[In the following essay, Twitchell studies Shelley's use of the vampire myth in the imagery of The Cenci.]

The Cenci is certainly one of the most philosophically intricate works Shelley ever wrote. It is intricate in that Shelley set for himself the complex task of reconstructing historical events in a form that demands sequential as well as imaginative cohesion, and it is philosophical in that he deals with the problem of casuistry, the use of evil means for good ends.¹ It is a drama that shows through a fiction the real workings of evil: how evil is generated, how it is transferred, and how it can destroy and be destroyed. While one could say the same thing about The Cenci's companion piece, Prometheus Unbound, there is an important difference. Prometheus Unbound is a work, as Shelley himself said, of “pure idealism,” while The Cenci is one of “sad reality.” In artistic terms, this means that while in Prometheus Unbound Shelley can resolve casuistical problems by fiat (which he does by having Prometheus forgive Jupiter prior to the action of the drama), in The Cenci he must “work them out” through action and imagery within the play. In The Cenci there can be no apocalyptic resolution, no Act IV where cosmic harmonies are struck, no Spirits of the Mind floating out to millennial levels; instead, only the sad irresolution of Actuality.

Shelley must have realized in late April 1819, when he set Prometheus Unbound down at the end of Act III, that the writing of The Cenci would demand a significant change, not only in action, but in imagery as well. For he wrote in the “Preface”

I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's murder should be judged to be of that nature.

In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery may alike be fit for the dramatic purposes when employed in the illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow of its own greatness.²

He continues, asserting that in such a drama “we must use the familiar language of men” so that the widest possible audience will be reached. For if art can move this audience to “true sympathy,” lasting social reform may be achieved.

This paper will attempt an explanation of how imagery and passion do indeed “interpenetrate one another” in The Cenci through the specific example of an image as familiar in our day as it was in Shelley's—the vampire. The image of the vampire had artistic currency in the early nineteenth century, first as a translation of German Gothicism and then as an independent English literary type that culminated in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Before Shelley, Southey had used the vampire superstition in Thalaba the Destroyer (Bk. 8), Coleridge had used it in Christabel as had Keats in Lamia, but the real development of the myth occurred as the result of a serendipitous meeting in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. There, during a rainy summer evening, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Byron, and Dr. John Polidori (Byron's traveling physician) each pledged to write a ghost story. We remember Mary Shelley's contribution, for her Frankenstein is still very much a part of our popular culture, but we may forget that here also the other Romantic monster, the vampire, saw the light of day. Byron produced a “Fragment” of a vampire novel (usually published after Mazeppa in collected works) that he showed John Polidori. Polidori, ever mindful of Byron's fame, substantially rewrote the story and published it under Byron's name in the April 1819 issue of Colburn's New Monthly Magazine. It was a stunning success—Goethe claimed it was the best thing Byron had ever written!—and was soon reprinted and translated almost into tatters. It provided the first real popular audience for vampire fiction and to Shelley, as we have seen in the “Preface” to The Cenci, this familiarity between audience and imagery was essential.³

Stuart Curran in Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire has already discussed how specific clusters of images reveal a depth of meaning barely suggested by the surface plot. Professor Curran contends that this figurative language is

an essential organizing principle of drama by which the poet is able to disclose the subtlest nuances of thought. And given the nature of The Cenci, where moral ambiguity constantly attends upon the destruction of conventional values and one character after another is compelled toward solipsism, the structural demands on this essential organizing principle are extraordinary, necessitating the creation of intricate metaphorical patterns.⁴

And Curran points to aggregations of images around such subjects as commerce, hunting, darkness, bestiality, and imprisonment to show how this organizing principle operates. But he overlooks an important image cluster that I believe more than any other illustrates his point that when the movement of the work is not toward resolution but ambiguity, there is a special need for intricate metaphorical patterns. The major theme of the play is the dynamics of evil, and the vampire as both solipsist and casuist is a ghoulishly apt mythologem of the centripetal and centrifugal forces of disorder. For the vampire is both a festering center of evil and a contaminating carrier, an ambiguous destroyer of others and preserver of himself.

Finding an image for evil as a human process seems to have been in Shelley's mind at the end of Act III of Prometheus Unbound. For some sixty lines before he leaves man “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” Shelley has the Spirit of the Hour explain to Asia what the world looks like devoid of evil. The Spirit reports that everything looks the same except that thrones are kingless, prisons are empty, and altars are unattended. There is no more “hate, disdain, or fear”; evil, “the wretch crept a vampire among men, / Infecting all with his own hideous ill,” (III. iv. 147-48) has been cast out. Shelley's use of the image of the vampire serves here, as in The Cenci, to reinforce his conviction that evil is a perverse human process, that it is communicable, like an infectious disease, and that if properly destroyed, the forces of Good will automatically be asserted. The questions become: what is the vampire of Evil, how do we inoculate ourselves against him, and how do we properly dispose of him? In part The Cenci is Shelley's answer, but to understand it we need first to examine the mythic vampire.

