The Complete Plays of Jean Racine: Volume 2: Bajazet 9780271058856

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The Complete Plays of Jean Racine

The Complete Plays of Jean Racine volume ii: bajazet

Translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by

geoffrey alan argent

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

All Rights Reserved caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performances of bajazet (“Play”) are subject to royalty. This Play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by Universal Copyright Convention, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional and amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, and all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as cd-rom, cd-i, dvd, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning any of the aforementioned rights should be addressed to Patrick H. Alexander, Director, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 820 N. University Drive, USB 1, Suite C, University Park, PA 16802, www.psupress.org.

Please Note After having received permission to produce this Play, it is required that the translator geoffrey alan argent be given credit as the sole and exclusive translator of the Play on the title page of all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all cases where the title of the Play appears for purposes of advertising or publicizing the production. The name of geoffrey alan argent must appear on a separate line immediately beneath the title line and in type size equal to 50% of the size of the largest letter of the title of the Play and the acknowledgment should read jean racine’s bajazet Translated into English Rhymed Couplets by geoffrey alan argent

dedicated to

Leslie Eric Comens, “who knows no tears but those he’s caused to flow, who learned to stifle his tears long ago,” for having been moved to shed them by bajazet and to the very living memory of

George Balanchine, the greatest translator of all: from music into dance

contents

Translator’s Note   ix Bajazet: Discussion   1 Racine’s Two Prefaces   29 Bajazet   33 Bajazet: Notes and Commentary   107 Selected Bibliography   131

translator’s note

This translation of Bajazet, Racine’s seventh play, is one of a series which, when complete, will offer in English translation all twelve of Racine’s plays (eleven tragedies and one comedy), only the third such traversal since Racine’s death in 1699. This traversal, in addition, is the first to be composed in rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. My strategy has been to reconceive Racine in that pedigreed indigenous English verse form in order to produce a poetic translation of concentrated power and dramatic impact. After all, as Proust observes, “the tyranny of rhyme forces good poets into the discovery of their best lines”; and while subjected to that tyranny, I took great pains to render Racine’s French into English that is incisive, lucid, elegant, ingenious, and memorable. For  I believe that the proper goal of a translation of a work of literature must be, first and foremost, to produce a work of literature in the language of the target audience. For a considerably more expansive discussion of my approach to translation, as well as a vigorously, rigorously argued rationale for my decision to employ rhymed couplets, I direct the interested reader to the Translator’s Introduction, which appears in Volume I of this series, devoted to my translation of Racine’s first play, The Fratricides. This translation is based on the definitive 1697 edition of Racine’s theater as it appears in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of 1980, edited by Raymond Picard. The 1697 text represents Racine’s final thoughts on this play. The divergences between the first (1672)

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and last editions are, with two exceptions, relatively inconsequential. Most of them involve minor textual emendations that Racine made for the later edition, virtually all of which, one may confidently assert, represent clear improvements over the earlier versions: improvements in diction, concentration, clarity, and impact. The only significant change Racine made was his excision of two brief passages (IV.v.53 –56 and V.iv.90 –93). These I have chosen to reinstate into the main body of the text, for reasons I explain in the relevant notes. The translations of Racine’s first and second prefaces are my own, as are the translations of passages from the critical commentaries in the Picard and Forestier editions that appear in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. I have preserved the scene divisions as they are given in the Pléiade edition (each new scene marking the arrival or departure of one or more characters)  and have, likewise, listed the characters participating in each scene just below the scene number. I have, in addition, furnished these translations with line numbers (every fifth line being numbered, and the numbering beginning anew for each scene), for ease of reference for readers and actors, and to enable me to cite passages precisely in the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary. Be it noted that these line numbers do not conform to those of any French edition, the Picard, for example, providing no line numbers at all and the Forestier using unbroken numbering from beginning to end; besides, I have sometimes expanded one of Racine’s couplets into a tercet (or even, more rarely, into two couplets), a procedure that would vitiate any line-for-line correspondence. The Discussion is intended as much to promote discussion as to provide it. The Notes and Commentary, in addition to clarifying obscure references and explicating the occasional gnarled conceit, offer, I hope, some fresh and thought-provoking insights, such as are occasionally vouchsafed the sedulous translator. But, whatever the merit of the ancillary critical material, I believe that the enduring value of these volumes will reside in the excellence of the translations. New approaches to studying Racine will undoubtedly be

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discovered and developed, opponent schools of thought will continue to clash, arguments may be challenged or overturned, but I am hopeful that the value of these translations will prove indisputable. Once again, I must acknowledge the maddeningly indefatigable efforts of Leslie Eric Comens, who, for many months seldom to be found without a copy of my Bajazet in his hands, has never allowed me to leave well enough alone.

bajazet: discussion

i Having in his first five tragedies taken his subjects from timeless myth (The Fratricides, Andromache)  and ancient history (Alexander the Great, Britannicus, Berenice), Racine made the remarkable decision to base his next play on actual events that had transpired at the Turkish court, and recently enough (“not more than thirty years ago,” as he writes in his first preface) to have been known firsthand by contemporaries of Racine still alive at the time he wrote. In the classic theater, this was quite unusual. In his lengthier second preface, Racine himself anticipates that “some readers may be astonished that I have dared to present on the stage such recent events.” What reconciled or, rather, attracted Racine to the Turkish subject (as he makes clear in that preface) was that the story, though not shrouded in the mists of time like The Fratricides, was shrouded in the veils of the dark, mysterious apartments of the Seraglio, a setting as far removed culturally from his audience as the Thebes of legend was temporally: “We have so little commerce with the princes and the other people who live in the Seraglio, that we consider them, so to speak, as living in another age than our own.” But if Racine contends that “the remoteness of the country compensates in some way for the too great proximity in time,” that is, that the milieu

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in which the action unfolds — and, by extension, the people who move about in it — is no less unfamiliar to his audience than those of his other plays, we who believe that Racine’s characters, in all the excess and extravagance of their emotions, are always recognizable as ourselves, might rather put it that what takes place in Bajazet is no less familiar to us than what we encounter in, say, The Fratricides, Iphigenia, or Athaliah. As we explore this play, however, we will discover certain aspects of Bajazet that entitle it to be considered as “exotic” as its setting would suggest and, indeed, “stranger” than any of Racine’s other plays. In addition to the novelty of its setting and subject, Bajazet offers, in its tone and temperature, the most striking volte-face to its predecessor Berenice, which was itself the result of Racine’s selfimposed challenge to create a tragedy with no violence, no bloodshed, and virtually no vehemence in its plot. While the two plays feature corresponding love triangles (two people mutually in love and a third person unrequitedly in love with one of the other two), in Berenice, the central conflict focuses on a different triangle: the same two mutual lovers, but with Rome as, so to speak, “the other woman.” And the working out of both the personal and the political conflicts in that play is cool, staid, and civilized, whereas in Bajazet, the working out is overheated, perfervid, and savage. Neither is happily resolved, but Berenice ends on a poignant and elegiac note, while Bajazet leaves us with a sense of ignoble waste.

ii Bajazet takes place in the stifling and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Seraglio. Martin Turnell describes the milieu as “an oriental palace with its corruption and intrigues, its subterfuges and deceptions, its dark winding passages, its grotesque inhabitants: the flitting shadows, the silent cowering slaves, the horrifying ‘mutes’ clutching their knotted cords, the spies passing furtively in both directions” (Turnell, 157). In the very first line of the play, Akhmet, the vizier, invites us to enter this strange world: “Viens, suis-moi” (Come, follow me — which I have perforce condensed to “This

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way” [I.i.1]), he says to his devoted comrade-in-arms, Osmin. We find ourselves in the perfumed but poisonous atmosphere of the Seraglio, which, like the Venus flytrap, admits the unwary visitor, but allows no escape. Two of the principals (Bajazet and Roxane)  are murdered and one (Atalide)  commits suicide; even the fearsome Orcan, sent by Amurat, the sultan, to commit that double murder, is himself killed to avenge Bajazet’s death. Another minion, sent earlier by Amurat to assassinate Bajazet, had been dispatched before the curtain rises, his body “consigned . . . to the depths of the Black Sea” [I.i.80]. And as the curtain falls, we leave the vizier and Osmin “determined to perish in battle against the supporters of the Sultan” (Brereton, 171). At the outset of the play, the doors to the Seraglio stand wide open, but before the play is half over Roxane orders that “the Serail be closed forevermore / And all restored to what it was before” (II.ii.4 –5). The trap springs shut.

iii In the lengthy expository opening scene (the longest in any of Racine’s plays), Akhmet apprises Osmin (and the audience)  of recent events, and we learn only later that the information he has imparted is faulty in several crucial respects. Osmin is clear-sighted enough to admit, when giving his account of how matters stand with the sultan and with his campaign against Babylon, that, having left the sultan three months previously, “I may not know all that’s taken place” (I.i.28); Akhmet, by contrast, cannot see what is going on right in front of his eyes. Although he has masterminded the plot to overthrow Sultan Amurat, introducing the sultaness, Roxane, to the sultan’s brother Bajazet, who will, he hopes — Bajazet being less inimical and more malleable than the sultan — wrest the throne from Amurat and share it with Roxane, Akhmet has no idea that Bajazet is in love with his cousin Atalide and she with him. This naturally causes complications, of which he remains, throughout almost the entire play, blithely, almost comically, unaware. He explains to Osmin, smugly proud of being in on the secret, that “the Prince is wooing her [Atalide], apparently; / She hears his suit,

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though, for the Sultaness, / Hoping that she may further its success” (I.i.174 –76), never suspecting that this clever subterfuge conceals an even more devious one. Furthermore, he crucially misreads the character of Bajazet, claiming that “Bajazet’s great soul makes him despise  / The idle ease most sultans’ sons so prize” (I.i.117–18). But “idle ease” (“molle oisiveté” [soft idleness or inaction], as the French has it) is precisely what Bajazet displays throughout the play: never taking the initiative, he is passively manipulated by Akhmet, by Roxane, and, especially, by Atalide; and, in our last view of him, he goes off, a helpless victim, to suffer an ignoble death. One should note, however, that Racine makes the same dubious assessment of his hero, assuring us, in his second preface, that he (Racine)  has “taken care to make a great distinction between the passion of Bajazet and the tenderer feelings of his lovers. He retains in the midst of his love the ferocity of his nation.” If there is any ferocity on display, it is all on the part of Roxane and — in a subtler, but almost more frightening way — on that of Atalide. (This is a cautionary example, by the way, of the fallibility of Racine’s prefaces, the observations and opinions offered therein being occasionally rather questionable, if not misleading. As to the various instances — well documented by Forestier and others — of Racine’s tampering with facts in his prefaces, I consider them as forgivable as they are inconsequential.) Akhmet also — and far more critically — misconstrues the significance of the crucial tête-à-tête between Roxane and Bajazet (occurring between Acts II and III), for his distorted account of that scene inflames Atalide’s jealousy, with disastrous consequences. Toward the end of the play, he recognizes how mistaken his assumptions have been, branding himself as a “vizier yet more blind” (IV.vii.14). But, scarcely thrown off balance by this momentary (and unwonted) self-awareness, he quickly recovers his egotistic equilibrium and, complacently assuring Osmin that “through the Serail’s dark byways I can steer” (IV.vii.60), reestablishes himself in his own good opinion, so unwilling is he to believe what events have proved him: a highly unreliable guide, a blind man leading the blinded-with-passion. No wonder that the audience, after the opening “exposition,” which has been more an obfuscation, enters the Seraglio on a very shaky footing.

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iv What we can glean from Akhmet’s account of “the plot thus far” is that this play (in common with Britannicus and Mithridates) could also have been subtitled, like Racine’s first play, Les Frères ennemis (The Enemy Brothers — The Fratricides in my version). One might contend, furthermore, that Bajazet also ends (as Britannicus certainly does)  in a fratricide, since if it is Roxane who sends Bajazet to his death, she is able to do so only by the authority the sultan has granted her, and is, in fact, merely carrying out his express command. And here we can point to another aspect of this play that gives it its rootless, unstable character: the lack of a functional familial framework. In this respect it provides a striking contrast to Iphigenia, in which, according to Roland Barthes, “the central character of the play [is] the family. In Iphigénie there is an intense family life. In no other play has Racine presented a family so solidly constituted” (Barthes, 114). Although Agamemnon nearly succumbs to the powerful political forces pressuring him to consent to the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, the even more powerful paternal feelings urging him to resist finally prevail. Certainly, the intrafamilial hatred that will later overwhelm that famous family of myth is barely hinted at in Racine’s treatment (and, indeed, would be obviated by Iphigenia’s eleventh-hour rescue in his version). Even in The Fratricides, in the course of which the seven protagonists (one of whom, Meneceus, does not actually appear onstage), all of them members of two closely consanguineous families, meet their deaths, the intense familial feelings on display are by no means all of a hostile nature. Jocasta’s love for her two sons is as powerful as their hatred for each other, and Antigone’s love for her mother and her two brothers is touchingly ardent. In Athaliah, too, strong family attachments provide a sense of normalcy and stability. Jehoiada and Josabeth are very much the happily married couple (notwithstanding that, as is the case with Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, the wife occupies a conspicuously subservient position), and she is a passionately devoted mother, both to her own children, who reciprocate her love, and, even more so, to her adoptive son, Joash. One might even make a case that Athaliah herself, though having proved

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capable of ruthlessly slaughtering her own grandchildren, was motivated by pathologically intense family feelings, and by her very savagery proved herself the most devoted of daughters. “Could  I have seen a father slain, a brother; / Seen them from a high turret hurl my mother,” she asks, “[and not have] met wrath with wrath, and dealt out death for death, / Not punished David’s race as savagely / As they did Ahab’s hapless progeny?” (Athaliah II.vii.98 –99, 107–9). In Bajazet, by contrast, there is no reassuring family structure; rather, the most significant family relationship, the one between Sultan Amurat and his brothers, is painted in appalling terms by Akhmet: “You know our sultans’ wonted ruthlessness:  / One brother rarely lets the rest possess  / The dangerous honor of a rank too near” (I.i.107–9). Of the half-wit brother Ibrahim, he observes, “Unworthy of concern, alive or dead, / He’s left in care of those by whom he’s fed” (I.i.113 –14); and of Bajazet, “The other, justly worthy of jealousy, / Is threatened by the Sultan constantly” (I.i.115 –16). Indeed, as mentioned earlier, Amurat, while away on his campaign, had previously dispatched a slave with a secret order demanding the head of Bajazet. Furthermore, as Akhmet explains to Osmin, the sultan, when he left for battle, trusted that “Roxane, with little cause and less contrition, / Would sacrifice him [Bajazet] at her least suspicion” (I.i.133 –34). Roxane herself confirms this less than brotherly tradition when she tries to convince Bajazet to take preemptive action against his brother, reminding him that fratricide is a time-honored facilitator of succession: “The case is common: sultans, it’s well known, / Oft choose that well-trod route to reach the throne” (II.i.23 –24). Although Amurat never appears in this play, these two “enemy brothers” loom equally large in it. Not only is Amurat mentioned or referred to numerous times, but he is even allowed to “speak” once, through the medium of the comminatory letter he has written to Roxane, which she hands to Atalide to read, and whose last two lines certainly conjure up a ruler “who exercises his authority almost without conscience” (Tobin, 97): “If you desire to live another day, / Don’t show yourself without his [Bajazet’s] head in hand” (IV.iii.27–28). In addition, Amurat plays a crucial role — indeed,

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the controlling one — in the denouement, being responsible for the death not only of his brother but of Roxane as well, since, as we learn from Osmin at the end of the play, “it was, it seems, the Sultan’s secret plan / To sacrifice her lover, then Roxane” (V.xi.6 –7). While some critics see the hand of God in the denouement of Athaliah, shaping and directing events through His loyal and obedient servant Jehoiada, the influence of Amurat on the denouement of Bajazet, realizing his plans through his obedient servant Orcan and his henchmen, is certainly a more palpable one. The convincingly godlike might and majesty of the sultan is suggested by Orcan’s injunction to “adore your master’s order I hold here. / His sovereign signet, traitors, recognize” (V.xi.9 –10). Amurat’s relationship to Bajazet, then, is, to say the least, hardly brotherly; even the combative interaction between Eteocles and Polynices in The Fratricides is more recognizably fraternal. Rather, Amurat is like one of the vengeful deities so often invoked in Racine’s plays, who, even from a distance, relentlessly stalk their prey.

v Racine develops a powerful trope to sinisterly suggest the unnatural, even perverse, quality of Bajazet’s moral universe by manipulating the meaning of one of the key words of the play: noeud, meaning knot, bond, or tie. While in most contexts noeud would signify “the tie that binds,” that is, a bond, whether matrimonial or otherwise, between two people, in this play Racine cunningly “twists” its meaning, so that, on key occasions, it takes on the macabre signification of the “bowstring,” the barbaric garroting instrument that awaits the unwary arousers of the sultan’s dudgeon. It appears seven times in the play (five times in the plural), each appearance, whether straightforward or ironic, figurative or brutally literal, carrying a potent charge. In Roxane’s first interview with Bajazet, she tells him that it is only “by the sacred marriage knot we tie” (II.i.29) that he can justify her faith in him, but it is the other noeud with which she consummates their relationship: “His lover, now his furious foe . . . Consigned him to the bowstring’s fatal knot”

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(V.xi.21, 23). (In order to achieve this closure — to tie the two ends of the [t]rope together, so to speak — Racine revised line 23, in which, originally, Osmin reported that Roxane had given Bajazet up “à ce perfide” [to this perfidious man, meaning Orcan].) Earlier, Roxane had assured Atalide, in a grim double entendre, that “far from keeping you apart, I’ll see  / You tied together — for eternity” [“by eternal knots” in the original] (V.vi.53 –54). In the final scene of the play, another common signifier of human attachment, lien (link, bond, or tie), also takes on a fatal connotation, when Atalide, blaming herself for the death of Bajazet, says: “Moi seule, j’ai tissu le lien malheureux / Dont tu viens d’éprouver les détestables noeuds” (“ ’Twas I alone who wove the fatal cord / Whose odious coils choked off your life, my lord” [V.fin.sc.11–12]). In this play, in which the lien transforms itself into the noeud, Racine suggests that even love’s embrace, whether it be Roxane’s ferocious one or Atalide’s desperately clinging one, can easily become the clasp that asphyxiates.

vi Another aspect of Bajazet that makes it difficult for us to get our bearings is that the central action revolves around a grand deception. Raymond Picard goes further: “Bajazet is the tragedy of pretense. Everyone lies: Akhmet and Roxane deceive the sultan; Atalide and Bajazet deceive Roxane and Akhmet” (Picard, 525). As to his first example, however, since the sultan never appears in the play, and all the characters who do appear collude in the plot against him, there is, from the audience’s point of view, no active, dramatic deception involved. Rather, it is the second deception, Bajazet’s and Atalide’s concealment of their mutual love, that propels the action and provides the drama. The double game they are playing perplexes and disorients Roxane, causing her to career between confident hope of reigning alongside Bajazet as his sultaness and wife, and angry frustration, which vents itself in tortured soliloquies and violent threats against Bajazet. This subterfuge has its effect on him as well: ricocheting between two domineering

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women, uncertain of his own mind, disgusted and worn down by an enforced mendaciousness inimical to both his inveterate inertia and his rudimentary moral sense, Bajazet seems, by the end, to have been drained of his will to live, so anxious is he just to be done with the whole wearying charade. Nor is Atalide immune from the pernicious and demoralizing effects of the mendacity their scheme entails. (One is reminded of Josabeth’s description of the “pestilential throne” that Mathan, the Priest of Baal, occupies, “where falsehood reigns and its foul poisons spread” [Athaliah III.iv.55].) Atalide, perhaps the most interesting, psychologically, of four very complex protagonists, spends the entire play sending mixed signals to Bajazet, never confident enough in their love to believe that, when she has goaded him into feigning a false regard for Roxane, he is merely playing the part she has assigned him. Her emotional myopia is aggravated by the tenebrous milieu of the Seraglio, where perceptions are obscured and sotto voce conversations indistinct. Hence the mistaken account Akhmet gives her of Bajazet’s dimly lit tête-à-tête with Roxane, which he paints as a scene of almost torrid rapprochement. Atalide’s reaction is immediate and seethes with bitterness: “I don’t wish to disturb their joy; let’s leave” (III.iii.1). It is a measure of how neurotic she can be that her response is strikingly similar to the deeply disturbed Eriphyle’s when she sees her rival Iphigenia’s joyous reunion with her father (unaware that it is only one-sidedly so): “Let’s not constrain them, Doris, but retire, / Leaving them in the arms of spouse and sire” (Iphigenia  II.i.1–2). And Atalide’s subsequent comment, “What! would you have me witness such a scene?  / You see it’s settled: he’s to wed the Queen” (III.iii.3 –4), recalls both Eriphyle’s sarcastic “What! so you think the sad Eriphyle / Should witness their sweet transports tranquilly?” (Iphigenia II.i.23 –24) and Hermione’s galled plea to Pyrrhus to “solemnize your wedding: I consent;  / But don’t force mine [my eyes] to witness the event” (Andromache  IV.v.98 –99). Indeed, there is much of Hermione in Atalide. Like Hermione, she is adept at manipulating her lover: using his love for her, she engages in a sort of psychological blackmail, which is not always as “magnanimous” as Picard (1121) would have one believe. The similarity between her and Hermione is most marked

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in the latter’s famous volte-face: when Orestes returns from having carried out her command to assassinate the fickle Pyrrhus, confidently greeting her with “Madame, it’s done. Your vengeance has been served. / He’s met the fate his faithless life deserved” (Andromache V.iii.1–2), she turns on him, spitting out vicious and irrational accusations: “What have you done? By what brute urge possessed, / Madman, did you cut off a life so blest? . . . Why kill him? For what crime? By whose decree?” (Andromache V.iii.45 –46, 50). While not, perhaps, the “mad, insensate lover” (Andromache V.iii.53) Hermione confesses herself to be, Atalide, upon confronting Bajazet (whose greeting to her, “It’s done, I’ve spoken, madame: I’ve obeyed. / My life’s assured: you need not be afraid” [III.iv.1–2], is almost identical in its guileless hopefulness to that of Orestes, cited above), masochistically works herself up into an irrational tirade, a masterfully delineated demonstration of passive-aggressiveness, in effect accusing the hapless and nonplussed Bajazet of treacherously transferring his affections to Roxane: My lord, I don’t resent your happiness: Just heaven owed this miracle to you. You know that to your interests I’ve been true. Nay, with my every breath, as you’re aware, To keep you safe has been my constant care; And since, while I live, you’re in danger yet, I sacrifice my life without regret. It’s true, if heav’n had heard my prayers and sighs, I might have faced a happier demise: You would have wed my rival nonetheless, Swearing to your new bride your faithfulness; But to the husband’s vows that were her due You’d not have joined such tender pledges too. Roxane would have been just as satisfied, And I’d have thought, with pleasure, as I died, That, having made you adopt this strategy, I sent you to her, full of love for me; That, bearing to death’s kingdom all your love, I did not leave a lover here above. (III.iv.16 –34)

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One might well feel that Atalide is less to be excused than Hermione for turning on the man who loves her, inasmuch as she actually returns his love, whereas Hermione never loved Orestes and only used him for her own purposes. (The general view, however, seems to be that Hermione is manipulative, unstable, and eminently blameworthy, whereas Atalide, far from deserving the blame she nobly arrogates to herself in the final scene, is only rendered the more blameless by her doing so.) In any case, we may confidently affirm that if Racine had never written anything else, these lines would prove what an incomparably astute psychologist he was. (The niggling “It’s true” is a stroke of sheer genius.)

