Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline

Zastrozzi, The Master of Discipline is a play by Canadian playwright George F. Walker, first produced at Toronto Free Theatre in 1977.

[2] The major characters and the plot of the play are nearly identical to the 1810 novel Zastrozzi by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Zastrozzi, the master criminal in all of Europe and an atheist, like the character in the 1810 novel and Shelley himself, has focused for nearly three years on the pursuit of revenge against his mother's murderer: the whimsical, inconstant, and delusively God-obsessed artiste Verezzi.

In the Shelley novel, Zastrozzi's mother Olivia was seduced and impregnated by Verezzi's father when she was fifteen.

In both the novel and the play, Zastrozzi, with the help of his heartless protégé Bernardo and his sometime lover, the seductress Matilda, chases Verezzi to a small town in the Italian countryside and engineers an elaborate plot to destroy his enemy.

While Verezzi may be an easy target, his tutor Victor, a former priest, presents a much more difficult challenge for Zastrozzi.

The play retains all the major characters of the Shelley novel: Zastrozzi, Verezzi, Julia, Matilda, Bernardo, and the Priest (Victor).

The same themes are addressed in both works: Atheism, revenge, the ethical and moral debates, and issues relating to retribution.

Zastrozzi, a criminal, seeks to avenge the death of his mother for which he blames Verezzi, a quixotic, eccentric, and delusional artist.

By killing himself, Verezzi would achieve eternal damnation based on the Christian religious precepts he upholds.

The themes are good versus evil, atheism and religiosity, obsession and pursuit, revenge and murder, and man overreaching the boundaries of morality to become a new Prometheus - a Miltonian Satan.

[3] It was directed by Jennifer Tarver and starred Rick Roberts as "Zastrozzi", Oliver Becker as "Bernardo", Sarah Orenstein as "Matilda", John Vickery as "Victor", Andrew Shaver as "Verazzi" and Amanda Lisman as "Julia".