A significant number of readers are not entirely convinced that the murder in The Cenci can be construed as an act of vengeance. Aware of Shelley's explicit condemnation of “revenge, retaliation, atonement,” they will nevertheless insist that “there is no evidence that she [Beatrice] seeks revenge. … [S]he is not thinking in such terms. For her it is a deed that is as yet unexpiated and that asks atonement”¹ (this despite Shelley's association of revenge and atonement). Tending to regard the murder as an “act of rebellion,”² they prefer to describe Beatrice as a “public benefactor,” one who resorts to bloodshed to extirpate “social and domestic evil”³ (this despite the fact that no lasting public benefit or social reform results from her deed). Newman I. White even goes so far as to suggest that Shelley “can scarcely tolerate his own notion of revenge as part of her character. Her real motive for the murder is self-protection. …”⁴ On the contrary, I think we will be able to see that revenge was the very part Shelley wrote into the figure of Beatrice Cenci when refashioning her character for his drama. In fact I propose to show that all the major changes Shelley made in the Cenci story work toward the end of underplaying the theme of tyranny and rebellion evident in his manuscript source and replacing it with the significantly different issue of revenge and atonement. Just why Shelley made such changes will be a final consideration.

It seems to me that the wide range of critical opinion regarding Beatrice's justification is to a great degree the result of unintentional ambiguities introduced into the play by those changes Shelley made in the Cenci story. Specifically, the difficulty with the play is that the murder is rationalized by its perpetrators as an act of revenge and atonement, but it is executed upon a stage originally set for a drama of tyranny and possible revolt. As a result, the play presents its readers with two Beatrices, the rebel and the avenger. However, I believe we may see that the characterization of Beatrice as killing in self-defense or in revolt against tyranny can only be based upon a knowledge of Shelley's manuscript source or the character of Beatrice as she is represented in the opening two acts of the play. Beyond these there is little or no reason for regarding the heroine of Shelley's tragedy as anything but a woman destroyed by a religious compulsion to seek revenge and atonement.

It is noteworthy first of all that nowhere in his preface to the play does Shelley specifically condemn violence undertaken with the end of either rebellion or self-defense. Shelley does of course bring up the subject of rebellion, but not with reference to the heroine of his play. He notes in the first paragraph that Beatrice “after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination of both body and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common tyrant” (“Preface,” p. 275).⁵ But we must recognize that at this point Shelley is relating the Cenci legend and speaking of Beatrice as she appeared to him largely through the manuscript, “Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci.” There we are similarly informed that at “length, these unhappy women, finding themselves without hope of relief, driven by desperation, resolved to plan his death.”⁶ The manuscript speaks simply of their “hope of relief” while Shelley insists upon Beatrice's desire to escape from “perpetual contamination.” This novel emphasis upon contamination is our first hint at a shift away from the theme of self-defense toward that of pollution and atonement, and it should be kept in mind for upcoming discussion. In any case, Shelley does accept and present the explanation given in the manuscript that Beatrice of story and legend killed to escape oppression.

However, he does not begin to discuss the heroine of his drama until the fourth paragraph of the Preface, the pivotal significance of which is apparent from its opening sentence: “This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable” (p. 276, italics added). Turning from the story itself to consider under what conditions it might be successfully transferred to the stage, Shelley explains in this paragraph how and why he transformed Beatrice, not into the “wiser and better” person he might have wished her to be, but into a tragic character who mistakenly believes that a “person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another” (“Preface,” p. 276) and is thereby driven to seek revenge and atonement. Privately, Shelley confessed that The Cenci was “written for the multitude” and “calculated to produce a very popular effect. …”⁷ It is in fact modeled after a genre of proven popularity, the revenge tragedy; and its heroine, Shelley admits, was created to appeal to a mass audience that would have no interest in a wise and good protagonist:

Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never been a tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists.

