SOURCE: Campbell, John. “Tragedy and Time in Racine's Mithridate.” Modern Language Review 92, no. 3 (July 1997): 590-98.

[In the following essay, Campbell considers to what extent Mithridate can be called a tragedy.]

Even admirers of Racine's tragedies have hesitated with Mithridate. For François Mauriac it was ‘le moindre de ses chefs-d'œuvre’, and for Raymond Picard ‘la tragédie la moins tragique de Racine’, while for Marcel Gutwirth the play ‘n'est tragique que par le sous-titre’, and for Jean Rohou it is ‘plus héroïco-galant que tragique’.¹ Common to many reactions is the idea that as a tragic drama it is structurally flawed. Unfavourable comparisons are made with the plotting techniques of the mature plays that precede it: there is a hint of regret that ‘it cannot be dismissed as an early effort’.² Whereas in Bérénice love's shipwreck intervenes only at the very end of a sustained, agonizing progression in dramatic tension, in Mithridate the main source of conflict seems to be removed in Act IV with the reconciliation of father and son: ‘Racine has deprived the action of its force once the power relations between the two active individuals are reversed in Act IV.’³ There is an even greater difference with the plots of Andromaque, Britannicus, and Bajazet. These are intricate knots of conflicting interests, tightened to breaking and then suddenly undone with catastrophic consequences. Mithridate, visibly, is not so tightly strung. With his ‘inutile courroux’ (l. 1409), Mithridate blusters, but in the end does nothing, while the two lovers are reunited, all obstacles removed, in what for Charles Mauron is ‘un dénouement de comédie’.⁴ This is certainly not the traditional Racinian tragedy, where murderous passions unfurl in gradually increasing tension and fear, provoking irreversible actions that rebound one on the other until an explosive climax. If Act V can be treated as what Gustave Rudler calls ‘remplissage’, how does this square with Racine's own classical dictum, in his ‘Preface,’ that ‘on ne peut prendre trop de précautions pour ne rien mettre sur le théâtre qui ne soit essentiel’?⁵ In the circumstances, does Mithridate deserve the description ‘tragedy’?

This article seeks a possible answer to these questions and hesitations in the particular sense of time created in Mithridate. We may, of course, simply consult ‘Time’ in our mental dictionnaire des idées reçues about seventeenth-century drama, where the term is found with ‘Unity’ beneath the picture of a straitjacket. Time and tragedy, however, are obviously linked by more than dusty rules. After all, when we see a play, even in our mind's eye, we witness that magical operation Eugene Vinaver has called ‘la plus belle des métamorphoses, la transformation du temps réel en temps fictif’.⁶ In the theatre, as in music, time is the hidden dimension of any composition, ‘le personnage central de toute tragédie composée’.⁷ In Mithridate any radical change in the expected use of tragic time will thus involve an equally radical departure from the typical tragic structure. It will inevitably demand that the work be viewed in a different way from the other Racinian tragedies, and be judged by different criteria.

In these other works time comes in the form of a substance always in short supply, soon to be running out. There is the irresistible movement from initial crisis to final paroxysm, with a gradual acceleration modulated by delay, panic, and reversal. Standard markers are phrases such as ‘il va bientôt revenir en furie’, ‘il faut partir’, ‘que tardez-vous?’, ‘ne tardons pas’. Dramatic suspense is the first fruit of this use of time. This is true even in a play as apparently empty of incident as Bérénice, where the dramatic action concerns the protagonists' attempts to ignore time's imperious contingencies.⁸ The Racinian tempo, be it in early plays such as Andromaque or in late works such as Phèdre or Athalie, seems as distinctive as a thumbprint.

