The Moor's Progress: A Study of Edward Young's Tragedy, The Revenge

Abstract

A reviewer of a production of Edward Young's tragedy, The Revenge, in 1815, wrote:Sound morality and good manners demand that this Play should either be greatly altered, or banished from the Stage. No character of Kotzebue is either so unnatural or so dangerous as Zanga. We may pronounce him a despicable coward by the surest test of cowardice – a vindictive spirit that knows not how to pardon…. Zanga is described as brave, heroic, and noble, yet forgiveness is not in his nature. He is more contemptibly mean – more desperately wicked than Iago. He is made more an object of esteem and pity than Othello…. Why did not the author make him the victim of his own contrivances? Why did he not exemplify in the disappointment of Zanga, the sure punishment of an indiscriminate revenge? … He is a fiend that gains our respect by forcing our admiration, and he does this when the real nature of his actions qualify him rather for the gibbit than for the honourable termination of his life.

Staging the Tories' Islamic Jihad against George I and the Whigs in Edward Young's The Revenge

“…Modern scholarship since the eighteenth century has affirmed Young's employment of Shakespeare's Othello , showing Young's deviation from the Shakespearean Machiavellian portrayal of Iago by presenting the Moorish character Zanga as a royal prince of valor. Gerald D. Parker points out: “In Young's version of the Moor's revenge, the role of the scheming, lustful villainess is eliminated altogether” (Parker, 1981, 184). Even though Shakespeare's Othello did not receive much interest in the Restoration and eighteenth‐century adaptations, an absence indicated by Kilbourne: “this play has happily escaped alteration” (Kilbourne, 1906, 172), 1 it was “refined” according to the neo‐classical rules and taste (Rosenberg, 1954, 75–94).…”