As a result of an intrigue by the Duchess of Bouillon and other friends of the aging Pierre Corneille, the play was not a success at its première on 1 January 1677 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, home of the royal troupe of actors in Paris.

[1] Names of characters in French, with their equivalents in English: The play is set at the royal court in Troezen, on the Peloponnesus coast in Southern Greece.

When pressed by Theramenes, he reveals that the real motive is his forbidden love for Aricia, sole survivor of the royal house supplanted by Theseus and under a vow of chastity against her will.

Close to death and reeling about half-dementedly, under pressure from her old nurse Oenone she explains her state, on condition that she be permitted to die rather than face dishonour.

Oenone urges her mistress that, since her love for her stepson is now legitimate, she should form an alliance with him, if only for the future benefit of the infant son of her own flesh.

When Oenone tries to make light of her mistress's illicit love, Phèdre in a towering rage accuses her of being a poisonous scheming monster and banishes her from her presence.

Phèdre is right to fear judgment; she is driven to an incestual love for her stepson Hippolytus, much like the other women in her family, who tended to experience desires generally considered taboo.

Phèdre has been widely regarded as masterly, due to its tragic construction, deeply observed characters, richness of the verse, as well as the interpretation of the title role by Marie Champmeslé.

In the character of Phèdre, he could combine the consuming desire inherited from her mother with the mortal fear of her father, Minos, judge of the dead in Hades.

In his work Le Dieu caché, the 20th century author Lucien Goldmann extrapolates social theories of the role of the divine in French consciousness from thematic elements in Phèdre.

Although Phèdre is perhaps less often studied at high school level in France than Britannicus or Andromaque, it is still frequently performed, and the eponymous role has been played by actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt and Isabelle Huppert.

Another English production of the Hughes translation premiered at the Royal National Theatre in June 2009, with a cast including Helen Mirren as Phèdre, Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus, and Margaret Tyzack as Oenone.

[6] In the nineteenth century, Émile Zola loosely based La Curée, one of his books from the Rougon-Macquart series (an exploration of genealogical and environmental influences upon characters), on Racine's Phèdre.

Marcel Proust devotes 20 pages of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower to his experience of the Sarah Bernhardt Phèdre at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.