As Oenone's perfidy assumes its fullest dimension, there is danger of slipping into melodrama. In lago's confrontation with Othello, Shakespeare avoids this pitfall by his sure theatrical sense. Classicists like Racine resort to understatement and relegate the most excessive scenes to the wings, as he does with the interview between Oenone and Theseus here. However, the end of the conversation heard by the audience contains enough clues so that the previous conversation can be reconstructed. Oenone has accused Hippolytus of trying to take Phaedra by force and has shown Hippolytus' sword as proof. She gives evidence of her nimble mind and lack of scruples in a masterful example of double entendre: "A criminal love was the cause of his whole hatred." Theseus' fury testifies to the success of her ruse.
If classicism is restrained, it is not necessarily unemotional. The famous injunction of Boileau, the seventeenth-century French critic, to respect good taste, refers only to a certain decorum in treatment and not to moderation in effect. Theseus' explosive expression of grief and rage is perfectly suitable to the situation and suggests the monumental indignation of the warrior and hero Othello under similar circumstances.
Hippolytus, by refusing to attack Phaedra, makes himself hopelessly vulnerable. The motivation for his silence, obscure though students sometimes find it, is firmly rooted in his character and his love for his father. Innocent though Hippolytus may be, the revelation that his father's wife has made advances to him must inevitably strain the relationship between father and son, and the strain will be increased if it is Hippolytus who makes the revelation. Moreover, as we have seen, Hippolytus firmly believes that innocence is its own best defense, that truth will inevitably out, and that he need do nothing himself to defend his cause. In Euripides, it is Hippolytus' excessive chastity which brings about his death; in Racine, it's his excessive innocence; in both cases, the authors seem to be suggesting that an excess of some virtues may be as harmful as a vice.
His lips thus sealed, his ineffectual defense based on both his reputation for chastity and his love for Aricia is highly unconvincing, and the scene has the horror of an attack by a wild boar on a helpless animal. The horror is intensified by the awareness that Hippolytus' plight is of his own choosing, caused by his filial desire to spare his father the unbearable knowledge of Phaedra's incestuous desires. We are not witnessing merely the persecution of the innocent, but the immolation of a martyr. And, of course, the fact that the immolator is the father and the victim the son, and that Theseus labors under a misapprehension that he is going to regret deeply, gives the scene its ultimate poignancy.
Theseus' language, without going to extremes, is sufficiently violent to convey his fierce indignation. He condemns Hippolytus to the most distant exile, feels revulsion at his mere presence, and can hardly restrain his homicidal impulse. At last, as a fitting climax, he evokes Neptune's help in killing his son. Hippolytus, in his own defense, finds words full of dignity and pathos, such as "The day is not purer than the depths of my heart."
