Book description
This volume brings together two translations by Alan Hollinghurst
of Racine's most strongly contrasted tragedies, Berenice and Bajazet.
The critical event inBerenice, the death of Titus's father, the
Emperor Vespasian, happens a week before the play opens. Thereafter
Titus knows that his separation from Berenice is inevitable.
Thereafter Titus knows that his separation from Berenice is
inevitable. The breaking off of a great love affair involves too the
hopes of Antiochus, himself long in love with Berenice. The play
pushes all three of its principals to the brink, not of revenge but of
self-murder, before in her sublime last speech Berenice redeems and
directs them all in an act of collective abnegation. Many tears are
shed, but not a drop of blood. The effect is unconventional, and
profound: the pained acceptance of the irreconcilable in human
affairs, and the surrender, by each of the main characters, of the
person they most love. Bajazet is Racine's most violent drama; it
ends, like Phèdre, with a female character's on-stage suicide, here
the culmination of a vividly described sequence of off-stage murders.
The setting, in a claustrophobic space within the harem at
Constantinople, menaced from both without and within, seems to license
a violence of emotion as well as of deed. Violent too are the repeated
reversals of fortune, and the terrifying acceleration of the play
towards its inexorable catastrophe. Alan Hollinghurst's translation of
Berenice premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in October 2012
and Bajazet, at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 1990.
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels: The Swimming Pool
Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, and the winner of the 2004 Man
Booker Prize, The Line of Beauty.