We could, out of habit, attempt to make Mithridate conform to this classic, or classical model, and many have done so.⁹ Throughout the play, characters do tell each other that there is no time to lose, in familiar ‘dramatic’ phrases such as ‘il faut […] presser notre départ’ (ll. 237-38), ‘puisque le temps presse’ (l. 244), ‘Le péril est pressant’ (l. 345), ‘Cours par un prompt trépas abréger ton supplice’ (l. 751), ‘partez dès ce moment’ (l. 857), ‘Le temps est cher. Il le faut employer’ (l. 1114), ‘Que dis-je? on vient. Allez. Courez’ (l. 1265). The time-markers are there, but is their immediate function obvious? Does their use generate the same kind of dramatic tension and foreboding as, say, Pyrrhus's ‘Je viendrai vous prendre’ (Andromaque, l. 193)? Does any significant action ensue? Negative replies to these questions will suggest that despite appearances, time is not managed in the same way in Mithridate as in the other tragedies.

In these other plays, from the opening lines, we are plunged into a rapidly evolving and always escalating crisis. At the beginning of Mithridate, remarkably, we are brought to the very end:

On nous faisait, Arbate, un fidèle rapport:
Rome en effet triomphe, et Mithridate est mort.

(l. 1)

‘Sa mort […] est l'action de ma tragédie’, asserts Racine in his ‘Preface.’ This is not suspense but a kind of suspension. As Roland Barthes has pointed out: ‘La tragédie de Mithridate se joue entre deux morts […] ou, si l'on veut, Mithridate est l'histoire d'une mort manquée et recommencée.’¹⁰ The plot is built like a suspension bridge between the death announced in this ‘fidèle rapport’ and the physical death of Mithridate, at the end. This gives a certain savour to the liminal question: ‘Il est mort: savons-nous s'il est enseveli?’ (l. 298). Throughout the play, however frantic the external action may at times appear, characters are as though suspended between life and death, without being able to live or die. It is symptomatic that this original dramatic structure can be apprehended through dictionary definitions of the term suspendre: ‘Rendre pour un temps immobile, inactif; supprimer pour un temps. Mettre un terme aux activités de. Remettre à plus tard’ (Petit Robert).

This suspension is especially true of the King himself, that putative source of decisions affecting the lives of all. Just as the end is contained within the beginning, so the movement of the whole play is reflected in the long death scene of the end, before which Mithridate has spoken of ‘un cœur déjà glacé par le froid des années’ (l. 1421). From the terminal beginning we know that the reality of Mithridate's power has gone:

Et j'ai su qu'un soldat dans les mains de Pompée
Avec son diadème a remis son épée.

(l.7)

The lost crown and sword are a solemn initial statement of Mithridate's demise as ruler and general. Since these functions constitute his historical raison d'être, nothing else remains. Racine twists the knife by adding to these lost sovereignties a final, emasculating defeat: that of any pretence of sexual dominion. Not for nothing is the scene set in Mithridate's kingdom of Bosphorus, in a Crimean backwater at the uttermost distance from the centre of power. ‘To have been killed in battle’, as Kuizenga remarks, ‘believing in the illusory allegiance of Monime, would have been Mithridate's personal belle mort. Instead, he survives, returns to Nymphée to die less gloriously’ (p. 284). What ‘happens’ in the play is thus less important than what can no longer happen. In so far as life is movement in time, in Mithridate the imitation of an action is played out in a temporal no-man's-land. This creates not so much a sense of unreality as a radically different dramatic reality. Time, therefore, expressed in terms of past, present, and future, is essentially envisaged in this perspective. Suspension is the name of the game.

It is widely accepted that in all Racinian tragedy the past weighs heavily on the dramatic action.¹¹ In Mithridate, however, the present, seen as movement and progression, is as though crushed by things past:

Ce cœur nourri de sang, et de guerre affamé,
Malgré le faix des ans et du sort qui m'opprime,
Traîne partout l'amour qui l'attache à Monime.

(l. 458)

This inability to live and move in the present time is expressed in different metaphors of denial, such as slavery, imprisonment, unpaid debt, and suffocation:

          de mon devoir esclave infortunée,
A d'éternels ennuis je me voie enchaînée.

