SOURCE: Strand, Ginger, and Sara Zimmerman. “Finding an Audience: Beatrice Cenci, Percy Shelley, and the Stage.” European Romantic Review 6, no. 2 (winter 1996): 246-68.

[In the following essay, Strand and Zimmerman concentrate on the moral problem associated with Beatrice's role as a heroine.]

“… in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, Beatrice Cenci is really none other than Percy Bysshe Shelley himself in petticoats …”¹

The action of The Cenci revolves around two violent events, both of which take place off stage. Count Cenci's rape of his daughter Beatrice leads to the second brutal incident, his murder at the hands of assassins she has hired. Critics of The Cenci have typically read the play as the story of a heroine who, unable to suffer in silence, takes matters too firmly into her own hands and thus falls from the elevated position of virtuous daughter persecuted by tyrannical father to that of tyrant herself.² This reading focuses on what Stuart Sperry calls the play's “ethical problem,” (414) that is, the apparent moral dilemma with which the audience is faced: by having her father murdered, Beatrice Cenci seems to have lost the moral high-ground she needs in order to be our heroine.³ According to this reading, her “tragic fall” occurs when she assumes for herself the arbitrary authority that her father had wielded and for which she—and we—easily condemn him. In the first half of the play, her obvious victimization contrasts starkly with his abusiveness, but when, in Act III, Beatrice Cenci hires assassins to kill her father and then allows them to take the fall as she steadfastly asserts her own innocence, we are put into an awkward situation. Can an audience continue to sympathize with a daughter who commits parricide without remorse? How do we interpret her sustained denial of her guilt? We saw her arrange Cenci's murder, and we know that she knows that others are being tortured for confessions, and yet she continues to insist that she is “more innocent of parricide / Than is a child born fatherless” (4. 4. 112-13).

The play is often read as a continuation of Shelley's sustained investigation of how to rebel against despotism without becoming degraded in the process, an issue which he had just been treating in the three acts of Prometheus Unbound completed before beginning The Cenci. According to this account, whereas Prometheus Unbound represents a joyous apocalypse that follows the hero's act of forgiveness and rejection of counterviolence, The Cenci's heroine takes the opposite course, resorting to her father's own means of domination—murder and coercion. Prometheus wins rejuvenation for himself and for his world; Beatrice Cenci loses the fight against both tyranny and the temptation to tyrannize. Earl Wasserman makes an argument foundational to this account of the play, claiming that both the Count and Beatrice Cenci, along with several other characters in the play, “repeatedly claim that in carrying out their monstrous deeds they are merely agents of God's will … thereby fabricating a sanction for any evil they care to perform and releasing themselves from moral responsibility” (90).

Shelley seems to lend credence to this reading of Beatrice Cenci's actions in the Preface, when he states, “Undoubtedly no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love.” He goes on to concede that “revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes” (Cenci 240).⁴ Moving beyond The Cenci's Preface to other writing, Shelley's statements about reform clearly indicate his disapproval of methods like those Beatrice Cenci uses to effect change. Reading The Cenci against Shelley's essays on reform—as Marjean Purinton does—casts the play all too perfectly as a straightforward demonstration of how not to go about social transformation.⁵ But read as a play—a literary experiment for Shelley—keeping in mind both the emotional force commanded by the stage and the playwright's attraction to self-dramatization, The Cenci looks very different indeed. Even the Preface needs to be viewed in its context: rather than a simple statement of intent, it was written as a kind of program note for what Shelley thought would be a very public event—the presentation of a piece for the stage.

“Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes.” Pernicious mistakes? Even as Shelley offers a prefatory line of argument which helps to convict his heroine, his tone reflects a certain defensiveness which indicates a subtext; as James Wilson suggests, the poet “seems to protest too much” (85). Shelley's comments seem to anticipate objections to his heroine's actions, a reasonable anticipation given a choice of subject matter that would certainly be objectionable to the Examiner of Plays. But Shelley had additional reasons for presenting his play to the public carefully—motivations both personal and more broadly political. His proleptic defense of Beatrice Cenci may be read as a strategy to protect himself, heralding an analogy between playwright and heroine which will have further implications in what follows. Shelley's comments in the Preface must be read within the context of his situation at the time of composition.

To rehearse well-known circumstances, Shelley wrote the play and its Preface in Italy, an exile imposed upon himself in 1819 after a series of personal and professional setbacks. He sent his play back into a world which he and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had left after his own poor health encouraged a move to a warmer climate, a motivation strengthened by the pressure of mounting financial debts and his failure to find an appreciative audience for his writings. In addition, Percy and Mary had suffered the sharp disappointment of a recent Chancery court decision denying him custody of his two children by Harriet Westbrook Shelley after her suicide. The fact that he had lost the custody battle partly because of his political writings is significant. Lord Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, ruled in March 1817 against Shelley partly on the basis of evidence of his unsound political and personal pronouncements in Queen Mab, the Letter to Lord Ellenborough, and several personal letters that he had written after his separation from Harriet Shelley. Shelley wrote The Cenci immediately following the experience of having his own words used against him in a legal forum. The parallels with Beatrice Cenci's own failed attempt to use words to make her case to a judge in a courtroom must have seemed disturbingly familiar—and provocative. The prospect of reaching a sympathetic audience with a popular play was presumably tempting to Shelley. After hearing in Italy that in “people reprobate the subject of my tragedy,” he observed to Leigh Hunt with rather plaintive exasperation, “I wrote this thing partly to please those whom my other writings displeased” (LPBS [Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley] 2:200).⁶ Shelley had hopes that The Cenci might help him to win not only compensation for his sense of personal wrongs; it might also provide him with a vehicle for speaking to various political crises then reaching a revolutionary boil in 1819 England.