Basically the vampire is the devil incarnate in a sinner's body. For any number of reasons (excommunication, burial without rites, suicide, improper tithing, attack from a vampire) the devil will possess the body before the soul can depart.⁵ Then for an eternity, unless properly destroyed, the fiend will wreak havoc, primarily on those people who were closest to the sinner before demonic possession. This point, although lost in our twentieth-century retelling of the mythology, was a most important part of the Romantic version as seen, for example, in Byron's highly successful Giaour (first edition, 1813; fourteenth edition, 1815). Here is the Giaour curse, which seems an obvious influence on a number of different aspects of The Cenci as well:

But first on earth, as Vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet, which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corpse,
Thy victims, ere they yet expire,
Shall know the demon for their sire;
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, best beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father's name—
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet thou must end thy task and mark
Her cheek's last tinge—her eye's last spark.
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o'er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shall tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which, in life a lock when shorn
Affection's fondest pledge was worn—
But now is borne away by thee
Memorial to thine agony!
Yet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth, and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go—and with Ghouls and Afrits rave,
Till these in horror shrink away
From spectre more accursed than they.

(755-86)

In the curse we are told that the vampire must first attack those he loves most, and that these victims are the females of his own family. Shelley has spared us the “gnashing tooth, and haggard lip,” but the Cenci's victims are, as we shall see, first his wife and then his children, especially Beatrice, “The youngest and best beloved of all.” The vampire's course of action is singularly horrible because he is initially hesitant about destroying his loved ones, but of course he cannot help himself. He is “possessed.” Even more complicated is the fact that the loved one must make some initial advance in his direction—she must initiate the rapprochement. Once this initial move has been made, however, the vampire, through the hypnotic powers of his eye, mesmerizes the victim who, once “enthralled,” cannot later recall what has happened, other than that it was exciting and sexually traumatic. It is only after the vampire's destruction that she will remember.

The actual encounter is both erotic and awful. For the vampire partially drains the life fluid, through a long, sensuous kiss on the victim's neck. She turns pale as he strengthens. But he does not kill her, at least not yet. She can still escape by protecting herself with religious icons, garlic, or various other talismans that differ depending on the cultural milieu. But if she hesitates too long, he will return again and again, until she becomes so enervated that she quite literally shrivels up and dies a seemingly physical death. However, this is a deception, for in reality she passes into the world of the “walking dead,” becoming a second-generation vampire (technically a “lamia”) now on the prowl for virginal male victims of her own.

Actually much of this vampire lore is still part of our culture, although the medium has changed from print to celluloid. Any schoolboy can tell you that vampires prefer to work at night, especially around midnight, that they travel in mist and cause storms, that they can be killed only with a stake through the heart, and of course that they depend on the elixir of blood. But what we have forgotten is that in an historical sense the vampire is a product of the very religion he abhors—Roman Catholicism. To be sure the vampire myth antedates Christianity, but it was revived by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages to shepherd the unconvinced, the unconfirmed and the apostate back into the church.⁶ Excommunication, burial in an unsanctified ground, suicide, and a refusal of the sacraments were all invitations to the devil to enter the sinner's body. The myth still thrives in south central Europe where it was belligerently used for generations as a wedge against encroaching Greek orthodoxy.⁷ Conveniently the superstitions had more than a political use in the Middle Ages; they also bolstered the newest and most uneasy sacrament—the eucharist. This was the most abstract of the sacraments, depending on the metaphorical understanding of Christ's words:

Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

(St. John, VI. 53-57)

Was it not equally sensible that this transubstantiation process could be reversed by the devil, who would celebrate a diabolical eucharist by drinking the blood of the sinner?

I would not contend that Count Cenci is an actual practicing vampire, but only that Shelley is evoking the image cluster with all its horrible connotations to show how evil is generated, transferred and destroyed. The most obvious use of the metaphor is in Act I, where Cenci twice celebrates a perverse eucharist. Here he is, first celebrating the deaths of his sons:

(Filling a bowl of wine, and lifting it up) Oh, thou
          bright wine whose purple splendour leaps
And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl
Under the lamplight, as my spirits do,
To hear the death of my accursed sons!
Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,
Then would I taste thee like a sacrament,
And pledge with thee the mighty Devil in Hell,
Who, if a father's curses, as men say,
Climb with swift wings after their children's souls,
And drag them from the very throne of Heaven,
Now triumphs in my triumph—But thou art
Superfluous; I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine to-night.

