SOURCE: Weinberg, Alan M. “Religion and Patriarchy in Shelley's The Cenci.” Unisa English Studies 28, no. 1 (April 1990): 5-13.

[In the following essay, Weinberg assesses the role of religion as it relates to the characters and themes in The Cenci.]

In writing The Cenci, Shelley was scrupulous in his attention to historical detail. The reason for this is explained in a comment he made in his ‘Dedication’ of the play to Leigh Hunt. Speaking of the poems he had already published, Shelley says they are ‘dreams of what ought to be, or may be’. By contrast,

[t]he drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.

(Reiman and Powers 1977: 237)

Shelley was committing himself to ‘actuality’: he wanted the sad facts of history, not his personally held beliefs, to dictate his sense of reality to him. By keeping intact all the major incidents of his source (“The Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci”), Shelley allowed the ambiguities present in the legend to reappear in the play, thus taking up the challenge to give them their due, rather than omitting them to suit his personal whim.¹ In Julian and Maddalo Shelley adopts a similar approach, for the Madman's ‘story’ and actual experience of madness were ‘dreadful realities’ which put to the test the optimistic theories of Julian, Shelley's surrogate. Even in “Lines written among the Euganean Hills,” it is the live setting, eloquently manifesting the Italian past, which, to a large extent, shapes the response of the speaker.² One detects, in these literary works, a new phase in Shelley's development as a poet, a willingness to give more scope to the ‘realities’ of culture, setting and history than he had hitherto practised in England.³ The story of the Cenci family was a ‘sad reality’, particularly as it was co-involved with the radical decline in personal and political liberty that marked the period of the Counter-Reformation. Shelley could sense the truth of this ‘reality’ when visiting the Cenci palace, which is situated close to the Jewish ghetto.⁴ In the ‘Preface’ to the play, Shelley describes the palace as sombre and menacing, almost as if it belonged to some region of Dante's Inferno. It is a ‘vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture’ which remains ‘in the same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this tragedy’ (242).

The historical element in the play is strengthened by the inclusion of religious issues. It must be remembered that with the waning of the High Renaissance from 1527 onwards, Italy underwent, in the period of the Counter-Reformation, a time of great religious ferment and despotic government. In the Vatican, the ruling Popes aligned themselves with conquering Spain, and in their attempt to restore the Papacy to credibility after a period of extreme laxity, severely imposed the notorious system of the Inquisition. Expressing his contempt for tyranny, Symonds writes that

… the Papacy at this period committed itself to a policy of immoral, retrograde, and cowardly repression of the most generous of human impulses under the pressure of selfish terror [while] the Spaniards abandoned themselves to a dark fiend of religious fanaticism … were merciless in their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated provinces [and among other defects] cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life.

(1935: II, 544)

It is in this period of religious and political suppression, which was nevertheless historically bound to the Renaissance, that Cenci rose to power. Though, in the play, Cenci is merely a family despot, his rule within that domain is almost unbounded, since he cynically exploits the religious hypocrisy of the time, which had become even more flagrant than during the hey-day of Renaissance ‘libertinism’. It is important to observe that in the “Relation” [“of the Death of the Family of the Cenci”] Cenci is presented as an immoral atheist, the stock figure of depravity. Shelley's Cenci is, on the other hand, a Catholic whose religious faith, in his eyes, is in no way compromised by the atrocities he commits. Stuart Curran (1970: 43) suggests that the change to a religious Cenci was a concession made to English taste, since the audience of the time would not tolerate the horrors of atheism on the stage. While Curran appreciates the manner in which Shelley capitalises on this alteration to his source, adding that, to an English audience, a Catholic was probably no more acceptable than an Atheist, he omits to mention a more basic reason for the change: namely, that in Italy—as Shelley states in the ‘Preface’—‘[t]he most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so’ (241).⁵ Shelley was in fact applying the rule of Aristotelian probability to his protagonist: though the historical Cenci might have been an atheist, Shelley's experience of Italy had taught him that, more likely than not, Cenci was a religious man, and that the “Relation” may have wished to cover up Cenci's Catholicism. Though implicitly critical of Papal leniency towards Cenci and severity towards his family, the “Relation” is not anti-clerical: the characters are all, at the last, repentant of their crimes, and their execution, by order of the Pope, is considered to be the work of Divine Justice. Thus the Church is absolved from any guilt attaching to the death sentence or even to the torture which preceded it. As regards Cenci's religion, Shelley has adjusted his source to achieve greater historicity. This is a technique which may well have been derived from Shakespeare, whose treatment of legendary figures seems to penetrate deeper layers of historical fact. Having stated his aim of representing his characters ‘as they probably were’, Shelley adds, pointedly:

and [I have] sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true, thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion.

