Jean Racine 
Phèdre 

Jean Racine (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʁasin]), baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine (22 December 1639 – 21 April 1699), was a French dramatist and an important literary figure in the Western tradition. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such ‘examples of neoclassical perfection’ as
Phèdre,
Andromaque, and
Athalie.

Racine’s plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic alexandrine; he is renowned for elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what Robert Lowell described as a ‘diamond-edge’, and the ‘glory of its hard, electric rage’. Racine’s dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage.