Racine and Chauveau: A Poetics of Illustration
Keble College, Oxford
This article examines the original illustrations for Racine's plays, mostly drawn by François Chauveau, and attacks several perennial received ideas about them: that they mostly depict off-stage violent action; that they are aesthetically at odds with the plays themselves; that the illustrations owe more to the artist's fantasy than to Racine's text. The article demonstrates that most of the illustrations depict on-stage events, and, with particularly detailed analyses of the illustrations for La Thébaïde and Mithridate, argues that, whether the event depicted is on-stage or off-stage, the artist engages scrupulously with the text of the play, producing an illustration that is faithful to Racine's work and inviting the reader to engage in fruitful parallel readings of text and image. The illustrations respond to, and capitalize on, Racine's dramatic poetry.