(240)

The neglect, by critics, of the religious dimension in the play⁶ can be attributed to the fact that, in modern tragedy, this aspect tends to be very broadly generalised. However, Shelley was impressed by the Athenian practice of employing ‘religious institutions’ in their attempt to represent ‘the highest idealisms of passion and power’ (A Defence of Poetry, 489).⁷ In the case of The Cenci, Shelley not only strove to elevate his drama on classical lines, but knew that the downfall of the Cenci family could not be divorced from the religious issues of the time. His pervasive concern with the tyranny of religious belief and its link with superstition—a concern which expressed a Lucretian habit of mind—was well served by the ‘facts’ of the legend. (The projected, but never completed, Charles I probes similar issues.) Religion could not be regarded as a secondary issue in Italy. Shelley observes in the ‘Preface’ to The Cenci that, in Catholic Italy, religion is ‘interwoven with the whole fabric of life’ (241). Consequently, in the play, it is a fundamental aspect of Cenci's and Beatrice's experience. They refer to God, in speech after speech, while their strong faith motivates them to action. In Italy, religion is ‘never a check’, Shelley continues, referring obliquely to its restraining influence in Protestant countries; rather it is a ‘passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge’ (241). The religious feelings of the characters commonly justify personal feelings. As far as Cenci is concerned, his hatred for his children has the sanction of divine will. God is an omniscient father demanding obedience and sanctioning the authority of all fathers over their children.⁸ As his children, and Beatrice in particular, commit the grave sin of filial disobedience, he has no hesitation in calling on God to aid him in his curses. As he puts it,

                                                                                The world's Father
Must grant a parent's prayer against his child
Be he who asks even what men call me.

(IV. i. 106-8)

His terrible curse in Act IV invites God to rain down horrible afflictions on Beatrice. She is his ‘bane and [his] disease’ (i. 118) and all her good uses must be turned to ill.

In his desperate mood, and with the weight of accusation against him, Cenci none the less regards himself as a scourge:

I do not feel as if I were a man,
But like a fiend appointed to chastise
The offences of some unremembered world.

(IV. i. 160-2)

He will relinquish his soul and his humanity, but he will not relinquish his faith in God. This shows how far he is prepared to go in order to justify his acts in the name of religion, and Shelley makes the further point that even the most depraved person believes he is in the right. Cenci sees himself as serving God's will in chastising others whose offence is, like Adam and Eve's or like Beatrice's, their disobedience of authority. He transmits his vengeful feelings to God who works hand in hand with the devil.⁹

Cenci refutes the generally held belief that a man of religion is necessarily a man of conscience. His heart ‘beating with an expectation / Of horrid joy’ (IV. i. 166-7) as he prepares to demolish Beatrice's ‘stubborn will’ (10), Cenci takes an hour of rest which, he feels, will be ‘deep and calm’ (182). In his opinion, conscience is an impostor, ‘thou most insolent of lies!’ (177). There can be no doubting the satanic nature of Cenci's mind: his own obedience to God is a complete distortion of the Christian ethic of love, charity, mercy. His God is a vengeful fiend. Yet the genuineness of his religious feelings is not in dispute: his commitment is real. His conviction is sanctioned by the fact that Catholicism has, indeed, subjected the devil to God's will and accommodated the vindictive principle to an omnipotent deity. If it be thought that Shelley has overstepped the bounds of probability in his depiction of Cenci's religious zeal, then one might recall that the Reformation drew its strength from the gross corruption of religious practices in the Catholic world. Symonds comments that ‘[i]n Italy … religion survived as superstition even among the most depraved’ and that ‘the crimes of the Church had produced a schism between this superstition and morality’ (1935: I, 233). Shelley shows that religion and morality, as practised in Italy, have no necessary connection with each other. Catholicism is ‘adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration; not a rule for moral conduct’ (‘Preface’, 241).¹⁰ At the same time, Shelley is far from condoning Protestant alternatives. Protestantism has not succeeded in disabusing itself either of the paternalism or the retributive character of its predecessor.¹¹ Shelley suggests that religion leads inevitably to superstition, idolatry and self-justification when it insists on the creed of obedience, a creed which makes it a vengeful oppressor of the free human spirit. Roman Catholicism was not an aberration from normal religious observance. Rather, it served as a glaring example to men, that an ‘undoubting persuasion of the truth of the popular religion’ may and does exist side by side with ‘a cool and determined perseverance in enormous guilt’ (240). Earl Wasserman comments that, in The Cenci, ‘Catholicism is merely the artificial apotheosis of unrestrained human conduct. … It is descriptive of actual human conduct in fictitious theological terms and thus permissive’ (1971: 90).