vii In Racine’s plays, the emotional states of his characters, far from being hard to read, are usually positively flaunted. (When there is any deception, more often than not it is self-deception.) In Andromache, for example, his four protagonists make little attempt to hide their true feelings. Orestes not only assures Hermione that he loves her, but confesses to her that he wishes he didn’t. She, in turn, admits to him, after some ineffectual equivocation about whether she returns his love, that she only wishes she did. In Pyrrhus’s one confrontation with Hermione, he tells her of his futile struggle to love her. The only deception is practiced, surprisingly enough, by the one “noble” character: Andromache. But this is her famous “innocent stratagem,” which will allow her to remain true to her late husband, Hector, while saving their precious son, Astyanax. As opposed to those “open relationships,” in Bajazet, as we have seen, the central love affair (between Bajazet and Atalide) is kept camouflaged throughout most of the play. And Atalide shows herself to be a mistress of dissimulation in all her meetings with Roxane and Akhmet. When Roxane expresses her doubts about Bajazet’s ardency, Atalide promptly and glibly responds with artful plausibility: What! All the pains he’s taken pleasing you, All that you’ve done, all that you still can do,

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The risks he runs, the beauty he adores: Does all this not confirm his heart is yours? (I.iii.13 –16) Even after receiving the devastating news that “our lovers [Bajazet and Roxane] now have reached a sweet accord” (III.ii.1), she has enough presence of mind to choke down her consternation and express her stunned surprise in such a way as allows it to be taken as unalloyed delight: “Yes, but this miracle takes my breath away” (III.ii.23). This ongoing imposture, however, can only impose on Roxane for so long without her feeling that there is more — or, rather, less — to Bajazet’s wooing than meets the eye, and the querulous dissatisfaction she expresses to Atalide would not be out of place in a comedy by Molière: Why can’t the wretch, to comfort me, just say The things I’m told he says when I’m away? Ten times, encouraged by your confidence, Thrilled, in advance, by his heart’s vehemence, I sought some proof of his fidelity And had him brought before me secretly. Perhaps excessive love makes me complain; But, not to tire you with a tale so vain, I found no ardency of any kind, Such as your forecasts flattered me I’d find. (I.iii.19 –28) Recognizing that the less devious, more forthright Bajazet is “not adept at such duplicity” (I.iv.58), Atalide “must, each moment, vigilant and tense, / Give to his words more favorable a sense” (I.iv.60 – 61). Bajazet’s continual discomfiture when pressed to prevaricate lends some of his encounters as well an almost comical tone. (This is not surprising, since imposture is the stock-intrade of comedy, whereas it is somewhat out of place and less often encountered in the loftier mode of tragedy.) In Bajazet’s first encounter with Roxane (II.i), when she catches him off guard

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by proposing that he marry her, he is forced to think on his feet, adducing unwritten laws and precedents that would make such an undertaking ill advised, even stalling for time by giving Roxane an impromptu history lesson about the many conquests of Suleiman the Great (II.i.53 – 61). And when Roxane, after so unsatisfactory an interview, informs Akhmet that the wedding plans are off and all is to be restored to the status quo ante (which will fatally compromise his master plan of replacing Amurat with Bajazet as sultan), Bajazet is obliged to account to Akhmet, his close friend and mentor, for this sudden rupture, without divulging that he and Atalide are in love with each other (a situation the purblind vizier is too pleased with his own ingenious complot to grasp). This gives rise to a substantial scene devoted to Bajazet’s risible attempts to justify to Akhmet his rebuff of Roxane’s offer of marriage, a scene whose tone is set by Bajazet’s opening declaration — a false one — of his intention to “come clean.” The French runs, “Il ne faut point ici vous abuser” (literally, I must by no means deceive you in this matter), a diction quite pointed in its intent, and which we might render, colloquially, as “I want to be completely upfront about this” or “Let me be perfectly frank here.” In my version, Bajazet declares, “Now is no time to prevaricate” (II.iii.4), but then, having seemed poised to take Akhmet into his confidence, he proceeds to do just that (that is, prevaricate) for the remainder of the scene; and Bajazet’s harried parrying of Akhmet’s remonstrations is made doubly farcical by his having just trotted out the same strained arguments to Roxane in an unsuccessful attempt to temporize with her.

viii All this mendacity, this secrecy, this tortuous scheming, for which the twilit, twisting passageways of the Seraglio serve as a fitting correlative, confirms the errant and dim moral sense of the four protagonists. Even when, in the last act, Bajazet and Atalide seem to redeem themselves by their noble displays of altruism, each attempting to save the other’s life by assuming full responsibility for their plot to deceive Roxane, one might argue, upon further

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consideration, that in doing so they are, at the same time, compounding their guilt, for, rather than seeking to exculpate the innocent, they are scheming to let the guilty go unpunished. Certainly, up until then, none of the characters gives any sign of being motivated by anything we would consider noble or lofty; the least ignoble motive we can attribute to any of them is self-preservation. For Bajazet has been made aware of the death warrant the sultan has issued against him: as Akhmet tells Osmin, “Thus, Roxane saw the Prince. She soon made known / The order entrusted to her care alone” (I.i.155-56). Akhmet, too, believes the sultan has designs on his life: “Amurat’s sworn to ruin me, I know well;  / What his return will mean I can foretell” (I.i.85 – 86). Hence his plot to have Bajazet usurp power, a plot which he could reasonably expect Bajazet’s survival instinct would induce him to participate in. Now, since Roxane wields power in the sultan’s absence, she too has to be included in his plans, and the vizier makes up his mind that she and Bajazet shall meet, fall in love, and reign jointly. This agenda dovetails beautifully with her own ulterior long-term goals, tempting her to risk losing what she has for the prospect of gaining what she has always longed for: “to become an ‘honest woman,’ to quit the ranks of the court strumpets by ridding herself of the odious Amurat and marrying the amiable, normal and slightly ‘wet’ Bajazet” (Turnell, 155). Akhmet’s scheme answers admirably, then, in Roxane’s case, but in Bajazet’s, not so much. For the vizier betrays his ignorance of the ways of love (which he, on more than one occasion, acknowledges — but to no purpose), first, by believing that propinquity will be a sufficient guarantee of Bajazet’s reciprocating Roxane’s feelings, and, second, by failing to realize that Bajazet’s affections are, in any case, already engaged elsewhere. Nor does his ineffectual scheming end there. Akhmet, whose long years of service have taught him to trust no one, fearing that “once this selfsame prince [i.e., Bajazet] ascends the throne, / His useless friend he may perhaps disown” (I.i.193 –94), takes the further precaution of stipulating that Atalide shall be his reward for his (self-serving)  efforts on behalf of Roxane and Bajazet, his reasoning being that, since Atalide is of royal Ottoman descent, “Bajazet, once she’s become my bride, / Will have, despite himself,

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to take my side” (I.i.185 – 86). Here again, however, this admirably prudent maneuver he has ingeniously devised is doomed to failure, in this case because Atalide’s affections are engaged elsewhere, a situation of which he is also serenely unaware. Compared to the typical pair of frustrated young lovers (and not only those in Racine’s plays), Bajazet and Atalide lack that moral probity that makes us commiserate unreservedly with innocence undeservedly persecuted and love unfairly thwarted. Having once been drawn into Akhmet’s imbroglio in the Seraglio, Bajazet and Atalide lose their bearings and find themselves ill equipped to contend with forces outside their control. In this, they remind one of Britannicus and Junia, stranded in Nero’s corrupt court (which prompts Junia to remark: “How strange a stopping place for you and me!” [Britannicus  V.i.47]). But Bajazet and Atalide are by no means as pitiable as those two innocents, nor as undeserving of their fate. In their selfish and cruel manipulation of a pathetically infatuated female to further their own ends, they are among Racine’s least savory characters. While Akhmet may have orchestrated the plot to displace Amurat, it was no part of his plan — bespeaking at once his lack of cruelty and his excess of naïveté — to wantonly torment Roxane and rack her with maddening doubts and suspicions; indeed, he imagines he must be doing Roxane a great favor, “fixing her up with” the amiable and seductively handsome Bajazet, and, later, when Roxane shows Akhmet Bajazet’s damning letter, he cannot quite see what all the fuss is about, having no inkling of the heartache he has unintentionally caused her by placing her in the clutches of Bajazet and Atalide. Even granting that these two “play” Roxane in the name of an enduring and cruelly frustrated love, that love is itself of questionable integrity (when compared with the sounder love between, say, Junia and Britannicus, or Aricia and Hippolytus). Atalide is constantly, and with an irritating air of superior wisdom, encouraging Bajazet to temporize with Roxane and even to accede to her design of making him her consort, but no sooner does Bajazet comply with her express instructions than she begins her even more irritating recriminations, blaming Bajazet for unfaithfulness and, with remarkable ingenuity, instilling him with guilt.

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It is not unreasonable to conclude that, foredoomed though Bajazet may be by the “hit” his brother has “put out” on him, it is Atalide who, provoked by her morbid jealousy to launch a calculatedly brutal verbal assault on her stunned lover (III.iv), precipitates his death. Indeed, she admits as much herself in her final soliloquy (“Yes, my dear prince, your death is due to me, / Not Roxane’s rage nor Amurat’s decree” [V.fin.sc.9 –10]). And it is no less unreasonable to conclude, on the other hand, that had Atalide not struck fear into her lover’s heart by her emasculating excoriation, then Bajazet would have ended up betraying her. For had he not been intimidated into responding to Roxane’s rapturous presentation of him to Akhmet and Atalide as their new sultan with those dutiful, perfunctory, utterly unrapturous, expressions of gratitude that so aroused Roxane’s fury and her suspicions, then what more likely than that Bajazet (who, it must be said, had never demonstrated the staunch unwillingness to conciliate Roxane that we would expect from a faithful, ardent lover)  would, for his part, have shown no further resistance to honoring the engagement he had just entered into with Roxane (albeit less from a sense of honor, in my opinion, than from sheer inertia)? Indeed, he confirms such a supposition in his last interview with Roxane: “Heaven, which heard me, knows: the vows I made, / In spite of all, I’d never have betrayed” (V.iv.51– 52). (True, Roxane dismisses “these fruitless vows”: “Such offers are well meant; / Without your heart, though, could I be content?” [V.iv.59, 57–58]; but that is only after she has learned — again, through Atalide’s agency — of Bajazet’s attachment to her rival.) And with Bajazet “nobly braving the grave risks of war” [III.iv.11] or, more likely, indolently lounging on a sultanic divan, under the lustful, watchful eye of Roxane, where would that have left the wretched Atalide? So much for these lovers’ selfless devotion. Throughout the play, Bajazet’s vacillations and equivocations, as much the consequence of his halfhearted desire to reign as of his halfhearted loyalty to Atalide, threaten to undermine his chances of surviving, let alone of reigning. Roxane herself, however, frustrated by his undemonstrative wooing, compensates for his deficiency; he hardly needs to exert himself at all, as he explains to Atalide: “Of truth or pretense, though, there was no need: / Roxane knew her

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own mind and took the lead” (III.iv.41–42). Thus, it is not only Bajazet and Atalide who deceive Roxane: she deceives herself. Just as Akhmet interprets the reconciliatory meeting between Roxane and Bajazet according to his own desires and designs, so Roxane, though given the shakiest foundation on which to build her hopes, willfully deludes herself into believing that her love is requited. Later, Bajazet, when called upon to justify the deception he has practiced, makes that very point to her: “And ’twas your love (to be quite frank with you), / By your benevolence, your boons, misled, / That answered for my feelings in my stead” (V.iv.30 –32).

ix As Picard says: “Everyone lies.” With everyone meandering through this miasma of mendacity, whose word can be trusted? Well, after spending long hours teaching Bajazet — a most inapt pupil — how to lie, with results that do little credit to her pedagogic powers, Atalide proves much more successful, it turns out, at goading him into telling the truth, which he does in such an unambiguous, unequivocal, and (in its literal sense)  graphic manner, that the letter he writes to Atalide, indiscreetly testifying his love for her, has the probative value of an affidavit. Thus, when this incriminating epistle falls into Roxane’s hands, there can be no further doubt on Roxane’s part about Bajazet’s true feelings. (One would like to think that it has finally removed the last doubt about Bajazet’s feelings from Atalide’s mind as well — albeit too late.) Which is not to say that Roxane treats Bajazet’s letter as his own death warrant, any more than she did the sultan’s strongly worded “reminder,” sent to “confirm my strict command” (IV.iii.26) and received by Roxane a short while before. (Of course, when Amurat advises Roxane in that letter that he expects her to welcome him home with Bajazet’s head in her hand, he is indulging in a private joke at her expense, for he is, with good reason, far more convinced than Roxane herself can be that she will do no such thing, since — as he neglects to tell her, and as we learn only late in Act V — “it was . . . the Sultan’s secret plan / To sacrifice

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her lover, then Roxane” [V.xi.6 –7], and he knows full well that, upon his return, Roxane will be in no condition to welcome him home, with or without Bajazet’s head.) Racine, understanding the resilience of the love-struck human heart, has Roxane, her eyes finally opened, confront Bajazet one last time, believing that she still might be willing to accept marriage with Bajazet on any terms, even loveless ones. Her wounded pride, however, demands that he agree not merely to renounce Atalide but to acquiesce in her execution: “Pledge me your faith: the rest trust time to do. / Her life for yours, if you will just consent” (V.iv.79 – 80). Such a barbaric stipulation finally provides Bajazet with the excuse he has been longing for to end the masquerade. Once he does so, he is banished by Roxane’s peremptory “Leave” (V.iv.102) from the dark precincts of the Seraglio, which foster secrecy, duplicity, and misapprehension, and comes within the jurisdiction of the sultan’s utterly unambiguous death sentence.

x Let us now examine the character of that sultan, for such an examination may perhaps shed additional light on the other characters who move about in this play under his shadow. The traditional view of Sultan Amurat is that he is the heavy of this piece (Tobin’s “authority almost without conscience”), that, however flawed the other characters, however open to question or censure their motives and their actions, he is undilutedly, irredeemably malign: the envious brother who persecutes his worthier sibling, the ruthless ruler who wishes to eliminate the threat that sibling poses, the possessive lover who is unable to instill love in his mistress and who cruelly refuses to marry her, the despicable despot who has earmarked his loyal vizier for death. But perhaps Amurat is no less sinned against than sinning. In regard to his ingratitude for his vizier’s loyal services and his murderous intentions toward him, we should note that, although Akhmet alleges that “Amurat’s sworn to ruin me” (I.i.85), we have only his word for it. What we do know is that Akhmet, while claiming that “I serve my sultans well” (I.i.199), has

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masterminded a plot to overthrow the sultan while he is away on a military campaign. Akhmet further alleges that To wipe me from his soldiers’ memory, He wages wars, lays sieges — without me: He leads the army, while I’m left to rule, Wielding a futile power, Istanbul. (I.i.87–90) But is it not likely that this vizier, “growing old ’neath three sultans” (IV.vii.27), has justifiably been put out to pasture, and that his dreams of bringing back the days “when, sure of victory, they [the janissaries] fought at your side” (I.i.48), as Osmin puts it, are ludicrous, alerting us once again to the vizier’s impaired judgment and myopic self-regard? As for the sultan’s relations with Roxane, we have been told that he has singled her out for special favor, having selected her “from ’mongst the many beauties who collected  / Here in the Sultan’s palace” (I.i.99 –100); he has, furthermore, “even chosen to declare  / Her sultaness before she’s borne an heir” (I.i.103 –4), a nearly unprecedented distinction. Roxane tells Bajazet: “You know quite well your brother loves me still” (II.i.116) and boasts that she is “sovereign of a heart that loves but me” (V.iv.64), meaning the sultan’s. But she also acknowledges her own ingratitude for all his special treatment: generous though the sultan has been to her, after she became enamored of Bajazet, “His brother’s favors did I once recall?” (III.vii.27), as she pointedly asks herself. Moreover, she too requires little persuasion to betray him, both sexually and politically. If, as we later learn, “it was, it seems, the Sultan’s secret plan / To sacrifice her lover, then Roxane” (V.xi.6 –7), a plausible justification, or at least explanation, is provided for his seemingly barbarous fiat when Zatima, Roxane’s confidante, suggests to her that “some treacherous tongue may have revealed / This new love you’ve so cautiously concealed” (IV.v.41–42). Zatima even argues that such summary vengeance would attest to the sultan’s deep love for Roxane: “A swift death, when the case is this severe,  / Is just what proves he held his victim dear” (IV.v.45 –46). But, as I suggested

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earlier, while an audience may be moved to pity Roxane for her one-sided infatuation, no one thinks to commiserate with Amurat on account of his unrequited love. Atalide recalls that, growing up with Amurat and Bajazet, “I learned to favor him [Bajazet] above his brother” (I.iv.29); Roxane, too, admits to Atalide that “more fortunate than my lord, despite his woe, / He’s [Bajazet] pleased me, though not planning to do so” (I.iii.53 –54). But if Amurat is less attractive than Bajazet, does that make him a monster? While Amurat’s attitude toward his brother may strike us as anything but fraternal — indeed, as quite unnatural — does Bajazet ever evince the slightest affection for his brother, or even an aggrieved sense of a familial bond betrayed? His relationship to his brother seems wholly a nominal one; one never gets the sense, as one does with Xiphares and Pharnaces (in Mithridates), or even with Eteocles and Polynices, that these brothers have a common history, that they are conjoined in any meaningful way, even by hostility or hatred. The relationship is strictly a “business” one, and the vying for a throne, cutthroat though it may be, has “nothing personal” about it, as Akhmet observes: You know our sultans’ wonted ruthlessness: One brother rarely lets the rest possess The dangerous honor of a rank too near, Which consanguinity leads him to fear. (I.i.107–10) Amurat, then, is just doing what sultans do: he is neither conspicuously evil nor a bad ruler — at least, when judged within the context of Turkish morals and mores as Racine represents them. (But, for some reason, Sultan Amurat never receives the good political press that is sometimes accorded to Athaliah, that other ruthlessly parricidal monarch.) And if Amurat feels no compunction about eliminating a potentially usurpative brother, his ruthlessness hardly seems misplaced, since Bajazet displays no hesitation or pangs of conscience in conspiring to steal the throne from him and appropriating his mistress. Given the treacherous proclivities of his sibling, one can hardly blame Amurat for adopting a “first strike” policy.

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In short, the sultan, no more egregiously than Bajazet, Roxane, or Akhmet, follows a base metal version of the golden rule: do unto others as — or better yet, before — they would do unto you. That being the case, whatever judgment we are instinctively disposed to pronounce on the sultan, whatever opprobrium his actions evoke, should apply with equal validity to the other three.

xi To convince ourselves of the moral rootlessness of Bajazet, we need only compare Bajazet with Racine’s other plays, in which, however dark, depraved, or frightening the world Racine creates, we can always find some reassuringly familiar and trustworthy exemplum of rectitude, some reliable guide, some moral compass to direct our steps. The Fratricides provides an instructive example. The moral tenets Creon’s confidant, Attalus, clings to, though derisively dismissed by Creon as misguided or even illusory, keep us tethered to a conception of decency and humaneness and provide a sharp contrast to, and an implicit judgment on, Creon’s appallingly cynical and vicious tirades in Acts III and V. Racine is careful to introduce Creon’s disquisitions by Attalus’s touchingly ingenuous observations: Who wouldn’t admire so rare a change of heart? Creon himself at last takes peace’s part! .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Who yields his hatred for the fatherland Would yield his life as well if it demand. (The Fratricides III.vi.10 –11, 18 –19) Even when Attalus at last grasps Creon’s insidious scheme to wrest the kingship from his two nephews, his innate sense of morality causes him to fall back on the suggestion that Creon will now, at least, have to endure the pangs of remorse: “It’s only you yourself you need fear now, / For, with the crown, remorse may bind your brow” (III.vi.79 – 80). Of course, Creon swiftly disabuses him of such a notion:

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     By vain remorse I’m undismayed; Of crime my heart no longer is afraid: They cost us dear, our first iniquities, But those that follow we commit with ease. (The Fratricides III.vi.87–90) But Attalus perseveres: with a tenacious faith in some redemptive goodness in Creon, he opines that the death of both his sons must surely provide some dilution of his happiness in having achieved (as they both still mistakenly believe) his two goals of ascending the throne and marrying Antigone: It’s true fate favors you, and were you not A father, yours would be a happy lot. Ambition, love, have nothing to desire; But nature calls forth tears and sorrow, Sire. (The Fratricides V.iv.14 –17) And although we — like Attalus, no doubt — may be staggered by the depravity of Creon’s reply, shuddering in horror at his dictum, “Father is but a vulgar appellation, / A gift the Gods give with no hesitation” (V.iv.22 –23), at his complacent conclusion (or, rather, calculation) that “I’ve lost much less than I hope to gain” (V.iv.21), and at his cold-blooded observation — the ultimate in solipsistic cynicism — “Heav’n rids me of my rival with my son” (V.iv.33), we are steadied by the reassurance that someone holds sacred the parent-child bond, someone considers peace a goal worth striving for, someone regards altruistic love of country as noble, someone believes that crime imposes its own punishment. Furthermore, The Fratricides offers, to offset the egoistic machinations of Creon and the unquenchable hatred of his nephews, several embodiments of noble altruism and loving solicitude in the persons of Meneceus, Haemon, Jocasta, and Antigone. In Iphigenia, as suggested above, the deeply entrenched “family values” that inform the whole play, though continually threatened by almost overwhelming forces, whether human or divine, or both, are firmly reasserted at the play’s conclusion, over which Racine

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allows no hint of future dysfunctional developments to cast any premonitory shadow. In Athaliah, although the value system triumphantly vindicated at the end of that play is questionable at best, Racine offers us Josabeth, probably his most selfless and sympathetic character, who serves as an inspiring beacon of goodness throughout the play. We may find the “judge in heaven” (V.fin.sc.7) whom Jehoiada invokes in his concluding homiletic utterance — and, indeed, Jehoiada himself — disturbingly violent and vindictive, but Jehoiada’s characterization of God as “a father to the fatherless” (V.fin.sc.9) we feel no reluctance in applying to Josabeth, who has proved herself such a fervently loving surrogate mother to the orphan Joash. Even in Phaedra, to offset the title character’s lawless, reckless passion, Oenone’s wantonly destructive efforts to protect her mistress, and Theseus’s fatal accession of jealousy and anger, Racine offers us Hippolytus’s noble (perhaps even excessively altruistic)  attempt to shield his father from the horror of learning of his wife’s transgressions, and Theseus’s ultimate reconciliation with Aricia, indeed, his effective adoption of her (“In my heart she shall claim a daughter’s place” [V.fin.sc.61] — the very last line of the play), which, promising peace, stability, and mutual consolation, bestows a redemptive benison over the final moments of the play. At the conclusion of Andromache, the amorous and political turmoil that culminates in murder, suicide, and madness for three of the principals is settled by the accession to Epirus’s throne of the surviving fourth principal, Andromache. We certainly feel a sense of moral rightness in her miraculous survival and that of her son (miraculous, since it depended on the perfectly synchronized working out of the play’s two interlocking love triangles), she being the only one of the four principals whom we are disposed to admire, however worthy of our pity the others may be. Perhaps Britannicus provides, in the person of Burrhus, Nero’s tutor, the best example of a character operating as a moral linchpin, anchoring the play amid its welter of treachery, depravity, and violence. His inviolable integrity manifests itself throughout the play, registering due horror at Nero’s first full-fledged crime (poisoning his stepbrother, Britannicus)  and making itself felt in his immortal curtain line: “Please heav’n this prove the last of Nero’s crimes!” (Britannicus V.fin.sc.52).