(l. 643)

When, for example, Monime feels able to breathe again:

Après deux ans d'ennuis, dont tu sais tout le poids,
Quoi! je puis respirer pour la première fois?

(l. 1173)

the respite is quite illusory. Mithridate reminds her that a promise made in the past ‘Par des nœuds éternels l'un à l'autre nous lie’ (l. 1276), and that ‘votre cœur est un bien qui m'est dû’ (l. 1281). Monime for her part vitrifies the relationship in terms such as reconnaissance, obéissance, and respect (ll. 1323-27). The nœuds éternels that bind her to the past, and prevent her from moving freely in the present, are embodied in the royal bandeau that ties her to Mithridate, ‘Bandeau, que mille fois j'ai trempé de mes pleurs’ (l. 1502). Monime tries literally to strangle herself with this asphyxiating presence from the past. It goes without saying that the attempt is unsuccessful: like Mithridate himself, she manages neither to live nor to die. Ironically, Monime and Xipharès exhort each other with a ‘Vivez!’, as though this were something they could not manage to do (ll. 1213, 1265). This suspension of life is expressed in the ‘silence éternel’ (l. 698) in which Monime has buried her love for Xipharès, himself described by the King as ‘de tout temps à mes ordres soumis’ (l. 465).¹² After Mithridate has tricked her into expressing her real feelings, this silence becomes a choice of death:

Et le tombeau, Seigneur, est moins triste pour moi
Que le lit d'un époux qui m'a fait cet outrage.

(l. 1350)

This sense of life not lived in the present is acutely rendered in those two elements that paradoxically constitute the staple of the plot: waiting and fleeing. All the characters wait. They wait to be free, to love, to win, or to die. At the very outset we are presented with a Pharnace who ‘attend tout maintenant de Rome et du vainqueur’ in order to begin his real life (l. 26), though it is, ironically, the Romans who will kill him (ll. 1691-92). He cannot wait any longer for Monime to give up waiting:

Jusques à quand, Madame, attendrez-vous mon père?
Des témoins de sa mort viennent à tous moments
Condamner votre doute et vos retardements.
[…]
Mais il faut, croyez-moi, sans attendre plus tard,
Ainsi que notre hymen presser notre départ.
Nos intérêts communs et mon cœur le demandent.
Prêts à vous recevoir, mes vaisseaux vous attendent.

(l. 224)

Monime for her part is still waiting to live, to breathe with ‘ce triste cœur […] dont jamais encor je n'ai pu disposer’ (ll. 161-62). As for Xipharès, he awaits orders from Monime. Indeed, when he is enjoined by her to leave, despite the immediate action he feels is needed, his only action is to wait again:

                                                                                          toi-même tu vois bien
Que ton propre devoir s'accorde avec le sien.
Cours par un prompt trépas abréger ton supplice.
Toutefois attendons que son sort s'éclaircisse.

(l. 749)

This unusual temporal perspective strongly suggests that we need to look at the dramatic structure of Mithridate in a different light from that of traditional Racinian tragedies such as Andromaque or Britannicus. For example, the first scene of Act IV, in which Monime waits for Xipharès to appear, has often been criticized for not advancing the action. Here, as always, one must be careful not to confuse the dramatic action with a series of physical actions that have visible consequences. Action on stage is not always fuelled by ‘the native hue of resolution’ (Hamlet, III. 1. 84). Self-evidently, be it in Hamlet or in Huis Clos, an inability to act can be the very basis of a dramatic action. In Mithridate, similarly, the reality of that action is expressed in phrases such as ‘Que tarde Xipharès?’ (l. 1131). A revealing cameo occurs when Mithridate, confronted with a Monime who refuses him, responds with ‘J'attends, pour me déterminer’ (l. 1357), to which she replies: ‘J'attendrai mon arrêt’ (l. 1373). In the real world this is not what might be called ‘real action’, but it is no less real for that. In Mithridate tragedy is the imitation of inaction.

