ABSTRACT
Jacques Pradon wrote ten tragedies in all, seven of which followed his notorious Phedre et Hippolyte. This near-contemporary of Racine had begun in 1673 with Pirame et Thisbe, an attempted renewal of Theophile’s fifty-year-old play. After Phedre he wrote two tragedies on Greek subjects which had been treated by Seneca and Euripides, then turned to Roman history. On that more superficial level the identity plays of the fifties and sixties can also be included in the baroque, which is thus extended to the time of Racine. But Racine himself, though he made some use of ambiguity, cannot be fairly classed as baroque. In the course of the eighteenth century this began to be seen more clearly, and the history of that drama is characterized by attempts at modification or escape. The romanced historical dramas of Hugo and Dumas pere bore resemblances to seventeenth-century tragicomedy, and particularly to the comedie herotque as Corneille conceived it in writing Don Sanche d’Aragon.
