Leo Spitzer's Racine

The reception history of Racinian tragedy veers off in one of its more curious directions when, in 1948, Leo Spitzer announces that Phedre is the ideal type of a baroque tragedy.' The essay which contains this statement confronts what has historically been the most frequently criticized passage in the entire Racinian corpus. Indeed, its eighteenth-century readers made of the recit de Theramene, the 95-line narration of the circumstances of the death of Hippolyte, delivered by his governor to a Thesee upon whom it has just begun to dawn that the boy may be innocent, a critical battleground in the project of canon formation and the establishment of the French classic. The battle raged around the issue of the voice: Who speaks from the mouth of Theramene? And, most particularly, whose voice emits the recit's most problematic Alexandrine, Le flot qui l'apporta recule epouvante

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