(book in DjVu format)
Bajazet (French: [baʒazɛ]) is a five-act tragedy by Jean Racine written in alexandrine verse and first performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in January 1672, after Berenice, and before Mithridate. Like Aeschylus in The Persians, Racine took his subject from contemporary history, taking care to choose a far off location, the Ottoman Empire. In 1635, the sultan Murad IV (Amurat, in the work of Racine) had his brothers and potential rivals Bajazet (Bayezid) and Orcan (Orhan) executed. Racine was inspired by this deed, and centered his play on Bajazet. Racine also develops several romantic subplots in the seraglio. The action is particularly complex, and can only be resolved by a series of deaths and suicides.
The initial success of the play was not prolonged. Today, it is one Racine's least played pieces. In 1717 it was staged in London's Drury Lane Theatre under the title The Sultaness after being rewritten by Charles Johnson. The character of Bajazet in the opera of the same name by Antonio Vivaldi is not the same as the protagonist of Racine. The play was translated into English by Alan Hollinghurst. This translation was published by Chatto & Windus in 1991. In 2011 Pennsylvania State University Press published an English translation of the play by Geoffrey Alan Argent in iambic pentameter couplets. A translation in Alexandrines was made, as for all the other Racine plays, by Samuel Solomon and published by Random House (1967).