ABSTRACT
Two years after Andromaque the playbills of the Hôtel de Bourgogne announced Racine’s Britannicus. He had spent the best part of the year following Les Plaideurs in composing and polishing his fourth tragedy. With no one star actress in mind, no passionate attachment to inspire him, he had put all his dramatic skill, all his feeling for psychological and historical truth, into this play which he hoped would lift him to the top of his profession. Seven years later, when all his secular tragedies except Phèdre had been written, he observed of Britannicus that “of all my tragedies this is the one which I can say I worked on most carefully”. He intended it to affirm his mastery in ‘political’ drama as Andromaque had established his reputation in sentimental, and to prove that he was as much at home in a Roman subject as in a Greek.