The King crystallizes these disparate elements of non-life in a single word, fuite. To the extent that flight here assumes the proportions of a tragic illusion, it is difficult to accept, as even Mauron seems to do (p. 123), the established critical image of the King as a noble, Promethean figure single-handedly struggling against fate and the might of Rome. Mithridate's illusion is triple: that of past glory where flight is confused with victory, that of a present in which a hopeless cause will become an element of surprise, and that of future conquest, in a final flight into unreality.

The prime falsification is that of the past:

Non plus comme autrefois, cet heureux Mithridate
Qui de Rome toujours balançant le destin,
Tenais entre elle et moi l'univers incertain.

(l. 436)

It is quite natural to view the King Mithridates of history, like the Pyrrhus of legend, first and foremost as a great warrior. Racine's Pyrrhus and Mithridate, however, are markedly different creatures. They are created with great artistic licence by and for an autonomous dramatic action, and exist only through it. Just as the Pyrrhus of Andromaque is defined by a passionate love he will go to any lengths to fulfil, so in Mithridate the eponymous hero is, more than anything else, a failure and a fugitive. Past defeats, and a military career spent running away, are subsumed in a single word: gloire. The burning presence of the glory days recalls the amputee's sensation of a phantom limb. This is never more evident than in the long speech that begins Act III.¹³ Here Roman triumphs are minimized and ridiculed (‘gravant en airain ses frêles avantages’ (l. 767)), his own retreats are presented as triumphs (‘l'ennemi, par ma fuite trompé’ (l. 765)), and his victories are fashioned with imagination and thin air:

Le Bosphore m'a vu, par de nouveaux apprêts,
Ramener la terreur du fond de ses marais,
Et chassant les Romains de l'Asie étonnée,
Renverser en un jour l'ouvrage d'une année.

(l. 769)¹⁴

Just as the King, in the kingdom of his mind, transforms past retreats and defeats into cunning victory strategies, so he carries out the same mental surgery on the catastrophic present. The initial ‘je suis vaincu’ (l. 439) is quickly forgotten. He does, it is true, sometimes seem to sail uncomfortably close to the truth:

Vaincu, persécuté, sans secours, sans États,
Errant de mers en mers, et moins roi que pirate.

(l. 562)

This picture, however, is only a hypothesis. It allows the King to affirm that even if this complete shipwreck were to occur, such a ‘naufrage élevé’ would be preferred by any king anywhere to his own kingdom (ll. 567-69). It is henceforth without irony that ‘je fuis’ is raised as a standard of revolt (l. 759). When, therefore, Mithridate points again to his past glory to declare that ‘ce temps-là n'est plus. Je régnais, et je fuis’ (l. 1041), the tacit admission of defeat is made only in order to trap Monime: he does not believe a word of it. For she, too, must be made to accept the one self-image he will tolerate:

Ne me regardez point vaincu, persécuté:
Revoyez-moi vainqueur, et partout redouté.

(l. 1293)

This evasion of the present is paralleled by the King's headlong rush into an unbelievable future strategy of reconquest:

Tout vaincu que je suis, et voisin du naufrage
Je médite un dessein digne de mon courage.

(l. 431)

Despite an implied admission of total defeat, Mithridate projects himself into a future of ‘nouvelles conquêtes’ (l. 559) he sees already to be as glorious as his imagined past. Paradoxically, in a play taking place in one particular place on one particular day, the action that concerns him is not in the here and now, but in a past expressed solely by gloire, and in the future, demain, loin d'ici:

Ma gloire loin d'ici vous et moi nous appelle;
Et sans perdre un moment pour ce noble dessein,
Aujourd'hui votre époux, il faut partir demain.

(l. 544)

Demain, sans différer, je prétends que l'Aurore
Découvre mes vaisseaux déjà loin du Bosphore.

