S helley, P ercy B ysshe, Prose

Abstract

Percy B. Shelley's prose can be categorized into three main classifications: the two early Gothic novels, the political essays and philosophical works, and translations. Although not generally thought of as a prose stylist, Shelley did write two short Gothic novels: Zastrozzi, A Romance (composed in the spring of 1809; published 1810) and St . Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (composed 1810; published Dec. 1810 but dated 1811), both composed when he was between the ages of 18 and 19 and in his final year at Eton. Zastrozzi is a Gothic revenge fantasy predicated on a son's consuming need to avenge his soiled mother's sexual honour. This short novel presents its eponymous character as a mysterious and ominous embodiment of fate, so consumed with hatred for Verezzi (Il Conte Verezzi) that he plots Verezzi's ‘destruction’ ‘urged by fiercest revenge’ (Shelley 2002: 61). Zastrozzi intends nothing less than to force Verezzi's suicide so that his eternal soul will be damned. After drugging and kidnapping Verezzi, Zastrozzi has him chained for weeks to the wall of an underground cavern where lizards and ‘large earth‐worms, which twined themselves in his long and matted hair, almost ceased to excite sensations of horror’ (ibid.: 63). One could claim to hear in this work's overwrought dialogue early echoes of the Prometheus–Demogorgon dispute that is so central in Shelley's later major work Prometheus Unbound , and certainly there is a hyperbolic quality to the latter drama that may very well have had its origins in the experiments of this early Gothic novel (Rajan 2010).