(“Preface,” pp. 276-77)

This passage, which is often taken to allow in some way for a justification of Beatrice, is actually only an explanation of why an unenlightened, mass audience would seek her justification in the first place. For Shelley begins by stating unequivocally that her action is unjustifiable—a pernicious mistake. (The specific condemnation is of violence employed for the purpose of revenge and atonement; to repeat, there is nothing in the Preface which states that violent rebellion is unjustifiable!) But he anticipates that the masses for whom he has written will seek, by resorting to “casuistry,” to justify the very motives he had condemned. The difficulty they will face is not having to justify revenge, which they find morally acceptable, but defending revenge enacted against one's own father. Violence of this sort is what will strike them with “superstitious horror.” For certainly Shelley would never use the adjective “superstitious” to describe anyone's abhorrence of revenge—or oppression for that matter. But “superstitious horror” could appropriately describe the reaction of an audience aroused by scenes of incestuous rape and parricide. Thus Beatrice “has done what needs justification” only because the multitude believe that revenge is justified in her case, but they cannot reconcile their superstitions concerning the need for revenge and atonement of the crime of incestuous rape with their equally superstitious horror at the prospect of violence directed against one's father. A draft of this passage states the precise nature of their dilemma more clearly. It reads, Beatrice “has done an unnatural deed, but urged to it by one more unnatural. …”⁸

From the Preface we may therefore conclude that Shelley understood the murder to be in retaliation for the “one,” singular crime of forced incest. He never applies the escape-from-tyranny interpretation to the heroine of his drama, nor does he raise the issue of honor and revenge when discussing her prototype. We may thus further conclude that Shelley understood these two women to be motivated by entirely different ends. Of course in Shelley's version it is Cenci's tyranny which ultimately drives Beatrice to murder; however, when she does have her father killed, it is not with the aim of eliminating tyranny, as we shall soon see. If we seek a rebel Beatrice, the Preface, for one, indicates that we might better look for her not in the play but in the legend from which it was adapted.

Yet Shelley was not totally successful in making the motive for the murder revenge instead of rebellion or self-defense. The changes he wished to make were introduced into the play too late and too abruptly. The revenge motif is not sufficiently foreshadowed and indeed runs contrary to the direction established in the play's exposition. It is the problem these changes create that we should now consider.

The woman we discover in Act I is modeled after the legendary figure of Beatrice, and if anything, represents a more idealized portrait. Her predicament is also the same. She and her family are hopelessly seeking relief from Cenci's endless persecution, and their plight is conveniently summarized in Beatrice's plea for help:

BEATRICE.
I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What, although tyranny and impious hate
Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?

.....

                                                                                Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world?
O think what deep wrongs must have blotted out
First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind,
Till it thus vanquished shame and fear! O think!
I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand
Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke
Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love, and tears
To soften him, and when this could not be
I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the Father of all,
Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard
I still have borne,—until I meet you here,
Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast
Given at my brothers' deaths. Two yet remain,
His wife remains and I, who if ye save not,
Ye may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves.

(I. iii. 99-125)

The situation as Beatrice represents it is quite clear: She has borne “deep wrongs” (keep in mind her reference at this time to a plurality of wrongs); and unless she and her family can be rescued from Cenci's “tyranny,” he will most likely destroy them. But Cenci successfully intimidates those who would come to their aid; and shortly afterward, Beatrice learns that her petition to the Pope has not been answered (II. ii. 24-25). Thus the first act of Shelley's drama depicts the same inescapable conditions that in the story had originally driven Beatrice to murder. At this point there can be no doubt in the reader's mind that the problem is relief from oppression and escape from inevitable death. Except for a remark by Cenci on the enjoyment of “revenge” (I. i. 77-91), which has more to do with sadism that retribution, there is no mention of honor, revenge, or atonement.