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While this masterstroke of dramatic irony opens out for us the endless prospect of Nero’s unparalleled career of depraved malefaction and murder, we feel reassured by the moral probity of the character who utters it, which will not permit him to laxly dismiss such a prospect, as Akhmet undoubtedly would, as merely a continuation of “our sultans’ wonted ruthlessness” (I.i.107), a phrase that, in the exotically amoral world of Bajazet, carries about as much opprobrium as “business as usual.”

xii Nowhere in Bajazet is any god invoked to whom the characters might consider themselves answerable. Racine, in his attempt at authenticity, does not go so far as to mention Allah; the only allusion to Muhammad is in the mention of “the Prophet’s banner” (III.ii.5). The most overt reference to religion occurs in Akhmet’s sneering, dismissive deprecation of it as merely a means to an end: With cunning I’ve won over to our cause The sacred guardians of our holy laws. I know the people’s slavish piety: They bear religion’s yoke devotedly. (I.ii.21–24) In Bajazet, the gods do not even achieve the status of “inevitable dramatic properties,” to borrow a phrase from Jean Dubu (“Artistic Reasons for Racine’s Silence After Phèdre” [Dubu, 219]). Rather, it is “your master’s [Amurat’s] order” that Orcan commands Osmin and his followers to “adore” (V.xi.9). In the moral void that is Bajazet, on which no theocratic influences impinge, where no ethical imperatives are recognized, and over which hangs the inevitable doom of the sultan’s decree, Racine would seem to have fashioned the perfect existential conditions within which Bajazet might be impelled to perform some noble, redemptive act of defiance. Alas, his last-minute heroics, namely, dispatching a band of Roxane’s hapless myrmidons (as inferred by

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Osmin [V.xi.26 –29]), which, after all, he performs with the purpose of saving nobody’s life but his own, fail to rise above the level of the last stand he had imagined himself making: Perhaps, amidst the turmoil that prevails, Despair will save my life when all else fails: Trusting in you, I’ll put up some resistance And give you time to come to my assistance. (II.iii.61– 64) (Indeed, we tend to regard a condemned man’s assaulting the hangman or the headsman as unseemly.) True, his refusal to yield to Roxane’s offer belies Atalide’s fears that he may “opt . . . for selfpreservation” (I.iv.74), but it is far, far from being a far, far better thing than he has ever done. Rather, it is of a piece with his moral indolence, for it hardly demands the exertion of making a choice. As was the case, earlier, that “Roxane knew her own mind and took the lead” (III.iv.42), so, here too, it is she who, in effect, dictates his refusal to live on the terms she proposes. For those terms, however reasonable they may seem to Roxane in her maddened state — and one can well believe she has been driven to madness by the heartless, calculated deception that has been practiced on her (it might prove instructive here to invoke the similarly ruthless machinations in Les Liaisons dangereuses, Gaslight, and Les Diaboliques) — are, almost literally, unthinkable. To close with such an offer, to agree not only to yield “her [Atalide’s] life for yours” (V.iv.80), but to witness “her demise / At the mutes’ hands” (V.iv.76 –77), would place him beyond the pale of Roxane’s (perhaps even Nero’s) heartless barbarity. Even in the case of Hermione and Orestes (in Andromache), while we are disposed to brand her injunction to him to assassinate Pyrrhus — and his complicity in carrying out that assassination — as heinous, we understand, at the same time, that, for those tormented souls, irresistible Racinian passions were in play, and we can allow that she was driven to murderous lengths by Pyrrhus’s rejection of her, as he was by Hermione’s (threatened) rejection of him. In Bajazet’s case, on the other hand, were he to have acceded to Roxane’s terms, there could have been, on our part, no such understanding,

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no such allowance. Far from any irresistible passion urging Bajazet to capitulate to Roxane’s demands, he would have thereby destroyed the only thing that he appears to have felt at all passionate about, namely, Atalide. In short, his final defiance of Roxane cannot be construed as heroic, rather as, at best, unhorrific.

xiii This is entirely consistent with Bajazet’s character, as it has been subtly revealed to us in this play. Bajazet himself unwittingly provides us with a fairly accurate self-portrait in the following speech, a wholly gratuitous disclaimer — quite a non sequitur, really — to a supposition that Atalide (his interlocutor in this scene) has never voiced: Madame, please don’t imagine that, today, To cowardly despair I’ve fallen prey, That of a sultan’s burdens I’m afraid, Which by a speedy death I would evade. Perhaps a reckless daring masters me; But envying my great forebears’ bravery, I hoped that, fleeing a repose too base, Amongst such heroes I would earn a place. But though ambition burn and love implore, I can deceive her trusting heart no more. (II.v.69 –78) One had no reason to suppose that he would be afraid of a sultan’s burdens before he raised the point, but, given that we have seen no burning ambition on his part (rather, it is Akhmet, Roxane, and Atalide who have tried to enflame him with the prospect of a throne), and that his love for Atalide is perhaps not as ardent as he suggests (in line 77, in the original, his love, like his ambition, “burns” [brûle]), we are prompted to believe, by the same token, that luxuriating in a base repose, he is, in fact, too indolent to wish to rule, and that his disclaimer is just more, and mere, rationalization. As for his self-deluded boast that he is mastered by a “reckless

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daring” (“une imprudente audace”), it is rather the case that he is enslaved by an innate otiosity. Roxane may continually admonish him that she wields absolute power over his destiny (“I hold the palace gates: it’s up to me / If you remain a prisoner or go free. / Your life is mine to take away or give” [II.i.88 –90]), but, in truth, his prison is of his own making, and his failure to live, in any meaningful sense, is a product of the putatively Eastern passivity, physical and spiritual, that paralyzes his will. Even for today’s audience, Bajazet stands apart from the rest of Racine’s plays in its lack of the moral framework within which their characters operate, whether struggling to uphold received principles or rebelling (voluntarily or involuntarily) against them. Bajazet and the other characters wander aimlessly through the moral labyrinth that is the Turkish Seraglio. Its darkness promotes both deception and delusion, so that its denizens, often “communicating” at cross-purposes, remain as blind to what is going on right in front of them as they are unaware of what has already happened months before and miles away. They operate without the benefit of any moral or religious guidance, and are neither constrained nor consoled by any family ties. Whether or not we are warranted in identifying such an amoral milieu as typically Turkish, we are warranted in characterizing it as “exotic,” seen within the context of Racine’s other plays and, indeed, within that of French society of Racine’s time. But it is in Bajazet himself that Racine most strikingly embodies an ethos that, in its passivity, in its crippling moral lassitude, must be deemed “exotic.” Whereas Racine’s most potent creations are, typically, a prey to their own passions (cf. Phaedra’s famous line [Phaedra I.iii.144]: “C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée” [It is Venus in all her might, fastened on her prey]), and are irresistibly driven to act in accordance with them (whether or not there exist any moral or religious constraints they must defy in doing so), in Bajazet’s case, the forces that operate on him — love, ambition, friendship, honor (or izzet, its Islamic equivalent: see note 16 for Act II), even fear — prove to be less than irresistible, or, rather, the object they encounter proves quite immovable. Bajazet, appropriately enough for the protagonist of this tale of the exotic Orient, is a prisoner, not of his passion, but of his lack of passion.

racine’s two prefaces

first preface 1 Although the subject of this tragedy has not yet appeared in any printed historical account, it is nonetheless quite true. It concerns an incident that took place in the Seraglio not more than thirty years ago. The comte de Cézy was at that time ambassador at Constantinople.2 He was apprised of the death of Bajazet in all its particulars; and there are a number of persons at court who remember having heard him recount them upon his return to France. The chevalier de Nantouillet is one of these persons, and it is to him that I am indebted for this story, and even for the project I have undertaken of turning it into a tragedy. In order to do so, however, I was obliged to alter some of the circumstances. But as these changes are rather insignificant, I do not think it necessary to point them out to the reader. My principal concern was to change nothing relating to the mores and the customs of the [Turkish] nation. And I have taken care to present nothing that is not consistent with Turkish history and with the newly published History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, which has been translated from the original English.3 Above all, I owe much to the advice of Monsieur de la Haye,4 who has been so good as to enlighten me in regard to all the perplexing questions that I posed to him.

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second preface Sultan Amurat, or Sultan Morat,5 emperor of the Turks, he who captured Babylon [i.e., Baghdad] in 1638, had four brothers. The first, namely, Osman, was emperor before him and reigned for about three years, at the end of which the janissaries deprived him of both his empire and his life. The second was named Orcan. Amurat, at the very beginning of his reign, had him strangled. The third was Bajazet, a prince of great promise; and it is he who is the hero of my tragedy. Amurat, whether out of cunning or kindness, had spared him until the siege of Babylon. After taking that city, the victorious Sultan sent an order to Constantinople to have him killed. This business was arranged and carried out much as I have represented it. Amurat had one brother left, who afterwards became the Sultan Ibrahim, and whom this same Amurat ignored as mentally incompetent and unlikely to pose any threat. Sultan Mahomet,6 who reigns today, is the son of this Ibrahim, and thus the nephew of Bajazet. The details of the death of Bajazet have not yet appeared in any printed historical account. The comte de Cézy was ambassador at Constantinople when this tragic incident occurred in the Seraglio. He was well informed about Bajazet’s love affair and the Sultana’s jealousy. On several occasions he actually saw Bajazet, who was permitted from time to time to stroll along the cape of the Seraglio, on the channel of the Black Sea. The comte de Cézy used to speak of the prince as being quite well-favored. Afterwards, he gave a written account of the circumstances of his death. And there are still several persons of quality who recall hearing him relate the story when he had returned to France. Some readers may be astonished that I have dared to present on the stage such recent events. But I have seen nothing in the rules governing dramatic poetry that need have deterred me from this undertaking. In truth, I would not advise an author to select as a subject for a tragedy a happening so contemporary as this, if it had taken place in the country in which he expects his tragedy to be performed, nor to place on the stage heroes who would have been well known to most of the audience. The characters in a tragedy must be looked at with a different eye from that with which we

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ordinarily look at people whom we have seen so close up. One might say that the respect we have for heroes increases in proportion to their distance from us: major e longinquo reverentia.7 The remoteness of the country compensates in some way for the too great proximity in time. For most people make hardly any distinction between what is, if I may put it so, a thousand years away from them and what is a thousand leagues away. That is what ensures, for example, that Turkish characters, however modern they may be, will have dignity on our stage. One soon comes to regard them as ancients: their manners and customs are so completely different. We have so little commerce with the princes and the other people who live in the Seraglio that we consider them, so to speak, as living in another age than our own. It was more or less in such a manner that, in ancient times, the Persians were regarded by the Athenians. Thus, Aeschylus had no problem at all introducing into one of his tragedies8 the mother of Xerxes, who was perhaps still living, and presenting on the Athenian stage the desolation of the Persian court after that prince had been routed. Yet this same Aeschylus had been present at the battle of Salamis, where Xerxes had been vanquished; and he had been present as well at the defeat of the lieutenants of Darius, Xerxes’ father, on the plain of Marathon. For Aeschylus was a warrior, and the brother of that famous Cynegeirus, much celebrated in Antiquity, who died so courageously while attacking one of the ships of the king of Persia.9 I was determined to faithfully convey in my tragedy what we know of the manners and principles of the Turks. Some have said that my heroines were too knowing in matters of love and too refined for women born among a people whom we consider here as barbarians. But without speaking of all that one reads in the accounts of travelers, it seems to me sufficient to point out that the action takes place in the Seraglio. After all, is there a court anywhere in the world where jealousy and love are, necessarily, as well known as they are in a place where so many rivals are closely confined, and where all these women have no other occupation, in an atmosphere of unending idleness, than that of learning how to please and how to make themselves loved? The men there probably do not love with the same refinement. I have therefore taken care to make a great distinction between the passion of Bajazet and the

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tenderer feelings of his lovers. He retains in the midst of his love the ferocity of his nation. And if one finds it strange that he consents to die rather than abandon the woman he loves and marry the one he does not, one need only read the history of the Turks. One will observe everywhere the contempt they have for life. And one will also observe in numerous situations to what extremes they carry their passions, and what natural affection can drive them to do. Witness one of Suleiman’s sons, who killed himself on the corpse of his older brother, whom he tenderly loved, and who had been assassinated in order to secure the Empire for that same younger son.10

notes 1. The first preface appeared in the original edition of 1672 and was replaced by the second preface in the three subsequent editions (1676, 1687, 1697) published in Racine’s lifetime. 2. He served as ambassador from 1618 to 1641. 3. History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, by Paul Rycaut, 1669, translated into French by Pierre Briot, 1670. 4. Jean de La Haye-Ventelet was French ambassador at Constantinople from 1665 to 1670, having succeeded his father, Jean de La Haye, who had held the post after the comte de Cézy. 5. Murat IV (reigned 1623 –40). 6. Mahomet IV (reigned 1648 – 87). 7. Literally: respect [is] greater from a distance. A phrase from Tacitus (Annals, I, 47), referring to the emperor Tiberius. 8. Aeschylus, The Persians. 9. For the final edition of 1697 Racine (having a number of years before distanced himself from the licentious and disreputable milieu of the theater) suppressed the paragraph below, perhaps feeling that the too intimate and expert conversance with the ways of worldly love that it suggests might compromise his hard-won position both as pious paterfamilias and as historiographer-royal. 10. Racine’s account of this tragic episode is somewhat inaccurate. The older brother, Mustafa, Suleiman’s eldest son, had indeed been strangled (with the obligatory bowstring), and by order of Roxelane (mentioned in this play: II.i.47–51), in order that her own son should succeed to the throne, but the younger brother Racine cites was not that son of Roxelane’s (who did in fact reign several years later as Selim  II), but another of Mustafa’s brothers, one Jihangir, whose grief over the death of his brother did, however, impel him to kill himself, but only several months afterward. Thus, the actual historical facts do still validate Racine’s point, if not perhaps by means of so spectacular a coup de théâtre.

Bajazet

1672

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cast of characters bajazet, brother of Sultan Amurat roxane, Sultaness, favorite of Sultan Amurat atalide, princess of the royal Ottoman line akhmet, Grand Vizier osmin, friend of the Grand Vizier zatima, slave of the Sultaness zaïre, slave of Atalide The scene is at Constantinople [Istanbul], formerly Byzantium, in the Seraglio of the Great Sultan.

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act i Scene i [akhmet, osmin] akhmet This way.1 The Sultaness will be here soon; Meanwhile, this tête-à-tête is opportune. osmin Since when have the Seraglio’s doors stood wide, Beyond which even glances never pried? Swift death once punished such audacity. akhmet When you’ve learned all that’s happened recently, My entry here will cease to astonish you. But weightier matters, Osmin, claim their due. How my impatience pined for you to come! How glad I am you’re in Byzantium!2 Now tell me what you’ve learned of interest From your long journey made at my request. Of what you’ve witnessed let your words speak true: For know that on the account I have from you May hang the Turkish Empire’s destiny. How goes the war? The Sultan: how fares he? osmin Babylon, faithful to her ruler, viewed Our circling troops with steadfast fortitude;3 To aid her, Persia’s troops were on their way, Approaching nearer Amurat’s camp each day. He, weary of the stubbornness she’d shown, Seemed bent on leaving Babylon alone. Since his assault had proved a futile course,

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He was resolved to engage the Persian force. Despite my speed, though, I had far to go: The Sultan’s camp is not nearby, you know; A thousand obstacles I had to face, And I may not know all that’s taken place.4 akhmet And our brave janissaries: how were they?5 Is it sincere, the loyalty they display? Their hearts’ innermost secrets could you read? Is Amurat’s power absolute indeed? osmin Amurat is content and seems to be Confident of a crushing victory. In vain, though, his true thoughts he would conceal: He affects a calm he surely cannot feel. Barely suppressing his mistrust, he still Receives the janissaries when they will: He well recalls, my lord, how, once before, His hatred sought to halve that glorious corps, When, to affirm his new omnipotence, He wished, he said, to escape their influence. I have, myself, oft heard them air their view; As he fears them, so they still fear him too.6 His kindness now can’t heal that injury. They don’t endure your absence willingly. They much regret those days, dear to their pride, When, sure of victory, they fought at your side. akhmet What! Osmin, my past glory, you would say, Lives in their thoughts and fires their hearts today? You think they still would gladly follow me And bow to their vizier’s authority?

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osmin Sire, they await the outcome of the fight: Will Amurat prove victorious or take flight? Although they follow him against their will, They must uphold their vaunted martial skill: Their years of brave exploits they won’t negate. But his success rests in the hands of fate. If Amurat, urging those brave soldiers on, Wins victory on the fields of Babylon, You’ll see his troops return to Istanbul,7 Blindly submissive to that despot’s rule. But if in battle harsh fate should ordain Defeat and blight the Sultan’s budding reign, Doubt not that, his disgrace goading their pride, Their hatred, by fresh daring fortified, Will find in his defeat a fatal sign That Amurat is judged, and heav’n malign. Meanwhile, I learned (or so the rumors went) That from his camp, three months ago, he sent A slave, bearing some secret order here. The troops, for Bajazet’s sake, shook with fear, Convinced this order, filling them with dread, Demanded no less than his brother’s head. akhmet Such was his plan. That slave came, but in vain: The boon he asked for he did not obtain.

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osmin What! could you send the Sultan’s servant hence Without that pledge of your obedience? akhmet That slave’s no more: some order, happily, Consigned him to the depths of the Black Sea.8

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osmin Won’t Amurat, surprised he’s overdue, Soon seek the reason — and the remedy too? When you are called to account . . . akhmet                 Ere that betide, More pressing cares will keep him occupied. Amurat’s sworn to ruin me, I know well; What his return will mean I can foretell. To wipe me from his soldiers’ memory, He wages wars, lays sieges — without me: He leads the army, while I’m left to rule, Wielding a futile power, Istanbul. What work! What wasted days for a vizier! But I have spent my hours more wisely here: I have contrived for him new qualms, new cares: The rumors will soon catch him unawares.

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osmin How so? What have you done? akhmet               I hope today His throne will be usurped by Bajazet, With Roxane at his side, holding joint sway. osmin What! that Roxane whom Amurat selected From ’mongst the many beauties who collected Here in the Sultan’s palace, having left The courts of Asia and Europe quite bereft? His heart, they say, she’s managed to ensnare, And that he’s even chosen to declare Her sultaness, before she’s borne an heir.9

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akhmet He’s done still more for her: while he’s away He’s given Roxane unrestricted sway. You know our sultans’ wonted ruthlessness: One brother rarely lets the rest possess The dangerous honor of a rank too near, Which consanguinity leads him to fear. The half-wit Ibrahim lives, undismayed, In endless childhood, safe and unafraid: Unworthy of concern, alive or dead, He’s left in care of those by whom he’s fed.10 The other, justly worthy of jealousy, Is threatened by the Sultan constantly; For Bajazet’s great soul makes him despise The idle ease most sultans’ sons so prize.11 Once past his youth, the clash of arms he sought, And, under me, he found it and he fought. You too have seen him run into the fray, Firing his soldiers’ hearts to win the day, And, bloodied, savoring the ecstasy That swells young hearts with their first victory. But Amurat, though suspicious, does not dare, Before the State’s safeguarded by an heir, To sacrifice his brother, in his ire, Lest he should let the royal line expire. So in the meantime, Amurat, frustrated, Keeps him in the Serail, incarcerated. He left, trusting that, faithful to his hate, And sole decider of his brother’s fate, Roxane, with little cause and less contrition, Would sacrifice him at her least suspicion. But I, left here, was filled with righteous ire: To aid his brother was my sole desire. I told Roxane, concealing my intent, Her lord’s return was far from imminent; I spoke of grumbling troops, the chance of arms.

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I pitied Bajazet and praised his charms, Of which, though close by, she was unaware, Concealed from her by Amurat’s jealous care. Need I say more? The Sultaness was lost: She pined to see the Prince at any cost. osmin Such jealous scrutiny could they evade?12 It seems to me too strong a barricade. akhmet Perhaps you may recall a rumor spread — With little truth — that Amurat was dead. The Sultaness, pretending to be grieved, Made sure, by weeping, it should be believed. Her slaves all trembled, duped by this charade; Bajazet’s guards, thank heav’n! were disarrayed; Bribes neutralized their lingering loyalty, So that their captives dared meet secretly. Thus, Roxane saw the Prince. She soon made known The order entrusted to her care alone. Bajazet’s charming. To survive, he knew He had to please her — and was able to. Fate favored him: her care, her sympathy, The disclosed secret, their complicity, The sighs which forced concealment made more sweet, The stimulating silence when they’d meet, The dangers and the fears they braved together: These bound their hearts and fates in tender tether. And those who should have kept a watchful eye, Once having shirked their duty, dared not spy. osmin What! has Roxane, then, recklessly revealed This fatal flame she should have kept concealed?

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akhmet No, up till now her secret’s been secure: Atalide’s lent her name to this amour. She is the Sultan’s father’s niece; no less Than his own sons she shared his tenderness, Brought up beside them since her infancy. The Prince is wooing her, apparently; She hears his suit, though, for the Sultaness, Hoping that she may further its success. And to induce me to support their side, They’ve promised me the hand of Atalide.13

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osmin You love her, Sire? akhmet          You think it would be sage To enroll as love’s apprentice at my age? Should my heart, numbed by years of stress and strain, Rashly pursue a pleasure all too vain? She pleases me, but for quite other ends: In her I prize the blood whence she descends; For Bajazet, once she’s become my bride, Will have, despite himself, to take my side.14 Our sultans always mistrust their vizier: Scarce chosen, he inspires them with fear. They eye his goods and envy him his gold; Their hate, their greed, prevent our growing old.15 Now Bajazet esteems and honors me; His perils make him treat me tenderly. But once this selfsame prince ascends the throne, His useless friend he may perhaps disown; And if my fealty doesn’t stay his hand, If one fine day my head he should demand . . . I say no more, Osmin, but trust I may Defer his dudgeon to some distant day.

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I serve my sultans well, but when they’ve erred, I leave their praises to the vulgar herd; And it would be too servile, I submit, To approve my death when they have ordered it! — Now I shall tell you how I gained ingress And met in private with the Sultaness. At first, she kept concealed, content to hear, Since the Serail’s strict laws filled her with fear. Such tiresome caution, though, she soon disdained: It made our conversations too constrained. She herself chose this spot, so set apart, Where we two could commune with eyes and heart. By secret ways, with some slave as my guide, I . . . Hush! She comes, with her dear Atalide. Stay, and be ready to corroborate The crucial news I’m going to relate.

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Scene ii [roxane, atalide, zatima, zaïre, akhmet, osmin] akhmet Rumor and truth, madame, are in accord; Osmin’s assayed the troops and seen your lord. Worries beset the Sultan every day, While every heart inclines towards Bajazet: With common voice they call to have him crowned. Towards Babylon the Persians were still bound, And soon the chance of battle would decide, Beneath her walls, which army would preside. That outcome should make our position clear; Judging from Osmin’s lengthy journey here, Heaven already has resolved the fight: Even now the Sultan triumphs or takes flight. Let’s openly declare ourselves today,

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Secure Byzantium’s gates, and bar his way; And heedless if he’s triumphed or he’s fled, Let’s quickly act before the news has spread. If fled, why fear? If his the victory, Swift action is the safest strategy. Should you try to seduce the crowds who wait To welcome him, you’ll find you are too late. With cunning I’ve won over to our cause The sacred guardians of our holy laws.16 I know the people’s slavish piety: They bear religion’s yoke devotedly. Let the bright sun at last greet Bajazet, And from his prison free the Prince today. In his name let the Prophet’s banner fly,17 The wonted sign whenever danger’s nigh. The people, predisposed towards him, all know His goodness, not his guilt, has brought him low. Besides, a vague report, confirmed by me, Has now convinced the people, happily, That Amurat scorns them and would relocate Quite far from here, himself, his throne, his state.18 Disclose his brother’s peril and display The cruel decree that threatens him today. Let him present himself and so make known His noble bearing, worthy of a throne. roxane Enough. I’ll do all that I’ve sworn to do. Brave Akhmet, go: assemble all your crew. Sound out their feelings and report to me; I’ll let you have my answer presently. I must see Bajazet: I can’t decide Until I’m certain our hearts are allied. Make haste now.

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Scene iii [roxane, atalide, zatima, zaïre] roxane         Well, dear Atalide, you see: Bajazet must decide our destiny. I’ll meet him one last time now and find out If he loves me. atalide        Is this a time for doubt? This venture must be quickly carried through. You heard what the Vizier just said to you. You love the Prince. Tomorrow, are you sure His liberty, his life, you can secure? Perhaps even now the Sultan’s hastening here, Enraged, to end that life you hold so dear! And why today should you mistrust his heart?

