Tony Harrison as Founder of Classical Reception Studies

The chapter analyses Tony Harrison’s Phaedra Britannica, an adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre which also draws on other responses to the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus, including Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Neronian Phaedra. Previous scholarly discussion of Phaedra Britannica has been confined almost exclusively to form and language, commenting on the rhyming couplet which Harrison developed to marry Racinian technique to, often colloquial, English. But by far the most significant decision made by Harrison was to relocate the story to British India under the Raj, instead of mythical Greek Troezen in the Peloponnese. Reading the play alongside Harrison’s notebooks and journals, the chapter argues that the politics, theology, and psychology of Phaedra Britannica are intimately informed by the parallels that Harrison finds between ancient (especially Roman) and British imperialism, the Olympian religion and the Hindu Pantheon, and the extreme psychological dualism marking both ancient Stoicism and Victorian attitudes to sexual morality.