AUGUST W. SCHLEGEL COMPARAISON ENTRE LA PHÈDRE DE RACINE ET CELLE D’EURIPIDE A digital edition Version 2 by Donald J. Mastronarde Department of Classics University of California, Berkeley with an English translation by Emily Allen-Hornblower Department of Classics Rutgers University Distributed through the eScholarship Repository of the California Digital Library Introduction, annotations, translation of Schlegel’s preface ©2006, 2011 Donald J. Mastronarde Translation of Schlegel’s essay ©2011 Emily Allen-Hornblower A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807/1842) TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 2 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE .................................................................................. 4 SCHLEGEL, COMPARAISON… ........................................................................ 5 SCHLEGEL, COMPARISON… (ENGLISH TRANSLATION) ............................... 46 AVANT-PROPOS (1842) ............................................................................... 88 PREFACE (1842) (ENGLISH TRANSLATION) .................................................. 91 GLOSSARY OF PROPER NAMES ................................................................ 94 ANNOTATIONS ........................................................................................... 102 ENDNOTES: TEXTUAL VARIANTS ......................................................... 115 Digital edition version 2 (April 2011) 1 A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807/1842) INTRODUCTION August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) was one of the most prominent literary scholars of the Romantic period in Germany. Along with his more prolific brother Friedrich (1772-1829), he promoted the study of world literature and did much to set the course of literary history in the nineteenth century and beyond. For students of ancient Greek literature, the Schlegels are especially important because they endorsed, consolidated, and extended an ancient tradition that posited a growth and decay of genres, and in particular in the case of Greek tragedy they offered assessments of and distinctions between Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that are still echoed in scholarship and popular criticism to this day. The Schlegels were major exponents of the so- called “nineteenth-century damnatio” of Euripides (cf. E. Behler in Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 27 (1986) 335-67). August Schlegel published Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literature in 1809, and already in 1815 that book was translated into English as A course of lectures on dramatic art and literature, and it was frequently reissued thereafter. Earlier, however, in 1807, he published in French a long essay comparing Racine’s Phèdre to Euripides’ Hippolytus. In the Schlegels and a generation earlier in the dramatic criticism of Lessing, we can observe the tendency of the German intellectuals to react again the dramas and poetics of the classical French tradition and to stake out in opposition a new aesthetic for German literature based on a return to the Greek classics. Schlegel’s comparison of these two plays is a provocative contribution to such a program. It is also rather piquant to observe Schlegel here showing such enthusiastic appreciation for a specimen of Euripides’ work. This essay is neither included in the German editions of A. W. Schlegel’s collected works nor widely available in libraries. Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide first appeared as a separate volume in 1807; a reprint of the 1807 edition was issued by A. L. Pollard, Old Marston, Oxford, in 1962. In 1842 Schlegel reprinted his essay, with some minor revisions of wording, in a collection of his French essays, Essais littéraires et historiques, where it has an alternative short title “Comparaison des deux Phèdres.” The 1842 version is now available as a free Google book. My interest in this work stems from years of teaching Euripides in general and often his Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, and Racine’s Phèdre in the same class, as well as from a longstanding interest in the reception of Greek tragedy from the Renaissance onward. The intention of the present edition is to make this text more widely available and, through the annotations and glossary, more accessible to modern readers. For the same reason, an English translation has been added in the current version, so that the work can be used easily in English- speaking classes, where the two plays can usefully be studied side by side in English translations. The translation is the work of Emily Allen-Hornblower, with a few suggestions from me that contributed to her final revision of the piece. (The translation of the 1842 preface which appears at the end of this edition is originally my work, but with corrections and suggestions from Emily in the final revision.) The text presented here is basically that of the 1842 revision, for which Schlegel made no substantial changes of content or argument, but introduced a few refinements of wording