Bérénice romantique

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Bérénice was regarded as a separate play in the Racinian repertoire. Bérénice was held to be rather a poetic experiment than a usual theatre play. This particular status of Bérénice in the nineteenth-century imagination results from at least three factors: the originality of its plot whose action was supposedly “internal”, the context in which the play was created, and the relative absence of Bérénice from the romantic stage. But for the romantics, Bérénice was also a play with a "meta-critical" value. Critics used the powerful emotions and the elegiac inspiration of Bérénice as arguments to denounce the spectacular violence of romantic drama. Such are the aspects of Bérénice's reception which this article proposes to investigate.

Keywords

• Romanticism
• Comédie Française
• Elegy
• Literary history