ABOUT THE PLAY

“It is yet better in the closet than upon the Stage.” This ambiguous praise prefaces the 1792 edition of Edward Young’s 1721 tragedy, The Revenge. The play was never a popular sensation. It might disappear from the stage for a decade and subsequent revivals might include three performances in a season at most. Yet, it survived for over a hundred thirty years through print publication, private performance, and a series of male stars who found its hero a showcase for their virtuosity. Its ruthless protagonist, Zanga, became a byword for vengeance and the play remained in the repertoire long enough for British actors to bring it to the colonies and for a descendant of the enslaved to redeploy Zanga across Europe as a vehicle of artistic protest against chattel slavery.
 

Young’s explosive tragedy had an inauspicious debut: one documented performance at the royal patent theatre, Drury Lane, on April 18, 1721. The first recorded revival in 1732 was advertised as a performance “at the particular Desire of several Persons of Quality. Not Acted these Ten years.” Apparently, aristocrats had a particular taste for The Revenge, relying on print editions to keep the play alive in private reading and performance until it could be brought before the broader public for another trial. In the 1740s, the star James Quin added it to his repertoire. 

 

For the next hundred years, the play survived as an object of “particular desire” of a succession of actors: Henry Mossop, John Kemble, and Edmund Kean among them. These English men took star turns in the blacked-up role of Zanga, a Moor of royal birth, who is unable to conquer his captor, Don Alonzo of Spain and so plants the poisonous idea that the Spaniard’s new bride and best friend have cuckolded him. In Zanga’s closing address, he stands over Alonzo, celebrating the Spaniard’s suicide but lamenting that victory through intrigue has proven ignoble and unsatisfying. In 1805, an adolescent Lord Byron delivered this speech at Harrow School—perhaps as a kiss-off to faculty who had insulted him by calling him a blackguard. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Ira Aldridge, the Black New Yorker who made his career in England and throughout Europe transformed the role into an Abolitionist vehicle in full-scale productions and in solo recitals. Aldridge surely emphasized Zanga’s grievances: Don Alonzo’s murder of his father, the Spanish massacre of 10,000 Moors in battle, and one humiliating slap that cemented Zanga’s abject status. Aldridge’s revival of the role was already bucking a trend among critics who argued that the play survived because of playgoers’ fond memories of the luminaries who had played Zanga. With Aldridge’s demise, The Revenge lost its last champion among actors. Both actors and critics assessed the play as derivative of Othello and retired it from the repertoire. 
 

The Revenge owed its survival to Zanga, surely. One Philadelphia theatre critic referred to the “arduous character of Zanga,” opining that “[i]n the whole range of drama, we do not recollect a single part which requires more exertions in the representation.” Zanga arrives onstage loudly encouraging a storm to rage on. Yet the role does not consist solely of shouting at thunderclouds. Scholar Amy Huang detects the resonance of Zanga’s “whispered wrath and [unvoiced] resentment” as part of the play’s impact on spectators and its potential as a vehicle for Ira Aldridge. 

 

This Revelation Reading offers an opportunity to consider whether Zanga might be revived again to provide us something other than what Othello offers. We might also ask if there is more to recommend The Revenge than the vengeful Moor. For this reader, the remarkable feature is the male circle of love and commerce. In heightened language, the men of The Revenge declare their economic and affective vows to each other–creating a world in which women are as marginal in marriage as in military campaigns against the Moors. Zanga’s retribution requires that the Spanish men demonstrate an egregious obliviousness to his physical and psychological injuries and to the glaring misogyny in the code of honor they use to regulate women, sex, and marriage. The Revenge is potentially a story of the tragic consequences of overwhelming self-love between white men, and as much a vehicle for the women’s smoldering rage as for Zanga’s.

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

The son of a clergyman, Edward Young was born near Winchester, England in 1683. He attended Oxford University, where he honed his literary skills In the 1710s, he published a handful of poems seeking to obtain patronage from aristocrats and even the monarchy. After achieving his doctorate in canon law in 1719, he turned to drama and a new patron, the Duke of Wharton. Busiris, King of Egypt (1719) was successful enough that Drury Lane theatre committed to his next play, The Revenge (1721), which closed after a night. The insolvent Wharton’s promised donations came in below promised levels and income from plays proved insufficient. Young eventually obtained an appointment as a royal chaplain and published what was then a celebrated long poem, “Night-Thoughts,” published in installments from 1742 to 1745. The elegiac poem made him famous and earned translations in eleven other languages. Nevertheless, Zanga of The Revenge remains his best-known invention today. The dramatist and theatre critic Elizabeth Inchbald claims that, in Zanga, Young “surpassed the genius of Shakspeare [sic]—but immorally so—he has adorned malice and its kindred vices with a sentiment appropriate to the rarest virtue—scrupulous regard for unblemished honour.” 

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- Miles Grier | Associate professor of English at CUNY