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roxane So you, who speak for him, you take his part? atalide What! All the pains he’s taken pleasing you, All that you’ve done, all that you still can do, The risks he runs, the beauty he adores: Does all this not confirm his heart is yours? Trust me: your goodness he has not forgot. roxane Alas! I wish to think so, but cannot. Why can’t the wretch, to comfort me, just say The things I’m told he says when I’m away? Ten times, encouraged by your confidence, Thrilled, in advance, by his heart’s vehemence,

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I sought some proof of his fidelity And had him brought before me secretly. Perhaps excessive love makes me complain; But, not to tire you with a tale so vain, I found no ardency of any kind, Such as your forecasts flattered me I’d find. If I grant him his life — the Empire, too — Such vague, uncertain pledges will not do.

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atalide What further homage must his love now pay? roxane To prove his love he must wed me today. atalide Wed you! Think what you’re saying, I implore! roxane I know it’s something seldom done before: I know our sultans rarely condescend To wed; that it’s a law they’re loath to bend. True, sometimes they will deign to single out One beauty from amongst the scheming rout; But ever insecure, despite her charms, A slave, she takes her master in her arms; She wears her yoke forever, and unless She bears a son, can’t be named sultaness. Amurat, more ardent, breaking precedent, Bestowed my title as love’s emolument, And with that title left me in command, Placing his brother’s fate into my hand. But this same sultan, generous though he be, Has never promised he would marry me; And that’s the prize I’ve longed for most of all:19 His other bounties I can scarce recall.20

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Why justify myself, though, when I find Bajazet’s driven all else from my mind? More fortunate than my lord, despite his woe, He’s pleased me, though not planning to do so.21 For him I have suborned guards, slaves, vizier; You see, then, what I’ve done for one so dear. I’ve made good use, obeying love’s dictate, Of all the power I wield over his fate. He’s almost reached the throne: with one step more He’s there, but that’s the step I’m waiting for. And if, despite my love, he won’t agree To join my life to his by marrying me; If he should cite a law he ought to hate; If, taking all, he won’t reciprocate: That instant, heedless of the man I cherish, Not caring if it means I too must perish, This wretch, false and ungrateful, I’ll restore To the sad state I found him in before.22 — That’s why I want his definite declaration: On that depends his fall or his salvation. I don’t ask you to intercede today, Transmitting everything I have to say: I want his face, his features, to impart — Undimmed by doubt — what’s hidden in his heart. Let him be brought, in secret, to this place — All unprepared — to meet me face to face. You’ll know all, once I’ve questioned him. Adieu. Scene iv [atalide, zaïre] atalide It’s over! Atalide’s undone!23 zaïre             What! You?

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atalide I see too clearly now how things will fare: The only hope I have is in despair.24 zaïre But why? atalide      Did you not hear the fatal plan That’s just been set in motion by Roxane, The hateful terms with which he must comply? For Bajazet must marry her or die! If he should yield, how dire will be my lot! How dire will his be, though, if he should not! zaïre I understand your grief, but, to speak true, Your love should have foreseen this would ensue. atalide Ah, Zaïre! when does love act prudently? Everything seemed to be in harmony: Roxane, entrusting me with this affair, Confided Bajazet’s heart to my care, Charged me to weigh his words, to sound his sighs, Spoke through my lips and saw him through my eyes. I felt the fortunate hour approaching fast When, by her hands, I’d crown my lover at last. But heav’n has foiled my subterfuge, I fear. And now what’s left for me to do, Zaïre? Should I have told Roxane the truth, and see My lover ruined by my honesty? Before her love for him began to burn, I loved him and he loved me in return.25 From earliest years our love, as you’re aware, Strengthened the bonds born of the blood we share. Raised at his side by his devoted mother,

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I learned to favor him above his brother; Her heart rejoiced to see our hearts allied; And though we had to part after she died, Our souls, still seeing what our eyes couldn’t see, Knew how to love each other silently. ’Twas later that, suspecting naught, Roxane Asked me to assist her with her secret plan, For, having seen this hero’s charms, her heart Succumbed at once and swiftly took his part. Bajazet, heartened by her helpfulness, Returned her kindness: how could he do less? How easily love believes itself requited! Roxane, with his least courtesies delighted, Induced us both, by her credulity, To indulge her in her willful fantasy. My frailty, though, Zaïre, I must confess: A growing jealousy I couldn’t suppress. With bounteous gifts my rival weighed him down, Offering, in lieu of my dull charms, a crown; A thousand boons enhanced her in his eyes; She urged him on to claim the glittering prize. I’m powerless, though. My heart’s soliloquy Comprised just sighs, repeated endlessly. Heaven alone could count my countless tears. But Bajazet at last dispelled my fears. I stanched those tears, and, till this moment, I Have lied for him — and taught him how to lie. Alas! all’s at an end. Roxane, ill used, Of her mistake will soon be disabused. He’s not adept at such duplicity: His virtue will undo him, I foresee. I must, each moment, vigilant and tense, Give to his words more favorable a sense. He’s courting ruin! If only she, once more, Would let my voice speak for her, as before. If I could but have warned his face to lie!26

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act i, scene iv 

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But I can wait for him as he goes by: One word, one glance, will stand him in good stead. I’d sooner see him wed to her than dead. For die he must if Roxane so dictate. He’s courting ruin, I’m telling you. — But wait: Poor Atalide, your worries are undue; Trust that your lover knows what he must do. You think you’re worthy he should die for you? Perhaps he’ll harken to your exhortation And opt — too gladly — for self-preservation. zaïre Madame, why drown yourself in grief and care, And ere there’s any need, yield to despair? Bajazet loves you: that can’t be denied. These gnawing doubts you’d best dismiss — or hide; Don’t let your weeping make your passion plain. The hand that saved him will do so again. While she believes she’s loved by Bajazet, Roxane will think no rival bars her way. Come elsewhere now to stifle your distress, And trust their meeting will be a success. atalide Come, then. — But, heav’n, if you condemn the schemes Of two young lovers, thwarting all their dreams, If, pitiless, our love you can’t condone, I’m the more guilty: punish me alone.27

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act ii Scene i [bajazet, roxane] roxane The fateful hour has come, by heav’n’s decree, Which shall restore you, Prince, to liberty. Naught holds me back: today the means are mine To carry out my love-inspired design. Not that your victory will be easily won: The Turkish Empire’s not a tranquil one. The aid I promised you I shall bestow: I’ll arm your valor to subdue your foe; Once I fend off the peril threatening you, There’s nothing, Prince, your courage cannot do. The army, Osmin swears, supports your cause, As do the powerful guardians of our laws.1 The Vizier answers as to Istanbul; And I, you know, have subject to my rule The guards, the slaves, the eunuchs and all those Whom these capacious palace walls enclose: Submissive souls who long since sold to me Their lives, their silence, and their loyalty. Run to the glorious field I offer you And straightway claim the prize that is your due.2 It’s not unjust, this enterprise we’ve planned: You but repulse, my lord, a murderous hand. The case is common: sultans, it’s well known, Oft choose that well-trod route to reach the throne. But now, to best begin our grand design And guarantee your happiness and mine, Let’s show the world that when I saved your life, I did so as your loved and loving wife; And by the sacred marriage knot we tie,

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act ii, scene i 

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My faith in you you now shall justify.

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bajazet Ah! what are you proposing? roxane              Prince, what’s this? What secret obstacle can thwart our bliss? bajazet But, madame, would the Empire’s pride permit . . . ? Spare me the pain of verbalizing it. roxane Yes, I know well that ever since that day When one of your own emperors — Bajazet — 3 To some barbarian having fallen prey, Saw his wife chained behind the victor’s chair And dragged, in ignominy, everywhere, His proud successors, fearing a like shame, Have rarely deigned to assume a husband’s name. But love shouldn’t take such vain laws as its guide; And, setting humbler instances aside, Suleiman (and you know ’twas he, my lord,4 Who cowed the whole world with his conquering sword And raised the Empire to its greatest height) Cast eyes on Roxelane, to his delight. That monarch, mastering his wonted pride, Deigned to proclaim her as his queen and bride, Though she’d no claims to accede as sultaness But her small charms and her great artfulness. bajazet That’s true, but there is no comparison: How small am I, how great was Suleiman! With unmatched might and power Suleiman reigned:

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Bajazet

Dominion over Egypt’s king regained; Proud Rhodes, so long a thorn in the Empire’s side, Rendered a tomb for all her troops who died; The Danube’s banks laid waste by his attack; The Persian Empire’s boundaries pushed back; The sun-scorched Africans forced to obey — After such feats, our laws bowed to his sway.5 While I must grovel to the troops, the town; My great misfortunes make all my renown. Despised, denounced, with dubious claim to reign, Might I not lose those hearts I wish to gain? Why should they pity patent happiness? Will they believe my danger, your distress? With Suleiman’s case do not flatter me; Think of poor Osman, murdered recently:6 The janissaries, ready to rebel, Seeking to justify a plot so fell, Believed their regicide was authorized By the misguided marriage you’ve advised.7 What more is there to say? Once I have won The people’s trust, perhaps more may be done. Let’s not be rash; first raise me to a state Whence your great goodness I can compensate. roxane I understand. I see I was unwise; Nothing escapes, Prince, your far-seeing eyes: You sense the slightest danger threatening you That my too eager love subjects you to. For yourself, for your honor, you’re afraid, And I respect these scruples you’ve displayed. Have you foreseen, though, if we are not wed, That far more certain perils lie ahead, That, without me, your plans will go awry, And that it’s I whom you must please, Prince, I? I hold the palace gates: it’s up to me

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act ii, scene i 

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If you remain a prisoner or go free. Your life is mine to take away or give: So long as I still love you, you still live. Without that love, which your rebuffs offend, Can you not see your life is at an end?8 bajazet Yes, I owe all to you, and I had thought The only glory, madame, that you sought Was, once I’d gained the throne you helped me to, To hear me avow that I owe all to you. Why deny what my lips would fain confess? My gratitude I’ll ceaselessly express; The deep respect I feel demands no less. My blood, my life: all this I’m thankful for. But do you wish . . . ? roxane            No, I wish nothing more. Spare me your cunning cant, your noble claims.9 I see that we have very different aims. Your heart, wretch, I no longer wish to win. Return to the dark void I found you in.10 What holds me back? What can I hope to gain From an indifference he’s made all too plain? Have my avowals touched the ingrate’s heart? In all he’s said, does love play any part?11 I see your scheme: you think, whate’er I do, That my own danger means I must save you; That, by such strong attachments are we tied, Your interests and my own must coincide. But I can count on Amurat’s goodwill: You know quite well your brother loves me still; However furious he may prove to be, Your treacherous blood will cleanse my treachery, And your death will suffice to pardon me.

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Bajazet

Don’t doubt I’ll do it, and without delay. — Listen: I love you deeply, Bajazet. You’re courting ruin. You’d best not let me leave. Repentance can still earn you a reprieve. You goad a furious lover to your cost: If one word leaves my lips, Prince, you are lost.

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bajazet Yes, take my life: it’s yours, madame, not mine. Perhaps my death will further your design: Having obtained the happy Sultan’s grace, You’ll win back, in his heart, your former place. roxane His heart? You think that, though he wished it so, The hope of winning yours I could forego? That I, by this sweet dream so long possessed, Could nurse another passion in my breast? That I can live, if I can’t live for you? I arm you against me, cruel one, it’s true, Just when I should suppress my frailty, Hastening my downfall, and your victory. And now I have no choice but to confess: I feigned for you a proud and stern address. On you depend my joy and happiness. My bloody death will follow yours this day. That all my hopes for you should end this way! But you seem troubled now. Why do you sigh? Speak out.

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bajazet       O heav’n! would that I could, but I . . . roxane What’s this? What do you mean? You can’t speak out? Prince, you have secrets I can’t know about?

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act ii, scene iii 

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You harbor feelings that you can’t confide? bajazet Madame, once more, it’s you who must decide: To reach the throne show me some lawful way, Or else — I stand here ready — claim your prey.

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roxane Ah! it’s too much! You shall be satisfied. Ho! Guards! Scene ii [roxane, akhmet, bajazet] roxane       Akhmet, it’s over: I’ve been defied.12 Leave me now: I have nothing more to say. I bow before the Sultan’s sovereign sway. Let the Serail be closed forevermore And all restored to what it was before.13

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Scene iii [bajazet, akhmet] akhmet My lord, what’s this I’ve heard? Such shocking news!14 Whence comes this change, and whom should I accuse? What shall you do? And what will be my fate? Heav’n! bajazet      Now is no time to prevaricate; Roxane’s offended: she’ll retaliate. An obstacle has come between us two.

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Bajazet

Vizier, think of yourself, I caution you; Don’t count on me: do what you have to do. akhmet What? bajazet     Find your friends: seek some security. My friendship places you in jeopardy. I’ve marred your fortunes, which I’d hoped to amend. Don’t brood on it: our hopes are at an end. akhmet What is this obstacle, I’d like to know? Peace reigned when I left here a while ago. What fury’s seized you? Why is she upset?

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bajazet She wishes me to marry her, Akhmet. akhmet Our sultans frown on marriage, certainly; But that’s a custom, Sire, not a decree. Why risk your life for such a specious cause? Saving yourself is the holiest of laws; Don’t let an all-too-certain death erase The last, most precious blood of Othman’s race.15

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bajazet That precious blood comes at too high a cost If, saving it, my honor must be lost.16 akhmet Why think you’ll be so blackly compromised? Suleiman wed and he’s still idolized; And Suleiman, I’m sure, was never oppressed

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act ii, scene iii 

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By such great perils, all too manifest. bajazet It’s that concern for safety I despise; It makes this marriage shameful in my eyes. Suleiman was not moved by craven need: The love his slave inspired made him accede; Not bowing to a marriage on demand, He freely offered her his heart and hand.

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akhmet But, Sire, you love Roxane. bajazet             Please, leave me be.17 Don’t think that I bemoan my destiny. Death’s not the worst disgrace that could betide; When young, I often sought it at your side. This prison, too, in which I am immured, Has thrust it in my face, and I’m inured. How oft the Sultan’s sworn to have my head! Death will but end the troubled life I’ve led. Alas! if, leaving it, I’ve one regret . . . 18 Pardon me, but I pity, dear Akhmet, Those generous hearts who’ve rallied to my aid And whose staunch service I have ill repaid. akhmet Ah! if we perish, who’s to blame but you? One word will save us — and will save you too. The janissaries who’ve been left with me, Those who safeguard our faith so fervently,19 Our most respected citizens, who rule, By their example, all of Istanbul, Stand by to lead you to that sacred gate20 Through which new sultans enter here in state.

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Bajazet

bajazet Well, Akhmet, if they care for me so much, Let them come rescue me from Roxane’s clutch; Force the Seraglio’s portals, if need be, And enter with that valiant company. Though I should leave here bloody and beaten, still, I’d sooner that than wed her ’gainst my will. Perhaps, amidst the turmoil that prevails, Despair will save my life when all else fails:21 Trusting in you, I’ll put up some resistance And give you time to come to my assistance. akhmet Despite my diligence, could I prevent Her taking the revenge on which she’s bent? What would such acts of rash bravado gain, But to incriminate your friends in vain? Promise her. Once the present peril’s past, Your promise has no power to bind you fast.

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bajazet What! Lie? akhmet       Don’t blush. You think our sultans care If they break vows they’ve been obliged to swear? Think of those heroes whom the rights of war Propelled to victory on sea and shore: Free-willed, and masters of their word, their fate — Their only law: the interests of the State. Our sacred throne is partly based, my lord, On promises bestowed, but then ignored.22 I’m at a loss, Sire . . . bajazet           Yes, Akhmet, I know

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act ii, scene v 

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How far the Empire’s welfare made them go; Those heroes, though, who faced death recklessly, Scorned to redeem their lives by perfidy.23 akhmet What dauntless faith! What brave determination, Which, though we perish, claims my admiration!24 Must timid scruples in the end betray . . . ? — But what good luck sends Atalide this way?

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Scene iv [bajazet, atalide, akhmet] akhmet Ah! help me to persuade him, I implore! He’s courting ruin. atalide          That’s what I’ve come here for. But leave us. Roxane, avid for her prey, Wants all the palace gates shut straightaway. Stay close by, though, Akhmet, in case I call: We may require your presence after all.

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Scene v [bajazet, atalide] bajazet I fear this is the last you’ll see of me. Heav’n foils your ploy, condemns my perfidy. ’Gainst its last blows there was naught I could do: My choice was losing life or losing you.25 What use were all our lies, our base constraint? I’ve lived a few more days: a fruitful feint!

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Bajazet

I cautioned you, but you would have your way. Your tears, your grief, I tried my best to stay. I’ve done what you asked; now, I beg of you: Avoid the Sultaness, whate’er you do. Your tears betray you: hide them from her eyes, And don’t prolong these dangerous good-byes. atalide No, Prince. Your selfless generosity Has fought enough against harsh destiny. It costs you far too much to spare me pain. You must submit: renounce me, Sire, and reign.

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bajazet Renounce you? atalide        Yes, I implore. I’ve thought it out. Till now, consumed with jealousy and doubt, It’s true I thought I could not bear to see My lover live and not belong to me; And when, as sometimes happened, I would find My happy rival’s face haunting my mind, Your death (excuse a lover’s frenzied state) Didn’t seem to me the cruelest blow of fate. But then the horrid fact of your demise Was not yet present to my tear-filled eyes. I did not see you then as I now do, Ready to bid me one last fond adieu. With fortitude, I know, you’d face down death, Undaunted, undismayed, to your last breath. I know your heart would gladly testify Its steadfast faithfulness with its last sigh. But spare a soul, alas! less fortified: Mete out your woes to fragile Atalide, And don’t expose me to a poignant grief

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act ii, scene v 

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To which no flood of tears could bring relief. bajazet What will become of you if, in your sight, I celebrate this fatal marriage rite? atalide Don’t worry, Prince, what will become of me. Perhaps I shall obey my destiny. Who knows? I may find gladness in my grief: Consoled, amidst my tears, in the belief That, for my sake, you were resolved to die, And that, if someone saved you, it was I. bajazet No, such a cruel rite you shall not view. The more you bid me be untrue to you, The more your worth is made too manifest, Madame, for me to honor your request.26 What! shall this love, so tender and so true, Which, born when we were born, grew as we grew, Your tears my hand alone has always dried, My oft-sworn vows never to leave your side: Shall all this end in perfidy and lies? I wed? And whom? A slave one must despise, Who’s selfishness itself (I’m forced to say), Who’s placed her tools of torture on display, Who tells me I must marry her or die; While you, who dread my danger more than I, So worthy of your noble ancestry, Would sacrifice yourself, your love, for me! Ah! let the jealous Sultan have my head, If, to redeem it, I lose you instead! atalide Prince, you can live and yet need not betray

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Bajazet

Atalide’s trust: there is another way. bajazet Speak then, and if I can, I will obey.

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atalide Roxane, though angry, is in love with you: If you’d just act as if you love her, too, If, by your sighs, you signaled your intent That one day . . . 27 bajazet         Yes, I see, but can’t consent. Madame, please don’t imagine that, today, To cowardly despair I’ve fallen prey, That of a sultan’s burdens I’m afraid, Which by a speedy death I would evade. Perhaps a reckless daring masters me; But envying my great forebears’ bravery, I hoped that, fleeing a repose too base, Amongst such heroes I would earn a place. But though ambition burn and love implore, I can deceive her trusting heart no more; To save my life, ’twere vain to promise to: My lips, my eyes, would prove my words untrue, And just as I was trying hard to please, They might, instead, offend by their unease; Chilled by my frigid sighs, she’d realize My heart had not produced such soulless sighs. O heav’n! how oft I’d have enlightened her, If I’d but feared the wrath I would incur, If I hadn’t feared her jealous nature too, Which might make her suspicions fall on you! You wish me to deceive the Sultaness? Perjure myself ? And by such slavishness . . . Ah! far from urging me to such a wrong,

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I know that, if your love were not so strong, You’d be the first, no doubt, to blush with shame. So, to forestall your pleas and spare you blame, I go. I must find Roxane now. Adieu. Thus must we part. atalide          But I’ll not part from you. Come, cruel man, come, I will take you there: It’s I who shall lay all our secrets bare. Since, crazed, and careless of my sobs and sighs, My lover’s pleased to expire before my eyes, Roxane, in spite of you, will join us two.28 Her vengeance will thirst after me, not you, And soon, my lord, your frightened eyes shall see The bloody spectacle you’d planned for me.29

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bajazet What are you saying? atalide           Cruel one, can you doubt That honor’s something I too care about? A hundred times, while speaking in your name, My blushes nearly gave away the game! But then I’d think: I must not let him die! Now since my death is certain, ingrate, why Won’t you dare for me, what I dared for you?30 Perhaps a little gentler word will do; It may be you’ve already been forgiven. You see the extra time you’re being given. Did she, in leaving, discharge the Vizier? Has she dispatched her guards to seize you here? And when, enraged, she called on me for aid, Was not her love by tender tears betrayed? Perhaps she needs but some slim hope, my lord,

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Bajazet

For her to put aside the avenging sword. Go at once. Save your life and mine, I pray. bajazet So be it. But whatever shall I say? atalide Ah! don’t ask me: it’s you who must decide. Let heav’n and the occasion be your guide. Go now. It’s best that I not intervene: She might guess what our troubled glances mean. Again, I daren’t appear; go on ahead. To save yourself, say . . . all that must be said.

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act iii Scene i [atalide, zaïre] atalide She’s pardoned him, Zaïre? Can it be so? zaïre Indeed, a slave girl, just a while ago, Rushing to carry out Roxane’s behest, Led the Vizier in as a welcome guest. They did not speak, but more than words could do, His face expressed his pleasure, and I knew Some happy change brought him to the Serail And mutual peace would once again prevail. It seems she’s chosen to be less severe. atalide Thus, on all sides, my every joy, Zaïre, Now follows them and leaves me to lament; But since I had no choice, I don’t repent.1

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zaïre What does this mean? And why this fresh alarm? atalide Zaïre, did no one tell you by what charm, Or, rather, by what promise, Bajazet Could work so great a change in half a day? Roxane’s wrath didn’t seem likely to subside. By some sure pledge has she been pacified? Speak. Does he mean to wed her?

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Bajazet

zaïre                I couldn’t say. But if, to save himself, he’s had to pay So high a price, if he’s done as you said, If, in short, he should wed her . . .

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atalide                If he wed . . . ! zaïre What! you regret the selfless speech you gave him, Inspired by your deep concern to save him? atalide No, no, he did just as he had to do. Too jealous thoughts, I won’t pay heed to you.2 If he should wed her, it’s as I requested; Respect my virtue by which you’ve been bested; Its noble counsels don’t try to debase; And far from painting him in her embrace, Let me imagine him upon the throne My love commanded him to make his own. There! I’m myself again, just as I was. I wanted him to love me, and he does; And I can face my death more readily, Knowing I’m worthy of him and he of me.

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zaïre Your death! Why are you so resolved to die? atalide I’ve let my lover go, yet you ask why? How can you think my death a cause for grief, A death that dries my tears, that brings relief?3 If he lives, that’s enough: I wished it thus

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And wish it still, however onerous. My joy, my sorrow, do not matter, though: I love my lover enough to let him go. But now, alas! he should anticipate That, having made a sacrifice so great, I, who have thus contrived to save his head, Love him too much to witness him being wed. Come, I must know . . . zaïre            Compose yourself, I pray. You’ll hear what’s happened: Akhmet comes this way.

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Scene ii [atalide, akhmet, zaïre] akhmet Our lovers now have reached a sweet accord.4 The storm is over; calm has been restored. The Sultaness’s anger has subsided. To me her latest plans she’s just confided; And while the Prophet’s banner she displays Attracts all Istanbul’s astonished gaze, And Bajazet makes ready to appear, The meaning of that sign I shall make clear, And fill their souls with reverent awe today, Proclaiming our new sultan: Bajazet. Meanwhile, forgive me for reminding you Of the reward my zealousness is due. Please don’t expect from me the same sweet passion I saw those lovers show: that’s not my fashion. But if by other proofs, worthy of my age — Respect and loyalty, fervent yet sage — Such as your royal blood demands, I may . . .

