"Of all our authors," François Mauriac once said, "Racine is one of the least accessible to the peoples of other countries." Racine presents special difficulties for foreigners. They are by no means confined to foreigners (3).  -- Martin Turnell, Jean Racine - Dramatist (1972)

In Jacques Rivette's L'Amour fou (1969), a company of young Parisian actors attempts a more accessible rendering of Racine's Andromaque (1667) without changing the text. Perhaps you have to be French, or to have taken your French classes very seriously, to appreciate Rivette's gambit.

Racine appropriated the story of Andromache (Hector's widow, reduced to concubinage after Troy's defeat) from Euripides, Virgil, and Seneca and gave it a classicizing treatment. The strange thing, for us now certainly, is that while the plot has to do with the destruction of a chain of four unrequited lovers (as in A Midsummer Night's Dream but without the final, restorative drops of magic flower juice), Racine was the most Apollonian of poets to treat the Dionysian emotional disorder of tragic drama. The immaculate surface of his plays can, in fact, mislead. In his 1961 autobiographical volume George, the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams wrote of his own inability to digest Racine upon first acquaintance: "Racine is the most adult of authors, with a classic simplicity bound to deceive the most precocious student by his look of poverty: to the immature eye, the exquisitely right can look like the pedantically trite" (187).

Racine's dialogue, written in rhymed alexandrine couplets (that is, paired lines of exactly twelve syllables each), has been called "rapid, economical, but never realistic" (90) by Geoffrey Brereton in Jean Racine: A Critical Biography (1951) and tends to strike the modern ear as highly declamatory. Since Racine used the academically "purified" vocabulary of 17th-century French, his poetry is also thin on original imagery, resorting instead to more efficient stock metaphors. This is why Racine's verse has been referred to as "jargon raised to the level of great poetry," as reported by Brereton (325).

Racine's linguistic formality, which helps establish the characters' aristocratic decorum—even as they simmer, connive, rage in defeat, and crack up—is key to the effect of the plays. As Turnell generalizes:

The contrast between the outward dignity of palace life and the ferocious passions unleashed is so extraordinary, the ending with reports of violent deaths pouring in and the sight of principals who have poisoned or stabbed themselves to death, intensified in one instance by the ranting of a madman, that we feel slightly dazed, wondering how it could all have happened, how people could have got themselves into quite such a mess (10).

The short answer is "sex," but there's also remarkable psychological acuity about the ravages of thwarted desire. And since Racine expresses this more in strictly measured words than action, his drama is both headlong and stately, like a galloping charger in a sculptural frieze. Turnell argues that this is precisely where Racine's poetic genius lies: "in the contrast between the formal style and open violence, in the spectacle of the complete disintegration of personality within the walls of the alexandrine" (79). Because you understand the characters' feelings only by listening carefully to the compact verse, the turmoil can seem to be unfolding in a little duplicate theater in your brain, a ceremonial and yet intimate spectacle.