It seems clear that in writing the play, Shelley sought to address not only the “sad reality” of Beatrice Cenci's history, but also the “sad realities” of his day. Critics have noted that The Cenci is an integral part of his exploration at this time of the potential for language and action to supplement one another in envisioning real political change.⁷ He wrote “The Mask of Anarchy” for the planned volume of political poems in September 1819, the same month in which he had 250 copies of The Cenci printed in Italy. “The Mask of Anarchy” advocates for the workers of England exactly what Beatrice Cenci seeks and fails to find: an audience that can render her language politically effective. The speechless but eloquent gesture of the workers' passive resistance in the poem is transformed into “words” which “shall then become / Like oppression's thundered doom / Ringing thro' each heart and brain, / Heard again—again—again.” In early September, Shelley wrote to Charles Ollier shortly after learning about the Peterloo Massacre, the August 1819 event which inspired “The Mask of Anarchy,” proclaiming that “the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins.” Significantly, Shelley borrows Beatrice Cenci's words to express a desire for action, writing that “‘Something must be done … What, yet I know not’” (LPBS 2:117).⁸ Shelley's identification with Beatrice Cenci's desperation to take action seems pointed.

His Preface, then, had to perform a crucial function: to introduce a work containing volatile material—both on the surface level, in its narrative of incestuous rape and patricide, and on a more implicit political level as an account of resistance to tyranny. Terence Hoagwood's theory of romantic drama provides a paradigm for understanding how Shelley attempted to address contemporary political concerns indirectly. Hoagwood suggests that in an era of strict censorship, playwrights often handled themes of tyranny and rebellion by removing the scene of these events temporally and geographically, and that in fact that “this displacement of revolutionary sociopolitical content is the central fact about Romantic drama” (51).⁹ Read within this context, Shelley's disclaimers about Beatrice Cenci's actions seem more proleptic defense of his play than definitive gloss on her character.

Another reason for declining to take the playwright's words condemning Beatrice Cenci's actions at face value is found in the body of the work itself. The argument that the play is a kind of cautionary tale against responding to oppression in kind suggests that Beatrice Cenci ends up becoming as diabolical as her father. But within the world of the play this claim is insupportable on a fundamental level: the Count's vicious acts are possible only because, in the course of a career of intimidation and retribution, he has made himself untouchable. Impervious to the interventions of both church and state, he is an omnipotent presence whose power is based on his ability to control public discourse by determining who will and who will not speak in important public forums. The significance of this power in the play is foregrounded in the banquet scene in Act I, in which Cenci displays his capacity to control public discourse by announcing his two sons' deaths as cause for celebration. Before the announcement, Beatrice Cenci's stepmother, Lucretia, expresses her disbelief that her husband could stage a scene so reckless. After the Count has spoken, Beatrice Cenci seizes the occasion—and tries to steal the scene—by pleading for protection for her family from this tyrant. She begins her plea, “I do entreat you, go not, noble guests” (1. 3. 99). But Cenci regains control by threatening his guests, suggesting that they “think of their own daughters—or perhaps / Of their own throats,” (1. 3. 130-31) thus demonstrating Beatrice Cenci's vulnerability and inability to protect her family. In this scene Cenci makes clear his control over public forums in which his daughter's complaints could be heard. For Beatrice Cenci, as for all other characters in the play (except for the Pope, who never appears on stage) this kind of power is unavailable.

The play demonstrates that the use of words to disrupt tyranny is dependent upon the speaker's ability to command a forum. What Beatrice Cenci learns, and finally acts upon, is central to the play: for language to assume the efficacy of action it must reach an audience. Although she fails to save her own life or her stepmother's, her final pleas to the judge enable her to announce her family's victimization in a public forum and to win sympathy from her listeners. This victory comes too late to stop the progress toward their executions, but she succeeds in gaining a position from which to announce her father's crimes, an act that no one else in the play accomplishes. Within the context of the play, Beatrice Cenci begins in a position of helplessness against her father's machinations, despite her determination to resist them. By the end of the play, she has gained a platform from which to convince others of her father's villainy. A focus on the need to gain a stage from which to make her words effective provides the play's strongest link between its heroine's story and Shelley's decision to tell it. Concentration on Beatrice Cenci's moral culpability has served to exclude the parallels between the two. As a consequence, a broader issue has been elided: why her story attracted Shelley so strongly and why he decided to write it for the stage. We believe that Shelley was interested in Beatrice Cenci's story not primarily because of an ethical dilemma she faced, but rather because she managed to do what he thus far had been unable to accomplish: find a forum for a narrative about tyranny. She finds one not only in the play itself, but also in Rome, where for generations she had been a popular hero. She thus becomes a model for Shelley, rather than a negative example of how to respond to oppression. Critics have tended to consider Beatrice Cenci implicitly as a rejected “other” self, one exorcised by her tragic fall, but we view the relationship between playwright and heroine as closer to that of identification.

We are not suggesting that the situations of Shelley and his heroine are consistently analogous. Rather, our argument is that concern with the play's overall moral import has overshadowed the complexity of Shelley's treatment of his heroine. Our aim is to identify and emphasize what Shelley may have seen in Beatrice Cenci and her story in order to help explain his attraction to her, which has been well-documented but rarely weighs into critical assessments of her actions. The Victorian critic who provides our epigraph expresses our point most pithily: Shelley's identification with his heroine is significant for understanding the play. Rather than representing the abject—qualities Shelley rejected in his grappling with the problem of tyranny—as most critics have implicitly or explicitly contended, Beatrice Cenci embodies something more positive—and hence more useful—for Shelley. What he found in Beatrice Cenci and her story was a theatricality which had moved him and which he felt might move others.

