[In the following essay, originally published in 1886, Forman and Forman delineate elements of horror and poetry in The Cenci, labeling Shelley the “chief tragic poet since Shakespeare.”]

When Milton gave to the world in 1671 his dramatic poem Samson Agonistes, he set before it a short discourse “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy.” The discourse opens thus:—

“Tragedy, as it was antiently compos'd, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.”

Of the emotions to which man is subject, pity and terror are the most urgent and tense and the most completely concentrated to a single point of time. Unlike the appetites hunger and desire, to which they bear a certain analogy in respect of urgency, tension and concentration, the emotions pity and terror have a large share of unselfishness; for pity is mainly unselfish, though closely knit up with the consideration of what one would himself feel in the circumstances of the person pitied; and terror, though primarily selfish, is largely called into play by circumstances affecting other persons and not the person assailed by the emotion. Thus these two emotions which it is the gift of tragic poetry to raise and purify are not only extreme in their urgency, tension, and concentration, but eminently purifiable by exaltation of the unselfish element and elimination of the selfish.

The high tension on the moral chords of our nature produced by pity and terror is not readily obtainable by other emotions; and, as the strings of a musical instrument must be tense in a high degree before the player can evolve with their assistance those vibrations which constitute the basis of music, so the moral nature of man and woman must be as it were strung up, before the highest effects of art can be evoked from it. Hence the test of a great tragedy is not only the measure of its power to awaken pity and terror, but also, and chiefly, its success in purifying those emotions of all that is base or unpleasant and leaving the whole moral and intellectual nature in a state of complete and vibrant equilibrium.

It is almost needless to say that tragedies answering satisfactorily this severe test are of extreme rarity. Among dramas of the nineteenth century one looks in vain for an acted tragedy fulfilling the conditions; and the unacted drama yields but one example,—that tragedy which Shelley wrote for the stage and greatly wished to have upon the stage, but which has been reserved during sixty-seven years for a Society of his special adherents to get acted.

But we must go further than this; for tragedies, in the full specific sense, are so few in the whole world's literary history that the small number of companions for Shelley's work must be sought in almost as many ages and literatures. We cannot find several tragedies answering fully to the test even in the sumptuous collection of great works left us by Shakespeare. We cannot find several in ancient literature, or several in French classic literature, or even one in modern literature of the rest of Europe. But, let it be clearly understood, this is no question of relative greatness alone, simply one of greatness combined with the true tragic quality, the exaltation and purification of pity and terror. In this regard we must exclude from the competition the stately name of Æschylus, and the high names of Calderon, Alfieri, Goethe, Hugo, Wagner. The material introduction of the supernatural deducts largely from the essentially tragic character of the Oresteian Trilogy, as from Macbeth and the Ring des Nibelungen: Hamlet lacks for the intense appeal to pity and terror that concentration to a single point which we find in the few typical tragedies: Othello is comparatively domestic and un-ideal: Hugo stirs up rather than purifies pity and terror; and in the Wagnerian lyrical drama there is the further differentiating element of music.

Companionship for The Cenci must be sought in the Œdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, in the Medea of Euripides, in Shakespeare's King Lear, and in the masterpiece of French classic drama, Phèdre.

It does not follow that a claim is set up for these five tragedies to rank as the greatest of all dramatic works. No question arises as to the relative importance of these and of the Oresteia, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Athalie, Faust, Les Burgraves, or the Nibelungen Tetralogy. But, as pure tragedy, none of these latter will stand comparison with any one of the former: that is to say, the catharsis of pity and terror is not so complete in them.

Mythology and inner significance themselves deduct from the urgency and concentration of the appeal to pity and terror; and the supernatural and musical elements are comparatively cheap methods, so to speak, of helping to bring the intellectual and moral nature into a state of vibrant equilibrium. The purification of pity and terror, without any adventitious aid, but by simple concentration of human interest, is the dramatist's most difficult task;—not necessarily his highest task; but its superlative difficulty suffices to account for the rarity of pure tragedy.

For genuine tragedy of idea, conception, and laying out, there is little in English literature, outside Shakespeare's work, to compare with Otway's Venice Preserved and The Orphan; but Otway was poor as a poet and weak as a delineator of character: hence his work does not come seriously into the present comparison. Nevertheless it is noteworthy that The Orphan, as horrible in subject as it could well be, held the stage in the early part of this century in the hands of that Miss O'Neil to whom a squeamish Covent Garden manager could not even venture to submit The Cenci.