The distorting effects of religion are also revealed in Beatrice's tragic conflict. In the early stages of the play, while maintaining a Promethean attitude of forbearance towards Cenci, Beatrice holds on to her view that the God of Catholic worship is both merciful and just towards the oppressed. God, in her eyes, could not possibly condone the cruelty of her father, in spite of the fact that her ‘passionate prayers’ through the ‘long and sleepless nights’ have not been answered (I. iii. 119, 117). After she has been violated by Cenci, Beatrice is so humiliated and undergoes such anguish at the feeling of being stained for life, that she places herself under God's protection. She believes, with Paul, that the violation of her body has made it the ‘unworthy temple of [God's] spirit’ (III. i. 129).¹² She sees herself, therefore, as an innocent victim who, paradoxically, will be redeemed from the corruption she endures, when God takes the life of her tyrannical father. Though she plans his murder and is even prepared ultimately to kill him with her own hands, she insists on the belief that she is but the instrument of God's will. Hers is a ‘high and holy deed’ (IV. ii. 35) and she tells the murderer Marzio, ‘Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God / To a just use’ (IV. iii. 54). Beatrice rids herself of a father whose intention was to corrupt her soul; but, ironically, in sensing her corruption, and seeking to regain the purity of her soul, she adopts intrinsically the same attitude to God as Cenci does. Foregoing individual choice, she allows her father's God of Vengeance to take the upper hand over her God of Mercy. In this manner, Beatrice unwittingly perpetuates the licence with which the Church invokes the powers of a punitive deity.

Like Cenci, Beatrice perseveres in her actions, persuaded that God is on her side. Her religious self-justification is called into question throughout the second half of the play. On each occasion the weakness of her standpoint is underlined by dramatic irony. In the first instance, she is subtly prompted to kill her father by Orsino who, despite his priesthood, believes in ‘flatter[ing] the dark spirit’ (II. ii. 159). An obsessive passion for Beatrice allows him to exploit her ruthlessly. He aims to win her love and her dowry by first making her dependent upon his favour (it is he who handles and secretly withholds her petition to the Pope), and then by using her to get Cenci out of the way. In a soliloquy in II. ii. he lets it be known that ‘while Cenci lives / His daughter's dowry were a secret grave / If a priest win her’ (126-8). In the incest scene, he takes advantage of Beatrice's traumatic state: he foments her incipient feelings of revenge by knowingly exploiting the weakness in the Cenci family for ‘self-anatomy’: that process which, as he says,

                                                                                          tempts our powers,
Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,
Into the depth of darkest purposes.

(II. ii. 111-13).¹³

Orsino's suggestion that Cenci will destroy her power of resistance if she lets him live, causes Beatrice to retire in thought. She returns, having fatefully ‘determined what is right’ (III. i. 221). Orsino cleverly justifies Beatrice's thoughts when he tells Lucretia that ‘high Providence commits … their own wrongs / Into the hands of men’ (181-3), adding that Beatrice has ‘Only one duty, how she may avenge’ (201). When he manipulates Giacomo to make him party to the parricide, it becomes clear that Orsino, rather than God or even Beatrice, is the controlling agent of the revenge plot. The comparison of Orsino with Iago is just, as far as it goes. The characters are alike in their concern with ‘realpolitik’—as Arline Thorn has suggested (1973: 223). Each, playing on the weaknesses of others for his own gain, believes that he remains untouched by the corruption he causes. But while conceding the parallel between Iago's manipulation of Othello and Orsino's exploitation of the plight of Beatrice and Giacomo (a parallel which suggests the ‘self-interested malignity’ of both villains), P. Jay Delmar points out that, unlike Iago, ‘Orsino is not merely initiating … evil; in his lust for the sexual control of Beatrice, which is equivalent to the Pope's lust for political power, he is really reflecting his superior's evil qualities and thus the evil qualities of his society at large’ (1977: 39). In representing the less elevated ranks of the clergy, Orsino acts as an ‘emblem of the corrupt ecclesiastical hierarchy’ (Smith 1964: 81), and his sanctioning of vengeance shows the ease with which religious ideas are exploited by the Church for expedient ends.