(I. iii. 76-89)

Although Cenci claims he will drink no more—that he is sated with evil for awhile—this is not to be. For later that evening, after Beatrice has initiated a confrontation at the party, he again returns to the communion wine:

                                        (Exeunt all but Cenci and Beatrice.)
                    My brain is swimming round;
Give me a bowl of wine!                                        (To Beatrice.)
                                                  Thou painted viper!
Beast that thou art! Fair and yet terrible!
I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame,
Now get thee from my sight!                    (Exit Beatrice.)
                                                                                          Here, Andrea.
Fill up this goblet with Greek wine. I said
I would not drink this evening; but I must;
For, strange to say, I feel my spirits fail
With thinking what I have decreed to do.
                                                                                                                        (Drinking the wine.)
Be thou the resolution of quick youth
Within my veins, and manhood's purpose stern,
And age's firm, cold, subtle villainy;
As if thou wert indeed my children's blood
Which I did thirst to drink! The charm works well;
It must be done; it shall be done, I swear!

(I. iii. 163-78)

A number of important motifs are developed here in addition to the recurring image of wine as blood. First, the Count is not all-powerful; his “spirits” fail; and although he is revived by the metaphorical blood, we get a definite sense of hesitation, almost as if part of him were unwilling. He repeats this hesitancy: “… I bear a darker deadlier gloom / Than the earth's shade, or interlunar air, / Or constellations quenched in murkiest cloud, In which I walk secure and unbeheld / Towards my purpose.—Would that it were done!” (II. ii. 189-93). But he is powerless to stop, for the Count is truly a man possessed, as everyone, including himself, understands. Cardinal Camillo recognizes that Cenci harbors a “fiend within” (I. i. 45); his wife Lucretia can “see the devil … that lives in him” (II. i. 45); Beatrice realizes that only his death will “… dislodge a spirit of deep hell / Out of a human form” (IV. ii. 7-8); and ironically even Cenci himself is aware that “I do not feel as if I were a man, / But like a fiend appointed to chastise / The offenses of some unremembered world” (IV. ii. 160-63).

Another important motif, introduced in the Count's communion speech, is that he knows a “charm” to make Beatrice “meek and tame” (I. iii. 167). What that charm is we are never told—perhaps it is an ironic reference to his incestuous plans; perhaps it is also the trance the vampire uses to subdue his victim and make her receptive to evil. The two possibilities are by no means mutually exclusive; rather, they are complimentary and overlapping. The spell, whatever it is, seems to be transferred through Cenci's eye, and is so powerful that when Beatrice attempts to recount what has happened, she can only mumble, “He said, he looked, he did …” (II. i. 76). The evil eye is an important element of the play, for after Beatrice has been attacked, Lucretia notices that her daughter's eyes “… shoot forth / A wandering and strange spirit” (III. i. 81-2). And by the end of the play, when Beatrice is cornered by both Camillo (the Church) and the Judge (the State); she attempts to use this new-found power to force her henchmen to remain quiet: “Fix thine eyes on mine,” she demands of Marzio; but he cannot meet her gaze (V. ii. 82). His “brain swims round,” he cannot speak (V. ii. 88), but when Beatrice attempts to use her power to influence the judge and Camillo (both of whom are already in the service of different devils), she is thwarted by their implacability.

The last motif introduced in Cenci's eucharist speech is that his heinous activity will take place later at night. Cenci is a creature of the night, not just because Gothic monsters prefer midnight work, but specifically because as a vampire—even a figurative vampire—he is positively photophobic. The daytime for him is “—garish broad and peering … / Loud, light, suspicious, full of eyes and ears, / And every little corner, nook and hole / Is penetrated with the insolent light. / Come darkness!” (II. ii. 176-81). Little wonder then that he demands that Beatrice “attend me in her chamber / This evening: … at midnight and alone” (I. i. 145-46).

Their awful nocturnal conjunction is reminiscent of that part of the Giaour curse where the vampire must

… ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet, which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corpse,
Thy victims, ere they yet expire,
Shall know the demon for their sire.

(757-64)

And now, with the overlapping of the incest motif, the central horror is increased. For as Count Cenci is draining goodness, he is not leaving behind an empty husk, but rather impregnating a neutralized life with evil. This Manichean transformation occurs before us as Beatrice, once goodness personified, is undone and then reconstituted as evil when she accepts the “pernicious error” of allowing the ends to justify the means. For when she decides to destroy her father she destroys her self, in a sense becoming the person she hates. At the end she is indeed her father's “wretched progeny.”

