This is the fifth volume of a projected translation into English of all twelve of Jean Racine’s plays. Geoffrey Alan Argent’s translations faithfully convey all the urgency and keen psychological insight of Racine’s dramas, and the coiled strength of his verse, while breathing new vigor into the time-honored form of the “heroic” couplet. Complementing this translation are the Discussion and the Notes and Commentary—particularly detailed and extensive for this volume, Britannicus being by far Racine’s most historically informed play. Also noteworthy is Argent’s reinstatement of an eighty-two-line scene, originally intended to open Act III, that has never before appeared in an English translation of this play. Racine’s Britannicus dramatizes a day in the life of Emperor Nero that would eventually change the course of Roman history. Agrippina, the widow of the recently deceased emperor Claudius, has manipulated subsequent events so that her son, Nero, would succeed to the throne ahead of his stepbrother, and Rome’s true heir, Britannicus. In Nero, Racine has created a character who embodies, but also engenders, the infamous qualities of the Roman Empire: its cruelty, its depravity, its refined barbarity. Overcoming his mother, his wife, Octavia, his tutors, and his vaunted “three virtuous years,” Nero makes his move to demonstrate his omnipotence, destroying his innocent stepbrother.