Now the extreme horror of the main subject of The Cenci is precisely what it has in common with its few great compeers in addition to the splendour of poetic treatment, without which there can be no such thing as tragedy properly so called. For just as in The Cenci, in Phèdre, in King Lear, in Medea, in Œdipus Tyrannus, the poetical style of each dramatist is at its highest level, so in each of those works we find a subject more terrible than elsewhere in the works of Shelley, of Racine, of Shakespeare, of Euripides, of Sophocles. In every one of those tragic masterpieces of the world the heart is pierced and the spirit is appalled by crimes violating the most sacred ties of nature.

It is not as dealing with real events that the tragic masterpiece of Shelley has a supreme value to the world. It is purely as an ideal work that it is of so rare a price. Antiquarian research was in its infancy when Shelley became saturated with the subject of his tragedy; and at that time, beyond the alleged outrage and the murder and execution, the real merits of the Cenci family history were but vaguely known. The documents from which he drew for his conception are the portrait of Beatrice prefixed to this volume and the “Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci,” of which a translation is appended. It is of no consequence whatever in judging of this tragic work whether the portrait represents Beatrice and was painted by Guido or not; and it is equally inessential whether the “Relation” [“of the Death of the Family of the Cenci,”] is true or untrue. That portrait and that narrative supplied the material; and Sophocles and Shakespeare supplied the bulk of what was not individual in the conception and treatment. The form is Shakespearean; and so very often is the language. The general sense of an awful impending doom is Sophoclean. But it was from Shelley's own deep heart that the transfiguring forces welled up to make a great tragic character of the Beatrice whose history we have in the “Relation” and whose bodily semblance we find in the picture.

The sense of that perfect human loveliness in which the Italian girl presented herself to Shelley, living within the shadow of a nameless crime, under the menacing and ever-encroaching power of a demoniac father, stirred the ardent sympathies of Shelley, his resentment against tyranny and “victorious wrong,” from their very foundations. And while on the one hand the realized spectacle of that tender and lovely girlhood, pitted against the most abandoned of criminals, evokes pity from every heart where pity is not dead, on the other hand the austere dignity and unflinching courage with which, in her despair of release or relief, this gentle creature assumes in her turn the part of a criminal, and reasons of parricide as of a high duty, stirs up horror from its lowest depths.

But it is not the complicity of Beatrice alone in her father's murder that appeals to our sense of the terrible. The picture is in truth one of a series of horrors growing, as it were naturally, out of a prodigious defection from nature's rule. The spectacle of an old man, consumed with hatred of his wife, children, retainers, and indeed all who come within the scope of his dread personality, is horrible in a high degree. The terror of this picture, however, derives half its force from the mild and humane character of the wife, son, and daughter, who are transformed by the power of Count Cenci's own egregious wickedness into instruments of his death. The overpowering criminality of the one is such as to beget in the others not so much hate as fear of what may yet come to pass; and that fear becomes an imperious need which gives its victims no rest until they have accomplished their unnatural end. The expiation of the whole series of crimes by the mere death of all the principals is unimpressive compared with the surrounding and motive circumstances of guilt and tyranny, endurance and eventual resistance, despair and sudden revenge. The final horror concentrates in the innocent young brother, who sees every member of his family swept away by a devastating wave of crime.

The intolerable nature of the worst offence of Count Cenci has been urged as a reason for keeping this great tragedy off the stage. But it should not be forgotten that the same reason has been found wholly insufficient to prevent the performance of other tragedies, or even to keep from the glare of the footlights works radically unsuited for stage representation by reason of their structure. Let it be remembered that Byron's Manfred, one of the least actable of dramas, has been publicly performed, notwithstanding the crime which overshadows the hero's life, and which leaves the poem open to the same censure as The Cenci. It is remarkable that this should be the case with what is certainly one of Byron's best works, and the most poetical at all events of his dramas. In Manfred we are not left in any real doubt that the crime was actually committed. In The Cenci, the atmosphere is that of abominable outrage and impending crime against the heroine, by whom, at the close, we are assured that, “tho' wrapt in a strange cloud of crime and shame,” she “lived ever holy and unstained.”

An ungenerous prejudice against Shelley, and the general debasement of our national drama, have combined to prevent the performance of this masterpiece, in which, notwithstanding the horror of the subject, there is positively not an offensive word. Great and grave authorities have from the first treated The Cenci with the profound respect which it merits. To name Landor and Browning among those who acknowledge loyally this “noble tragedy” and “superb achievement” should suffice to make it certain that, when the time comes for a public performance of The Cenci to be seriously mooted, such performance will take place without let or hindrance. Our “faith is large in time”; and the time is well-nigh ripe for this consummation of Shelley's wish, this payment of the world's due, this act of simple justice to the fame of England and England's chief lyric poet, for whom we claim, in virtue of the tragedy now about to be acted for the first time, the prouder title of chief tragic poet since Shakespeare.