The image that links these processes of transformation, vampiric and incestual, is the image of fluid, or more specifically, the two fluids central to each process—blood and semen. Much of the blood imagery in the play is hymeneal, showing the trauma that innocence suffers when actually impregnated with evil. But often the images of blood are used to show, not how blood results from rupture, but rather how it has been drained from the characters by Cenci. Although all the characters in the Cenci family have been psychologically bled of the energy of goodness, Beatrice is most obviously described as pale and wan, especially after her encounter with her father (III. ii. 351). But the same pallid condition is also true of her brother Bernardo (II. i. 123) and her mother Lucretia (II. i. 41-42). They are now only shells of their former selves, but the Count has not seen fit—as will his literary descendant, Count Dracula—to make all his victims actively participate in evil. Only Beatrice will finally execute his will.

The image of blood is more than a metaphor of energy exchange; it also symbolizes initiation into Cenci's demonic world. Paradoxically, although Beatrice is unable to recount what has happened between her and her father, her actual organs of perception are colored with the satanic stain: “My eyes,” she says, “are full of blood; just wipe them for me … / I see but indistinctly …” (III. i. 2-3). And she continues:

                                                                                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 charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps
A clinging, black, contaminating mist
About me. …

(III. i. 12-18)

Here Beatrice's transformation is literally occurring before not only her eyes but our own as well.⁸ Just as the vampire rises in mist from his “charnel pit,” so evil clouds the inner world and alters “reality.” The modus operandi of both external vampire and internal corruption is synchronized. This process is further developed when Cenci claims that Beatrice may well carry his child, an organic division of his demonic energy. He hopes his evil seed will develop into “a hideous likeness of herself, that as / From a distorting mirror, she may see / Her image mixed with what she abhors …” (IV. i. 146-48). Here again the incest and vampire motifs are dovetailed, for part of the superstition is that a vampire can cause hideous offspring if he even so much as looks at a fertile female.⁹ The Cenci is the incubus, the living nightmare, visiting evil and chaos on the unprotected and unwary. He quite literally incubates evil by contact with those he visits. The residue of this evil, the image of this potentiality for disorder, is represented by the other important fluid in the play—semen.

The relationship between blood and semen is a close one as they are both life-giving or life-supporting fluids. Ernest Jones, the Freudian psychologist, contended that “in the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen,” and Anthony Masters elaborates:

There existed in vampire belief a very strong love motive which involved the vampire in having intercourse with a living woman. This belief probably grew up via the occasional erotic stimulant of blood-letting in intercourse, the breaking of virginity, and, on a more mystic level, the medieval succuba, an erotic demon who preyed upon and destroyed man's virility.¹⁰

Shelley depends on the blood/semen linkage to express almost subliminally not only the transfer of evil, but its organic development as well.

Shelley is concerned not only with the clash of good and evil but with the consequences of this clash as well. The moral bind Beatrice faces is that once having been corrupted, having become literally a carrier of evil, what can she do to escape? She recognizes that evil has her “enthralled,” and cries out:

                    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!

(III. i. 95-99)

Death, her own death, would seem to be the answer. In fact, Lucretia even tells her that “death alone can make us free” (III. i. 78), but Beatrice knows otherwise. For suicide is no palliative—it is, after all, one of the sins that created the vampire to begin with. Her religion (for she, like Cenci, is devoutly religious—he to the letter, she to the spirit) has forbidden this escape:

Self-murder … no, that might be no escape
For Thy decree yawns like a Hell between
Our will and it. …

(III. i. 132-34)

I thought to die; but a religious awe
Restrains me, and the dread lest death itself
Might be no refuge from the consciousness
Of what is yet unexplained.

(III. i. 148-51)

And here, as far as Shelley is concerned, she makes her mistake. For she will “expiate” the crime, she will assume the role Cenci has claimed for himself—as a “scourge,” a redresser of wrongs. She will become the solipsist, the casuist, the Lady Macbeth. She decides to destroy not herself, but him, and in doing so ironically makes herself party to the same horrible processes that Cenci has initiated. She now faces the central problem of the play: how to develop the means to accomplish what all will agree is a noble end.

