What makes this play so modern is that there is a hideous non-inevitability to the ultimate tragedy. The gods cannot be blamed. Responsibility for the tragedy rests in the hands of human beings. Their fallibility is their own. They squander every one.
Spoken words are responsible for the tragedy.
Confessions, lies, and curses unleash the havoc. The Alexandrine line in Racine, its formal, even rigid cadence, contains the tumultuous tortured logic of Phaedra's thinking like a vice. The more she speaks of how fatal it will be to speak, the more impossible it becomes for the vice to contain her speech. Her poetry, bursting with lush and violent imagery, finally gives way to action - the grabbing of Hippolytus's sword. This gesture becomes enormous, catastrophic.