Giacomo (whose inconstant wavering between ‘remorse’ and ‘vengeance’ is the most notable thing about him), falls into the same trap as Beatrice when, influenced by Orsino's guile, and hearing of Cenci's outrage against her, he fatuously exclaims,

There is a higher reason for the act [of revenge]
Than mine, there is a holier judge than me,
A more unblamed avenger.

(III. i. 363-5)

Giacomo uses the language of religion to bolster his sister's cause, which he would like to regard as just. The irony of Orsino's role is further suggested when, later, he is not brought to trial and makes his escape—albeit with a heavy conscience—by betraying Giacomo. Beatrice, on the other hand, at the expense of acute suffering, pays the full penalty for her actions.

Beatrice's religious standpoint is again in question when she actively and consciously uses the murderers, Marzio and Olympio, to kill Cenci. She considers them to be worthless characters but insists that, in killing him, they will be carrying out God's will. Like Cenci, she convinces herself that the devil can do the work of God. Ironically, the murderers actually turn out to be more humanly sensitive than expected, as they are unable to kill Cenci at first.¹⁴ Beatrice regards this as a weakness in them. As men hardened to crime, they must stamp out their compassion and misgivings, and see that the act they are required to perform is a deed where ‘mercy insults heaven’ (IV. iii. 30). She even taunts them by threatening to do their work for them. Repeated echoes in IV. iii. of Lady Macbeth and the murder of Duncan make it clear that, in resorting to parricide, Beatrice has become a heartless murderess. In the trial scene she forces Marzio to deny the truth of her involvement, insisting on her total innocence and on the fact that God's ‘hand at length did rescue her’ (V. ii. 142). She then allows him to be tortured to death in order to protect her innocence. Although one recoils from Beatrice in this scene, it is, ironically, her religious faith which strengthens her resolve and relieves her of the burden of guilt. She never wavers in her conviction of having done the right thing: in this respect, her behaviour in Acts IV and V is consistent throughout.¹⁵

A further example of dramatic irony occurs when Savella arrives to announce the arrest of Count Cenci on ‘charges of the gravest import’ (IV. iv. 12). The placing of this announcement directly after the murder, and the consternation Savella's commission causes in Lucretia, suggest the folly of taking the law into one's own hands. Beatrice receives the news as an earthly confirmation of God's will:

Both Earth and Heaven, consenting arbiters
Acquit our deed.

(IV. iv. 23-4)

Lucretia, notwithstanding her own unquestioning faith in God, counters with the view that

All was prepared by unforbidden means
Which we must pay so dearly having done.

(29-30)

Events, if left to themselves, might well have made the whole business of murder superfluous. Yet neither Beatrice nor Lucretia realises that the process of law, which both respect, is entirely arbitrary and corrupt. Given the venality of the Church towards Cenci (established in the opening scene of the play) there is little doubt that the eventual arrest of Cenci would not have been made solely for reasons of justice. Thus the law loses its ‘unforbidden’ aspect: to act within the law and to act, as Beatrice has done, outside it, are equally indefensible positions. Again, the above allusion to the Macbeths implies culpability on the part of Beatrice as well as the existence of a just standard; but, whereas justice ultimately triumphs over the forces of disorder in Macbeth (the Macbeths pay dearly for what they do), there is no such prospect in store for Beatrice: she is neither vindicated by God nor judged fairly by an impartial system of law. Beatrice simply plays into the hands of those who unscrupulously wield power.

In spite of her situation, Beatrice persists in asserting the wisdom of what she has done. While her freedom of conscience is admirable when she advises Lucretia to

                                                            Be faithful to thyself,
And fear no other witness but thy fear[,]

(IV. iv. 40-1)

her attitude requires that they resort to gross deception in order to avoid arrest:

                                                                                                    we can blind
Suspicion with such cheap astonishment,
Or overbear it with such guiltless pride,
As murderers cannot feign.

(43-6)

Beatrice bluntly refuses to be called a murderer (however ‘just’) and claims the right to deceive on religious grounds of ‘innocence’. Given the extreme circumstances in which she is placed, and the nature of the society into which she is born, it is, perhaps, inevitable that Beatrice should regard herself as innocent of the crime. It is in the nature of oppression that it strip the victim of any sense of culpability or responsibility for his actions. This is an idea which recurs frequently in Shelley's writings. Beatrice, however, goes one step further, turning her innocence into a divine decree, which doubly reinforces the conviction. She then proceeds to act as if she were a completely free agent:

                                                                                          The deed is done,
And what may follow now regards not me.
I am as universal as the light;
Free as the earth-surrounding air; as firm
As the world's centre. Consequence, to me,
Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock
But shakes it not.