Shelley encountered Beatrice Cenci's story in an environment more conducive to pitying than to condemning her. Kenneth Neill Cameron reports that in Italy, “as the story grew, it acquired political significance as a heroic struggle against feudal and papal tyranny.” Moreover, “the source that Shelley used for his play was one of the seventeenth or eighteenth century ‘relazioni,’ which treated the story in sensational style as a struggle against inhuman oppression.” In these “relazioni,” “Count Cenci was represented as a monster of wickedness and Beatrice as a martyr” (399).¹⁰ This reading—the cultural narrative by which Shelley first encountered the story—stops short of the final step in most readings of the play, which suggest that Beatrice Cenci becomes as wicked as her father by resorting to murder. In these sources, Beatrice Cenci is represented as a martyr, an historical interpretation which shifts emphasis away from moral culpability to what Shelley calls, if not in the classical then in the everyday sense, a “tragedy.”

Mary Shelley tells us that Percy was strongly affected by seeing a painting erroneously reputed to be Beatrice Cenci's portrait by Guido Reni. Mary recalls that Percy's “imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy.” She reports, “I entreated him to write it instead; and he began and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language” (Collected Works 2:156). According to Mary Shelley, Percy's first response, the one that motivated him to write the play, was “intense sympathy” with Beatrice Cenci. His own account of the portrait in the play's preface is worth including in its entirety because it demonstrates his attitude toward his heroine:

There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate; the eye brows are distinct and arched: the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow are inexpressibly pathetic.

(Cenci 242)

The qualities he emphasizes are somewhat unexpected given the story that the play proceeds to tell. He attributes to her nothing of the murderous desperation, the hard-hearted betrayal of Marzio, or the stubborn insistence of innocence on which critical arguments often dwell. Instead what Shelley sees is “the patience of gentleness,” delicacy, lips that suggest “imagination and sensibility,” eyes “beautifully tender and serene,” and finally a “simplicity and dignity” combined with a look of “deep sorrow.” He summarizes the effect of the portrait as “inexpressibly pathetic.” It is important to realize that Shelley believes that the portrait was taken “during her confinement in prison”—that is, after the murder, not before, when she was “innocent.” Her appeal outlasts her actions for Shelley. The play rehearses a history of brutality and complicated motivations, but he seems to have been drawn to Beatrice Cenci not in horrid fascination nor in moral repugnance but rather in sympathy.

David Marshall has discussed at length the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concern with sympathy and fellow-feeling, a concern taken up by both moral philosophy and aesthetics. As Marshall demonstrates, the possibilities—and dangers—of sympathy were inextricably linked with issues of theatricality. Acts of sympathy depend, as Adam Smith argues in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, not only upon the sympathizer's capacity for fellow-feeling, but also upon the sympathized-with's ability to represent himself or herself as a readable text, tableau, or spectacle (5). What Shelley learns from Beatrice Cenci is that she must present herself as a sympathetic figure to a responsive audience in order to gain some measure of control over her situation. We are suggesting that what she offers is not only, or even primarily, a negative lesson—that revenge corrupts the perpetrator—but rather that a person who had committed moral transgressions, and even a crime, could still win sympathetic listeners. In the wake of Harriet Shelley's suicide, which inspired speculations both in and out of the courtroom about the possibility of Shelley's culpable negligence, this lesson must have been powerfully attractive.

What Shelley finds in Beatrice Cenci is a person circumscribed by events and by an inability to find a forum in which to be heard. By the end of her story, she finds both an audience within the play—in the courtroom—and then another, posthumously, in Italian society, both of which respond sympathetically to her plight. Her example provides an important lesson for Shelley: that failure to find responsive listeners is not the result of the inadequacy of language but rather of the difficulty of gaining a forum in which to speak. The play has inspired critical analyses about the failures of language, but what it dramatizes is that a social context is needed in order for language to be rendered effectual.¹¹ From the opening banquet scene to the final courtroom scene, The Cenci may be read as a series of struggles between Beatrice Cenci and her father for public forums which are, in effect, stages. A focus on the performative helps explains Shelley's choice of genre for telling the story: Shelley puts into action what he learns from Beatrice Cenci by staging a play.

Critics have noted that language and the capacity to speak are foregrounded in the plot.¹² Cenci coerces people into complicity by commanding or threatening them; more importantly, he is able to determine who may speak and who will not be heard. His daughter is the player whom he is unable to silence. As Lucretia reminds her, at a point of her near collapse when she has begun to comprehend her father's plans for her: “Until this hour thus you have ever stood / Between us and your father's moody wrath / Like a protecting presence: your firm mind / Has been our only refuge and defence” (2. 1. 46-49). Cenci's effort to silence his daughter and her struggle to control her own words and to find listeners for them are at the center of the play, a claim supported by Shelley's source. The manuscript of the “Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci,” derived from Lodovico Antonio Muratori's account in his Annali d'Italia reports that, even after the confessions of her co-conspirators, “the Signora Beatrice, being young, lively, and strong, neither with good nor ill treatment, with menaces, nor fear of torture, would allow a single word to pass her lips which might inculpate her; and even, by her lively eloquence, confused the judges who examined her” (Collected Works 2:162).

The Count temporarily silences his daughter by raping her, an extremely resourceful ploy on his part, since he knows that shame and the lack of socially-sanctioned speech will prevent her telling what has happened to her. As he warns his daughter after her failed appeal to the guests at the banquet, “I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame” (1. 3. 167). Cenci's plot against her includes the hope that the rape will succeed in degrading her language itself. In subduing Beatrice Cenci, her father intends to turn her ability to silence others against her. He tells her:

Never again, I think, with fearless eye,
And brow superior, and unaltered cheek,
And that lip made for tenderness or scorn,
Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind;
Me least of all.

(2. 1. 116-20)

But as the Count implicitly recognizes, Beatrice Cenci also knows a “charm” that will silence him: she uses gesture—her “brow superior” and “unaltered cheek”—rather than language. Her performative skills—the statuesque bodily presence of the nineteenth-century actress—will help her to create what no one else in the play has been able to: a public forum in which her speech will be heard. Beatrice Cenci pays for the murder with her life, a simple equation that makes clear the lesson that crime does not pay. But her martyrdom has broader implications for a playwright seeking his own audience.

