Zastrozzi

Major characters

Epigraph

The epigraph on the title page of the novella is from Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton, Book II, 368–371:

—That their God
May prove their foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works—This would surpass
Common revenge.
– Paradise Lost.

Plot

Pietro Zastrozzi, an outlaw, and his two servants, Bernardo and Ugo, disguised in masks, abduct Verezzi from the inn near Munich where he lives and take him to a cavern hideout. Verezzi is locked in a room with an iron door. Chains are placed around his waist and limbs and he is attached to the wall.

Verezzi is able to escape and to flee his abductors, running away to Passau in Lower Bavaria. Claudine, an elderly woman, allows Verezzi to stay at her cottage. Verezzi saves Matilda from jumping off of a bridge. She befriends him. Matilda seeks to persuade Verezzi to marry her. Verezzi, however, is in love with Julia. Matilda provides lodging for Verezzi at her castle or mansion estate near Venice. Her tireless efforts to seduce him are unsuccessful.

Zastrozzi concocts a plan to torture and to torment Verezzi. He spreads a false rumour that Julia has died, exclaiming to Matilda: "Would Julia of Strobazzo's heart was reeking on my dagger!" Verezzi is convinced that Julia is dead. Distraught and emotionally shattered, he then relents and offers to marry Matilda.

The truth is revealed that Julia is still alive. Verezzi is so distressed at his betrayal that he kills himself. Matilda kills Julia in retaliation. Zastrozzi and Matilda are arrested for murder. Matilda repents. Zastrozzi, however, remains defiant before an inquisition. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Zastrozzi confesses that he sought revenge against Verezzi because Verezzi's father had deserted his mother, Olivia, who died young, destitute, and in poverty. Zastrozzi blamed his father for the death of his mother, who died before she was thirty. Zastrozzi sought revenge against not only his own father, whom he murdered, but also against "his progeny for ever", his son Verezzi. Verezzi and Zastrozzi had the same father. By murdering his own father, Zastrozzi only killed his corporeal body. By manipulating Verezzi into committing suicide, however, Zastrozzi confessed that his objective was to achieve the eternal damnation of Verezzi's soul based on the proscription of the Christian religion against suicide. Zastrozzi, an outspoken atheist, goes to his death on the rack rejecting and renouncing religion and morality "with a wild convulsive laugh of exulting revenge".

Reception

The Gentleman's Magazine, regarded as the first literary magazine, published a favourable review of Zastrozzi in 1810: "A short, but well-told tale of horror, and, if we do not mistake, not from an ordinary pen. The story is so artfully conducted that the reader cannot easily anticipate the denouement." The Critical Review, a conservative journal with a "reactionary aesthetic agenda", on the other hand, called the main character Zastrozzi "one of the most savage and improbable demons that ever issued from a diseased brain." The reviewer dismissed the novella: "We know not when we have felt so much indignation as in the perusal of this execrable production. The author of it cannot be too severely reprobated. Not all his 'scintillated eyes,' his 'battling emotions,' his 'frigorific torpidity of despair'... ought to save him from infamy, and his volume from the flames."

Zastrozzi was republished in 1839 in The Romancist and Novelist's Library, No. 10, published in London by John Clements.

Eustace Chesser, in Shelley and Zastrozzi (1965), analysed the novella as a complex psychological thriller: "When I first came across Zastrozzi I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the dream material with which every psychoanalyst is familiar. It was not a story told with the detachment of a professional writer for the entertainment of the public. Whatever the conscious intention of the young Shelley, he was in fact, writing for himself. He was opening the floodgates of the unconscious and allowing its fantasies to pour out unrestrainedly. He was betraying, unwittingly, the emotional problems that agitated his adolescent mind." Patrick Bridgwater, in Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale (2003), argued that the novella anticipated Franz Kafka's work in the twentieth century.

Stylistically, the novella reveals several flaws. The most striking flaw is missing chapters, although some critics and editors have argued that Shelley intended this omission as a prank. At about one hundred pages, Zastrozzi is shorter than novel-length, which prevents a more thorough and complete development of the characters. In the middle sections of the novella, moreover, there is not enough variation in the setting. There is a primary focus on Verezzi and Matilda at the exclusion of the other characters and at the expense of the plot development. Shelley also experiments with word selection and structure which tends to slow down the flow of the story.

Adaptations

In 1977, Canadian playwright George F. Walker wrote a successful play adaptation called "Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline" based on the Shelley novella. The play was based on a plot summary of Shelley's work, but in and of itself was something "rather different from the novel," in the author's words. The play has been revived on several occasions and was part of the 2009 season of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Walker's play retains all the major characters of the Shelley novella, the core plot, and the moral and ethical issues relating to revenge and retribution and atheism.

In 1986, Channel Four Films in Britain produced a four-part television mini-series of the Shelley novella Zastrozzi, adapted and directed by David G. Hopkins and produced by Lindsey C. Vickers and David Lascelles, which was also shown on American television. Mark McGann played Verezzi, Tilda Swinton played Julia, Max Wall was the Priest, while Zastrozzi was played by newcomer Geff Francis. The production consisted of four 52-minute episodes. In 1990, Jeremy Isaacs named the dramatisation of tZastrozzi as one of the 10 programmes of which he was most proud during his tenure as Channel 4's chief executive.

Shelley's later prose fiction

In 1811, Shelley wrote a follow-up novella to Zastrozzi called St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian, A Romance, about an alchemist who sought to impart the secret of immortality, published by John Joseph Stockdale, at 41 Pall Mall, in London, which relied more on the supernatural than did Zastrozzi, which was imbued with Romantic realism.

The principal fictional prose writings of Shelley are Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, the chapbook Wolfstein (1815–18), The Coliseum (1817), Una Favola (A Fable), written in Italian, A True Story (attributed to him) from the 1820 Indicator by Leigh Hunt, which is almost identical to the poem The Sunset (1816), The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment, which presents fictional fantasy with political commentary, and The Assassins, A Fragment of a Romance (1814), an unfinished novella about a morality-driven sect of zealots determined to kill the tyrants and oppressive dictators in the world. Shelley also wrote the preface and contributed at least 4,000–5,000 words to the Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) by his wife Mary Shelley.