(46-52)

These are noble words, asserting the Romantic idea that man can liberate himself from the tyrannising forces of society, and thus achieve moral autonomy. The release from Cenci has indeed freed Beatrice from oppression and fear; but it has done so only temporarily. Beatrice cannot be regarded as existentially ‘free’, for she has, by her act of vengeance, forfeited her ‘real’ freedom. A religious fanaticism possesses her, and nothing shows this up more clearly than her failure to perceive the irony of her situation. She loses sight of all that exists outside her own righteous and uncompromising self.¹⁶

The high-handed, self-justifying strain in Beatrice does not, on the whole, alienate the audience because, firstly, it is wrought out of the most trying circumstances imaginable; secondly, it is an attempt to preserve her autonomy and her belief in a just universe; and thirdly, it expresses an impressive strength of purpose. Yet, even though confidence in her innocence is the only defence available to her for the maintenance of her sanity, it must still be recognised that her self-righteous conviction reflects the principle of authoritarianism upon [which] the structure of sixteenth-century Italian society was based.

Supreme at the head of the hierarchy and ruling omnipotent, God the father is constantly invoked: he is everyone's protector in time of need or trouble, irrespective of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’—the projected principle, as it were, of self-preservation. The Pope, God's regent on earth, and ‘father’ designate of the Catholic Church, represents the authoritative will of God: in so doing he assumes absolute powers. His position is constitutionally one of ‘blameless neutrality’ (II. ii. 40), a phrase which suggests that, in the eyes of the Catholic hierarchy, he can do no wrong. He is above the law and, in fact, proclaims the will of God. To this end, he takes refuge behind the ‘law’ of the Church. He, therefore, threatens Cenci with damnation if the latter continues to act like a tyrant, but Cenci is, in reality, filling the coffers of the Papacy, and is only too aware of it. In continuing to let Cenci go free, the Papacy becomes accomplice to the crimes he commits and the sufferings he imposes. As a father, Cenci merely confirms the pattern of unquestioned authority invested in him by the structure of society. He has, in fact, even greater freedom to act out his impulses than the clergy, which must, as a rule, maintain an image of sanctity. Consequently, Cenci is blatantly open about his crimes—and to this degree is, as Curran points out, ‘honest’ (1970: 72)—whereas the Church, in its pursuit of secular power, is more underhand and circumspect. Cenci's acts are certainly diabolical, yet they are less insidious than those of the Papacy, which institutionally holds the keys of Justice and Salvation, and at the same time feeds like a parasite on the evil of others.¹⁷ This point, made right at the beginning of the play, prevents the audience from reacting to Cenci as if he were merely an isolated instance of depravity. In the opening dialogue with Camillo, Cenci sees through the Pope's charade of an offer of clemency:

Respited me from Hell!—so may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven.

(I. i. 26-7)

He recognises the religious hypocrisy and bigotry of the Church, but his insight does not prevent him from behaving as he does. He knows that his ‘authority’ has divine and religious sanction and he does not fail to take advantage of it.

In killing Cenci, Beatrice would seem to be actively rebelling against the society that invests such power in her father. This might in fact be the case on a symbolic or unconscious level. But Beatrice, generally speaking, takes her society for granted. She does not question the power base upon which it is established. She accepts the fatherhood of God (I. iii. 118; II. i. 16-17) and the authority of the Church, as Wasserman points out (1971: 88-9). It is only because her father grossly abuses his powers that she is forced to disobey him. Her response to Cenci is also not self-consciously intellectual but deeply personal. The murder is an act of self-preservation: she has no wish to reform society or to set the world an example of heroism or emancipation. In effect, her unbending faith in God's protection and her continued hope for clemency from the Pope uphold the paternalistic structure of Italian society: in removing her father, she has only removed the immediate cause of oppression. Beatrice is trapped by her society. She believes that God will save her through the law, and that she is the instrument of His will. But the power of God in her society is invested in Cenci and in the hands of the Pope, who sentences her to death on the grounds that

                                                                                          Parricide grows so rife
That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young
Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs.
Authority, and power, and hoary hair
Are grown crimes capital.

(V. iv. 20-4)

The Pope cannot allow Beatrice to threaten his (or God's) authority, and the whole fabric of society from which it draws its sustenance. Murder is, apparently, a less serious offence to the Papacy than is the undermining of parental power. Inevitably, it is the government of the Church and the complicity of Italian society which decide Beatrice's fate.

