening minutes). The room has no windows and only one door. Eventually Garcin is joined by a woman (Inez), and then another (Estelle). After their entry, the bellhop bolts the door shut. All expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize, they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other's sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. At first, the three see events concerning them that are happening on earth, though they can only observe and listen, but eventually (as their connection to Earth dwindles and the living move on) they are left with only their own thoughts and the company of the other two.