Revenge by Aleksander Fredro
Published 1834 · 18,000 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Comedy, Classic Literature
How hard is Revenge to read?
Revenge scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 64 out of 100
- Early nineteenth-century gentry Polish with legal, military and Latin-macaronic vocabulary used for comic effect.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Rhymed couplets throughout with syntax bent to the metre, fast and speakable but formally tight.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- Entirely concrete: a wall, a lawsuit, a marriage and a letter, with no argument beyond the comedy.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- A small cast in one castle with a single interlocking plot, delivered at comic speed.
- Narrative indirection: 36 out of 100
- Motives are announced in asides and soliloquy; the audience is always ahead of the characters.
- Symbolic density: 44 out of 100
- The half-repaired wall stands for the quarrel and does so plainly, without further symbolic apparatus.
- Ironic distance: 64 out of 100
- The Notary's soft-spoken piety is the play's most sustained joke, and Papkin's heroic self-description is contradicted by every action he takes.
- Resolution withholding: 28 out of 100
- The marriage settles the feud, the wall is forgotten, and everything closes as comedy requires.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Four acts of classical intrigue in a single location with one continuous timeline.
How Revenge is regarded
Revenge holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.