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atalide Let time confirm the truth of what you say. And time will let you know me better too. But what’s this passion they’ve revealed to you?5

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akhmet Surely, madame, their ardent sighs make clear These two young lovers hold each other dear? atalide Yes, but this miracle takes my breath away. To win her pardon, what price did he pay? He’s marrying her, then? akhmet            Yes, upon my word. But let me tell you all that’s just occurred. Surprised that they had quarreled, I confess, Railing ’gainst lovers, love, fate’s fickleness,6 I left the palace, driven by despair. I reached the port: a vessel waited there,7 On which I stowed all that I held most dear, Thinking to journey far away from here. Summoned back, while still planning what to do, Filled with new hope and joy, I ran, I flew. The doors of the Serail now opened wide;8 A slave appeared, who ushered me inside And led me to a room, with scarce a sound, Where Roxane heard her lover’s suit, spellbound. No one dared breathe: an august silence reigned. The impatience I was feeling I restrained; Respecting from afar this private scene, I watched their every move with interest keen. At last, with eyes wherein love’s flame was lit, She held her hand out, as a pledge of it, And he, with looks that spoke of his desire,

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Assured her, likewise, of his amorous fire. atalide [aside] Alas! akhmet    Their silent guest they then espied. Here is your prince, Vizier — our prince, she cried. Brave Akhmet, I shall leave him in your care: His sovereign honors you must go prepare. Once the Serail has offered its acclaim, Let an obedient people do the same. At our new sultan’s feet I then fell prone, But, rising swiftly, left those two alone. Thrilled that I could, by this faithful narration,9 Apprise you of their reconciliation, And pay my deep respects, I now must run: For he’ll be crowned, I swear, ere this day’s done.

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Scene iii [atalide, zaïre] atalide I don’t wish to disturb their joy; let’s leave. zaïre Madame, believe . . . atalide           Yes? What should I believe? What! would you have me witness such a scene? You see it’s settled: he’s to wed the Queen. He swears he loves her; she believes it’s true. I can’t complain: it’s what I wanted too. But who’d have thought, when, fired with passion, he,

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So jealous of his staunch fidelity, Was poised to sacrifice himself for me; When he, who showed me such concern but now, Refused to swear to her the simplest vow; When all my tears proved vain to change his course; When I rejoiced they had such little force: Who’d think his heart, despite this evidence, Would find, to win her heart, such eloquence? Perhaps the passion he professed to feel Became, with little effort, something real. Perhaps, on closer view, her eyes disclosed New charms, more ravishing than he’d supposed. She must have poured her sorrows in his ears; She loves him, and an Empire gilds her tears: Such love would win his kind soul’s sympathy. Alas! what grounds he has to abandon me!10

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zaïre Just wait, madame: his efforts may yet fail. atalide No, to deny the truth will not avail: I have no wish to aggravate my woe. He did all this to save himself, I know. When to Roxane my tears sent him away, I had no thought that he would not obey; But having heard, just now, his sad good-byes, His tender transports and his touching sighs, I think he needn’t have shown so openly The rapturous joy Akhmet described to me. Judge for yourself, tell me if I’m deluded: Why from this counsel am I alone excluded? Am I so uninvolved, then, in his fate? Would he, in seeking me, procrastinate, Did not his guilty heart’s just accusation Make him, alas! avoid a confrontation?

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But no, he need not take such pains for me: He’ll never see me more.

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zaïre            Madame, it’s he! Scene iv [bajazet, atalide, zaïre] bajazet It’s done, I’ve spoken, madame: I’ve obeyed.11 My life’s assured: you need not be afraid; And I’ll rejoice if honor and honesty Don’t censure my unjust felicity, And if my heart, which guilt and shame oppress, Can pardon me as has the Sultaness. But, free at last, on arms I can rely; And ’gainst a cruel brother I shall vie — No longer, by my silence and your art, Basely contesting for his mistress’ heart, But nobly braving the grave risks of war, Seeking him in strange lands, however far — To win the people’s love, the troops’ acclaim, And let the outcome be adjudged by Fame. What do I see? You weep? Why this distress? atalide My lord, I don’t resent your happiness: Just heaven owed this miracle to you. You know that to your interests I’ve been true. Nay, with my every breath, as you’re aware, To keep you safe has been my constant care; And since, while I live, you’re in danger yet, I sacrifice my life without regret. It’s true, if heav’n had heard my prayers and sighs,12

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Bajazet

I might have faced a happier demise: You would have wed my rival nonetheless, Swearing to your new bride your faithfulness, But to the husband’s vows that were her due You’d not have joined such tender pledges too. Roxane would have been just as satisfied, And I’d have thought, with pleasure, as I died, That, having made you adopt this strategy, I sent you to her, full of love for me; That, bearing to death’s kingdom all your love, I did not leave a lover here above. bajazet Why speak, madame, of husband, lover, bride? O heav’n! such terms are quite unjustified! Whose false account could make you so mistake? I, love Roxane! I, live for Roxane’s sake! You think that those are my true sentiments, That I could even mouth them in pretense? Of truth or pretense, though, there was no need: Roxane knew her own mind and took the lead;13 And whether my return appeared to be A proof, to her, that she was dear to me, Or pressing time made her capitulate, When I began to speak, she could not wait: Her gushing tears cut short the speech I’d planned. She placed her fate, her life, into my hand, And, trusting to my gratitude, Roxane, Her hopes renewed, confirmed the wedding plan. Blushing, myself, at her credulity, Her tender love, bestowed unworthily, In my confusion, which the Sultaness Attributed, madame, to love’s excess, I felt so cruel, so criminal, so unkind. Believe that I was forced to bear in mind, In that dire hour, my love for Atalide,

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act iii, scene v 

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To keep well hidden what I had to hide. Yet, after all the efforts that I’ve made, When I come here to have my guilt allayed, My ravaged soul is cruelly abused, And of your death I find myself accused. Why, at this very moment, I can see You’re listening to me quite indifferently. Madame, it’s time to end our mutual pain; Let’s not torment each other all in vain. Roxane’s nearby; indulge my honesty: I’ll go to her much more contentedly To demonstrate her love is based on lies, Than when, just now, my thoughts wore a disguise. — She’s here.

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atalide        Just heav’n! don’t make a rash mistake! Don’t let her learn the truth, for our love’s sake!14 Scene v [bajazet, roxane, atalide] roxane Come, Prince: the whole Seraglio’s gathered here; It’s time for their new master to appear. Summoned by me, the teeming population Expectantly awaits my proclamation. My slaves — from whom the rest will take their cue — Are the first subjects my love offers you. [to Atalide] Would you have thought, when he returned to me, That love could banish rage so rapidly? But now, my vengeance held unchallenged sway: I swore he’d never live another day. Yet scarcely had my ardent lover spoken,

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Bajazet

Than that same vow love made, by love was broken.15 I read his tenderness in his distress: I pardoned him, and trust his faithfulness. bajazet Yes, I have sworn and never will forget Just how much, madame, I am in your debt. And having sworn obedience to you, I’ll prove my gratitude by all I do. If I can earn your favor doing so, Your goodness will reward my pains, I know.16

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Scene vi [roxane, atalide] roxane O heav’n! I am astounded! — horrified! Is this a dream? Perhaps my eyes have lied?17 Could his cold words, his curt reception, mean That it was false, our prior tender scene? What does this man imagine I expected When he regained the love he had rejected? I thought he swore that till death did us part His love proclaimed me mistress of his heart. Does Bajazet regret appeasing me? Or was I duped by his duplicity? Ah! . . . But he spoke to you: what did he say?

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atalide To me, madame? He loves you more each day.18 roxane His life depends upon my thinking so. But midst so many joys, I’d like to know: Is there some secret cause that might explain

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act iii, scene vii 

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75

Why he rushed off in such apparent pain? atalide That pain was never evident to me. He’s long extolled your generosity; When we just met, that’s all he talked about. He seemed the same, I thought, when he went out. But, madame, is it matter for surprise That, on the eve of this great enterprise, Bajazet is disturbed and cannot hide The pressing cares with which he’s occupied?

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roxane I see you excuse him most assiduously; You speak in his defense better than he.

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atalide What other interest . . . ? roxane             That’s enough, madame. I’m not so blind as you may think I am. Leave me. I wish to have some solitude. This day has caused me much disquietude. Like Bajazet, I’ve griefs and cares, and I Would brood on them with nobody nearby. Scene vii [roxane, alone] roxane What must I think of all that’s just transpired? To plot against me have those two conspired? Why did he flee, and what caused his confusion? Did not their glances hint at some collusion?

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Bajazet

Atalide stunned! Bajazet stupefied! O heav’n! by this affront why am I tried? Has my blind love brought all this grief on me: Days filled with dolor, nights with misery? My fatal treachery, the plots I laid: Was all this done to lend a rival aid? Perhaps, though, I’m too quick to take offense At such a slight, that’s of no consequence. ’Twas some caprice, not love, that he obeyed. Love can’t explain the rudeness he displayed. For would he not have kept up his charade?19 Seeing his treacherous goal was almost gained, For one more moment could he not have feigned? No, rest assured: too much love makes me fear. And Atalide: why think he holds her dear? What has she done for him? What would he gain? Which of us two enables him to reign? But don’t I know how potent love can be? If she has charmed him by some sorcery, What matter that he owes me life and throne? Great favors are outweighed by love alone. Nay, when this ingrate had me in his thrall, His brother’s favors did I once recall?20 Ah! if by other chains he were not tied, Would marrying me make him so terrified? Wouldn’t he have willingly made me his wife? Would he, by scorning me, have risked his life? Yes, clearly . . . But who seeks an interview?21 What can they want? Scene viii [roxane, zatima] zatima           Pardon my troubling you.

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act iii, scene viii 

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A slave, madame, sent from the camp, awaits; Although he found himself shut out, the gates Upon the seaward side were soon unbarred, Per Amurat’s orders, by the palace guard. But what is strange, it’s Orcan whom he’s sent.

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roxane Orcan! zatima     Yes, his most trusted instrument For carrying out his cruel and cunning schemes, Orcan, burnt black by Afric’s scorching beams. Madame, he waits for you impatiently. I thought, though, I should warn you first, lest he Provide too great a shock for you; so I Detained him in an anteroom nearby. roxane Must I be plagued by this misfortune too? What can his mission be? What shall I do? Doubtless the Sultan, fearful for his reign, Means to condemn his brother once again. Without me, though, they cannot apprehend him; My word is law here. But should I defend him? Which is my master? Amurat? Bajazet? One I’ve betrayed; the other, I fear, may. Time presses; I must clarify all doubt, And act before this precious time runs out. In vain they hide their love. Though well concealed, Love, by some sign, at last will be revealed. Bajazet’s actions I shall scrutinize, And Atalide I shall take by surprise; I’ll find their secret out, sooner or later, And crown the lover, or condemn the traitor.

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Bajazet

act iv Scene i [atalide, zaïre] atalide Ah! how Orcan’s grim visage made me quail When I caught sight of him in the Serail! His advent just now fills me with dismay. I fear . . . But have you questioned Bajazet? What did he say? Will he yield to my pleas? Roxane’s suspicions will he try to appease? zaïre He may not see her except at her dictate. So she ordains: she wants to make him wait. She’d hide him from Orcan, that’s evident. Pretending that we met by accident, I gave the Prince your note; now you shall see What’s in the letter he’s just handed me. atalide [reading]   After so many base detours, Must I go on pretending, at your love’s insistence?   But I’ll take care to safeguard the existence   Of one whose days you swear are dear to yours. I’ll see Roxane, convince her of my willingness, And by my gratitude, which new vows will express,   I’ll calm her wrath, if I am able to. Demand no more of me: I never will aver, Though faced with death and urged by you, that I love her,   Since I will always love no one but you.1 Why tell me this? Does he think I don’t know? Not know he loves me — nay, adores me so?2 Is it thus that my instructions are obeyed? It’s Roxane, and not me, he must persuade.3

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act iv, scene iii 

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79

With what new fears does he now burden me! O fatal blindness! Treacherous jealousy! O false report! Doubts I could not suppress! I heeded you and blamed his faithlessness!4 All was arranged, my wishes gratified; I was beloved and Roxane satisfied.5 Zaïre, return to him now, if you can. These words are vain: he must appease Roxane.6 His eyes, his tongue, his mien, must testify How much he loves her. Ah! if only I Could fire his soul when he makes his appeal And fill his speech with all the love I feel! But that might make things worse for him, not better.

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zaïre Roxane is here! atalide         Ah! I must hide this letter! Scene ii [roxane, atalide, zatima, zaïre] roxane [to Zatima] Come. Here’s the order. Now to make her tremble. atalide [to Zaïre] Go, run; convince him that he must dissemble. Scene iii [roxane, atalide, zatima] roxane I’ve just had new reports from Babylon. Are you aware of all that’s going on?

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Bajazet

atalide They say some slave arrived from camp just now; But why he’s come I know not, I avow. roxane The tide’s turned: fate has favored Amurat’s cause, And Babylon submits now to his laws.

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atalide What’s this? Osmin . . . roxane            Was misinformed, I fear: This slave departed after him, that’s clear. It’s done, we’re ruined now. And, what is worse, The Sultan’s following him! atalide             What a reverse! But couldn’t the Persian army block his way?

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roxane No; he is swiftly heading home, they say. atalide I feel for you, madame! Now, surely, you Must promptly achieve what you set out to do!7 roxane His triumph it’s too late to overturn. atalide O heav’n! roxane      Time hasn’t rendered him less stern.

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act iv, scene iii 

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81

Here in my hands I’ve his supreme decree. atalide And what’s his will? roxane          Read it yourself and see. You know his seal, you know his signature. atalide Yes, they’re cruel Amurat’s, of that I’m sure. [she reads] Ere Babylon fell to my strong-armed offense, I had my express instructions sent ahead. I wish to credit your obedience And shall assume that Bajazet is dead. I now leave Babylon beneath my sway, But, ere I go, confirm my strict command. If you desire to live another day, Don’t show yourself without his head in hand.

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roxane Well? atalide [aside]     Hide your tears, unhappy Atalide. roxane What do you think? atalide          He’s bent on fratricide; But he thinks no one takes his brother’s part: He does not know the Prince has won your heart And that your lover shares one soul with you. That you would sooner die . . .

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Bajazet

roxane               I, madame? True, I’d like to save the Prince, were there a way — I cannot, after all, hate Bajazet — But . . .

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atalide      What have you decided? roxane                To obey. atalide Obey! roxane     At such a time, what can I do? I must. atalide     What! this sweet prince, so fond of you, Who offers you his life, his heart, his hand, Must die? roxane       He must. I’ve issued the command. atalide I’m dying. zatima      She succumbs, her senses fade. roxane Go, to the adjoining room have her conveyed. Note what she says and does; observe with care

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act iv, scene iv 

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All that will lay their treacherous passion bare.

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Scene iv [roxane, alone] roxane My rival’s just revealed herself to me: To think I trusted in her loyalty! For six months I believed that she promoted My eager love, to which she was devoted; For six months, though, it seems I’ve served her need, Devotedly, and helped her love succeed, Nay, by my earnest efforts, found a way To ensure their happy meetings every day, And, furthering her desires, rushed to confer The sweetest moments ever known to her. This is not all: now I must ascertain If she’s succeeded or has schemed in vain; I must . . . But do I need more proof of it? On her pale face is not my sorrow writ?8 In her late seizure do I not discover A heart that trembles for a faithful lover? Free from those doubts by which I am dismayed, It’s only for his life that she’s afraid.9 No matter. I’ll persist: perhaps, like me, She founds her faith upon his falsity.10 To wrest the truth from him some snare I’ll lay. But what unworthy game is this I play! Why strain my wits to cause myself more pain And with my own eyes witness his disdain? Wary now, he may outmaneuver me. Besides, Akhmet, Orcan, and this decree Require me to act immediately: They’re waiting and I must make up my mind. To all I’ve seen it’s better to be blind.

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Bajazet

Their love, their lies, need I investigate? Let’s test how far he’ll go, and hazard fate. We’ll see if, once enthroned through my kind care, He’ll dare betray the love that placed him there, And if, too liberal with what’s not his own, He’ll basely let my rival share the throne. If need be, I can easily discover Some means to scourge the rival and the lover. Observing him, with righteous wrath my guide, I can surprise him with his Atalide; Uniting both of them, then, with one knife, I’ll turn it on myself and take my life. Enough: I have no doubt what I must do. I’ll turn a blind eye.

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Scene v [roxane, zatima] roxane          Ah! what news have you? Is Bajazet in love with her? Did she Say aught that hinted of complicity? zatima She has not spoken, scarce has drawn a breath, And all that seems to separate her from death Are the long sighs and groans that make her quake: I thought her heart must follow in their wake. Your ladies, in attendance, thought it best, So those sighs might escape, to expose her breast. When I, too, tried to ease her sore distress, I found this note enfolded in her dress.11 ’Twas in your princely lover’s hand, I knew; I thought I should deliver it to you.

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act iv, scene v 

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roxane Let’s see. — Why quake? What chill fear clutches me, And makes my hand start trembling suddenly? He may have written her: that’s no offense; He may . . . Let’s read it, though, and grasp its sense. . . . . I never will aver, Though faced with death and urged by you, that I love her,   Since I will always love no one but you. Ah! here’s clear proof of treachery and guile. I recognize his smooth seductive style. Is it thus my love’s repaid? And has he dared . . . ? Dastard! Unworthy of the life I spared! Ah! I can breathe at last! What joy sublime!12 The traitor has betrayed himself this time! No need now to resolve my racking doubt: Calmly, my vengeance I can carry out. He dies! I’ll be avenged. Let slaves be sent To seize him and prepare his punishment. Ready the fatal noose immediately,13 Which ends the life of traitors such as he. Run, Zatima, be swift to serve my ire.

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zatima Ah, madame! roxane        Yes? zatima          You know I’ve no desire To vex you when by such just wrath you’re stirred, But if you’d deign to hear one timid word: True, Bajazet deserves his punishment, Nor should your executioners relent; But, ingrate though he is, wouldn’t you agree That Amurat’s more to be feared than he?

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Bajazet

Who knows? Some treacherous tongue may have revealed This new love you’ve so cautiously concealed. You know too well the rupture can’t be mended When once a heart like his has been offended; A swift death, when the case is this severe, Is just what proves he held his victim dear.14 roxane Ah! with what insolence, what cruelty, Those two exploited my credulity!15 What joy I felt, believing all their lies! Wretch! you’ve gained no great victory in my eyes, Duping a heart that eagerly believed, A heart that dreaded to be undeceived. You hardly needed half your artifice, And in all fairness I must grant you this: I’m sure you often blushed to contemplate How small a lie deceived a love so great.16 Traitor! I, whose high rank filled me with pride, Rescued you from misfortune’s rising tide, Granting you days of peace and happiness, Days once engulfed by danger and distress; After such ardent generosity, You couldn’t bear to say that you loved me! But ’mongst what memories does my mind now stray? You weep, poor soul? You should have wept that day When, urged by vain desire to your disgrace, You first conceived the wish to see his face. You weep? While the ingrate, ready to betray, Frames falsehoods to beguile your doubts away. He clings to life to calm your rival’s fear.17 Ah! traitor, you shall die. — What? you’re still here?18 Go. No, I’ll go. He’ll see, with his own eyes, The tender pains I take for his demise; I’ll show the wretch both Amurat’s decree And this fine token of his treachery.

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act iv, scene vi 

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87

Zatima, keep my rival here with you. Her cries will bid the dying man adieu. Meanwhile, attend her faithfully; defer To all her wants: my hate has need of her. Ah! if her lover’s woes evoked her sighs, If she swooned at the thought of his demise, My vengeance will take even more delight When she knows that he’s dead: such a sweet sight — Her horror, seeing him so still and spent — Will pay me for the pleasures that I’ve lent! Go, guard her well. Above all, speak no word. — Who’s this now? Must my vengeance be deferred?

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Scene vi [roxane, akhmet, osmin] akhmet What are you doing, madame? Whence this delay? Why waste one moment of this precious day? All Istanbul, whom I’ve assembled here, Questions its chiefs, infected by their fear; And everyone, your friends as well as mine, Eager for news, awaits your promised sign.19 Silence greets their impatience; tell me why The stern Seraglio grants them no reply? It’s unwise to delay: you must declare . . . roxane I shall, and you’ll be satisfied, I swear. akhmet Your looks, your voice, and your severity Suggest, despite your words, the contrary. What! have new trials destroyed a love so strong . . . ?

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Bajazet

roxane That traitor Bajazet has lived too long. akhmet The Prince! roxane       To both of us he’s basely lied: We’ve been betrayed.

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akhmet           How so? roxane               This Atalide, Who’s proved a prize unworthy to repay All that you’ve done thus far for Bajazet . . . 20 akhmet Well then? roxane      Read this. After such insolence, Why undertake this treacherous man’s defense? Let’s imitate the just severity Of Amurat, who returns triumphantly, And hastening this base schemer’s execution, Appease my lord by such swift retribution. akhmet [handing back the letter] Yes, since the ingrate has betrayed me so, I will avenge you for this treacherous blow. From both our lives, madame, I’ll wash away The stain his crime has soiled us with today. Show me what path to take: I’m at your call.21

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act iv, scene vii 

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roxane No, Akhmet, let me watch the traitor crawl, See his confusion and enjoy his shame: Vengeance too swift does not deserve the name. You, meanwhile, with all speed, shall go dismiss The assembled throng. I shall attend to this.

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Scene vii [akhmet, osmin] akhmet Stay here, Osmin: I must not leave just yet. osmin What! have love’s transports overwhelmed Akhmet? Why must you push your vengeance further, Sire? You wish to witness Bajazet expire? akhmet What are you saying? Are you so credulous, You think I nurse a wrath so ludicrous? Jealous? I pray that, in his knavery, The imprudent prince has injured only me!

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osmin But, far from taking his side, you agreed . . . akhmet Was she in any state to pay me heed? When I pledged to chastise him, couldn’t you tell I hoped to save us both or die as well? How all my counsels have been undermined! Blind prince! Or, rather, vizier yet more blind! How wise — so old, so honored — to consign Into such youthful hands your grand design,

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Bajazet

And let a vizier’s failure or success Depend upon these lovers’ recklessness! osmin Ah! let them work their anger out, those two. Bajazet wants to die; let’s think of you.22 Who’s privy to the secret plans you’ve laid? Your friends, who’ve sworn they shall not be betrayed. The Prince’s death will soothe the Sultan, Sire. akhmet So Roxane reasons, reckless in her ire. But I see further; years of service tell: The lessons of the throne I’ve learned too well. Growing old ’neath three sultans, I could trace My peers’ swift rise — and swifter fall from grace;23 Only by dint of sheer audacity Can men like me achieve security. When slaves offend, the only compromise Their masters offer is a cruel demise.24

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osmin Fly then. akhmet      I did consider doing so; My plans were less advanced a while ago. But since it’s much too late now to retreat, I’ll make my mark by my sublime defeat, And leave behind such wreckage when I flee As should impede my every enemy. The Prince still lives. Why be dismayed? Somehow I’ve rescued him from tighter straits ere now. In spite of him, let’s save him if we can,25 For us, for our allies — nay, for Roxane. You saw how, sheltering him from any harm,

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act iv, scene vii 

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She tried to hinder my avenging arm. I’m no adept at love, but in this case, Would she condemn a man she would disgrace?26 We still have time; despite her desperate vow, She loves him still and goes to seek him now. osmin Where is such noble rashness leading you? We must depart, if Roxane tells us to. This palace, full of . . . akhmet           Abject slaves, that’s all, Raised far from war, within the palace wall. But you, whose valor Amurat’s forgot, Whose wrongs unite us in one common lot, Will you support me, as you used to do?

