The Revenge: A Tragedy — A Reader’s Guide

A Villain's Opening Soliloquy

The first scene gives Zanga nearly uninterrupted speech. He tells Isabella he was captured 'twice three years' ago, that Alonzo slew his father and—the unforgivable insult—'struck me on the cheek.' The gesture is precise: a public blow to a captive already stripped of rank. Young builds Zanga's grievance from this single physical humiliation, not from abstract envy. The storm outside mirrors Zanga's declaration that 'horrors now are not displeasing to me.' Readers should note how the play's language of weather and bodily sensation—'rocking,' 'stagger,' 'groan'—will recur whenever Zanga's schemes advance.

The Garden Scene and Its Echoes

In Act III, Zanga reports to Alonzo that he saw 'two lovers in each other's arms' in a garden arbour. The reported embrace is the play's hinge: Alonzo's new wife Leonora is supposedly with his friend Carlos. Young does not stage the encounter; we hear it secondhand, filtered through Zanga's narration. The phrase 'Oh, night of ecstasy! When shall we meet again?' becomes a refrain that Alonzo repeats obsessively. This technique—a single overheard line doing the work of pages of proof—shows Young's economy. Readers should watch how Zanga's reports always arrive just after a marriage or reconciliation, timing his poison for maximum effect.

Alonzo's Collapse and the Language of the Body

When Alonzo finally believes Leonora false, Young renders his grief through physical markers: 'his knees smite one another,' 'his eye-balls roll in anguish.' The stage direction 'he sinks into a chair' is the only such notation in the excerpted text. Alonzo's speech fractures into exclamations—'Oh, oh, my heart!'—and self-contradiction: 'I do. Am I not most distracted?' Zanga watches these symptoms with clinical satisfaction, commenting in asides ('Groan on, and with the sound refresh my soul!'). The play thus pairs a suffering body with a detached observer, a dynamic that recurs whenever Zanga feigns loyalty while cataloguing Alonzo's pain.

The Play's Structure of Delayed Revelation

Young withholds key information from the audience as well as from Alonzo. The excerpts do not reveal whether Leonora is actually guilty; we only see Zanga's accusation and Alonzo's credulity. The prefatory 'Remarks' note that the story 'is so nearly followed by Dr. Young in his admirable Revenge' from a real Spanish narrative, but the excerpts give no ending. This structural withholding forces readers to attend to the play's verse—its repetitions, its imagery of storms and blows—rather than to plot resolution. The tragedy's power lies less in what happens than in how Zanga's language reshapes what others see.

Readers approaching The Revenge for the first time will benefit from tracking the play's recurring images: the cheek that was struck, the arbour that was violated, the storm that opens and may close the action. Young's verse rewards attention to its rhythmic variations—short exclamatory lines against longer meditative ones—as Zanga shifts between public deference and private exultation. The excerpts offer no final act, so the tragedy remains, for now, a mechanism of suspense rather than resolution.

I’ve often set down Young’s Zanga with a sigh, that dark music of grievance so sharply tuned. Yet beside it on my shelf rests the calmer, steadier voice of Bridges, whose quiet verse feels like the hush after that storm. There’s a kinship there, I think—two poets listening to the same human heart, one in its fury, the other in its settled peace. Poetical Works of Robert Bridges, Volume 4 — Reading Companion holds that gentler echo.