Defeated even by her God at the last, and facing imminent death, Beatrice breaks free of the Catholic dominion and its patriarchal hierarchy, acquiring an independent, disillusioned attitude towards life. Enjoined by Lucretia, in the final scene of the play, to

                                                  Trust in God's sweet love,
The tender promises of Christ: ere night
Think we shall be in Paradise,

(V. iv. 75-7)

Beatrice, in reply, shows clearly enough the change she has undergone:

                                                                                                                                                      I
Have met with much injustice in this world;
No difference has been made by God or man,
Or any power moulding my wretched lot,
'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.
I am cut off from the only world I know,
From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime.
You do well telling me to trust in God,
I hope I do trust in him. In whom else
Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.

(V. iv. 80-9)

The directness and simplicity of her thoughts reveal that—however painfully—she has made a breakthrough in self-knowledge. Her trials have shattered her dependence on any absolute law or power, and refined away illusions she has harboured of the justness and compassion of ‘God or man’. Left ‘cold’ by the world, she yet acknowledges the beauty of life which Cenci has denied her.¹⁸ At the same time, Beatrice retains her belief in her innocence right to the end, claiming that death ‘is the reward of innocent lives’ (110). This belief gives her the nobility of a Greek heroine who accepts her fate from a position of strength. She is like the Niobe in the Uffizi gallery, in whom Shelley saw ‘a tender and serene despair’; or like the Minerva in the same gallery who, as the emblem of Wisdom, pleads ‘earnestly with Power’, but knows she must plead in vain (Clark 1966: 353, 349). Even more to the point is the portrait of Beatrice in which ‘despair … is lightened by the patience of gentleness’ (‘Preface’, 242). Beatrice is ‘sad and stricken down in spirit’ (242), the figure of grief, but not overwhelmed by grief.¹⁹ She can advise her brother Bernardo to ‘Err not in harsh despair, / But tears and patience’ (V. iv. 144-5). Her language is eloquent, subdued and dignified. If a measure of righteous conviction underlies her sceptical vision, it is also true, as Wasserman suggests, that Beatrice is ‘innocent in some fundamental sense, even though she herself is incapable of understanding the reason as she searches about for justification’ (1971: 124). A crucial moment occurs in her farewell speech to Bernardo, just as the guards are ready to take her off to execution. Looking back on her life, Beatrice claims that she was ‘wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame’, yet ‘Lived ever holy and unstained’ (V. iv. 148-9). These sentiments coincide with the view put forward by Shelley in the ‘Preface’ that

[t]he crimes and miseries in which [Beatrice] was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the world.

(242)²⁰

Shelley is saying that her essential being (her ‘soul of goodness’) has remained untouched by all that she has done, and it is this assumption on the part of Beatrice which must be set against her earlier conviction that she had been debased by Cenci. That the soul is, in fact, inviolable dispels the impression that evil is the only ‘reality’ in the Cencian world,²¹ an impression which, ironically, Cenci has himself supported, thereby strengthening the dreaded engine of Catholic oppression. In affirming her innocence, Beatrice actually subverts orthodox Catholic virtue and saintliness. Yet, tempted as he must have been to idealise Beatrice, Shelley does not mitigate the tragedy of her experience: she dies the victim of an unjust world, and of her own faith that it would vindicate her. In this manner, Shelley heightens the tragedy—which is Aristotelian in so far as the discovery or ‘anagnorisis’ is contingent upon the heroine's ‘fall’—and remains faithful to the Beatrice of legend.

Notes

1. ‘That Shelley made only minor alterations suggests that, aside from finding the limitations congenial to his needs, he also believed his primary duty to be the dramatisation of the myth with its many ambiguities intact. But by compressing the events into a manageable sequence, the poet accentuates these ambiguities’ (Curran 1970: 45-6). It is also clear that Shelley was training himself to give full weight to the story. Hitherto he had, according to Mary, ‘shown no inclination for, nor given any specimen of his powers in framing and supporting the interest of a story’. Yet he rightly ‘believed that one of the first requisites [for writing drama] was the capacity of forming and following-up a story or plot’ (‘Note on the Cenci’, Hutchinson 1983: 335, 334).

2. In his comment on Euganean Hills, Karl Kroeber (1974: 321-4; 334-9) shows that the poet's concern to combine history and vision is characteristic of Romantic art.

3. Although Shelley's maturity as a poet is often said to coincide with his exile in Italy, it is not usually recognised how formative Italy was in the shaping of that maturity. Italy had become a reliable index of the ‘nature of things’.