Beatrice Cenci wins her stage inadvertently, when her murder plot fails. But her choice of action over speech is made when she decides to plot her father's demise. Her first attempt involves staging an ambush of her father's carriage on his trip to the Castle Petrella, where he intends to sequester and torture his family. Like the murder itself, the ambush represents a reversal of Cenci's own diabolic intentions toward his daughter. Critics have noted that the murder strongly resembles the murder of Duncan in Macbeth.¹³ Shelley emphasizes the theatricality of the story by foregrounding her role as an actor—and even as a kind of playwright—within the play. Beatrice Cenci's final performance in the courtroom is the last in a succession of scenes she stages after forsaking speech for performance after the rape. Recognizing that her words will be ineffectual as long as her father controls the public forums in which they could be heard, she resorts to action, a path which leads her to another forum—a courtroom in which she is finally heard, although too late to save her own life.

In writing his only completed work intended for the stage, Shelley follows her example by using performative strategies to reach unwilling or indifferent listeners. Stephen Behrendt's reading of the play supports this claim. He suggests that “In composing a play specifically intended for the stage, Shelley was attempting to enter into a significantly different relationship with an audience based not on the solitary and tranquil act of reading but on the social and more subjective act of witnessing live theater” (Shelley and His Audiences 145).¹⁴ The audience Beatrice Cenci engages must have been attractively broad to Shelley: she reaches both characters in the play who are initially resistant to her cause and an audience of successive generations who continued to respond to her legend. In the nineteenth-century Rome in which the Shelley's acquired the manuscript, Beatrice Cenci cut a popular figure. Shelley recalls, “On my arrival at Rome, I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest” (Cenci 239). In Beatrice Cenci, Shelley found an historical figure who—temporarily—reversed the interrogative purposes of the courtroom and made it her stage. Her attempts to gain this forum—and her success as character if not as defendant—must have been appealing to Shelley in the wake of the Chancery court decision.

For Beatrice Cenci, the possibility of simply describing her oppression would jeopardize her position further, a circumstance which her father shrewdly anticipated. To name her plight would mean to accept her own public shame. Enactment provided a way for her to represent her story in a different way. Critics who have read the play as an ethical dilemma to be resolved have insisted that Beatrice Cenci's tragic flaw is in thinking that she was “dishonored” when she was raped—that her virtue is now tarnished and cannot be restored. These critics have charged Beatrice Cenci with taking matters into her own hands unnecessarily—since surely there can be no shame in being victimized. We want to suggest that, on the contrary, Beatrice Cenci—like Shelley—knows that her “honor” is irreparably damaged when she was incestuously raped—“honor” is a social term. She understands that she will never be the same in her community's eyes. Beatrice Cenci herself draws our attention to the fact that her place in society has been taken away from her: “Oh, what am I?” she asks, “What name, what place, what memory shall be mine?” (3. 1. 74-75). Beatrice Cenci, recognizing that she has in fact experienced a fall—a social fall—begins to plan her actions outside the laws of the social order that could only have seen her as a fallen woman. As Julie Carlson puts it, the play suggests “the radical contingency of female innocence as their honor is passed from mouth to mouth of men” (Theatre [In the Theatre of Romanticism] 191).

Beatrice Cenci knows that she cannot simply tell her story for another reason: because even a narration of what had happened would not precipitate her father's punishment—we are told that he has managed to escape justice for past transgressions, including murder, by bribing the Pope. Furthermore, there is no socially-sanctioned language in which she could represent her experience, even to her stepmother: “What are the words which you would have me speak?” (3. 1. 107) she asks rhetorically. After the rape, in a fit of near madness, she tries to articulate what has happened but stops short each time: “worse have been conceived” she says, “than ever there was found a heart to do.” “But,” she continues, “never fancy imaged such a deed / As …” (3. 1. 53-56). We get a dash here at the unspeakable act. She asks Lucretia:

                                                            … of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery; if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die,
And left it, as I must, without a name.

(3. 1. 111-16)

This passage conveys a key point in the play: Beatrice Cenci's speechlessness comes not from the fact that there is no language to describe what has happened, but rather that there is no language which “ministers to mortal intercourse.” In other words, there is no language that society will listen to sympathetically. When Orsino asks her why she doesn't simply publicly say what happened, she tells him:

If this were done, which never shall be done,
Think of the offender's gold, his dreaded hate,
And the strange horror of the accuser's tale,
Baffling belief, and overpowering speech;
Scarce whispered, unimaginable, wrapt
In hideous hints … Oh, most assured redress!

(3. 1. 161-66)

Her father's ability to buy forgiveness—the “offender's gold”—and his propensity to punish her for speaking—“his dreaded hate”—are mentioned, but rhetorically outweighed by the four lines describing the “strange horror of the accuser's tale.” Should she speak out, Beatrice Cenci knows that her tale would be “strange” and “horrifying” in the effect it must have on a society so entirely unprepared to deal with the “sad reality” of incestuous rape.

When Beatrice Cenci stages her father's murder, she inadvertently accomplishes what she could not have managed otherwise: she moves the discussion of her father's criminal acts into a public realm. By this point in the play, Beatrice Cenci's lack of a sympathetic audience has already been demonstrated. At the banquet scene, in Act I, she attempts to take advantage of a public gathering to make a plea for her safety and that of her mother and surviving brothers. But even after hearing the Count rejoice in his sons' deaths, the company ignores her eloquent entreaty. It's not that they don't understand her, but rather that this audience refuses to be engaged by her. “Dare no one look on me” she asks,

None answer? Can one tyrant overbear
The sense of many best and wisest men?
Or is it that I sue not in some form
Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?

