considered one of the most remarkable in Racine's tragic oeuvre. The instrument of others' suffering, she is also the victim of her own impulses, a figure that inspires both terror and pity. Certain lines from the play, such as "" ("the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë"), have become classics in the French language; but despite the celebrated musicality of the alexandrine, Racine never wrote poetry just for the sake of beauty of sound. 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. Despite its author's silence from 1677 to 1689, as time progressed Phèdre became one of the most famous of his plays. It is now one of the most frequently staged tragedies from the seventeenth century. 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. Adaptations Stage The French baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's first opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) was based on Racine's Phèdre as was Simon Mayr's 1820 opera Fedra. The British poet laureate Ted Hughes produced a highly regarded free verse translation of Phèdre. This version was staged shortly before his death with Diana Rigg playing the title role. 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. This production was digitally telecast live to cinemas around the world. A new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker premiered at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Autumn 2009. The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki announced that he was working on an opera of Phèdre for 2014. Novels 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 Phèdre at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Translations Robert Lowell's English translation Phaedra was published in