The Pleaders
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in Racine and French classical drama
- Dutch readers who want to read a translated play
- Drama readers drawn to law and verbal dispute
- Enthusiasts studying Racine's transmission and translations
Not a good fit for
- Readers who read only Chinese translations and do not know Dutch
- Readers expecting modern novelistic narration and description
- Researchers who need a scholarly edition with detailed notes
Reading tips
- First get a sense of Racine's basic dramatic style, then enter the dialogue and disputes of this play.
- Read scene by scene and note each character's position to clarify the claims and conflicts of the two sides.
- Compare with other Racine plays to observe the consistency of his restraint and psychological portrayal.
- If Dutch is hard going, start with a plot summary, then return to the original text.
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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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.