(1. 3. 132-36)

Beatrice Cenci wonders here why her words aren't finding an audience, speculating that the lack of a socially-sanctioned frame for her words makes speaking pointless. Only then does she choose action over speech. We are not suggesting that she commits the crime in order to win a courtroom audience. She takes pains to see that the crime would not be discovered. But events move on despite her, as they have throughout the play, only now she gains what she had failed to find before: a stage from which to speak, if only briefly. Furthermore, her action moves the struggle from the private domain of her father's castle—from the domestic space in which the rape occurs and where her father has absolute control—to a public realm where she has a better, although still limited, chance of being heard. Beatrice Cenci explicitly comments that even the most repressive public space—a prison—is better for her than the privatized world of the Castle Petrella—“thou knowest / This cell seems like a kind of Paradise / After our father's presence” (5. 3. 10-12).

In committing a crime which prompts a trial, Beatrice Cenci steps onto a stage and gains a forum in which her family's story is made public but her “dishonour” is never articulated. By steadfastly stating her innocence to her audience, she induces Marzio to retract the confession that he has made off-stage. She forces him to look at her and to say again on her stage that she is guilty; he can't. He in turn resorts to action, now that his own words have worked against him: he holds his breath until he dies, thereby refusing to be coerced into a second verbal confession. Julie Carlson observes that Beatrice Cenci is a “commanding actress” (Theatre 192); no one who listens to her in the courtroom can deny the effect of her words. Camillo, having decided earlier that she is guilty, now appears before the Pope and pleads for her life and Lucretia's. The Pope is unmoved: he has not been present to hear her defense, and so is able, unlike those who have listened, to turn a deaf ear to her pleas. He orders the execution, never having intended to listen to Beatrice Cenci's words. Camillo tells how in response to pleas for clemency for Beatrice and Lucretia, the Pope

… frowned, as if to frown had been the trick
Of his machinery, on the advocates
Presenting the defences, which he tore
And threw behind. …

(5. 4. 6-9)

The Pope's authority is precedented upon limiting the circulation of language. Camillo explains:

He turned to me then, looking deprecation,
And said these three words, coldly: “They must die.”

(5. 4. 13-14)

Like Cenci, the Pope does not need great eloquence: his powers of speech are such that they require very few words to effect action against his enemies. But those powers of speech are based upon his ability to control language—both his and others. His last words to Camillo are:

“Here is their sentence; never see me more
Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.”

(5. 4. 26-27)

The presentation of the Pope's brief “sentence,” concurrent with his denial of Camillos pleas, reminds us of Cenci's own assertion to his guests:

Enjoy yourselves.—Beware! For my revenge
Is as the sealed commission of a king
That kills, and none dare name the murderer.

(1. 3. 96-98)

Cenci, too, must lay claim to language in a delimited state: a “sealed commission” which allows no response and no intervention.

In the world of the play, both the Count and the Pope have managed to consolidate their power by retaining strict control over how language is deployed, both by issuing “sealed” decrees—in which language equals action—and by capitalizing on the fact that there is no audience in the play capable of hearing Beatrice Cenci and responding adequately to what she says. She herself understands her complete lack of such an audience when she refers to the “strange horror of the accuser's tale.” By writing a play for the stage, Shelley highlights the suggestion that a person's words are only effective if there is an audience to be moved by them. The one force capable of pardoning Beatrice Cenci—the Pope—is willfully absent at her performance. Her tragedy, ultimately, is not the tragedy of being unable to speak—it is the tragedy of being forced to speak only within a society which simply turns a deaf ear to her words. Camillo says about Bernardo, who has just rushed out of the prison to make his last-minute appeal to the Pope, that he might as well “pray / To the deaf sea” (5. 4. 42-43). Camillo, after having made his own entreaty, reports, “The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent” (5. 4. 1). The play demonstrates that if you have an audience, you don't need very many words—you need one or three. Cenci has managed to terrorize his daughter almost to the point of madness with only “one little word” (2. 1. 63) which we never hear, and the Pope, upon rejecting the prisoners' requests for clemency, says simply, “‘They must die,’” (5. 4. 14) and they are escorted offstage to their executions. Shelley here stages not the failure of language, but its dependence on engagement between speaker and audience.

The Cenci represents a complex effort on Shelley's part to win a broad audience. In writing the play, his only completed work for the stage, Shelley follows his heroine's example by using performative strategies to reach unwilling or indifferent listeners. His hopes that the play might be a popular success were founded on his sense that it represented a departure from his usual methods in terms of subject matter, language and genre.¹⁵ Letters show that Shelley made these decisions self-consciously, and with the end of reaching a mass audience in view. In August 1819 he wrote to Leigh Hunt “on the eve of completing another work, totally different from anything you might conjecture that I should write; of a more popular kind; and, if anything of mine could deserve attention, of higher claims” (LPBS 2:108). In an April 1820 letter he promised Thomas Jefferson Hogg, “You will see that it is studiously written in a style very different from any other compositions” (LPBS 2:186). In September 1819 he informed Charles Ollier, one of his publishers, that he was about to send a transcript of Prometheus Unbound along with “another work, calculated to produce a very popular effect & totally in a different style from anything I have yet composed” (LPBS 2:116-17). In March 1820 he informed Ollier that he estimated “the Prometheus [Unbound] cannot sell beyond twenty copies,” and instructed them “specially to pet him and feed him with fine ink and good paper” for an audience he describes as “select” in the play's Preface. In contrast, he had The Cenci printed more cheaply in Leghorn and then again in London, anticipating to his publisher that “Cenci is written for the multitude, and ought to sell well” (LPBS 2:174).

