Phaedra is to drink her bitter cup to the dregs. In Scene 4, she reaches the last stage of degradation and pain. The sudden revelation that she has a rival adds to the pangs of unrequited love, of remorse, the unbearable insult to her pride. The fury that her jealousy engenders consummates her guilt. She will now have to assume full responsibility for Hippolytus' death. She passes from a weak accomplice, reluctantly acquiescing to Oenone's treachery, to a full-fledged murderess. She has, in effect, condemned Hippolytus herself by refusing to clear him after having come with the clear intention to do so. In Scene 5, she explicitly states her intention to let Hippolytus die:
I am the only object he can't stand,
And I should undertake the task of defending him?
(1212)
The dramatic episode contains a marvelous example of Racine's use of surprise, the inadvertent revelation greeted with a few words which, in their banality, reveal a world of suffering.
Theseus: He maintains that Aricia has his heart, his pledge that he loves her.
Phaedra: What, my lord?
(1187)
Scene 5 is the lyrical amplification of the preceding scene. It adds nothing to the plot. Rather it is an operatic aria in which the wounded heroine pours out her agony and her spite.
Phaedra's new suffering, experienced in stunned silence in the presence of Theseus in Scene 4, expressed in a kind of cry in the following scene, is dissected at length in Scene 5. Phaedra is tortured by a pain more unbearable than anything she has endured thus far. She evokes Aricia and Hippolytus' innocent idyll and contrasts it with her furtive, guilty existence and her sickness unto death. Under the strain of her despair, she succumbs to a hysterical outpouring of the most diverse emotions. She rants at the lovers' immunity from her wrath; she begs Oenone to help her obtain revenge. Then in a horrified about-face, she confesses the immensity of her guilt. She contemplates suicide and discovers that even death is no escape. But through a sort of perversion, she passes from remorse for her passion to regret at not having enjoyed it. Finally her desire for revenge gives way to concern for Hippolytus. Finally she disowns and anathematizes Oenone, whose help she has just solicited. It is a spectacle of incipient madness.
The reference to Minos in hell punishing his own daughter, the sun observing in disapproval, and the universe "full of my ancestors" give Phaedra's tragedy a dreadful grandeur, a cosmic dimension.