But it is at this crucial point in the development of the action that Shelley forces the play to shift direction. The circumstances compelling Beatrice to actively resist her father's persecution reach a crisis with the Pope's refusal to come to her aid. This rejection originally stood as the turning point, the tragic climax of a story exposing the ineptitude and expediency of the Papacy. For prior to the rejection of her petition, Beatrice had not been represented as a thoroughly desperate woman; but almost immediately thereafter, the manuscript relates how she and Lucretia, “finding themselves without hope of relief … resolved to plan his death” (“Relation” [“of the Death of the Family of the Cenci”], p. 160). Now there can be no doubt that Shelley understood the significance of the moment, since he has Lucretia acknowledge that the unopened petition means their “last hope has failed” (II. i. 28). However, Shelley deliberately altered the sequence of events at the very moment of crisis because he sought to cast an entirely different light upon the murder. Instead of dramatizing a possible outcome of this crisis, he circumvented the problem by making certain alterations. The rape of Beatrice, which had originally compelled her to petition the Pope, does not occur in Shelley's version until after her petition is returned. So instead of the original sequence: persecution including rape, petition, its rejection, murder plot; we have: persecution, petition, its rejection, rape, murder plot. The entire second act of the play serves to divorce two events directly related in the manuscript, the collapse of all hope for relief (II. i. 28) and the first thought of murder (III. i. 117-26). In Shelley's version the thought of murdering Cenci occurs well after their last hope of relief has failed, but immediately after Beatrice is raped; and for this reason, the murder plot comes to be thought of as an act of vengeance and atonement and not justifiable tyrannicide.

The effect these interpolations have upon the development of the plot is that although the action climaxes naturally and inevitably enough at the beginning of Act II, it climaxes too early and for the wrong reasons. Thus the function of the second act is largely one of reorganization, and this is what accounts for the sluggish and inconsequential nature of the action throughout it. The purpose of Act II, as I see it, is to bridge the gap between the significant action of the first act, culminating in Act II with the petition's return, and the significantly different action of the third, beginning with the rape of Beatrice. As a result, the dramatic structure is so drastically altered that there are in effect two climaxes within one tragedy, the Pope's (and the banquet guest's) non-intervention and the rape of Beatrice. Consequently, there have been two generally plausible explanations for the murder of Cenci: self-defense and revenge.

However, the plot changes Shelley made render the first climax and much of the action of the first act inconsequential. At the exact moment when Cenci's death seems the only means by which his family may be relieved of endless torment, the action is suddenly redirected toward a future crisis:

SERVANT.
My master bids me say, the Holy Father
Has sent back your petition thus unopened.

.....

LUCRETIA.
So, daughter our last hope has failed; Ah me!
How pale you look; you tremble, and you stand
Wrapped in some fixed and fearful meditation,
As if one thought were over strong for you:
Your eyes have a chill glare; O, dearest child!
Are you gone mad? …

.....

You talked of something that your father did
After that dreadful feast? Could it be worse
Than when he smiled, and cried, “My sons are dead!”

.....

Until this hour thus have you ever stood
Between us and your father's moody wrath
Like a protecting presence: your firm mind
Has been our only refuge and defence:
What can have thus subdued it? …

.....

BEATRICE
(speaking very slowly with a forced calmness).
It was one word, Mother, one little word;
One look, one smile. (Wildly) Oh! He has trampled me
Under his feet, and made the blood stream down
My pallid cheeks. And he has given us all
Ditch-water, and the fever-stricken flesh
Of buffaloes, and bade us eat or starve,
And we have eaten.—He has made me look
On my beloved Bernardo, when rust
Of heavy chains has gangrened his sweet limbs,
And I have never yet despaired—but now!
What could I say?                                                            [Recovering herself]
                                                  Ah, no! 'tis nothing new.

(II. i. 24-73, my italics)

No sooner has Lucretia acknowledged that their “last hope has failed”—indicating presumably that in the history of Cenci's persecution of them the moment of mortal crisis has arrived—than with the very next words she manages to turn the scene and the drama completely about: “Ah me! / How pale you look. …” Now one might assume that the sudden change in Beatrice's appearance, her radically different behavior, reveals shock at the terrible news they have just received. That this is not the case is as clear an indication as any that Shelley is deliberately turning away from the line of action already established. In fact, he has Beatrice insist that her strange behavior has nothing to do with any of Cenci's previous crimes. This one will be worse than all of them taken together.

