Exploring the influence of Jean Racine's work, this book delves into its resonance throughout Europe, impacting various spheres such as courts, education, and the arts. It highlights the cultural and political significance of Racine's oeuvre, encouraging further examination of its legacy across different regions and disciplines.
This first biography of Racine in over half a century for an English-language readership also traces the impact of Racine over three centuries in England as well as France. The plays and their reception are reviewed, using contextual approaches as part of each phase of Racine’s life-story, with excerpts and quotations translated. Racine’s upbringing and work as poet and historiographer are related to the France of Louis XIV, to audiences and to advancement for this ‘man from nowhere’, with parallels in Britain and elsewhere. Changing attitudes to Racine are traced across the centuries, across literary movements and on stage, including recent productions.The book provides insights in the specialist field of Racine studies and seventeenth-century French literature and theatre, in comparative literary studies, particularly between France and Restoration England, and to the interaction of Racine and European cultural movements to the present day.
The first English-language biography of the man behind the scenes who made the German Shakespeare possible and brought Molière's plays to life for the German stage. Baudissin's life sets a mirror to his age: born with the French Revolution, spanning from feudal nobility to the age of industry, from Napoleon's Empire to the Germany of Bismarck, in youth revering Goethe, upholding the German Romantics yet at ease with Realists and championed in old age by Freytag; devoted to Bach and the piano, friend of the Schumanns, Chopin, Mendelssohn, his family bridging to Brahms. From diplomat to dedicated translator, committed to his family, to Holstein, and to Dresden high culture, his is a legacy of sheer human goodness.