His efforts to produce a popular work took several forms. In the Preface, he tells us that he has intentionally kept the language of the play simple, having “avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry” even to the point of writing “carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of words” (Cenci 241). In a letter he describes the kind of language he had used as “chaste” (LPBS 2:189). and he tells Keats that the play was “studiously composed in a different style” (LPBS 2:221). These reiterations underscore how intent Shelley was on adopting a Wordsworthian “familiar language,” a gesture he made, he tells us, “in order to move men to true sympathy” (Cenci 241). This effort was not lost on contemporary reviewers. Shelley's decision to simplify his language for a theater audience also enabled him to reach some critics who were antagonistic to his writing style. A predominantly negative response in the British Review begins with a backhanded compliment: “The Cenci is the best, because it is by far the most intelligible, of Mr. Shelley's works” (380). And John Scott, who begins his review in London Magazine with a diatribe against writers who seek “gratification in conjuring up, or presenting, the image or idea of something abhorrent to feelings of the general standard,” praises the play's language. He observes that Shelley “preserves throughout a vigorous, clear, manly turn of expression” and that “his language, as he travels through the most exaggerated incidents, retains its correctness and simplicity” (546-47).

Shelley also made a conscious decision to handle a new kind of subject in the play: historical fact rather than what he refers to in the Dedication as “visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just” (Cenci 237). He announces that The Cenci, instead of “dreams of what ought to be, or may be,” represents “a sad reality” (Cenci 237). Writing in July 1819 to Thomas Love Peacock, whom he hoped would arrange for the play's production at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, Shelley makes it clear that this new, “real” subject matter was chosen for its popular appeal, “having attending [for attended] simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced by such a development” (LPBS 2:102). The material itself, Shelley hoped, would generate a broad appeal for a diverse and popular audience.

In the Preface he recalls having discovered in Rome that “all ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart” (Cenci 239). Beatrice Cenci's audience, encompassing “all ranks of people,” is one that he sought as a writer and that he courted assiduously in writing The Cenci. Shelley was impressed that whenever Beatrice Cenci's story was rehearsed “the feelings of the company never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust” (Cenci 239). She had won sympathy despite her rebellious actions, becoming a heroine in her struggle against her family's “common tyrant” (Cenci 238) as Shelley refers to Cenci in the Preface.

His choices of style and subject comprise an effort to make the play ready for the London stage, an ambition for which he was prepared to sacrifice authorial credit during its premiere. In the July letter, Shelley asks Peacock to insure his anonymity, deeming it “essential, deeply essential to it's [sic] success” (LPBS 2:102), probably because the poet felt that his name might incite reviewers. Writing to Amelia Curran in September, Mary Shelley undoubtedly reflects her husband's feelings: “it is still a deep secret & only one person, Peacock who presents it, knows anything about it in England—with S.'s public & private enemies it would certainly fall if known to be his—his sister in law alone would hire enough people to damn it” (LMWS [The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley] 1:106). Nonetheless, Percy Shelley confesses to Peacock in the July letter that he is hopeful that the play will be a vehicle for gaining not only public recognition, but also a measure of empowerment: “After it had been acted & successfully (could I hope such a thing), I would own it if I pleased, & use the celebrity it might acquire to my own purposes” (LPBS 2:102). Although Shelley does not elaborate on these “purposes,” we can only assume that they might have encompassed both the recuperation of his personal reputation and broader political goals. Shelley's efforts to employ a simpler idiom, a popular subject, and a sense of historical immediacy are founded on The Cenci's central departure from what Keats called “habitual self”—its theatricality.

Shelley's own sense that The Cenci was different from anything he had written before is based on its theatricality, and Mary Shelley concurs in her note to the play, claiming that “There is nothing that is not purely dramatic throughout” (Collected Works 2:158). Although Shelley hedged his bets by having the 250 copies of The Cenci printed in Leghorn in advance, in case the play was rejected by Covent Garden's manager, Thomas Harris, his intention was that the play was to be performed. Writing to Charles Ollier, he explains that The Cenci was “expressly written for theatrical exhibition” and maintains, “I believe it singularly fitted for the stage” (LPBS 2:178). In the July letter to Peacock, he announces, “I have written a tragedy on the subject of a story well known in Italy, & in my conception eminently dramatic.” He assures Peacock that he has “taken some pains to make my play fit for representation.” At the same time he seemed confident of his success in this new forum, going on to assert that “as a composition it is certainly not inferior to any of the modern plays that have been acted, with the exception of Remorse,” and “that the interest of its plot is incredibly greater & more real, and that there is nothing beyond what the multitude are contented to believe that they can understand, either in imagery opinion or sentiment” (LPBS 2:102). His fixation on reaching a “multitude” reverberates throughout his letters on the subject and is reflected in these efforts to make his play accessible and palatable to a general audience.

Clearly Shelley had a stage production in mind, and not just any kind of production. The stage that he sought would insert him into a mainstream public world. The Theatre Royal at Covent Garden, one of London's two licensed theaters at the time, had been rebuilt after its complete destruction by fire in 1808. Seating 2,800 people in the pit, galleries and boxes, the new theater hosted audiences that included people of all ranks and classes. One critic describes a nineteenth-century theater audience as “the upper-class Sir Mulberry Hawk and his friends, Pendennis and David Copperfield, sometimes Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott; tallow-chandlers, lawyers' clerks, Charles Lamb's relatives, to speak of the middle class; and all that extraordinary congeries of street-peddlers and coalheavers and dog-stealers and prostitutes and the whole world of low-life that we read of in Mayhew” (Davies 23). Theater historians agree that the evidence from ticket prices, theater capacities and contemporary accounts all point to the changing nature of London audiences between 1792 and 1812 (Booth, et al. 7-9). In designing his play specifically for Covent Garden, Shelley sought a forum which was not only popular, but increasingly open to members of all classes.