Beatrice's words seem to anticipate problems arising from the changes which the play is undergoing as she speaks. At this very moment Shelley is beginning to translate the rape which had originally stood at this place in the story for the ultimate act of tyranny into what will be, when it occurs, the act that initiates Beatrice's revenge and serves as its primary motive. In other words, the scene marks the beginning of a second exposition within the play; and it does so by attempting at the same time to all but discount the continued relevance of the first beyond this turning point. Dismissing all of Cenci's former outrages as nothing compared with what he now conceives, Beatrice's words do indeed anticipate the introduction of something “new”: the theme of contamination and atonement. In fact they indicate a breakdown in the continuity of the action and even go so far as to encourage the audience to accept a discontinuity of development: We must somehow largely discount what we have learned of Cenci's tyranny in preparation for understanding the now delayed murder plot as growing not directly out of the context of Cenci's previous crimes so much as about to result from a single outrage yet to be enacted. And as anticipated, the rape will have the effect of so overwhelming Beatrice with superstitious horror that she will regard it, not as the worst instance of Cenci's tyranny, but as an extraordinarily monstrous act which calls for immediate and forceful action, as did none of his numerous other crimes.

But while Beatrice's hysterical response is psychologically plausible and in keeping with other changes Shelley made in the story, there is reason to question whether it is dramatically suitable, whether it is not similar to those other changes in that it also runs counter to the major thrust of the action up to the second act. We should note that Beatrice originally regarded the rape—more fittingly I believe—as an indication of how impossible it would be “to continue to live in so miserable a manner …” (“Relation,” p. 160). Her response to an outrage, the details of which Mary found “unfit for publication” (“Relation,” p. 160n.), was simply to send “a well-written supplication to the Pope, imploring him to … [withdraw] her from the violence and cruelty of her father” (“Relation,” p. 160). Even after she is violated, there is no mention of contamination or revenge; and her continued composure is in marked contrast to the hysteria Shelley wrote into his character:

BEATRICE.
                                                                                                                                  My God!
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!
The sunshine on the floor is black! The air
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe
In charnal pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps
A clinging, black, contaminating mist
About me … 'tis substantial, heavy, thick,
I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another,
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves
My flesh to a pollution, poisoning
The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!
My God! I never knew what the mad felt
Before; for I am mad beyond all doubt!

(III. i. 12-25)

The “mad” Beatrice is obviously Shelley's own creation, an addition to the legend. It is she who dissociates the rape from Cenci's other now purely tyrannical acts to comprehend it anew under the influence of honor codes and religious superstition, believing that in this instance she has been “dishonoured by the act of another.” For the compulsion to revenge is dictated by the understanding that though innocent of having committed a dishonorable act one may yet be guilty of having suffered it. Guilt is objective, without regard to an individual's intent or active involvement in the crime. Thus, in such matters, responsibility for righting the wrong readily falls upon the victim of the crime, who remains guilty so long as he or she allows his or her dishonor to persist unavenged and unatoned for. As Shelley knew, revenge is an act of atonement on the part of the victim of a crime who, as in Beatrice's case, seeks retaliation as the only means of ridding herself of dishonor and cleansing away the polluting and contaminating effects of the offending act.

The above words, the very first Beatrice utters after being raped, reveal that although still an unwilling victim, Beatrice no longer thinks of herself as an innocent one, but as a woman infected with a moral contamination for which she must make amends. That is why she insists that this “wrong … is such / As asks atonement …” (III. i. 213-15). Her immediate concern after the rape is to expiate her guilt and her dishonor, and thus she first considers taking her own life, not that of her father:

                                        O blood, which art my father's blood,
Circling through these contaminated veins,
If thou, poured forth on the polluted earth,
Could wash away the crime, and punishment
By which I suffer … no, that cannot be!
Many may doubt there was a God above
Who sees and permits evil, and so die:
That faith no agony shall obscure in me.