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osmin Sire, don’t insult me. Your death means mine too. akhmet A fearless troop of friends and soldiers waits For us to join them at the palace gates. Besides, Roxane believed my words.27 Raised here, Through the Serail’s dark byways I can steer; I know which room belongs to Bajazet. It’s time: let’s go. And if I die today, Then, dear Osmin, let us two meet our end, I, like a vizier, you, like his true friend.

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Bajazet

act v Scene i [atalide, alone] atalide Alas! I’ve searched this room without success. Wretched girl! How I lost it I can’t guess. Heav’n, could you let my fatal love betray My lover’s trust so oft in just one day, And — worse still! — let my rival scrutinize That damning letter, not meant for her eyes? My trembling hand, when I saw her appear, Concealed it in my breast as I stood here. Surprising me in my rapt misery, Her threats, her shouts, that order, troubled me; I felt my senses fade, then I passed out. As I revived, her ladies stood about; Before my startled eyes they fled, dismayed. Ah! too cruel hands which offered me your aid! Your treacherous help’s come at a price too dear: Through you my rival has his letter, I fear. What dire retaliation has she planned? On whom will her vindictive blows first land? To slake her anger, whose blood must be shed? Ah! Bajazet is dying, or is dead! If only I were not incarcerate! — The door is opening. Now I’ll learn his fate. Scene ii [roxane, atalide, zatima] roxane Withdraw!

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act v, scene iii 

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atalide      Please pardon my confusion, I . . . roxane Withdraw, I say! There’s no need to reply. Guards, seize her! Scene iii [roxane, zatima] roxane         Orcan and the mutes await: Their victim is about to meet his fate. Still, I’ve the power to save his life instead, If he stays here. But once he leaves, he’s dead.1 He’s coming? zatima       Yes, a slave escorts him here; And far from guessing that his end is near, He hastened from his room, it seemed to me, And seeks you out, madame, quite eagerly. roxane O craven soul, worthy to be betrayed! Can you endure his presence undismayed? You think with words you can cajole or cow? Were he to yield, could you forgive him now? Shouldn’t you, ere this, have punished one so base? You think you’ve not endured enough disgrace? It’s vain to soften his hard heart, I fear: Better to let him perish . . . Ah! he’s here.

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Bajazet

Scene iv [bajazet, roxane] roxane To hurl reproaches would be frivolous: Why waste in words the scant time left to us?2 You know just what I’ve done, for after all, You live; and what you know need I recall? Despite my love, if you could not love me, I don’t complain; but, speaking candidly, That love, those boons, shouldn’t they have supplemented My feeble charms with which you’re not contented? What stuns me, though, is that, as recompense, My prize for so much love and confidence, You have, by base detours and treachery, Long feigned a love you didn’t feel for me.3

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bajazet Who? I, madame? roxane         Yes, you.4 Would you deny A deep disdain you think I can’t descry? Would you try to disguise, with specious art, The love for someone else that fills your heart, And swear to me, even now, with tongue untrue, The love your Atalide’s inspired in you?

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bajazet Atalide! Heav’ns! Who told you that? I swear . . . roxane Here, traitor, read! Deny this if you dare!

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act v, scene iv 

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bajazet I say no more. This letter, too sincere, Makes our ill-fated, covert love quite clear. You now know what it grieved me to conceal, What, countless times, my heart wished to reveal.5 I love her, I confess; but ere your heart Declared its flame, tearing my hopes apart, Filled with a love I’d felt from infancy, To love another my heart was not free.6 You came, offering me life — the Empire too; And ’twas your love (to be quite frank with you), By your benevolence, your boons, misled, That answered for my feelings in my stead.7 I saw your error, but what could I do? I saw how much that error meant to you. How tempting is a throne to one’s ambition! I saw the advantages of my position. I cherished, and accepted eagerly, This happy chance to escape from slavery; The more so, that I had to agree, or die; The more so, that you wished me to comply, And that your greatest fear was I’d refuse, Having, at that stage, everything to lose, Since, once you’d dared grant me an interview, You risked being exposed if you withdrew. What proof, though, do I need but your complaints? Did you believe my promises and feints? Think how you criticized, time and again, A silence that betrayed my hidden pain.8 The more my glory and your goals entwined, The more my heart rebelliously repined. Heaven, which heard me, knows: the vows I made, In spite of all, I’d never have betrayed; And if kind fate had opened up a field Wherein my gratitude could be revealed,

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I’d have, by glory gained, by foes defied, Repaid your boons and satisfied your pride,9 So that you might . . . roxane           Such offers are well meant; Without your heart, though, could I be content? These fruitless vows: in truth, what could they mean? Have you forgotten who I am? A queen, Entrusted with your life and, more than that, Entrusted with the State by Amurat, Mistress of the Serail and, finally, Sovereign of a heart that loves but me, Such as I vainly hoped your heart would be; Perched on my peak of glory, I’d like to know What shameful honors are yours to bestow? Could I endure so dire a turnaround, Vile castoff of an ingrate whom I’d crowned, Degraded, of a rank with all the rest, Or else my rival’s foremost slave, at best? — Let’s end this interview, since speech is vain; For the last time, say: will you live and reign? I have the order, I can rescue you; But time is short. Decide.

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bajazet             What must I do?

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roxane My rival’s here. Come quickly. Her demise At the mutes’ hands you’ll see with your own eyes.10 Freed from a love that shames and shackles you, Pledge me your faith: the rest trust time to do. Her life for yours, if you will just consent.

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bajazet I’d only do so as your punishment:

act v, scene v 

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97

To let the eyes of all the Empire see The horror that your offer inspires in me. — But am I, blind with rage, provoking you Against the life of my poor lover too? She’s not complicit in the wrath I’ve shown: My crimes, my lies, my love, are mine alone.11 Nay, far from jealously restraining me, She entreated me to wed you — fervently.12 Praising your charms, your generous heart, she’d try, With urgent tears, to coax me to comply. Resolved to sacrifice herself, she thought Her death would clinch the union that you sought.13 In short, though I’m to blame, she’s innocent. Carry out, if need be, my just punishment; Make haste: with Amurat’s decree comply; But don’t force me to curse you as I die. The order names just me, not Atalide:14 Please spare the life of one so sorely tried. You’ve granted many boons; grant this one too. If ever, madame, I was dear to you . . .

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roxane Leave.15 Scene v [roxane, zatima] roxane     Traitor, we shall never meet again. Prepare for condign punishment and pain. zatima Atalide’s here; she begs to clasp your knees And speak to you a moment, if you please, Madame: she has some secret to transmit And claims it’s vital you be apprised of it.

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roxane Yes, bid her come, then follow Bajazet; When he’s dispatched, come tell me right away. Scene vi [roxane, atalide] atalide No longer do I come, with base pretense, To abuse, as I long have, your confidence.16 I know how worthy of your hate I am; I’ve come to bare my heart, my crime, madame. That I’ve deceived you cannot be denied: By my own selfish love preoccupied, I couldn’t obey you; seeing Bajazet, My only thought, I own, was to betray. I’ve loved him from my youth and, ever since, Have done my best to captivate the Prince. His royal mother wished us to be wed, Alas! not knowing what trials lay ahead. You loved him afterwards. It would have been Better for us if only you had seen Into my heart, or if you’d kept yours hid: You wouldn’t have trusted in me as you did! I am not blackening myself this way To vindicate the hapless Bajazet. I swear by heav’n, which sees my suffering, By those great Ottomans from whom I spring, Who, with me, at your knees, suing for grace, Plead for the purest blood to bless their race: By so much beauty and goodness captivated, He would have, soon or late, capitulated.17 Prompted by jealousy, I did my best, With cunning care, to curb his interest; Neglecting naught, not tears, nor tyranny, I even invoked his mother’s memory.

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act v, scene vii 

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99

Indeed, this very day, of days most dire, Reproaching him for granting your desire, Claiming my death would be his punishment, My mad, insistent ardor wouldn’t relent, And, wresting from him oaths of loyalty, Ended by ruining him as well as me.18 But why shouldn’t your beneficence outlast The coldness that he’s shown you in the past? I forced him to it, but you can restore The bonds I sundered, when I am no more. Although my crime demands its penalty, So just a death do not, yourself, decree; Don’t show yourself to that soul, brought so low, Stained with the blood your hands have caused to flow. Spare such a tender heart a shock so great. Madame, let me be mistress of my fate: My death won’t be less swift, you may be sure. Savor the happiness it will procure. Crown this brave prince, who’ll come to love his wife. I shall ensure my death; ensure his life. Go now, madame. Before you reappear, Your love will have no rival it need fear. roxane I don’t deserve a sacrifice so great; What’s due to me, though, I shall demonstrate. Yes, far from keeping you apart, I’ll see You tied together — for eternity.19 You’ll smile upon his charming face ere long. Arise. — But here is Zatima. Scene vii 20 [roxane, atalide, zatima] roxane             What’s wrong?

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zatima Ah! madame, show yourself, or soon, I fear, The rebel Akhmet will be master here! His treacherous friends have forced the gates and gained The sultans’ sanctum — rather say, profaned! Your eunuchs, half of whom have fled, don’t know If he’s still loyal or seeks your overthrow.

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roxane The traitors! Their attack we must repel. Zatima, guard my captive, guard her well. Scene viii [atalide, zatima] atalide Alas! towards whom should my heart be inclined? I’ve no idea what those two have in mind.21 — If, for such grief, some pity you can find, I don’t ask, Zatima, that you betray For my sake Roxane’s secret plans, but say, I beg you, what’s become of Bajazet? You’ve seen the Prince? Is he alive, or no?

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zatima All I can do is take pity on your woe. atalide What? Has Roxane condemned him? Answer me! zatima Madame, I have been sworn to secrecy. atalide Just tell me, wretch, if he’s alive, I pray.

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act v, scene ix 

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101

zatima To do so means my life: I dare not say. atalide Cruel one, don’t let your cruelty stop there: Convince Roxane of your unstinting care And pierce a heart your silence failed to kill, You heartless slave of one more heartless still! Cut short the life she means to tear from me; Prove that you serve your mistress worthily. You cannot keep me here, whate’er you try: Let me go see the Prince or let me die.

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Scene ix [atalide, akhmet, zatima] akhmet Ah! tell me where the Prince can be, I pray! Is there still time to rescue Bajazet? I’ve searched the whole Seraglio. At the gate, My brave friends thought it best to separate: Half went in dauntless Osmin’s company, The others took another route with me. I ran, but only found crowds gripped by fright, Cowering slaves, and women in full flight.

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atalide Ah! you know more about his fate than I. This slave knows. akhmet         Fear my just wrath, wretch. Reply!

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Scene x [atalide, akhmet, zatima, zaïre] zaïre Madame! atalide      Well, what has happened now, Zaïre? zaïre Your enemy is dead: banish your fear. atalide Roxane? zaïre      Prepare to be more stupefied: It was at Orcan’s hands that Roxane died. atalide What! zaïre     Furious that he’d not killed Bajazet, He doubtless wished to claim her as his prey.22

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atalide Just heav’n, you have protected innocence. Bajazet lives! Vizier, go find the Prince. zaïre Osmin knows better exactly what’s occurred: He saw it all.

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103

Scene xi [atalide, akhmet, zaïre, osmin]23 akhmet        It’s true, what we’ve just heard? Roxane is dead? osmin         Yes: haven’t I just seen The assassin draw his dagger from the Queen? Orcan, seeming to serve her, in his guile, Intended to betray her all the while: It was, it seems, the Sultan’s secret plan To sacrifice her lover, then Roxane. We heard Orcan proclaim as we drew near: Adore your master’s order I hold here. His sovereign signet, traitors, recognize. Who lingers in this sacred palace dies!24 With this, leaving his victim where she lay, He put his bloody hand forth to display Amurat’s decree: the fiend’s authorization To carry out this double assassination. But further discourse we considered vain; Carried away at once by rage and pain, For his vile crime we made the monster pay, Shedding his blood to avenge Prince Bajazet. atalide Bajazet! akhmet      What!

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osmin         He’s dead. You didn’t know?

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atalide O heav’n! osmin      His lover, now his furious foe, Fearing you’d rescue him, being near this spot, Consigned him to the bowstring’s fatal knot. I hastened, horrified at this grim sight, To seek some sign of life, however slight; In vain: the Prince was dead. Then we espied The dead and dying foes whom he’d defied: This hero, though outnumbered and waylaid, Had forced them to accompany his shade.25 But since he’s dead, Sire, you must think of us. akhmet Harsh fate, to me you’ve proved so ruinous! [to Atalide] I know the Prince’s death leaves you prostrate; I know, madame, that in your present state It’s not for me to offer you today The aid of these few wretches whose hopes lay, Not in themselves, but in Prince Bajazet. Crushed by the news that my dear friend is dead, I go — but not to save this guilty head; Beholden to my poor friends’ bravery, I shall defend their lives tenaciously, Lives which they saw fit to entrust to me. But if you’d flee to some far-distant shore, Then let us save your sacred blood, I implore; The palace, madame, now is in our hands; My faithful friends will follow your commands; And I, to use this time most gainfully,

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Shall run to where they have most need of me. But, ’neath the ramparts, which the sea waves beat, Where my swift vessels stand prepared, we’ll meet. Final Scene [atalide, zaïre] atalide Now all is at an end;26 my perfidy, My unjust doubts, my fatal jealousy, Have brought me to this pass: I realize ’Twas my crime that caused Bajazet’s demise. Cruel destiny, are you so unforgiving That I, condemned, alas! to go on living, Must bear, to crown my grief, the endless shame That for my lover’s death I am to blame? Yes, my dear prince, your death is due to me, Not Roxane’s rage nor Amurat’s decree. ’Twas I alone who wove the fatal cord Whose odious coils choked off your life, my lord.27 Tormented by such thoughts, can I survive The knowledge that you’re no longer alive? I who, when told of your impending death, Was robbed of reason and bereft of breath! Ah! for what purpose did I love you so? Was it to bring about your overthrow? No, it’s too much. To avenge your death this hand Must promptly shed the blood my crimes demand. — Heroes, whose peace I have disturbed today, Who should have been reborn in Bajazet; Mother, who pledged our hearts in infancy, Wishing our love a happier destiny; Hapless Roxane, unfortunate Vizier, Desperate friends: come now, confront me here; Torment this frenzied lover, all of you,

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And take, at last, the vengeance you are due. [She kills herself.] zaïre Ah! madame . . . She is dead. Heav’n! in my grief, Can I not, dying too, find some relief ?

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bajazet: notes and commentary

act i 1. The first sentence (“Viens, suis-moi,” meaning “Come, follow me,” which I have telescoped as “This way”) is an invitation to the audience to explore the exotic milieu of the Turkish Seraglio (or Serail). The dark, tortuous route one must take requires a guide familiar with its twists and turns. Unfortunately for Osmin and the other characters, Akhmet will prove to be a blind guide. 2. Byzantium is the ancient name for the city that Emperor Constantine I would rebuild and rename Constantinople in ad 330. Although Racine indicates that the scene is set at Constantinople, he refers to it as “Byzance” in the play itself: shorter, more elegant, and easier to rhyme, Byzance is the rhyme word in Racine’s line, as Byzantium is in mine. 3. Racine, to heighten the exoticism of an action based on actual events that took place so recently, prefers to the somewhat prosaic Baghdad the less correct but more mysterious Babylone. (Ancient Babylon was, in fact, situated on the Euphrates River, while Baghdad is on the Tigris.) Furthermore, Babylone, like Byzance (see preceding note), is easier to rhyme in French, as Babylon is in English. The Siege of Baghdad took place in 1638, a mere thirty-four years before the first performance of Bajazet. 4. These four lines are of crucial import. The principals, as well as the audience, will be kept in suspense throughout three-quarters of the play about an outcome that has already been determined before the rise of the curtain. In Wagner’s Parsifal there is a famous and profound line: “Du siehst, mein Sohn: zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (You see, my son: here time becomes space). In Bajazet, the opposite phenomenon applies: the

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distance separating Babylon (Baghdad) from Constantinople (Istanbul: see note 7 below) translates into a time rift of several months between far-off events and the characters’ knowledge of them. 5. The janissaries (derived from the Turkish for “new militia”) were an elite group of soldiers, organized in the fourteenth century, attached to the sultan’s person, similar to the Russian Streltsy (musketeers) who protected the czar. 6. Since the janissaries had recently revolted, assassinating Amurat’s older brother Osman, the sultan is amply justified in being wary of their power. See note 6 for Act II. 7. Istanbul is the Turkish name for Constantinople; here, it stands in for Racine’s Byzance. See note 2 above. 8. The French has “l’Euxin” (the Euxine, referring to the Black Sea). This casual reference to an order that conveniently disposed of this troublesome slave effectively evokes the ruthless disregard for life that Racine would have us believe is distinctively characteristic of the Ottoman ethos. 9. The title of sultaness was traditionally reserved for those who had provided the sultan with an heir. 10. This will prove to be, historically if not dramatically, another instance of Akhmet’s shortsightedness, since Ibrahim later succeeded his brother Amurat as sultan. 11. This description is belied by the character as he appears in the play. Perhaps Racine has Akhmet stress Bajazet’s heroic qualities because they barely manifest themselves to the audience. In his second preface, Racine claims he has “taken care to make a great distinction between the passion of Bajazet and the tenderer feelings of his lovers [Atalide and Roxane]. He retains in the midst of his love the ferocity of his nation.” Against this assertion, Martin Turnell protests: “It would be difficult to imagine a less convincing description of Bajazet” (Turnell, 156). Roland Barthes reads Bajazet’s indolence as a subverted masculinity: Bajazet is of an indeterminate, inverted sex, transformed from a man into a woman. . . . The Seraglio inverts him, even physically: Bajazet is a male confined in a female milieu where he is the only man. He is a drone who is fed and fattened by Roxane for his genital power. . . . But above all, his sexual ambiguity results from the fact that he is a prostituted male: Bajazet is handsome, he gives himself to Roxane in order to obtain something from her, he openly employs his beauty as an exchange value. It is this totally parasitical state that desexualizes Bajazet. (Barthes, 99 –100) In short, his passive posture throughout the play (where his behavior is always a response to the conflicting pressures exerted by Roxane and

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Atalide) exactly exemplifies “la molle oisiveté” (literally, the soft idleness) that Akhmet claims Bajazet despises. 12. Roxane, though nominally in a position of authority in the Seraglio, is, no less than Bajazet, a prisoner of the “jealous scrutiny” that operates even when the sultan is away. 13. The vizier, though completely hoodwinked by this two-layered subterfuge on the part of Bajazet and Atalide (he “pretends” to be courting her to protect Roxane, but their mutual love is quite real), takes smug satisfaction in assuring Osmin that he is “in the know.” As for the reward he is led to expect for his efforts, it will become apparent that they have no intention of fulfilling their part of the bargain. 14. That is, Bajazet will not dare molest someone whose wife boasts the blood of the royal house of Othman (founder of the Ottoman line). 15. Akhmet makes the same point later (IV.vii.27–32)  to Osmin, about the tenuousness of his position. 16. These are the “muftis” (from the Arabic for “a person who delivers a judgment”), the Muslim jurists, experts in religious law. 17. Muhammad’s standard, which bore the motto “Help is from God.” 18. According to Georges Forestier (1513), “This was the motive for the revolt of 1622 against Osman: he had wanted to ‘transporter son Trône et sa présence’ to Egypt.” 19. Turnell observes about Roxane: “What makes her for all her savagery a moving and at times a pathetic figure is . . . her very genuine desire to become an ‘honest woman,’ to quit the ranks of the court strumpets by ridding herself of the odious Amurat and marrying the amiable, normal and slightly ‘wet’ Bajazet” (Turnell, 155). 20. She makes a similar point later: “Nay, when this ingrate [Bajazet] had me in his thrall, / His brother’s favors did I once recall?” (III.vii.26 –27). Thus, both before and after her introduction to Bajazet, Roxane feels scant gratitude toward the sultan. 21. A subtle employment by Racine of his characteristic dramatic irony. We have already learned from Akhmet of Bajazet’s hidden agenda: “Bajazet’s charming. To survive, he knew / He had to please her — and was able to” (I.i.157–58). 22. Compare the taunt she later hurls directly at Bajazet: “Your heart, wretch, I no longer wish to win. / Return to the dark void I found you in” (II.i.105 – 6). 23. The first words Atalide bursts out with after Roxane has left, “c’en est fait” (it’s all over), recur at several key points in the play. (“C’en est fait” occurs seven times, “c’en est donc fait” [thus it is all over] occurs once, in the last scene of the play; not all these occurrences, however, carry such pivotal significance.) Raymond Picard (1120) points out that at each such critical stage of the action a character recognizes that a choice has been

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made between what Picard calls “the two terms of the tragic alternative,” which are pithily implied in Atalide’s remark later in this scene: “I’d sooner see him wed to her than dead” (line 67). The fluctuating choices Bajazet makes between those alternatives (marriage to Roxane and death) are what drive the action of the play. But since the fate of the protagonists has been sealed from the outset (see note 4 above), such agonized tergiversations will prove to have been pointless. As Ronald W. Tobin puts it: “If ever there were a lesson on the futility of human action, it is Bajazet” (Tobin, 100). 24. That is, her only consolation will be in Bajazet’s saving his life by marrying Roxane, which will, of course, lead to her own despair. 25. A parallel situation arises in Mithridates, Racine’s next play: there, the predicament of the heroine, Monima, is that, having been in love with Xiphares for years, she is appropriated for marriage by Xiphares’ father, Mithridates, King of Pontus. In both cases, a ruler lays claim to someone whose affections are already bespoken by someone else; only the sexual configuration is different — that is, reversed — which confirms the aggressive, masculine role Roxane plays and the passive, feminine aspect of Bajazet’s character. See note 11 above. 26. This harks back to Roxane’s pointed words to Atalide in the previous scene: “I want his face, his features, to impart — / Undimmed by doubt — what’s hidden in his heart” (I.iii.73 –74). 27. Cf.  Iphigenia’s similar invocation: “Strike now, just heav’n, end life, end agony; / Let fly your shafts, but aim them all at me” (Iphigenia V.ii.100 –101).

act ii 1. See note 16 for Act I. 2. Cf. Iphigenia’s exhortation to Achilles: “Think of the glory you will reap, my lord. . . . Think of the glorious fields to which you fly” (Iphigenia V.ii.26, 28). 3. The Bajazet to whom she refers is not the eponymous character of this play, but his forebear Bajazet I, defeated and captured at Ankara in 1402 by the “barbarian” Tamerlane, Tartar emperor (1336?–1405), most famously immortalized in Christopher Marlowe’s epic drama Tamburlaine the Great. At the end of Part One of that play Bajazeth (as Marlowe spells it) and his wife, Zabina, “brain themselves” (as the stage directions read) against the bars of their cage. 4. Suleiman I (“the Magnificent”) reigned from 1520 to 1566. 5. These historical conquests (“The Danube’s banks laid waste” refers to the fall of Belgrade and of Buda)  took place in the 1520s and 1530s; the reference to the conquest of Africa, according to Forestier (1515), “is