4. Its present location is marked by ‘piazza Cenci’ and the street name along the Tiber, ‘Lungotevere dei Cenci’. The sight, in St Peter's Square, of three hundred labouring convicts, heavily ironed and under the watch of armed soldiers, was dramatic confirmation of the loss of personal liberty in Italy. ‘[M]oral degradation contrasted with the glory of nature & the arts’ was, in Shelley's opinion, ‘the emblem of Italy’ (Jones 1964: II, 93, 94).

5. Shelley's idea finds support in the religious ‘comedies’ of Calderón. For parallels between The Cenci and the plays El Purgatorio de San Patricio and La Devoción de la Cruz, the two ‘ideal dramas’ (Jones 1964: II, 153) Shelley was reading in July 1819, see Webb (1976: 212). The ‘Calderónian cult’ was apparently ‘sparked by Italians in Germany’ (Hernández-Araico 1987: 481).

6. Critics who devote their attention to the play's socio-political ‘reality’ are James Rieger (1965: 169-84); Harry White (1978: 27-38); and Eugene Hammond (1981: 25-32); while Earl Wasserman contributes many valuable insights to this topic (1971: 84-128). Commentaries on The Cenci tend, in general, to focus on the characters of Beatrice and Cenci, the moral dilemma which Beatrice faces, the tragic element and the stageworthiness of the play. Curran's monograph (1970) exemplifies each of these approaches. Bates argues that Shelley's changes to the original ‘take away all possibility of regarding the play as a careful study of Italian life in the sixteenth century, or as any contribution to our historical knowledge’ (1908: 34). He excuses Shelley on the grounds that the poet was writing ‘not a history but a tragedy’ (33).

7. Shelley follows the example of Calderón whose ‘dramatization of religion’ is for him and the Schlegels ‘comparable to the ancients' use of mythology in drama’, Hernández-Araico (1987: 482). But while praising Calderón for attempting ‘to fulfil some of the high conditions of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the establishing a relation between the drama and religion’, Shelley adds, in A Defence of Poetry, that Calderón compromises the scope of his drama by substituting ‘the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of human passion’ (490). Thus, in The Cenci, Shelley subverts Calderón's religious confidence since he ‘disdains the Spaniard's adherence to dogma’ (482) and aligns religion, for the most part, with tyranny.

8. It is on similar grounds that the Pope rejects Camillo's appeal for clemency towards the Cenci children:

   CAMILLO:

   He holds it of most dangerous example

   In aught to weaken the paternal power,

   Being, as 'twere, the shadow of his own.

   (II. ii. 54-6)

9. This religious conception reflects the poet's satirical view that in the Christian dispensation ‘[t]he dirty work is done by the Devil’ (On the Devil and Devils: Clark 1966: 269).

10. The severance of morality from religion during the Renaissance is excellently documented by Symonds. See The Age of Despots, Ch. VIII: ‘The Church and Morality’ (1935: I, 225-49).

11. Commenting on religious practice in the seventeenth century, Shelley says that it ‘subsisted under all its forms, even where it had been separated from those things especially considered as abuses by the multitude, in the shape of intolerant and oppressive hierarchies’ (A Philosophical View of Reform, Clark 1966: 232).

12. ‘[K]now ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's’ (I Corinthians 6: 19, 20). So restrictive are the mores of Catholic society regarding the chastity of women, that Beatrice cannot utter the dreaded word ‘incest’ at any stage; nor does she openly plead her innocence in the palace of Justice on the grounds of incest.

13. For a full discussion of ‘self-anatomy’ and its role in the play, see Wasserman (1971: 101-26). He identifies ‘self-anatomy’ with the heroine's ‘hamartia’, her justification of revenge on the grounds that ‘circumstances alter cases’. His interpretation (which I support) runs counter to the one proposed by Curran that ‘there is no tragic “flaw” in Shelley's play: the tragedy is that good is helpless to combat evil’ (1970: 259). More recently, Stuart Sperry identifies Beatrice's hamartia with her ‘idealization of her virginity, as the center of her moral life and nature. It is the element essential to her sense of her own integrity as a human being’ (1986: 420).

14. Shelley has been charged here with plagiarising Macbeth, but, in point of fact—as Curran is keen to show (1970: 41)—he is following his source closely: ‘Soon after[,] the assassins entered, and told the ladies that pity had held them back, and that they could not overcome their repugnance to kill in cold blood a poor sleeping old man’ (“Relation,” Ingpen and Peck 1965: II, 161). Shelley exploits the parallel with Macbeth in order to promote that process of ‘restless casuistry’ which compels the audience to question Beatrice's actions, even as it desires to justify them.

15. In The Cenci Shelley shows how the oppressor and the oppressed justify violence: both end up employing the same tactics, as is tragically—and for the Romantic poets—disconcertingly demonstrated in the French Revolution.