(III. i. 95-102)

Beatrice conceives of death, whether hers or her father's, largely as a cleansing act of atonement which has as its primary aim to rid the world of the pollution caused by the particular crime of incestuous rape. To rid the world of Cenci's evil power remains a consideration secondary both to the need for atonement and to a sense of justice that is almost totally theological and metaphysical in character, rather than moral and political in its concerns. Stuart Curran is certainly correct when he says that Beatrice struggles “not to save herself, but the moral universe.”⁹ 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-centered purpose, but outright religious fanaticism on Beatrice's part. We must not forget that from the first Shelley insisted that “there is neither good nor evil in the universe” and that belief in a moral universe was the cornerstone of fraudulent religious doctrines which opposed humanitarian concerns.¹⁰ Under the influence of such doctrines, 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.

That Cenci is murdered almost exclusively for religious and not social-political reasons is apparent furthermore from the fact that Beatrice never does publicize the real reason for the murder, even though she had formerly spoken out against Cenci's “tyranny and impious hate.” Were oppression the matter, she might have reiterated in her defense any number of already revealed crimes. Her problem is that the one crime that explains and justifies the murder is unmentionable. To make known the “crime of … [her] destroyer,” would, she knows, effectively ruin her “unpolluted fame” (III. i. 152-66). Beatrice's silence reveals how troubled she is by a problem central to the whole question of honor and revenge, not to mention practical considerations regarding the status of a raped woman in sixteenth century Italy. Calderon, whom Shelley was reading at the time he wrote The Cenci, dealt with the dilemma that the act of revenge must somehow keep secret the fact of one's dishonor or contamination (see especially A Secreto Agravio, Secreta Venganza); and not incidentally, Mary felt the need for silence regarding certain details of the manuscript she edited.

We should take note of Beatrice's silence to counter any notions that she is rebellious, and we might compare her silence with the typical wordiness of rebel figures Shelley did create: Ahasuerus (in Queen Mab), Prometheus, Laon and Cythna (also a rape victim) never lack for words, eager as they are to publicize at length the reasons for their actions so as to enlighten and convert to the cause of public benefit and social reform. Their humanitarian sense of justice is altogether different from Beatrice's fanaticism. In the final analysis we find Beatrice capable of withstanding acts of inhumanity involving the worst kinds of mental torture and physical abuse. The sight of Bernardo gangrenous in chains or the news of her brothers' deaths does not disturb her as does the horror she feels at the mere hint of incestuous rape (see II. i. 24-73, quoted above). Human compassion does not have the force of religious superstition, and so Beatrice is roused to violent action only when she feels an offence has been committed not against other men, but against God:

BEATRICE.
                                                                                                    Ay, death …
The punishment of crime. I pray thee, God,
Let me not be bewildered while I judge.
If I must live day after day, and keep
These limbs, the unworthy temple of Thy spirit,
As a foul den from which what Thou abhorrest
May mock Thee, unavenged … it shall not be!

(III. i. 125-31)

