Performance and Historicity in Racine's Mithridate: On the Dynamics of Temporal Order in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This essay considers afresh the seventeenth-century ‘regime of historicity’ and thereby challenges a long critical tradition that has both identified in Racine's drama a systematically repetitive temporality and classified the so-called Grand Siècle as a century of stasis immobilised in a fantasy of eternity. The conflicting representations of time that subtend the dramaturgy of Racine's Mithridate enable a reflection on the historical nature of heroic models and political institutions. By closing with the spectacle of a bloody king dying amidst the admiration and tears of his relatives, Racine's play suggests that there is no better lieu de mémoire than a tragic performance. Dynastic transition becomes a ‘liminal’ turning point that combines the perpetuation of past practices with the incorporation of new affective qualities. Mithridate exemplifies the way in which theatre as a stage performing art complicates the theory of the king's two bodies, by temporalizing the frozen time of absolutist discourses. Within the overlapping contexts of the image-making of Louis XIV, the developing culture of galanterie, and the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, Mithridate promotes a new temporal paradigm in which the passage of time is not perceived as a deterioration but as an essential resource for the preservation and renewal of political and cultural values.