16. Harry White is one of the few critics to have highlighted the fanatical strain in Beatrice. His view, for this reason, deserves quoting. Agreeing with Stuart Curran that ‘Beatrice struggles “not to save herself but her moral universe”’, White adds: ‘To rectify the moral order is frequently the justification for revenge. However, it needs to be emphasized that such an aim reveals not a larger, less self-centred purpose, but outright religious fanaticism on Beatrice's part.’ Like Wasserman, White claims that ‘Beatrice sacrifices human life to maintain this abstract notion of a moral universe, imitating by her deed the traditional practice of the Church which will soon sacrifice her, as it has others, to the same principle of a moral universe’ (1978: 33-4).

17. As a functionary of the Church, Orsino, it has been claimed, is ‘a traitor more dangerous to the struggling champion of good than the avowed oppressor’. He is a ‘palterer, who faced with the choice between good and evil tries to play with both for the gratification of his own mean desires’ (Rees 1961: 6). It is also significant that in the aftermath of murder, Cenci's tyranny is replaced by that of the Pope, a silent Patriarch who never appears as a character, but whose influence over the action is all the more insidious for that reason.

18. One recalls the last line of Julian and Maddalo in which Julian's disillusioned reference to the ‘cold world’ contrasts with his admiration for Maddalo's daughter.

19. This union of intense suffering and graceful bearing, what Joseph Donohue calls ‘pathetic tragic character’ (1968: 53), again finds expression in Shelley's poem “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,” written in the autumn of 1819. Cf. ll. 14-16:

              'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
    Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
    Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

    (Hutchinson 1983: 582)

    It is no coincidence that the three works of art which elicited the deepest response from Shelley at this time were the ‘Niobe’, the ‘Minerva’ and the ‘Medusa’: these are all representations in the Uffizi of female Greek mythological figures, whose nobility enables them to withstand acute distress. There seems little doubt that in the closing moments of The Cenci, Shelley attempted to approximate the tragic intensity of Greek and Italian art.

20. Cf. ‘The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn’ (A Defence of Poetry, 487).

21. It is this view that Curran (1970) argues in what is, to date, the most thorough (if contentious) reading of the play.

Bibliography

Bates, Ernest Sutherland. 1908. A Study of Shelley's Drama The Cenci. Columbia University Studies in English, Series II, vol. III, no. 1. New York: Columbia University Press.

Clark, David Lee, ed. 1966. Shelley's Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophecy. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press (1st pub. 1954).

Curran, Stuart. 1970. Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Delmar, P. Jay. 1977. ‘Evil and Character in Shelley's The Cenci’. Massachusetts Studies in English, VI (1 & 2): 37-48.

Donohue, Joseph W. Jr. 1968. ‘Shelley's Beatrice and the Romantic Concept of Tragic Character’. Keats-Shelley Journal, XVII: 53-73.

Hammond, Eugene R. 1981. ‘Beatrice's Three Fathers: Successive Betrayal in Shelley's The Cenci’. Essays in Literature, VIII (I): 25-32 (Spring).

Ingpen, Roger and Peck, Walter E[dwin], eds. 1965. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Edition), vol. 2. London: Ernest Benn, rpt. of 1926-30 edn.

Hernández-Araico, Susana. 1987. ‘The Schlegels, Shelley and Calderon’. Neophilologus, LXXI (4): 481-8 (October).

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Jones, Frederick L. 1964. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kroeber, Karl. 1974. ‘Experience as History: Shelley's Venice, Turner's Carthage’. Journal of English Literary History, XLI (3): 321-39 (Fall).

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Reiman, D. H. and Powers, Sharon, B., eds. 1977. Shelley's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Edition). New York: W. W. Norton. All references to the play, the ‘Preface’ to the play, and to A Defence of Poetry are to this edition.

Rieger, James. 1965. ‘Shelley's Paterin Beatrice’. Studies in Romanticism, IV (3): 169-84 (Spring).

Smith, Paul. 1964. ‘Restless Casuistry: Shelley's Composition of The Cenci’. Keats-Shelley Journal, XIII: 77-85.

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Symonds, J[ohn] A[ddington]. 1935. Renaissance in Italy (The Modern Library). 2 vols. New York: Bennet A. Cerf, Donald S. Klopfer (1st pub. 1875, 1886).

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Webb, Timothy. 1976. The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

White, Harry. 1978. ‘Beatrice Cenci and Shelley's Avenger’. Essays in Literature, V (1): 27-38 (Spring).