July 17: A Throne for Son or Stepson? (Vol. 26, pp. 133-148)

The playwright John Baptiste Racine was elected to the French Academy on this day in 1673. Racine was a contemporary of Corneille, except that he supposedly has more humanized characters in his plays than Corneille's. It's hard to tell, though, since Racine's work — excerpted here from "Phaedre" — is just as unreadable as Corneille's.