Tan calf spine with brown title plates, raised banding and gilt title. Brown mottled boards.

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Please view our photographs. Leather. Condition: Good. A great value buy. Not Stated (illustrator). The complete plays of the renowned French playwright Jean Racine, with a brief biography. Inscribed to the title page by Sir Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925), a Russian and British historian and medievalist. The complete plays of the notable French playwright and poet Jean Racine (1639-1699), including a brief biography of Racine and an overview of his life. Racine primarily wrote tragedies such as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie, but did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs. Illustrated with a hand-coloured portrait frontispiece. Undated, dated through copies held at the HathiTrust Digital Library. In a half morocco binding. Externally sound, with rubbing to the spine and extremities, and shelf wear to the boards. Hinges are strained but held firmly by cords. The pages are firmly bound. Pages are age toned but generally clean. Good. book.

Jean-Baptiste Racine ( 22 December 1639 – 21 April 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille, as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. Racine was primarily a tragedian, producing such “examples of neoclassical perfection” as Phèdre, Andromaque, and Athalie. He did write one comedy, Les Plaideurs, and a muted tragedy, Esther, for the young.

Racine’s plays displayed his mastery of the dodecasyllabic (12 syllable) French alexandrine. His writing is renowned for its elegance, purity, speed, and fury, and for what American poet Robert Lowell described as a “diamond-edge”, and the “glory of its hard, electric rage”. Racine’s dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight, the prevailing passion of his characters, and the nakedness of both plot and stage