The poet would have [been] familiar with this forum, having attended the theater and opera frequently in 1818, often with Peacock or Marianne and Leigh Hunt, in the weeks that he and Mary Shelley resided in London before leaving for the Continent. It was at this time that he was struck with the acting skills of the leading man and lady he envisioned for The Cenci. Mary Shelley's journal notes that Peacock joined the Shelleys in attending the new play, Fazio, by the Revd. Henry Hart Milman, at Covent Garden on February 16, 1818. Eliza O'Neill starred in the play. Shelley appears to have been taken with her performance enough to want to see the play again: Mary Shelley's entry for March 5 of that year reports having seen The Libertine, a new play by Isaac Pocock which was playing at Covent Garden on a double bill with Fazio that night (Journals [The Journals of Mary Shelley] 1:193 ff.). During these weeks Shelley saw Kean as well, starring at Drury Lane in a gothic musical called The Bride of Abydos, written by William Dimond and based on Byron's poem. The Shelleys also attended the opera many times, and saw what Mary describes as “a new comedy damned,” The Castle of Glendower by Samuel William Ryley at Drury Lane (Journals 1:196).

Shelley was quite familiar, then, with what was selling on the London stages, and his tastes were by no means exclusive. Kean and O'Neill were all the rage among critics and audiences alike. Again, it is clear that Shelley envisioned The Cenci as a play which would please popular audiences and lend to its author mainstream celebrity. Shelley's comparison of The Cenci to Coleridge's Remorse, which played successfully at Drury Lane in 1813, is telling as well. Both dramas are thought to diverge from Romantic poets' tendency to write “closet dramas,” and both do so mainly by utilizing a widely-recognizable set of conventions popular at the time: the conventions of the gothic drama. The Cenci's irredeemably evil tyrant, his pathetic heroine-victim, and her self-divided suitor reflect one of gothic drama's standard groupings of stock characters. Shelley engages a host of gothic devices in the play as well: the medieval setting, the gloomy castle, the intercepted letter, the constant appeals to heaven, the Inquisition, and the dungeon scene—even the drugged drink Lucretia gives Cenci on the night of his murder is typical gothic fare. And Beatrice Cenci's lengthy and grim description of the intended forest location for her father's murder indulges in the gothic tradition in which “castles were always ruinous, forests set in deep gloom, and the seashore lashed by storm-driven waves” (Ranger 10). Given his use of the contemporary stage's most scintillating attractions, it's easy to understand Shelley's conviction that The Cenci would prove popular, and his subsequent frustration when it could not be performed.

In writing The Cenci as a gothic drama, however, Shelley was seeking more than box office draw. The over-the-top turbulence and sensation of gothic drama can be seen as a means of portraying the real-life sense of struggle and breakdown which characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, while avoiding the overt political commentary which would have alarmed the Examiner of Plays. The good versus evil nature of the gothic plot conveniently encapsulates moral dilemmas which were very often analogous to current political ones. Furthermore, the highly conventionalized nature of the gothic plot allowed Shelley to write a form of drama which in and of itself became a commentary on the necessity of having an engaged and sympathetic audience. The gothic drama was a form of theater in which “the audience was an integral part of the performance of the play” (Ranger 104). Awaiting its cues to laugh, weep, or recoil in horror, the nineteenth-century audience provided the response that guaranteed the success or failure of any play. The attention and sympathies of an audience are crucial for a play's performance more overtly than they are for the success of any other literary form; in a genre form such as the gothic, the play's effect depends entirely upon its reception by an audience. The playwright's desire for the rapt attentions and hearty response of such an audience reflects, for Shelley, the poet's desire for the understanding and complicity of an engaged readership. Historical displacement has often been used by writers to protect polemical references to contemporary events, a strategy which, as Hoagwood demonstrates, Romantic playwrights often employed. But drama supplements this protective distancing with another quality: the sense of immediacy that staged events can convey. Shelley indicates an awareness of this capacity by choosing, for his first attempt at staging a play, a heroine who embodies theatricality's potential for urgency in order to reach an audience.

Recalling Marshall's claim that winning an audience's sympathy depends upon effective self-presentation, in seems clear why Percy Shelley would turn to Beatrice Cenci to help him with this task. He stages his own difficulty in eliciting the sympathy of an audience by presenting us with an historical figure who overcame similar obstacles to win listeners and with whom he shares a past publicly marked by acts of rebellion and blame. Returning, in closing, to the Preface, we see Shelley cautiously negotiating his identification with his heroine. He assumes, in effect, the position of his own reader in acknowledging his reluctance to sympathize with Beatrice Cenci when he concedes that “Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes” (Cenci 240). When he goes on to defend her, then, it is seemingly in spite of his own hesitation—a reluctance he could assume he shared with readers facing his own story. His identification with her may be read as a tacit acknowledgment that winning an audience required an act of sympathy. In the Preface, we see him making the sympathetic gesture toward Beatrice Cenci that he desired from his own audience.

Notes

1. The critic for Fraser's Magazine advises Shelley to “leave philosophy and politics, which he does not understand, and shriekings and cursings, which are unfit for any civilized and self-respecting man.” His caricature of a feminized Shelley as shrill and politically aggressive emphasizes the misogyny implicit in the most extreme critical castigations of Beatrice Cenci as a vengeful woman. The critic attempts to distance this instance of Shelley's harpy-like behavior from the “perfect” writer that he is “when he will be himself—Shelley the scholar and the gentleman and the singer” (574). For our purposes, however, this parodic depiction of Shelley in petticoats represents a telling identification on a critic's part of playwright with heroine. Stuart Curran cites Charles Kingsley as the likely author (Shelley's Cenci 23).