“Keep thy body as a temple for the holy spirit,” said Paul. Cenci has violated the temple and sinned unpardonably against the holy spirit. His other acts were merely crimes against humanity; the rape is a sacrilege. That is why Beatrice and her co-conspirators, all “Catholics deeply tinged with religion” (“Preface,” p. 277), do not think of the rape as the last and most vicious in a long series of tyrannical abuses, but as an outrage that in and of itself demands retaliation. In their defense, they do not allude to the history of Cenci's oppression, basically ignoring what has been planted in the reader's mind by the opening acts of the play. In plotting his death these characters do not now refer, as Beatrice did in Act I, to “tyranny” and “deep wrongs,” but allude to the single act of rape as sufficient motive and justification for murdering Cenci: Beatrice must avenge “The thing that I have suffered …” (III. i. 88). Orsino speaks of Cenci's “late outrage to Beatrice … [which] makes remorse dishonour, and leaves her / Only one duty, how she may avenge …” (III. i. 198-201); and after the murder is accomplished, Giacomo says that Beatrice has avenged “a nameless wrong / As turns black parricide to piety …” (V. i. 44-45). When arrested, Beatrice significantly criticizes “human laws,” not for permitting injustice, but for barring “all access to retribution,” claiming that Heaven has permitted her “the redress of an unwonted crime” (IV. iv. 116-21); and she refers during her trial to her father's singular “wrong” (V. ii. 130). Admittedly Beatrice does speak of her “wrongs [which] could not be told” (V. ii. 141); but the plural is puzzling here, since there is truly only one wrong that cannot be told. However, Mary did edit out details of sexual abuse when she published the manuscript story, and it seems that originally Beatrice might have been violated on more than on occasion. We should also note here that the Preface does speak of Beatrice's “wrongs and their revenge” (p. 277), although, as we have seen, a draft of this passage, states that her unnatural act was motivated by “one more unnatural” (italics added).

Two conclusions appear certain. One is that we find uncertainty as to the extent to which the murder may have been motivated by a single outrage or by the totality of Cenci's tyranny. And secondly, this confusion results from the changes Shelley made in the story, all of which serve to downplay the rebellious and defensive nature of Beatrice's actions, tending to represent the murder, instead, as an act of vengeance. Nevertheless, this is not to say that we can find no meaningful relationship between the need for self-protection, evident in the opening acts, and the compulsion to revenge that later overwhelms Beatrice—only that the transition is poorly plotted. What The Cenci attempts to show is how a decent woman's hope for change and desire for the protection of self and others can readily degenerate within an unenlightened society into the wish for revenge. As Shelley noted in his “Essay on the Punishment of Death,”

the passion of revenge is originally nothing more than an habitual perception of the ideas of the sufferings of the person who inflicts an injury, as connected as they are in a savage state, or in such portions of society as are yet undisciplined to civilization, with the security that the injury will not be repeated in future. This feeling, engrafted upon superstition and confirmed by habit, at last loses sight of the only object for which it may be supposed to have been implanted and becomes a passion and a duty to be pursued and fulfilled, even to the destruction of those ends to which it originally tended.¹¹

In her passion Beatrice seeks “something which shall make / The thing … [she has] suffered but a shadow / In the dread lightning which avenges it … destroying / The consequence of what it cannot cure” (III. i. 87-91, my italics). And Orsino, we recall, finds that Cenci's outrage “makes remorse dishonour” and leaves Beatrice “[o]nly one duty, how she may avenge” (III. i. 198-201, italics added). Revenge is symptomatic of hopelessness regarding the possibility of security and/or reform. Not only does it not seek as its object any change in individuals or society, but it appears to be a duty precisely when the situation seems incurable.

In both the play and the manuscript, Beatrice turns to violence out of a sense of hopelessness, but in the play it is clearly despair over the possibility of reform. The first mention of despair occurs when Beatrice alludes darkly to some monstrous deed her father has hinted at: “I have never yet despaired,” she says, “—but now!” (II. i. 72). After the rape she comes to see her father as “a spirit of deep hell” in “human form” (IV. ii. 7-8), a reprobate totally beyond redemption and therefore deserving the punishment of death. Punishment is not an inducement to reform (its only possible justification); rather, Beatrice seeks the ultimate punishment because she despairs of Cenci ever changing.