and Digital edition version 2 (April 2011) 2 A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807/1842) used a more modern system of spelling (the 1807 edition had forms like avoit, sentimens, puissans for avait, sentiments, puissants) and punctuation (e.g. 1807 tout-à-fait, 1842 tout à fait). I have collated the two editions, and the endnotes indicate the different wording of the earlier version (but I do not record differences of spelling and punctuation). I have also tacitly corrected the two Errata noted on p. xxvii of the 1842 edition and corrected one other manifest typographical error introducted in 1842. During the process of translation, Emily Allen- Hornblower detected a few typographic errors that were present in my Version 1 edition, and these have been corrected. The following items have been added to the original text: (a) I have numbered the paragraphs with numbers between parentheses in bold type, from (1) to (67), to facilitate reference to and within this edition, since the pagination may change in later revisions. Similarly , the paragraphs of the Avant-Propos are numbered with roman numerals between parentheses in bold type. (b) The pagination of the 1807 edition is indicated by the number in square brackets, from [3] to [108], placed in the text before the first word or syllable of the page. (c) The pagination of the 1842 edition is indicated by the number in braces in italics, from {87} to {170}, placed in the text before the first word or syllable of the page. (4) In square brackets I have inserted line references for the quotations in the form [Ph. I.v, 355] or [Ph. III.i] or [Hipp. 373], meaning respectively “Racine, Phèdre, Act I, scene v, line 355” (that is, line 355 of the 1654 lines of the play as indicated in most modern editions of the French text), “Racine, Phèdre, Act III, scene I,” and “Euripides, Hippolytus, line 373” (that is, line 373 of the 1466 lines of the play as indicated in modern editions of the Greek text and in some English translations). (5) I have added superscript uppercase N in the text at the end of any phrase on which there is an annotation. In Version 2, I have also added links within the PDF. First, each paragraph number in the French and the English contains a link to the same paragraph in the other language. Second, the endnote numbers (for textual variants) are linked to the endnotes. Third, most proper names are linked (on their first occurrence only) to an entry in the Glossary: simply place the cursor over a proper name, and if the cursor changes to a pointing hand, there is a link. Fourth, for the annotations, each superscript N is linked to the appropriate page of notes. Donald J. Mastronarde Version 2 (April 2011) Digital edition version 2 (April 2011) 3 A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807/1842) TRANSLATOR’S NOTE The following translation was made possible through the generous support of professor Donald J. Mastronarde, whom I would like to thank warmly for providing me with the opportunity to ponder August Schlegel’s present essay as I translated it — a sometimes awkward, and always provocative, aesthetic treatise. In the present translation, I have sought to provide as close a rendering of Schlegel’s writing and style as possible, including any inaccuracies, particularly in his translations of Euripides’ Hippolytus, which at times stray from the original Greek. I thought it worthwhile to record his overtranslations, interpretive choices, and downright mistakes. Likewise, in §24 I translate Schegel’s version of Winckelmann, not Winckelmann’s text itself. Similarly, I have kept the Latinized names of the gods, which he preferred to their Graecized alternatives in the French. The translations of Racine’s Phèdre into English are those of Robert Bruce Boswell, now in the public domain, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1977/1977-h/1977-h.htm#one. An exception is “the trembling Hippolytus” in §29, which is my own version, since Boswell’s does not convey the idea of trembling that is central to Schlegel’s point here. Emily Allen-Hornblower (January 2011) Digital edition version 2 (April 2011) 4 A. W. Schlegel, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807/1842) [1] COMPARAISON ENTRE LA PHÈDRE DE RACINE ET CELLE D’EURIPIDE, PAR A. W. SCHLEGEL PARIS, CHEZ TOURNEISEN FILS, LIBRAIRE, Rue du Seine Saint-Germain, N.O 12. 1807 The 1842 title page reads: Essais littéraires et historiques par A. W. de Schlegel Professeur de Littérature et de l’Histoire des Beaux-Arts à l’Université Royale de Bonn; Directeur du Musée des Antiquités Rhénanes; Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Aigle Rouge 3e cl. avec le Nœud; Commandeur de l’Ordre Britannique et Hanovrien des Guelphes; Chevalier des Ordres de St. Wladimir, de Wasa et de la Légion d’Honneur; Membre Ordinaire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences à Berlin; Membre Honoraire de l’Académie Impériale à St. Petersbourg, de l’Acad. R. à Munich, de l’Acad. R. des Beaux-Arts à Berlin, des Sociétés Asiatiques de Calcutta, de Paris et de Londres, Etc. Etc. Bonn, Chez Edouard Weber Libraire.