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probably an allusion to the conquests of Algeria and Tunisia by Turkish pirates.” 6. See notes 6 and 18 for Act I. Racine elaborates in his second preface: “Sultan Amurat, or Sultan Morat, emperor of the Turks, he who captured Babylon [i.e., Baghdad] in 1638, had four brothers. The first, namely Osman, was emperor before him and reigned for about three years, at the end of which the janissaries deprived him of both his empire and his life.” 7. Forestier (1515), amplifying on the janissaries’ “justification,” points out that “Osman, not content with having married one of his concubines, the Sultaness Chaszeki, of Russian birth, had been planning to take three additional lawful spouses.” 8. But with this love, his life will effectively be over anyway, since, as Picard (1120) observes, “Roxane offers him life only to take away all desire and all reason for living — therein lies the tragedy.” 9. Racine, somewhat surprisingly, has Roxane adopt the familiar form of address (tu as opposed to vous — a usage with no equivalent in modern English), which usually connotes greater intimacy, but here suggests some degree of self-abasement. Where we might have expected Roxane to assume that form of address (as Hermione does in Act IV of Andromache, when she makes an abject avowal of her love for Pyrrhus), namely, when she makes an abject avowal of her love for Bajazet (line 121 below), Racine has her resume the more formal mode, only to have her revert once more to the familiar form at the beginning of her next speech. This veering between the formal and the familiar will recur in the last encounter between Bajazet and Roxane (V.iv). 10. Cf. I.iii.67– 68. 11. Roxane exasperatedly refers to Bajazet in the third person, a rhetorical maneuver to which people still — furiously or facetiously —  frequently resort. 12. This is the second of Picard’s “paliers de l’action” (stages of the action), marked again by “c’en est fait.” See note 22 for Act I. At this stage, Bajazet has chosen, from the two equally “tragic alternatives,” the one that allows him to remain faithful to Atalide, but ensures his death. 13. While this couplet would lead one to believe that a certain laxity and licentiousness, signaled at the very beginning of the play by the Seraglio’s doors standing wide open (I.i.3 –4), has previously prevailed and will now abruptly cease, in truth, that openness was merely illusory. As suggested in the last two sentences of note 23 for Act I, the characters have been, in effect, prisoners in the Seraglio since before the play opens, with no chance of escape, their fates already determined before the play begins. Of course, this is true of all of Racine’s protagonists, whose overpowering emotions foredoom them, but here that doom is externalized in the form of the Sultan Amurat, who has already sealed their fate. Likewise, when the

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reliably unreliable Akhmet later reports that “the doors of the Serail now opened wide” (III.ii.35), the potential freedom implied thereby will also prove to have been illusory. (See note 7 for Act III.) And for the duration of the play, a claustrophobic atmosphere will prevail, marked by images of closure and suffocation (including Atalide’s fainting fit in IV.iii), and culminating in the final tightening of the bowstring’s “odious coils” (V.fin.sc.12), which choke the life out of Bajazet. 14. There is a comic quality to this scene, as Bajazet, constrained to account to Akhmet for having rejected Roxane’s offer of marriage, and unable to confess the real reason (namely, that he is in love with Atalide), attempts to deflect the vizier’s arguments for his acceding to Roxane’s demands, fabricating desperate and specious explanations for his refusal, some of which he has already offered to Roxane in the previous scene. 15. Othman, or Osman I (1259 –1326, ruled from 1299 till his death), was the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. The French has “le sang des Ottomans” (the blood of the Ottomans). 16. If we do not regard this declaration as merely another dodge of Bajazet’s to fend off Akhmet’s forensic onslaught, we may perhaps find in it a more noble aspect of Bajazet’s character, namely, “the Islamic concept of izzet (a combination of private integrity and public repute), corresponding roughly to the French seventeenth-century conception of gloire,” as Samuel Solomon defines it (Racine, 6). But gloire is seldom the motivating force for Racine’s heroes that it is for those of Pierre Corneille, his older rival. 17. This exchange (lines 29 –35) is especially droll: Bajazet has been backed into a corner by Akhmet’s relentless arguments, and the latter’s perfectly reasonable query proves the final straw for Bajazet, who attempts to put a stop to the interrogation by abruptly changing the subject. 18. Bajazet very nearly makes a faux pas here: about to reveal his “one regret,” namely, that he must leave Atalide, he deftly sidesteps and pretends that it is his concern for “those generous hearts” that has caused him to choke up. 19. See note 16 for Act I. 20. The Adrianople Gate. 21. This line recalls Atalide’s earlier line (I.iv.3): “The only hope I have is in despair.” See note 23 for Act I. Here, the sense is that Bajazet, out of sheer desperation, will somehow be able to fend off his attackers. Forestier (1516) points out that the following couplet prefigures the denouement of the play, for in Act V Akhmet will, in fact, “force the Seraglio’s portals” (line 57 above), but as Akhmet predicts (lines 65 – 66 below), he will arrive too late to save Bajazet. 22. This Machiavellian observation is, according to Forestier (1516), an example of the Ottoman mores Racine gleaned from his researches. We may wonder, however, exactly how “exotic” such an attitude could have

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seemed even for Racine’s audience. Today, such an instance of Realpolitik would not raise an eyebrow. 23. Once again, Bajazet seems to be stirred by a sense of izzet (see note 16 above), yet he spends most of the play trying to redeem his life by perfidious means. 24. This is the comic climax of this scene: the “wily” vizier has been entirely duped by Bajazet and bursts out with these grandiloquent but fatuous encomiums. 25. See note 8 above. Bajazet’s choice lies between Picard’s “tragic alternatives”: if he loses Atalide, he loses life, or at least all reason for living; if he loses life, he just as surely loses Atalide. 26. This is one of several instances where Bajazet and Atalide vie for who can be the more altruistic. This underlying dynamic is one of the chief engines driving their encounters. 27. Atalide’s proposal (whereby Bajazet “can live and yet need not betray / Atalide’s trust” [lines 63 – 64 above]), which she announces as if it were some inspired new stratagem, is really nothing of the sort, being basically the same one they have been employing all along to deceive Roxane: a stratagem that involved Bajazet’s letting her believe he returned her love, and his offering vague promises of a more tangible commitment and vague prospects of some distant consummation of their relationship. 28. This is a pre-echo of Roxane’s equivocal but grim assurance to Atalide: “Yes, far from keeping you apart, I’ll see / You tied together — for eternity” (V.vi.53 –54). 29. The meaning of this couplet is: You (“your frightened eyes”) shall soon be a witness to my death, just as you, by revealing the truth to Roxane, would have had me witness the “bloody spectacle” of your death. This is a reversal of the “altruism competition” (see note 26 above): here it becomes a contest to determine who can cause the other greater pain. 30. Picard (1121) refers to this manipulative maneuver on Atalide’s part as “a sort of magnanimous blackmail to save her lover in spite of himself.”

act iii 1. This tellingly suggests the recurring pattern of Atalide’s emotional responses: no sooner has Bajazet carried out her injunctions than a reaction sets in and her irrepressible jealousy takes over; this, in turn, is followed by her attempt to fool herself into believing that she is perfectly satisfied with the present state of affairs. 2. It seems appropriate that Atalide couches this attempt to subdue her jealous feelings in the form of an apostrophe (running through line 32)  to an abstracted, independent entity, since they are completely out

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of her control. As we shall see, her attempts to browbeat those “jealous thoughts” into submission fail miserably. 3. The view that death, by putting an end to suffering, is welcome, is voiced by many of Racine’s characters. (Cf. Bajazet’s similar view: II.iii.42.) Picard (1121) observes: “It is not in death that the tragedy resides: death is more often merely the consequence of the tragedy.” To corroborate that view he points ahead to Roxane’s Act IV monologue, in which she compares her own agonizing doubts about Bajazet’s fidelity with the fears of Atalide, who, being sure of his love (or so Roxane believes), need worry only about his life: “Free from those doubts by which I am dismayed, / It’s only for his life that she’s afraid” (IV.iv.17–18). In that case, of course, the death involved is not one’s own but that of the beloved. But it would be fair to say that, in general, Racine’s inamoratas and inamoratos would prefer to see the object of their passion dead than in love with someone else. Indeed, Atalide’s declaration that “I’d sooner see him wed to her than dead” (I.iv.67) is sheer self-delusion, since, when faced with the near-certain prospect of his marrying Roxane, she reacts in such a way as succeeds in precipitating Bajazet’s death. See note 2 for Act  V and Section VIII of the Discussion. 4. This will prove to be another instance of Akhmet’s complacent cluelessness. Like Roxane, he has good reason to wish that the “lovers” be reconciled, if not good reason to believe that they are. Roxane, of course, is blinded by passion, but what is Akhmet blinded by? 5. In these three lines Racine has perfectly caught Atalide’s discomfiture: she must first respond to Akhmet’s pompous protestations, which she does with polite but curt temporizing, before she can ask the question she is burning to have answered, and one can almost hear the affected nonchalance with which she poses it. 6. Cf.  IV.vii.18, where he again rails against “lovers’ recklessness”; and he seems to have the same two lovers in mind when he does so, notwithstanding that the clandestine relationship between Atalide and Bajazet has just been revealed to him by Roxane. 7. Forestier (1518) asserts that this vessel waiting in the port is “structurally, essential: up to the end, it provides a real means of escape from the mortal menace which the Sultan dangles over the hero’s head.” Thus, he finds, it belies the notion of a “Racinian fatality” akin to the classical “destiny”: the hero is always free to determine his fate. From a pragmatic point of view, such a possibility exists, but dramatically, psychologically, it does not, for the very reason that it is pragmatic. Akhmet, the embodiment of pragmatism, is swayed by no irrational, uncontrollable passions, as is made explicit in the text. Twice he inveighs against “lovers’ recklessness” (see previous note) and twice he derides the idea of his own susceptibility to any amorous passion (I.i.179 – 82 and IV.vii.5 – 8). Bajazet, by contrast, is

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prey to an indomitable passion, albeit that “passion” is his passiveness. (See the last paragraph of my Discussion.) Throughout the play he is depicted as too passive, too willfully imprisoned, even to wish to break free. The drama of the play is not meant to depend on the question of whether or not the “hero” will gain his freedom. The prospect of escape that Akhmet dangles before Bajazet’s eyes should register as no less impracticable, no less chimerical, than the vision of Moscow for Chekhov’s three sisters. The escape option seems more a commentary, even a judgment, on Akhmet’s character: he is too shallow psychologically to be constrained by anything but practical concerns, and in that sense he is quite un-Racinian. We almost despise him for not being doomed by his own character, and Racine seems to share that scorn: unusually, we are never apprised of his fate. Does he escape? Does he die fighting off the sultan’s minions? To the extent that he always had the option of escaping, it is insignificant whether he does or not. 8. That the doors of the Serail open once again to admit Akhmet, after Roxane’s earlier fiat that “the Serail be closed forevermore” (II.ii.4), confirms the point made in the prior note: not being a prisoner of his passions, Akhmet, at least, is free to come and go as he pleases. See note 13 for Act II. 9. To point up, subtly but tellingly, both the vizier’s fatuity and his fallibility, Racine deliberately echoes his self-satisfied “faithful narration” (“récit fidèle”) later in the play (IV.i.29), when Atalide rails against that very same account, a “false report” (“récit menteur”), as it has proved, which provoked her to turn on Bajazet, to his ruin. 10. Atalide, like her rival, can devise arguments to convince herself that Bajazet is faithful or faithless, as occasion prompts. (Cf.  Roxane’s monologue [III.vii], in which her thoughts careen from doubt to assurance and back again.) It is significant that in the play bearing his name Bajazet is given no soliloquies or monologues, no self-revelatory moments of introspection. (The same applies to the titular characters in The Fratricides.) This is quite in keeping with the nature of his personality: he is completely passive and, thus, has no need to wrestle with himself in coming to any decisions. The two women in his life — about whose feelings he never entertains any doubts — make all his decisions for him: Atalide composes his dialogue for his scenes with Roxane, and if he forgets some of his lines, Roxane herself acts as his prompter. One might also take as “symptomatic” of his passivity the fact that, unlike Roxane and Atalide, who appear in all five acts of the play, Bajazet does not appear in either Act I or Act IV (and his role, accordingly, comprises significantly fewer lines than either woman’s, indeed, significantly fewer than Akhmet’s as well); though perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that for all that his actions affect the outcome of the play, he might as well not appear at all. 11. Here is the third of Picard’s “stages.” See note 22 for Act I and note 12 for Act II. It recalls Orestes’ line to Hermione: “Madame, it’s done.

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Your vengeance has been served” (Andromache V.iii.1). In both cases, these guileless men misguidedly believe that their having carried out their lovers’ orders will win their thanks, which accounts for the surprise Bajazet registers at the end of his speech (line 15). 12. The segue from “I sacrifice my life without regret” to “It’s true, if heav’n had heard my prayers and sighs” is typical of the resourceful, manipulative, and, as we can now confidently diagnose her, passive-aggressive Atalide, who develops the niggling “but” implied in “It’s true” with masterful rhetoric. 13. Confirming the point made in note 9 above, Bajazet testifies that Roxane in effect spoke for him (as he reaffirms in V.iv.30 –32). 14. Having goaded Bajazet into a determination to be honest with Roxane, Atalide once again “yanks his chain.” Her sudden volte-face and breathless admonition delivered just before Roxane’s entrance would not be out of place in a more comic context. (Indeed, if Iphigenia might be termed a tragedy with a happy ending, Bajazet sometimes seems like a comedy with a tragic ending.) 15. The meaning here is, that her determination to have him executed, prompted by her thwarted love, has been annulled by that same love for him, which she now believes is requited. 16. One can imagine Bajazet’s intense discomfiture: confronted, for the first and only time in this play, by Roxane and Atalide, and wishing to heed the latter’s desperate parting injunction not to let Roxane learn the truth (III.iv.71–72), but fearing to appear too ardent in his declarations to Roxane, lest he, still reeling from Atalide’s jealous tirade, should provoke her into launching another, Bajazet resorts to the same lukewarm professions of gratitude that infuriated Roxane earlier (II.i.94 –100). 17. One can sympathize with Roxane in her utter disbelief that that earlier scene of Bajazet’s mealy-mouthed temporizing (see prior note) is being reenacted here. Such a surreal recurrence is the stuff of nightmares, and it drives Roxane to the verge of madness. 18. Throughout this scene Atalide resorts to “damage control.” Unfortunately for Atalide, Roxane, gullible as she has been heretofore, is not so easily duped this time, as she herself affirms later in this scene (line 28): “I’m not so blind as you may think I am.” 19. I have inserted an additional line between the first and second lines of Racine’s somewhat elliptical couplet, turning it into a tercet, in order to provide a smoother logical flow and clarify Racine’s meaning. The seemingly cogent argument Roxane puts forward in this tercet and in the couplet that follows, providing her rhetorical questions with an implicitly reassuring answer, reckons without one important circumstance, namely, Atalide’s pathological jealousy. Had she factored that in, the answers to her questions might not have been so reassuring. For with Atalide standing

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right there — Atalide, who had just put the fear of god into him — Bajazet was too terrorized to have “kept up the charade” even “for one more moment.” 20. Roxane demonstrates great astuteness and self-awareness when she realizes the congruity between the Amurat-Roxane-Bajazet triangle and the Roxane-Bajazet-Atalide triangle. 21. Just at the moment when Roxane’s ruminations have led her to the truth (“Yes, clearly . . .”), her thoughts are deflected by the intrusion of her servant Zatima with her disturbing news.

act iv 1. In Racine’s oeuvre we can find examples of virtually all the various occasions that offered the classical dramatist the opportunity to diverge from the strict progression of alexandrine couplets. In this play there are two letters: this one, and another later in this act (IV.iii.21–28); Act V of The Fratricides opens with Antigone’s stanzaic elegy; that play and Iphigenia both feature oracular pronouncements couched in brief, unusual verse forms; each of Esther’s three acts concludes with an elaborate choral ode, intended to be sung; the first four acts of Athaliah conclude with choral odes as well, and in Act III the High Priest Jehoiada’s trancelike prophetic utterances are delivered, to an instrumental accompaniment, in two complexly rhymed stanzas. 2. Atalide accuses Bajazet of not understanding her, but he understands her better than she does herself. The confidence suggested by her rhetorical questions is belied by the fluctuating belief in Bajazet’s love for her that she has manifested in the preceding three acts, a belief veering back and forth between doubt, denial, and tentative conviction. 3. Atalide expects him to persuade Roxane of a love he does not feel, when he has not been able to persuade Atalide herself of a love he does feel. 4. Here is another apostrophe to abstract concepts. See III.i.26 –32 and note 2 for Act III. (The “false report” is the purblind Akhmet’s steamy account of Bajazet’s reconciliation with Roxane [III.ii.26 –46], a report which so aroused Atalide’s jealousy that she goaded Bajazet into a fatal display of indifference toward Roxane [III.v.15 –20].) By thus externalizing her emotions, by linking them with the “false report” as things equally out of her control, she seems to be shifting the blame away from herself; at the same time, she is voicing a Racinian truth: that the passions are as little under one’s control as the vagaries of circumstance. 5. In this rueful backward glance, Atalide recalls that brief period of equilibrium between Picard’s “two terms of the tragic alternative,” when Bajazet was neither irrevocably committed to marrying Roxane nor

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irrevocably condemned to death by her. Of course, as the play demonstrates, the nearly impossible feat of simultaneously satisfying both these importunate women could only be sustained momentarily. 6. “These words” refers to the letter she has just read. 7. Atalide attempts to turn this disastrous reversal to Bajazet’s advantage. 8. That is, the distress visible on Atalide’s face when she learned of Bajazet’s impending death now convinces Roxane, to her sorrow, of their mutual love. 9. In other words, Atalide, being certain of Bajazet’s love for her, only has to worry about whether he lives or dies. See note 3 for Act III. 10. Roxane’s hope, that Bajazet’s proving faithless to her will make his betrayal of Atalide a likely outcome, recalls the (cautionary rather than hopeful) words of Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, to Othello, his new sonin-law: “She has deceived her father, and may thee” (Othello I.iii.290). 11. This is one of the rare instances of a crucial “prop” in Racine’s plays. (The sword Hippolytus leaves with Phaedra is another.) It is appropriate that it should be Atalide who, having enjoined Bajazet on so many occasions to be discreet, to keep his feelings for her a secret from Roxane, and to persuade Roxane that he reciprocates her love, cannot, finally, keep hidden within her breast (literally) their clandestine love. It is as if those jealous feelings she had been trying to suppress (even attempting to browbeat them into submission: III.i.26 –32) could not be satisfied until they had not only incited Bajazet to indite an explicit declaration of his love for her, but had, in addition, ensured that Roxane would thereby discover that it was Atalide whom Bajazet loved, not Roxane. Such a subconscious stratagem is consistent with the passive-aggressive personality she has manifested elsewhere. (See note 12 for Act III.) Furthermore, it confirms that, in Racine’s world, for the passionate lover, the certainty that one’s love is reciprocated is paramount to all other concerns, even the safety of the beloved. See note 3 for Act III. 12. Cf. Orestes’ outburst when he learns of the death of Hermione: Thank heav’n for such unhoped-for misery! I praise you, Gods, for your tenacity. With constant care to aggravate my pain, The height of grief you’ve helped me to attain. (Andromache V.fin.sc.31–34) Whereas Roxane, a far more savage personality than Orestes, may well feel a momentary fierce exhilaration, born of the appetizing prospect (now that her doubts have finally been resolved, albeit unfavorably) of vengeful retaliation, Orestes’ sardonic, ironic paean to the gods reflects nothing but bitter despair.

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13. Forestier (1520) points out that Roxane “has gone from the dagger [IV.iv.40 –41], the weapon of personal vengeance, to the noose, the instrument of execution.” 14. A grim apothegm, neatly epitomizing the (supposedly)  exotic, barbarous mores of the Serail. For another, see IV.vii.31–32. 15. Racine deftly suggests Roxane’s abstraction. Undoubtedly brooding about the decision she has just made to condemn Bajazet, and already having misgivings, she has evidently not heard a single syllable of her slave’s previous speech, her only significant “solo” in the whole play. Venturing beyond the bounds of mere reply or reportage, Zatima has dared to interject her “one timid word” (line 36). 16. Racine deleted lines 53 –56 for the 1697 edition. Perhaps he felt their epigrammatic quality was at odds with the turbulence of Roxane’s stream of thought. I have thought them worthy of reinstatement, first, because they offer another instance of Roxane’s keen self-awareness, her recognition that she met Bajazet more than halfway in his attempts to deceive her, and, second, because her supposition that he must have “often blushed to contemplate / How small a lie deceived a love so great” is certainly correct and demonstrates a better understanding of Bajazet’s character than Atalide has ever shown. 17. Her remark is based on what she has just read in Bajazet’s letter: “But I’ll take care to safeguard the existence / Of one whose days you swear are dear to yours” (IV.i.15 –16). 18. Again, Racine signals Roxane’s prior self-absorption. See note 15 above. 19. Presumably, the “promised sign” is “the Prophet’s banner” referred to in I.ii.27. See note 17 for Act I. 20. This is a reference to the arrangement Akhmet had with Bajazet and Atalide, namely, that “to induce me to support their side, / They’ve promised me the hand of Atalide” (I.i.177–78). Akhmet reminded Atalide of it earlier (III.ii.11–12). 21. This is all a pretense on Akhmet’s part (as he will explain to Osmin at the beginning of the next scene), an attempt to preempt the punishment of Bajazet with the view of rescuing him. 22. Earlier, Bajazet had offered Akhmet the same advice: “Vizier, think of yourself, I caution you. / Don’t count on me: do what you have to do” (II.iii.7– 8). 23. According to Forestier (1520), “Under the reign of Amurat alone, seven grand viziers out of nine were either put to death (four of them) or dismissed (the other three).” 24. Another evocation of the brutal realities of the Turkish court. (Cf. IV.v.45 –46.) 25. The “in spite of him” is another indication that escape for Bajazet was never a real option. See note 7 for Act III.