(l. 855)

The temporal fantasies in Mithridate's planned military expeditions are justly celebrated: ‘dans trois mois au pied du Capitole […] en deux jours […] Aux lieux où le Danube y vient finir son cours’ (ll. 796-98). Who can believe, with Picard, that ‘l'avenir du monde est en suspens’?¹⁵ These plans tell us less about the King's grasp of strategy than about his failing grip on temporal reality.¹⁶ What he feels he has to do, in his unreal present, becomes something he imagines he can and will do in the future, because he could have done it in the past. In these circumstances it is not so much a question of valour struggling against fate as bravado toying with desperation: ‘Je vais à Rome, […] Je le dois, je le puis’ (ll. 1387-89). The King's portentous ‘Enfin, l'heure est venue’ (l. 755), which might at first seem to put the present back on the agenda, in fact relates to this future fantasy. This subversion of present reality by future plans is nowhere better symbolized than by his repeated references to the ships waiting to take him away:

Mes vaisseaux qu'à partir il faut tenir tout prêts.

(l. 622)

Les vaisseaux sont tout prêts.

(l. 953)

                                        mes soldats, prêts à suivre leur roi,
Rentrent dans mes vaisseaux pour partir avec moi.

(l. 1273)

The King does not yet know that this is an imaginary voyage, not because of cruel destiny but, more cruelly still, because his soldiers are unwilling to sail. It is a classic irony: the man celebrated for his dissimulation concealing reality from himself.

Between past gloire and imagined new conquêtes, all these temporal references thus translate Mithridate's inability to keep both feet on the firm land of the present tense: ‘Sortant de mes vaisseaux, il faut que j'y remonte’ (l. 1047). In that present he ends up by doing nothing. Within the suspended life which is that of the play, it is as though all were shadow-boxing, and nothing in reality could be done. In that reality, where acts have consequences, he who would set out to march into Rome now finds himself tracked down by the Romans to the extreme limits of what in the real present is the Roman world. The great king and general is unable even to control the parcel of land on which the remnant of his army is encamped. There is therefore a certain irony in the fact that both Monime and Mithridate are told, at different moments, ‘Vous pouvez tout’ (ll. 247, 547).

It will be objected that this imitation of inaction does not square with the fact that many things do in fact happen in the play, especially at the end: ‘Les coups de théâtre se succèdent: retour imprévu de Mithridate (fin de l'acte I), révolte de Pharnace et débarquement des Romains (acte IV), intervention inattendue du messager de Mithridate (V, 3), annonce de la défaite romaine et de l'arrivée de Mithridate mourant’ (Descotes, p. 114). Did Racine not himself declare in his ‘Preface’ that ‘il n'y a guère d'actions éclatantes dans la vie de Mithridate qui n'aient trouvé place dans ma tragédie’? Is there not a contradiction between this desire to cram into the play every striking incident in Mithridate's life and the contention that it is Mithridate's death that is the tragic action? In addition, is there not a sense of urgency created, as in the other tragedies? Is Monime not almost murdered? Are the Romans not defeated by Xipharès?

In response one might point out that the ‘actions éclatantes’ of legend dissolve in a death that leaves Asia Minor more subject to Rome than at the beginning of Mithridate's military career. For in the real time that exists beyond the palace of Nymphée, the present is defined and bounded by Rome: ‘Et le seul nom de Rome étonne les plus fiers’ (l. 1426). To ignore Roman power is to live in an imaginary land. That the King's death is real or reported does not change a lesson of powerlessness and futility delivered at the outset in a mocking chiasmus:

Ainsi ce roi, qui seul a durant quarante ans,
Lassé tout ce que Rome eut de chefs importants,
Et qui dans l'Orient balançant la fortune,
Vengeait de tous les rois la querelle commune,
Meurt, et laisse après lui, pour venger son trépas,
Deux fils infortunés qui ne s'accordent pas.