2. Perhaps the most important exception is Stuart Curran's full, subtle study of the play (Shelley's Cenci). Curran defends Beatrice Cenci by claiming that she is a kind of existential heroine because she realizes that there are no absolute standards of good and evil in the “sad reality” in which tyrants often have their way. Curran suggests that by acting on this understanding in the only way that her circumstances allow, Beatrice Cenci reflects the poet's own skepticism about any idealistic hope for rejuvenation, a parallel between the two that is useful to our argument, although our terms of comparison between Shelley and Beatrice Cenci differ from Curran's. Other critics have complicated the “moral dilemma” as well. Marjean Purinton agrees with the traditional reading in asserting that “Beatrice, unlike [Prometheus Unbound's] Asia, dons the cloak of patriarchal tyranny rather than the vestments of matriarchal freedom” (104), but argues that readers should not fall into the trap of judging Beatrice Cenci, for “if we ascribe evaluative labels to Beatrice's behavior as good or evil, vice or virtue, however, we risk falling into the trap of dichotomies that privilege one over the other—the very authority/submission hierarchy that The Cenci questions and depicts as false” (105). James Wilson defends her by making her the “unwilling vessel” for her father's “evil,” and thereby the “catalyst by means of which the Count unconsciously effected his perverse will to self-destruction” (80-81). While his argument is useful in relocating the source of “evil” firmly with the Count, our treatment of Beatrice Cenci focuses on her as an active agent. Newman Ivey White also comes to her defence by arguing that “her real motive for the murder is self-protection and an almost religious mission to rid her family and the world of a dangerous monster.” He, too, finds Shelley “sympathetic” with his heroine (2:139).

   In her reading of the play in the context of Romantic antitheatricalism, Julie Carlson makes an important argument for “Beatrice's inseparability from theatre” (Theatre 187). Like us, she is troubled by critiques of the play that focus on its heroine's flaws, pointing to “the inadequacy of moral interpretations of her character” (Theatre 187-88). But while she makes a case crucial to our argument for Shelley's sympathy with his heroine, Carlson maintains that he ultimately reacts against his own portrait of a strong woman acting out violent rebellion.

3. Sperry claims that “the fundamental issue upon which the drama turns, to put it simply, is: was Beatrice wrong in planning the murder of her father, Count Franceso Cenci; or was she rather justified in following, like Antigone, the dictates of her conscience and in adopting violent means to relieve both her family and herself from the toils of an insupportable tyranny?” (413).

4. All references to The Cenci are from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. All references to Mary Shelley's “Note on the Cenci” are from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Vol. 2.

5. Citing Shelley's essay, “A Philosophical View of Reform,” begun in 1819, Barbara Groseclose points out that Shelley did rethink his position against violent rebellion: “he had gradually begun to conclude that, on occasion, armed resistance might be necessary” (230). Groseclose makes an interesting argument relevent to ours, that Shelley makes incest “the crux of his plot” in order to make Beatrice Cenci “a special kind of political victim.” She differs from us, however, in arguing that his aim was to make her “neither criminal nor heroine” (231-32).

6. References to Mary's letters are from The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, Vol. 1 (hereafter LMWS).

7. For broader explorations of this point, see Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem, and Stephen C. Behrendt, “Beatrice Cenci and the Tragic Myth of History.”

8. Beatrice Cenci's lines read: “Ay, something must be done; / What, yet I know not … something which shall make / The thing that I have suffered but a shadow / In the dread lighting which avenges it” (3. 1. 86-89). Purinton also notes this congruence.

9. Julie Carlson makes an argument that supplements Hoagwood's: “A critical focus on theater,” she claims, “helps restore the complexity and political seriousness of romantic poetics” (“Impositions of Form” 151).

10. Curran reports that when Shelley encountered the story in Italy, it was “commonly reproduced as a veiled attack against the Italian aristocracy and the Papacy” (Shelley's Cenci 40).

11. See Michael Worton, “Speech and Silence in The Cenci.”

12. Steven Goldsmith finds “the ability to control access to speech, the ability to assert one's power by diminishing the linguistic capacities of others” to be central to the play. But he maintains the standard critical line on Beatrice Cenci's actions, concluding that after the rape “she speaks in a new voice that distinctly resembles her father's” (236-37, 238).

13. Curran outlines the play's literary debts in great detail in Shelley's Cenci.

14. Behrendt also argues that Shelley's attempt to reach a mainstream audience in The Cenci reveals the political message behind the play. Behrendt's reading of the play, however, and of Beatrice Cenci in particular, differs from ours in that he holds that The Cenci represents an effort subtly to introduce political ideas to his audience, rather than to dramatize exactly the problem of reaching that audience.

15. Behrendt suggests that with The Cenci, Shelley “determined to take an entirely new approach to language and style in an attempt to increase the play's accessibility for the theatergoer” (Shelley and His Audiences 145).

Works Cited

Anon. rev. of The Cenci. British Review 17 (June 1821): 380-89.

Anon. [Kingsley, Charles?]. “Thoughts on Shelley and Byron.” Fraser's Magazine 48 (November 1853): 568-76.

Behrendt, Stephen C. “Beatrice Cenci and the Tragic Myth of History.” History & Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Ed. Behrendt. Detroit: Wayne State U P, 1990. 214-34.

———. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.

Booth, Michael and Richard Southern, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, and Robertson Davies. The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 6. London: Methuen, 1975.

Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1974.

Carlson, Julie A. “Impositions of Form: Romantic Antitheatricalism and the Case Against Particular Women.” ELH [Journal of English Literary History] 60 (Spring 1993): 149-79.

———. In the Theatre of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1994.

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Hoagwood, Terence Allan. “Prolegomenon for a Theory of Romantic Drama.” The Wordsworth Circle 23 (Spring 1992): 49-64.

Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Purinton, Marjean D. Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1994.

Ranger, Paul. ‘Terror and Pity Reigned in Every Breast’: Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, 1750-1820. London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991.

Scott, John. Rev. of The Cenci. London Magazine 1 (May 1820): 546-55.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. The Journals of Mary Shelley. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987.

———. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Vol. 1. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1980.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. Vol 2. New York: Gordian P, 1965.

———. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. Vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964.

———. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977.

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Worton, Michael. “Speech and Silence in The Cenci.” Essays on Shelley. Ed. Miriam Allott. Liverpool: Liverpool U P, 1982. 105-24.