ABSTRACT
The bigger question, what Greek literature contributed to Racine's conceptions of tragedy, to his poetic powers, or simply to his pre-eminence in his field, has never been satisfactorily answered, and perhaps never will be. Racine sometimes read through a play marking very little—perhaps with attention to basic dramatic structure, not infrequently pausing to mark a few lines here and there, which may accord with wider patterns of interest across all the plays but conform to no very coherent, systematic pattern within the play concerned. On some of the latter occasions, Racine left no record of his reading at all; but the non-verbal annotations may supply clues as to the lines along which his mind tended to operate in these instances. The patterns of what Racine has and has not marked in his Euripidean texts leave many unresolved enigmas.