(l. 9)

As for the necessity for hasty action that characters urge on others, one cannot say that this has an obvious effect. If the characters move, it is to run on the spot, in a place very different from the terrifying, claustrophobic lieu of impending doom depicted in Britannicus or Bajazet. The palace where the supposedly dead King will eventually die is essentially a place of displacement set in a time of postponement. Words spoken do not seem to mesh with an outside world that is kept outside until Roman reality finally bursts in. The important thing that happens is that nothing important happens. It is apposite, for example, that Monime should end by not taking the poison, just as she has not been able to strangle herself.

It is thus difficult to accept the critical consensus that this play offers a ‘positive’ or ‘optimistic’ dénouement that in some way negates the effect of the opening couplet.¹⁷Mithridate is the tragedy of a man who feigns death to save his life, and, in an ultimate reversal, thereby loses the last little part of his life over which he has dominion. The loss is not only for one man. Neither the death of Mithridate nor the survival of Monime and Xipharès changes the tragic nature of existences that from the beginning are a kind of death in life. This is not exactly the ‘serenity’ which has been claimed for the play (Rohou, p. 285). It is equally difficult to side with the majority view that Mithridate's pardon of his son is a striking demonstration of ‘générosité morale’ and ‘human heroism’ (Rohou, p. 291; Parish, p. 101). The evidence points more in the direction of Barthes's contention that the pardon is an empty gesture compelled by force majeure, an ‘absolution postiche’ which changes nothing: Mithridate will die and the Romans will eventually triumph (Barthes, p. 108). In addition, as Vinaver reminds us, it would seem unwise to place too much reliance on words of forgiveness uttered by someone famous above all for ‘dangereux détours’ and ‘trompeuses adresses’ (ll. 369-72), who in the play has already faked his own death and the disinterested renunciation of his love.¹⁸

Equally, to criticize Act V for lacking in dramatic interest, because of the resolution of the struggle between father and son in the previous Act, is to predicate a traditional dramatic structure of interpersonal conflict that in Mithridate is not predominant. In this play the main conflict is always that between illusion and reality. If, as in Bérénice, reality takes the shape of Rome, illusion comes in the guise of a dislocation between what is and what seems to have been or what might be. In the final Act Mithridate is still living in those shadowlands where life and time are not invested with the hard reality of stubborn fact. The long death-throes of a king who no longer has any reason to live, but who does not know how to die, neatly encapsulate and crown the whole dramatic action. For even death itself seems to run away:

‘Ne livrons pas surtout Mithridate vivant.’
Aussitôt dans son sein il plonge son épée.
Mais la mort fuit encor sa grande âme trompée.

(l. 1602)

It is difficult to accept that ‘the Mithridate who sees the approach of death is free of passions, pretensions and illusions’.¹⁹ His final words show a blindness that remains complete until the end:

J'ai vengé l'univers autant que je l'ai pu:
La mort dans ce projet m'a seule interrompu.

(l. 1653)

As Racine remarked in his notes on Œdipus Rex, ‘bel artifice d'instruire le spectateur, sans éclaircir l'acteur’ (Œuvres, V, 235). A further irony is that Mithridate will finally die at the very moment that his son wins a skirmish with the Romans that would have allowed the father's illusions of success to persist. It is only fitting that Xipharès, worthy son of his father, should at the end stride off into this brave new world of the past: ‘Et par tout l'univers cherchons-lui des vengeurs’ (l. 1698). At the end? In a tragedy of suspended time, the death of the tragic illusion is, quite literally, interminable.

Mithridate has been justly dubbed ‘une création tout à fait unique’.²⁰ Its temporal perspective is radically different from that of Racine's other tragedies. This difference, however, does not mean that its structure is somehow flawed, or that its tragic quality is thereby diminished. On the contrary, as a recent production has clearly shown, we can witness a coherent dramatic action that generates, and is driven by, a truly tragic sense of loss and waste.²¹ It is a play about death and the denial of time. It concerns not just a physical death, but the death of a desire for domination pursued in full flight from that most implacable of enemies: present reality. In both its structure and its vision Mithridate is thus a symphony of negation. The dominant chords are those of defeat, retreat, inconsequence and impotence. If this is a ‘flaw’, it is a truly tragic flaw through which Racine allows us to experience something of our fractured human condition. Not bad for ‘le moindre de ses chefs-d'œuvre’.

