In his conclusion, Greenberg asks, ‘Could we not say that Racine was one of the first artists to portray the conflicts that Freud would theorize three hundred years later?’ (p. 246). This question is at least as old as Charles Mauron's influential 1957 study on the unconscious in Racine's works, yet this new book, while continuing the rich tradition of psychoanalytic approaches to Racine, also differs in important ways. Greenberg's Freud is primarily the author of the later cultural studies (Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism), and the additional psychoanalytically informed sources that he mobilizes are wide-ranging, including ethnopsychiatry, psychosociology, anthropology and studies of classical drama. Emphasizing the problematic relationship between subjectivity and authority, Greenberg shows how Racine adapted the twin foundational tragic myths of ancient Greece, Oedipus and Agamemnon, to create his tragedies of and for the emerging nation state.

The author underscores the timeless character of Racine's theatre by emphasizing the universality of its themes, but these issues are grounded within the dominant politicosocial discourse of seventeenth-century France: absolutism. Linking the figure of the king to that of God and the father, Greenberg collapses the distance between the Racinian ‘family romance’ and the reign of Louis XIV. The tragic failures of Racine's riven subjects and their ambivalent, even paradoxical, relations to self and others become symptomatic of ‘an entire society's feelings of ambivalence’ (p. 234) towards the radically new social structures being put in place. Such a reading provides a useful and persuasive corrective to views of Racine's tragedies as essentially conservative apologies for Louis XIV's absolutist state.

The study is arranged into chapters that largely correspond to individual plays, although the critical attention is sometimes a bit uneven: Bérénice, Bajazet, and Mithridate share a single chapter, while Alexandre le Grand is not treated at all. The predominantly French critical framework that Greenberg establishes early in the book remains fairly static, and consequently the analyses of the individual plays turn around similar themes and character types. While the chapters devoted to Andromaque and Phèdre are certainly highlights, Greenberg's study of La Thébaïde ou Les Frères ennemis, Racine's first tragedy, is of particular note, since the author turns this often neglected early work into the ‘ur-szene of the tragedies to come’ (p. 28). While many of these chapters could certainly be appreciated as free-standing studies, the book's sustained diachronic examination of Racine's theatre argues compellingly for a thematic unity to the playwright's evolving dramaturgy. The readers’ own estimation of Greenberg's arguments will depend on their appreciation of psychoanalytic approaches in general, and particularly the anthropological/sociological approach Greenberg adopts here. The links that he establishes between Racine's ancient Greek tragic sources and the absolutist political context, however, make this a stimulating study of France's most famous tragic playwright.