Rimes et action dramatique dans la tragédie française : Racine, Corneille, Hugo

This paper studies eleven tragedies by Racine, four by Comeille and two by Hugo.
All of them are written with the twelve-syllabics verse called "alexandrin". The system of
rhymes associates the verses by pairs, which form kinds of distichs. We focus on the relation
between the ends of the distichs and the ends of the characters' statcments: do the latter match
the end of a distich, or the first verse of it, or do they appear in the middle of a verse?
This feature is not random: in Racine and Corneille the ends of distichs and of statemenls
match significantly, though Hugo avoids this feature more frequently. After a study of short
statements (less than two verses)—which are more numerous in Hugo than in both classical
tragedians—we find that, in Racine and Corneille, specific textual en dramatical effects, like
questions, appear often when the end of a long statement is not associated with the end of a
distich. At the opposite, when a question is a rhetorical question, it ends more frequently with
the second verse of a distich. These facts don't occur in Hugo.