Notes

1. François Mauriac, La Vie de Jean Racine (Paris: Plon, 1928), p. 118; Racine, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Raymond Picard, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1950-66), I, 595; Marcel Gutwirth, ‘La problématique de l'innocence dans le théâtre de Racine’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 106 (1962), 183-202 (p. 192); Jean Rohou, Jean Racine (Paris: Fayard, 1992), p. 285.

2. Donna Kuizenga, ‘Mithridate Reconsidered’, French Review, 52 (1978-79), 280-85 (p. 280).

3. Henry Phillips, Racine: ‘Mithridate’ (London: Grant & Cutler, 1990), p. 88.

4. L'Inconscient dans l'œuvre et la vie de Racine (Gap: Ophrys, 1957), p. 123. Quotations from Mithridate and other works by Racine are taken from Racine, Œuvres, ed. by Paul Mesnard, 8 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1865-73).

5. Mithridate, ed. by Gustave Rudler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1943), p. xxix.

6. Eugène Vinaver, Entretiens sur Racine (Paris: Nizet, 1984), p. 57.

7. Alain Chartier, quoted in Agnès Elthes, ‘La composition du temps racinien’, Acta Litteraria, 33 (1991), 23-35 (p. 33).

8. See my article ‘Playing for time in Bérénice’, Nottingham French Studies, 32 (1993), 23-28.

9. From l'abbé Nadal, ‘Dissertation sur la Tragédie de Mithridate’, in François and Claude Parfaict, Histoire du théâtre français, 15 vols (Paris, 1734-49; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), X (1747), 253-74 (p. 256), to Maurice Descotes, Les grands rôles du théâtre de Jean Racine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), p. 114, and beyond.

10. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1960), p. 105. See also Michael Edwards, La tragédie racinienne (Paris: Pensée universelle, 1972), p. 210.

11. See Georges Poulet, Études sur le temps humain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1949; repr. Paris: Plon, 1950), p. 107.

12. On the filial relationships, see William Cloonan, ‘Father and Sons in Mithridate’, French Review, 44 (1975-76), 514-21, and Mary Kirschner, ‘Poetic Characterization in Mithridate: Xipharès and Pharnace’, Cahiers du dixseptième, 3 (1989), 17-27.

13. For an analysis of this speech, see Madeleine Defrenne, ‘La substance actorielle dans le monologue central du Mithridate de Racine’, in Ouverture et Dialogue, ed. by Ulrich Döring and others (Tübingen: Narr, 1988), 93-106.

14. On the ‘faits incohérents ou controuvés’ in Mithridate's speech, see Rudler, pp. 82-83.

15. Picard, I, 598. This comment seems to be at odds with the later statement that ‘la situation de Mithridate a surtout la beauté émouvante des causes perdues; c'est le dernier effort d'un roi vaincu et pourchassé’ (p. 599).

16. Mesnard records the literal-minded criticisms made by Racine's contemporaries of the practicality of Mithridate's projected expedition (Racine, Œuvres, III, 57).

17. Phillips, p. 68, and R. Parish, Racine: The Limits of Tragedy (Tübingen: Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature, 1993), p. 101.

18. Eugène Vinaver, Racine et la poésie tragique (Paris: Nizet, 1951), p. 77.

19. Michael O'Regan, The Mannerist Aesthetic: A Study of Racine's ‘Mithridate’ (Bristol: University of Bristol Press, 1980), p. 10.

20. Madeleine Bertaud, Le XVII^e siècle. Littérature française (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1990), p. 182.

21. See Micheline Servin, ‘Mithridate, mise en scène de Jean Gillbert’, Les Temps Modernes, 45.125 (1990), 180-83.