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26. The sense here is that Roxane would hardly bother to disgrace or humiliate a man she had earmarked for summary execution. But whatever Roxane’s ulterior intention may have been, her avowed intention, as communicated to Akhmet, seems to have lost something in his transmission of it to Osmin. For Roxane, after expressing her desire to “see his confusion and enjoy his shame” (IV.vi.31), explained why she wished to do so (and here Akhmet’s attention must have wandered): “Vengeance too swift does not deserve the name” (IV.vi.31). That is to say, she gave Akhmet to understand — but, as we have observed, understanding is not his forte — that she considered it very much worth the bother to humiliate Bajazet before having him killed. It is typical, too, of Akhmet’s self-satisfied obtuseness that, after admitting that he is “no adept at love,” he, in the same breath, “dares answer for it” (as the French translates) that Bajazet has not been condemned. And, indeed, however correct his assertion may be that “she loves him still,” Roxane’s love proves, in the end, to be no obstacle to her condemning its object. But although Akhmet’s sanguine supposition is belied by the event (as so many of his suppositions, conjectures, and convictions are), we must allow that the question of what Roxane’s true intentions are at this fateful moment is one that would challenge a far more astute and probing mind than Akhmet’s. For my admittedly tentative examination of the complex psychological dynamics at play in that final confrontation between Bajazet and Roxane, see note 2 for Act V. 27. Whether or not Roxane believed his words (that he would avenge her “for this treacherous blow” and “wash away / The stain his crime has soiled us with” [IV.vi.26 –28]), she — still determined to provoke a final éclaircissement with Bajazet — refused to release him into Akhmet’s custody, so Akhmet’s impromptu lie would appear to have done Bajazet’s cause no good.

act v 1. The menace in this line will find its consummation at the climax of the next scene (V.iv.102). See note 15 below. 2. One wonders what other use Roxane imagines they might make of “the scant time left to us,” but, be that as it may, they proceed to waste quite a few words, their duologue going on for several pages. And the reason it does so is that her interview with Bajazet is still, as I suggested earlier (see note 26 for Act IV), a negotiation, an ongoing dialogue, a parley to discuss terms. Like the question of whether a Racinian character would not rather die than go on suffering, the question of whether a Racinian character would not rather see the object of his or her love dead than have to suffer the pain of seeing that object in love with, or wedded to, a rival,

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is one that arises time and again in Racine’s plays. Indeed, in this play, it arises three times, as a consequence of there being two romantic triangles, overlapping but congruent (Roxane-Bajazet-Atalide and Amurat-RoxaneBajazet). I will discuss below Roxane’s ambivalence about sentencing Bajazet, whom she loves so desperately, to death. But even Atalide, in one of her scenes with Bajazet, admits to a similar ambivalence on her part: And when, as sometimes happened, I would find My happy rival’s face haunting my mind, Your death (excuse a lover’s frenzied state) Didn’t seem to me the cruelest blow of fate. (II.v.21–24) Amurat, too, forming the vertex of one of these triangles, is placed in a position in which, theoretically at least, the recurrent Racinian question under discussion might arise for him. Of course, since no one — neither characters nor audience — takes his feelings into account (and not only, or even principally, because he never actually appears onstage), one tends to forget the second romantic triangle. We can reasonably surmise, however, that his stand on this question, would, in any case, be quite unequivocal; as Zatima warns Roxane: “A swift death, when the case is this severe, / Is just what proves he held his victim dear” [IV.v.45 –46]. But to return to Roxane’s dilemma — if it is a dilemma. Notwithstanding that, by the time this scene unfolds, Roxane has received incontrovertible proof that Bajazet’s love is irretrievably attached elsewhere (and could Bajazet have been any more explicit? — “I never will aver,  / Though faced with death and urged by you, that I love her, / Since I will always love no one but you” [IV.v.18 –20]), we are not meant to suppose that Roxane opens the proceedings, certain in her own mind that they are a mere formality and that Bajazet is already well and truly doomed. And as the scene unfolds, we seem to be witnessing, as I suggested at the top of this note, a negotiation whose outcome is in suspense. I believe, however, that Roxane, exemplary Racinian heroine that she is, is determined (or, more accurately, predetermined — by her passions) that she would rather see her lover dead than in love with someone else (a determination she shares with Atalide, every bit as exemplary in this regard as Roxane: see note 3 for Act III and note 11 for Act IV); and that it is her subconscious purpose to present him with an ultimatum so extreme — one that on some level even she recognizes as being beyond the pale — that, by Bajazet’s failure to comply with it, she will be left with no choice but to condemn him to death. For Racine’s loveobsessed heroines (Hermione, Roxane, Atalide, Phaedra), all of whom substantiate the proverbial fury of a woman scorned, are inexorable in their bringing about the downfall and death of the men they love (Pyrrhus;

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Bajazet — doubly foredoomed between Roxane’s Scylla and Atalide’s Charybdis; Hippolytus), but in order to do so, they must convince themselves that they are not responsible for the demise of the faithless or unrequiting lover. And just as Roxane arranges her negotiation with Bajazet in such a way as to cause the fatal decision to implement Amurat’s order to execute his brother to devolve upon Bajazet himself, so Hermione, by not killing Pyrrhus herself (as, at one point, she, with great relish, imagines herself doing), but ordering Orestes to do so, effectively takes the decision to assassinate Pyrrhus out of her own hands and places it in Orestes’. And while, before the fact, Hermione expresses some misgivings about having entrusted the job to Orestes (“For Pyrrhus’ guilt aggrieves him less than me; / My blows would strike with greater certainty” [Andromache IV.iv.5 – 6]), it is that very uncertainty about whether Orestes will carry out her orders — Orestes, after all, not being the remorseless killing machine that Orcan is — that allows her to adopt a laissez-faire policy, passively waiting for events to play themselves out, and that will stand her in such good stead after the fact, when, her instructions to kill Pyrrhus having been carried out (albeit not by Orestes personally), he comes to claim his reward. For it is then that she launches into an epic denunciation of her cat’s paw, laying — or, rather, heaping — all the blame on him, insisting on his having acted as an independent agent and denying her own complicity: in short, thoroughly divesting herself of any accountability for Pyrrhus’s death. We can observe the same general pattern in Phaedra, but Phaedra has her own unique MO for blame-divestiture. From the very beginning, it is clear that, though she may be racked by guilt over the illicit passion she feels for her stepson, Phaedra does not believe that she herself is guilty. Throughout the play, it is Venus whom she arraigns for inflaming her with that passion (“I knew ’twas Venus who had set this fire, / To doom my race, the object of her ire” [Phaedra I.iii.125 –26]). Thus, while initiating the sequence of events that will ensure the death of the hapless Hippolytus (who had recklessly added to the insult of rejecting his stepmother’s advances the injury of bestowing his affections elsewhere), Phaedra convinces herself that such a concatenation cannot be traced back to her. But even after Hippolytus has met his heartbreaking, horrific end, when Phaedra, having taken poison, drags herself before Theseus “to express my deep remorse” (Phaedra V.fin.sc.43), she no sooner confesses her guilt, taking all of one couplet to do so (“On your chaste and respectful son, ’twas I / Who dared to cast a vile, incestuous eye” (V.fin.sc.30 –31), than she launches into a more spacious self-exculpation, first declaring that “heav’n placed this fatal fire in my breast” (V.fin.sc.32); then, in a positively seismic shift of blame, accusing her aged, selflessly devoted nurse, the “hateful Oenone,” of having “compassed all the rest” (V.fin.sc.33); and, finally, not only announcing, with

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self-righteous relish, that “she [Oenone] paid for it,” but deeming that she incurred “a punishment too easeful when she drowned” (V.fin.sc.39). Likewise, Atalide, who — once it is too late, mind you (“Enfin, c’en est donc fait” [V.fin.sc.1]) — graciously assumes responsibility for Bajazet’s death, has been busy during the course of the play generously meting out, from her own prodigious store, little portions of blame. After having given Bajazet to understand, in her inimitably subtle way, that nothing short of a written and sworn statement will convince her of the sincerity of his love, she testily blames him for having furnished her with the “necessary papers,” which later prove so incriminating: “Why tell me this? Does he think I don’t know? / Not know he loves me — nay, adores me so? / Is it thus that my instructions are obeyed?” (IV.i.23 –25). And while she is berating herself for her own “fatal blindness,” her “treacherous jealousy,” and the “doubts I could not suppress” (IV.i.28 –29), she is careful to slip in, between the last two items, Akhmet’s “fatal report,” to make sure that it comes in for its share of the blame, for surely she cannot be blamed for allowing a doddering vizier’s interested account of Bajazet’s reconciliation with Roxane (which, let us not forget, she herself insisted upon) to obliterate the testimony of a lifetime of faithful devotion to her. She even remembers to drop a crumb of culpability for Roxane’s serving women, who were so unkind as to try to ease her breathing after she swooned: “Ah! too cruel hands which offered me your aid! / Your treacherous help’s come at a price too dear: / Through you my rival has his letter, I fear” (V.i.14 –16). All these psychological dodges serve to reassure her that she is in no way instrumental in compassing a death that, in her heart of hearts, she deems the lesser of two evils. Just as Roxane, by the time this scene is over, will have convinced herself that she has merely sent Bajazet off to receive his “condign punishment” (V.v.2): in other words, that “he asked for it.” I have two further points to make about the Roxane-Bajazet negotiation. First, to underscore just how impossible are the terms that Roxane lays before Bajazet at the close of this scene, we should consider the ongoing negotiations between Andromache and Pyrrhus, a comparison that suggests itself by the similarity between the ultimatums delivered by Pyrrhus (“This is your choice: to perish or to reign” [Andromache III.vii.22]) and by Roxane (“For the last time, say: will you live and reign?” [V.iv.73]). One would certainly have to say that Roxane drives a far harder bargain than Pyrrhus, since he (and, for that matter, even Nero, in his dealings with Junia) offers, as an incentive for Andromache’s accepting his marriage proposal, to spare the life of someone precious to her, namely, her son, Astyanax (in Nero’s case, he offers to spare Junia’s beloved, Britannicus), whereas Roxane’s idea of “sweetening the deal” is to announce to Bajazet that she means to put to death someone precious to him, namely, Atalide. Second, we should take note of the somewhat remarkable circumstance

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that, after Bajazet, duly appalled and outraged by the utter heinousness of the offer that Roxane puts on the table, has hurled Roxane’s proposition in her teeth (with far more energy than he has displayed heretofore), just when we would expect her to take that as a cue to retaliate with her “Sortez,” she still withholds summary judgment. We must assume, then, that Roxane’s love for Bajazet is so tenacious, so resistant a strain, that even his refusal to close with her offer, to consent to witness the execution of her rival, is not enough to force her hand. But what finally does so, ironically, is what Bajazet goes on to say after getting a grip on his anger. Suddenly retrenching, he adopts a conciliatory tone in order to deflect her vindictive anger from Atalide. And that is the worst blunder he could possibly make. For what Bajazet does not realize is that, while Roxane might be able to endure his preferring Atalide to her, she cannot endure his preferring Atalide to himself. That he could be more concerned about saving the life of someone whose existence is a matter of utter indifference to Roxane, but, in his turn, be completely indifferent about depriving her “of one whose days you swear are dear to yours” (IV.i.16) (to appropriate, perhaps somewhat cruelly, another phrase from Bajazet’s letter to Atalide) — that is the “deal-breaker.” Thus, it is only when Bajazet plays what he ingenuously believes is his trump card, pleading that “If ever, madame, I was dear to you . . .” (V.iv.101) — confirming, in effect, that Roxane’s love for him is of no value to him except insofar as it can serve his love for Atalide — it is only then that Roxane, no longer able to restrain the fatal “Sortez,” brings it down like a scimitar, cutting him off in midsentence. Bajazet has obligingly driven in the last nail of his own coffin, and Roxane, like those other Racinian heroines, can assure herself that her lover has only himself to blame. 3. Cf. the similar arc of Iphigenia’s argument when she rebukes Eriphyle for her designs on her fiancé, Achilles (Iphigenia II.v.33 –44). 4. Here Roxane slips into the more familiar tu form of address, as she puts herself in the humiliating position of accusing him of loving another woman. See note 9 for Act II. 5. See note 11 for Act  IV.  If, as I suggest there, Atalide subconsciously wished Roxane to know of her relationship with Bajazet, he was no less desirous of having her learn the truth, but for a nobler, altruistic reason, namely, that he hated deceiving the too credulous Roxane. One can sense in this couplet the immense relief he feels at her discovery of their secret. 6. See I.iv.24 –33 and note 24 for Act I. 7. This is a complex sentence, both syntactically and psychologically. The idea behind it is that Roxane was so infatuated with Bajazet that the very favors she bestowed on him beguiled her into believing that he deserved them, that he must, in the natural order of things, have been

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moved to reciprocate, to repay, her feelings. The phenomenon may be difficult to describe, difficult to account for, but it is far from uncommon, and Racine (via Bajazet) demonstrates a shrewd understanding of the human psyche in having diagnosed it. 8. Demonstrating more of the mental acuity discussed in the preceding note, Bajazet advances a very cogent argument here, namely, that Roxane, having so often been provoked to complain about his lukewarm lovemaking and his taciturn discomfiture, should have been alerted to the insincerity of his avowals; hence, she too must take some responsibility for allowing herself to be deceived. Such cogency, such perspicacity, so noteworthy when Bajazet is at last free to speak the truth, are in remarkable contrast to the desperate sophistries to which he was driven earlier. (See note 14 for Act II.) Indeed, in the prior act, Bajazet himself marks the distinction when he implores Atalide to “indulge my honesty: / I’ll go to her much more contentedly / To demonstrate her love is based on lies, / Than when, just now, my thoughts wore a disguise” (III.iv.67–70). 9. Again (see note 5 above), there is a distinction to be drawn between the naive Bajazet and the disingenuous Atalide: whereas she, ever the tactician, urged Bajazet to deceive Roxane into believing he loved her (see II.v.66 – 68), he genuinely believed that Roxane would be satisfied if he honorably upheld his end of a romantically one-sided, but mutually beneficial, relationship. Roxane disabuses him of this belief in her reply. 10. Just as she savored the prospect (IV.v.81– 84)  of Atalide’s having to view the dead Bajazet (which would hardly be a pretty sight, his face empurpled and his eyes bulging from the remorseless tightening of the “fatal bowstring”), so here she craves the thrill of seeing Bajazet witness the execution of Atalide. (Of course, she cannot have it both ways, and, in the end, she has it neither.) 11. Bajazet is forced to continue to lie to Roxane, but now he does so to save Atalide’s life, not his own. He even would convince Roxane that his love for Atalide is one-sided (but she already knows better). Certainly, his crimes and his lies were hardly his alone, the former having been encouraged, and the latter scripted, by Atalide. 12. While it is true that Atalide begged him to accept Roxane’s offers, her selflessness proved no match for her jealousy, which, mistakenly imagining that his declarations to Roxane were becoming too convincing, did, in the end, urge her to restrain him. 13. Lines 90 –93 were also deleted by Racine for the 1697 edition. (See note 16 for Act IV.) Forestier (1510) suggests (as an explanation, one assumes, for Racine’s having done so)  that these four lines “can be interpreted as a sign of hypocrisy unworthy of the perfect Bajazet.” One further assumes that Forestier means the epithet to represent Racine’s own view of his hero. For, according to what value system could Bajazet be judged

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perfect (or anything better than woefully imperfect)? But, be that as it may, I have chosen to reinstate these four lines in order to preserve the carefully calculated irony that results when, only a few moments later, Atalide, in her attempt to exculpate Bajazet (V.vi.25 –34), echoes some of the expressions Bajazet employs in these deleted lines: for they both insist on the fervor and persistence of her efforts to persuade him, merely differing in the minor matter of whether those efforts were expended for the purpose of persuading him to yield to Roxane (Bajazet’s version) or to resist her (Atalide’s). See note 16 below. (One could also argue, in support of reinstating these lines, that, without them, the “In short” [“En un mot”] of line 94 seems uncalled for.) 14. An instance of dramatic irony before the fact: as revealed in the denouement, the sultan’s latest order, while it does indeed not mention Atalide, does name someone else, namely, the very person Bajazet is addressing. 15. This, for all its brevity, is the most famous line in the play, its significance deriving from its dense referentiality. Part of that density relates to the connotation the French (“Sortez”) carries of going out from one place to another. The implication of two different spaces suggests a very intriguing ambivalence. Thus far, the play has suggested that Bajazet is a prisoner in the Serail, that Roxane holds the key to his prison, and that she alone can grant him his freedom: in short, that what is outside represents his salvation. This is borne out by Akhmet’s advice to Roxane: “Let the bright sun at last greet Bajazet, / And from his prison free the Prince today” (I.ii.25 –26); by Roxane’s announcement to Bajazet: “The fateful hour has come, by heav’n’s decree, / Which shall restore you, Prince, to liberty” (II.i.1–2); and by her threat to him later in that scene: “I hold the palace gates: it’s up to me / If you remain a prisoner or go free” (lines 88 – 89). Now, what is outside has become dangerous and threatening. The Serail can imprison, but it can also protect. Once Roxane “releases” Bajazet from her domain of jurisdiction, where, until now, she has been able to shelter him, he comes, as she well understands, within that of his brother and nemesis, Sultan Amurat, whose decree has authorized, or, rather, ordered Roxane to have Bajazet killed. As Osmin later confirms, she “consigned him to the bowstring’s fatal knot” (V.xi.23), which, while choking the life out of him, frees him — alas! in the only way he could be freed — from the stifling constraint of the Serail. (Racine’s original version of the line just cited, which had, in place of “au noeud fatal” [to the fatal knot], “à ce perfide” [to that perfidious one, meaning Orcan], made it more explicit that, after Bajazet had been ordered by Roxane to leave her presence [“Sortez!”], he came within the grasp of the long arm of Amurat, in the person of Orcan, who was poised to carry out his master’s sentence.) 16. About this scene, Picard (1124)  remarks: “Bajazet and now Atalide, by turns and symmetrically, accuse themselves before Roxane and

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try to save, at the expense of their own lives, the life of the object of their love.” But what distinguishes this scene from Roxane’s earlier confrontation with Bajazet (V.iv), what unbalances the symmetry and prevents the second encounter from being an almost comical repetition of the first, is what has come between, namely, that momentous “Sortez” (V.iv.102). So that, whereas in the first scene a bilateral negotiation is being carried on, Bajazet’s fate not yet having been decided and both parties believing that it will be determined by his replies to Roxane, in the second, Roxane knows, as does the audience, that Bajazet is effectively dead. This means that Roxane can relish the pleasure of hearing her rival vainly plead for the life of her (dead)  lover and that, in addition, the audience can savor the irony. Roxane is content to let Atalide plead at length, having no wish to curtail the silent satisfaction she is deriving from her futile supplication. Indeed, Roxane’s earlier remark to Akhmet, when she tells him she wishes to see Bajazet one last time in order to “see his confusion and enjoy his shame” (IV.vi.31), could more pertinently be applied to her subsequent interview with Atalide. 17. This speculation is of a piece with the pathetically wishful/rueful claim Hermione makes upon learning of Pyrrhus’s death: “He would have shared his favors ’twixt us two, / And loved me, or at least pretended to” [Andromache V.iii.67– 68], except that in Hermione’s case she is lying to herself, whereas Atalide is lying to Roxane. But then, Hermione never needed anyone’s assistance in deluding herself; Roxane, by contrast, being more astute, more self-aware, allowed herself to be beguiled by illusory hopes of marrying Bajazet only after being subjected to a calculated, concerted, and unrelenting campaign on the part of Akhmet, Atalide, and Bajazet to wear down her defenses. But since, despite Atalide’s unremitting efforts to “give to his words more favorable a sense” (I.iv.61), whenever Bajazet “pretended to” love Roxane, she found his performances, more often than not, woefully unconvincing, it is hardly likely that she could entertain any such rueful/wishful thoughts as Hermione clings to — even now, when, Bajazet having been sent off to his death, there is no danger of their being belied by future events. It is by no means surprising, however, that Atalide — ever the indefatigable spokeswoman for the less smooth-tongued Bajazet — should offer Roxane such reassuring prognostications of Bajazet’s finally coming around, even confidently urging her to “crown this brave prince, who’ll come to love his wife” (line 47 below). But given that Bajazet, albeit unbeknownst to Atalide, has passed on to the next world, we may wonder whether Roxane may not derive some grim amusement from observing that Atalide, after having served — or, rather, “acted” — as the medium for conducting the affair between Bajazet and her, is now serving as a medium, in its more “spiritual” sense, transmitting even from beyond the grave the insincere avowals of the departed.

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18. These six lines evince a redeeming honesty and self-awareness; indeed, they provide an accurate précis of her part in precipitating Bajazet’s downfall. 19. This is another example of the dramatic irony so beloved by Racine. In addition to its savage, sardonic quality, it represents, like “Sortez” (see note 15), the climactic deployment of certain images and themes the play has been developing. Here, they derive from the polysemous “noeuds,” meaning knots or ties, a word signifying both the emotional ties that bind, especially those of an amorous or matrimonial nature, and the more literal kind, the knotted cords of the fatal noose. 20. The number of scenes in this act is proliferating rapidly (there will be an even dozen altogether), an indication of the headlong pace of unfolding events, with characters rushing in every few minutes to report the latest developments. 21. She must be referring to Akhmet and Roxane, having heard Zatima, in the previous scene (lines 6 –7), report that no one knows whose side Akhmet is on, and acknowledging herself (lines 4 –5 below) that she does not know Roxane’s “secret plans.” 22. Zaïre, erroneously inferring that Bajazet must be alive if Roxane is dead, makes the further erroneous inference that Orcan, having been cheated of his intended victim (Bajazet), decided to kill Roxane to assuage his vanity as an accomplished assassin, when, in fact, he had been instructed by the sultan (as we shall learn from Osmin in the next scene) to kill both Bajazet and Roxane. 23. Forestier (1522) calls our attention to the absence of Zatima’s name from the list of characters in this scene and reasonably surmises that she must have left upon hearing the news of Roxane’s death in the previous scene (lines 2 –4). 24. For the second edition (1676), Racine reworked this peremptory pronouncement of Orcan’s. It originally read: “Connaissez, a-t-il dit, l’ordre de votre maître, / Perfides, et voyant le sang que j’ai versé, / Voyez ce que m’enjoint son amour offensé” (Recognize, he said, the order of your master, traitors, and seeing the blood I’ve spilled, see what his offended love bids me do). The later version reads: “Adorez, a-t-il dit, l’ordre de votre maître. / De son auguste seing reconnaissez les traits, / Perfides, et sortez de ce sacré palais” (Adore, he said, the order of your master. Recognize the marks of his royal seal, traitors, and leave this sacred palace). Aside from completely rewriting the second and third lines, thus eliminating the somewhat stilted verbal redundancy, he touched up the first line, replacing the blander recognize with the startling adore, which strikes just the right exotic, even fanatical, note, and helps bring Orcan, a character we never see, vividly to life. If I have taken a slight liberty in my translation of the third line, I think it is authorized by the sanguinary second line and the menacing third line of Racine’s original version; indeed,

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it seems to me that Orcan’s final imperative, in Racine’s revised version, is perhaps uncharacteristically benign, offering these “traitors” the option of retreating unmolested. 25. Forestier (1522)  observes that “Racine, for whom these climactic récits were very much a part of the art of tragedy, here, exceptionally, abstains from all development.” There are two good reasons for this. First, unlike those plays (Britannicus, Iphigenia)  in which, after the lengthy récit has been delivered, the action appears to have been consummated, leaving no new eventualities to be played out; or those (The Fratricides, Phaedra) in which, after the horrific accounts offered in their climactic récits of the gruesome deaths of, in one case, two brothers and a lover, in the other, a beloved son, there is ample (and much-needed) time for the news to sink in; in the case of Bajazet, the action is still in a state of flux: the opposing factions are still engaged in armed combat, and there still remains the question of whether Akhmet (and possibly Atalide) will be able to escape the general debacle. In such a situation, it would hardly be plausible for these characters to remain standing about, listening to a lengthy narrative. Second, for his hero’s sake, Racine had to curtail the narrative of Bajazet’s death. In this hurried account, that death can pass for heroic, since, while Racine mentions the presumably numerous henchmen of Orcan’s whom the beleaguered prince “forced . . . to accompany his shade” (V.xi.29) before being overcome, he is very careful to make no mention whatsoever of precisely how Bajazet died. That he was brutally strangled by the bowstring we can surmise from the several allusions elsewhere to his death, both before the fact (IV.v.29 –32, V.iii.1–2) and after (V.xi.21–23, V.fin.sc.11–12). But had Osmin been allowed to be more circumstantial in his récit, we must have been subjected to a description so repellent (see note 10 for this act) that it is difficult to imagine Racine, despite his dutiful striving for Ottoman authenticity, conceiving it in the first place — or, at any rate, sanctioning its inclusion. Furthermore, such a description, by dwelling on the brutal, swift, and ignominious (Bajazet is, after all, executed) nature of his demise, would have only served to diminish further the stature of a character (and the titular one at that) whose demeanor in this play has not been especially admirable, let alone heroic. 26. This is the last of the eight occurrences of “c’en est fait”; in this case, to lend it a crushing finality, Racine elaborates it to “Enfin, c’en est donc fait” (At last, all is thus at an end). No hope remains of any further reprieves or reversals. 27. One last use of the knot (noeud) image. Here, the touching, figurative use of the image in the first line of this couplet becomes horrifically literal in the second.

selected bibliography

I include in the secondary-sources section only those few works to which I refer in the Discussion or the Notes and Commentary. There are countless other studies available, in English and French: a helpful selection may be found in the bibliography of Ronald W. Tobin’s Jean Racine Revisited. As Roland Barthes’ Sur Racine is one of the most important and thought provoking, I thought it expedient to refer the reader to the English-language edition.

primary sources Racine, Jean. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Georges Forestier. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. ———. Oeuvres complètes. Ed. Raymond Picard. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.

secondary sources Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1963. Brereton, Geoffrey. Jean Racine: A Critical Biography. London: Cassell, 1951. Dubu, Jean. “Artistic Reasons for Racine’s Silence After Phèdre.” Trans. Jean Dubu and R. C. Knight. In Modern Judgements: Racine, ed. R. C. Knight, 218 –30. Nashville: Aurora, 1970. Racine, Jean. Complete Plays of Jean Racine. Trans. Samuel Solomon. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1967. Tobin, Ronald W. Jean Racine Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999. Turnell, Martin. Jean Racine: Dramatist. New York: New Directions Books, 1972.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699. [Plays. English]  The complete plays of Jean Racine  / translated into English rhymed couplets with critical notes and commentary by Geoffrey Alan Argent.    p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “An English translation, in iambic pentameter couplets, of all twelve of seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine’s plays”— Provided by publisher. isbn 978-0-271-03744-8 (v. 2 : cloth : alk. paper) 1. Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699 — Translations into English. 2. Racine, Jean, 1639 –1699 — Criticism and interpretation. I. Argent, Geoffrey Alan. II. Title. pq1888.e5a74 2010 842’.4 — dc22 2010014681

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