But despair and the use of violence are of a different sort in the original story. Beatrice and Lucretia, we recall, turn to violence, finding “themselves without hope of relief.” Here then, in the original manuscript, is where we may look to find the means-and-ends issue so often discussed with reference to the play itself. Here is where Beatrice, after all other means have failed, turns to violence for the purpose of protecting herself and the remaining members of her family from Cenci's tyranny. But this transition from passively suffering to actively resisting evil never occurs in Shelley's version of the story. His heroine, unlike her prototype, is so dehumanized by tyrannical abuse and vicious notions, that she, a once innocent victim, comes to return evil for evil, employing violent means to evil ends. That is what the Preface quite appropriately criticizes Beatrice for doing, but appropriately so only because of the changes Shelley made in the plot.

Thus while acknowledging Shelley's tragic depiction of the destructive effects an unenlightened civilization can have upon a decent individual, I cannot help being curious about what does not occur in the play and wondering if the issue of revenge is not something of a red herring. It seems to me that the play avoids facing up to the consequences of Shelley's position regarding forbearance. For one entire act we see how forbearance of evil fails to reform either the individual or the political situation—how even the pleas of innocent victims cannot encourage the aid of good men. But Beatrice is not shown to forbear evil to the point where she voluntarily succumbs to it, allowing herself and her family to be destroyed. On the other hand, at the very moment when active resistance appears a viable alternative to the forbearance of torture, destruction, and the general persistence of tyrannical evil (i. e., the point at which her petition is returned unopened), active resistance is no longer at issue, but revenge and atonement will be. Since revenge is not resistance, but retaliation, Beatrice does not have to be condemned for actively resisting violence. In other words, Shelley avoided putting himself in the position of having to say what most mistakenly believe the Preface does say: that a decent woman was morally wrong for taking the life of a vicious tyrant to save her own and those of other innocent victims.

As a result of certain very deliberate changes in the story, the play dramatizes the evils of vengeance and not the difficulties inherent in Shelley's notions of forbearance, forgiveness, and passive resistance. It never puts his moral idealism dramatically to the test, and one has to suspect that Shelley was aware of how politically impractical his idealism was when confronting life's “sad reality.” My concern is that he never openly admits to its possible weaknesses or drawbacks. Rather, he insists upon a moral imperative in prefatory remarks that implies that it would be wrong to employ evil means to worthy ends—while all along he had created a drama in which the problem is that evil means are employed for evil ends. Indeed, the latter is what the Preface does in fact rather conveniently condemn. Of course, we do not have to know much about Shelley, the revolutionary age in which he wrote, the moral-political issue of peaceful reform versus violent revolution that has troubled his and other men's consciences, to know that the real question was and is not whether one can justify violence for evil ends. The problem Shelley had to face—he had it before him in the manuscript version—was whether violence is justified in fighting political oppression. It was a problem which, in The Cenci at least, he never truly faced up to.

Notes

1. Melvin R. Watson, “Shelley and Tragedy: The Case of Beatrice Cenci,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 7 (1958), 15-16.

2. Robert Whitman, “Beatrice's ‘Pernicious Mistake’ in The Cenci,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 74 (1959), 252-53.

3. Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1948), pp. 141-42.

4. Shelley (New York: Knopf, 1940), II, 139.

5. All quotations from The Cenci and its prefatory material are taken from Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. G. M. Matthews (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), and hereafter citations will be given parenthetically in the text.

6. “Relation of the Death of the Family of the Cenci,” in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed., Roger Ingpen (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), II, 160. Hereafter noted parenthetically in the text, using the short title, “Relation,” and the page number of this volume.

7. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: The Claredon Press, 1964), II, 116-17. See also pp. 127 and 174 where Shelley again expresses the opinion that he has compromised to reach a mass audience.

8. Note Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. H. Buxton Forman (New York: Phaeton Press, 1968), II, 91-92.

9. Shelley's Cenci (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 96.

10. “Notes on Queen Mab,” Shelley: Poetical Works, p. 812.

11. Shelley's Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1966), p. 157. The further relevance of the “Essay on the Punishment of Death” may be gauged by an earlier statement: “It is sufficiently clear that revenge, retaliation, atonement, expiation are rules and motives so far from deserving a place in any enlightened system of political life that they are the chief sources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circles of society” (p. 155).