Athaliah
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Foreign-literature students seeking an English text sample of French classical tragedy
- General drama readers interested in biblical adaptations for the stage
- Students of seventeenth-century French drama and the three unities
- Literature lovers who want low-cost e-book access to Racine's works
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer modern vernacular or contemporary fiction pacing
- Beginners who need detailed annotations, introductions, and background scholarship
- Readers impatient with religious subject matter and classical verse
Reading tips
- Familiarize yourself with the relevant figures in the Books of Kings before starting the play to reduce confusion over relationships
- Read through act by act, marking the choral passages and observing how they comment on and heighten the action
- After reading, review the key points of the classical three unities and see how the play maintains unity of time and place
- Read alongside chapters of literary history comparing Racine and Corneille to deepen understanding
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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About the author
Jean Racine (1639–1699) was one of the most important tragic poets of the French classical period. The library holds five of his works, whose representative titles include Phaedra, Mithridate, Esther, Athaliah and De Pleiters. His tragedies mostly draw on ancient myth, history and biblical stories, focusing on the intense conflicts of passion, duty and fate within his characters. His language is concise and his structure rigorous, with especially profound psychological portrayal; he is regarded as a model of French classical tragedy and has exerted a lasting influence on later European drama. Public information available here on his life and nationality is limited, so this introduction focuses on the subjects and style of his works.