The problem of disposing of vampires is a complicated one. In nineteenth-century fiction it was usually a priest who destroyed the demon by driving an apple, maple, hawthorn, or blackthorn stake through the fiend's heart; in twentieth-century cinema it is usually a doctor (chances are, a hematologist) who destroys the villain. In the folk tale it was the task of the vampire's child (usually a son) who, perhaps because he is a blood descendant, intuitively knew the father's weaknesses. The Dhampire, by a complicated ritual, exorcises the parental demon, allows the soul to escape, and then destroys the now-neutralized husk of a body.¹¹ Shelley understandably does not emphasize this aspect, for again it would have made actual what he wanted metamorphical; but Cenci's death is nonetheless peculiar. Beatrice takes control, orchestrating the henchmen, who first refuse to kill the sleeping Cenci but then are exhorted to finish the heinous task. They throttle the Count and then heave the body over the parapet, where it is later found hanging (impaled?) on the branches of a tree (IV. iv. 73-76). Shelley thus only implies a death by staking.¹² As soon as Cenci is killed the spell on Beatrice seems broken; she feels that “My breath / Comes methinks, lighter, and the jellied blood / Runs freely through my veins” (IV. iii. 42-44). She is confident: “The spirit which doth reign within these limbs / Seems strangely undisturbed. I could even sleep / Fearless and calm: all ill is surely past” (IV. iii. 64-65).

But all ill is not passed. Her very act proves that Cenci has succeeded in corrupting her. In death he has achieved what he wanted in life, spiritual domination. The instant Beatrice acts as God's ministering angel she is tainted with the pride of her father, and in a fallen and scurvy world she will have to pay the price of initiation. Shelley has so devised her plight that there can be no reprieve for evil regardless of intention. The ends simply cannot justify the means. She has met evil head-on, and now there is no escaping its consequences. Suicide is ruled out (that would only lead to an eternity of suffering); exile is denied (witness the fate of her brothers); remaining to redress wrongs by patience will not work (she has the example of Lucretia)—she cannot go, she cannot stay. And so at the end, battling like a cornered animal, she reverts to the same methods her father used: she employs the powers of evil and subterfuge.

This must have been a most difficult philosophical problem for Shelley to resolve. How much simpler to make her tragic, nobly accepting an unfair fate. But Shelley wants no martyr. He has gone to considerable pains to show us a Beatrice contaminated with evil. He has so fitted the vampire motif into both the artistic and philosophic structure of his work that ultimately we will not be able to understand the one without the other. Finally, once we understand how the vampire of Evil works, we will be forced into disagreeing with those characters in the play who insist on seeing Beatrice as a force of pure Good. For what Giacomo, Bernardo, and Lucretia (all of whom are effusive in their praise of Beatrice) cannot see is that violence met with violence can only lead to violence. Evil can vamp the good, forcing it to resort to the very evil means it despises.¹³

Perhaps Orsino, with Iago-like insight, understands Beatrice best when he soliloquizes: “‘Tis a trick of this same family / To analyse their own and other minds. / Such self-anatomy shall teach the will / Dangerous secrets …’” (II. ii. 108-11). For early on Beatrice has analysed herself and found only Innocence. She is then attacked by Evil, and for the rest of the play her primary concern is to return to that lost innocence, that prelapsarian world. She, like Blake's Thel, has seen the ugliness of the fallen world and wants to return to Har. But too late. Instead of trying to live with sin, she must destroy it. “It is sufficiently clear,” Shelley wrote elsewhere, “that revenge, retaliation, atonement, expiation are rules and motives, so far from deserving a place in any system of political life, that they are the chief sources of a prodigious class of miseries in the domestic circles of society.”¹⁴ It is Orsino who is able to apply this to the world of Realpolitik: “he prospers best, Not who becomes the instrument of ill, / But who can flatter the dark spirit, that makes / Its empire and its prey of other hearts / Till it become his slave …” (II. ii. 157-61). Whereas Orsino seeks to use this knowledge for his own aggrandizement, it is also possible, as Shelley attempted to show in Prometheus Unbound, to use this wisdom for the good.

Passive resistance would then seem the only alternative. And Shelley, at least at this time in his life, seriously promulgated it as the proper response to evil.

And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,—
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

(Mask of Anarchy, 340-47)

However, Beatrice is not one who can stand by “with folded arms and steady eyes” and wait until evil has run its course. Like the Assassins in Shelley's unfinished novel, she is so convinced of her own innocence, so sure she can set things right, that she accepts any means for the “restitution” of justice. In so doing, she is consumed by the very thing she wishes to destroy. For again as Shelley wrote, “men, having been injured, desire to injure in return. This is falsely called a universal law of human nature; it is a law from which many are exempt and all in proportion to their virtue and cultivation.”¹⁵

But Shelley's use of the vampire myth makes the exception to this “universal law” not just a matter of “virtue and cultivation,” but one of almost superhuman fortitude as well. For once one has succumbed even unconsciously to evil, once Beatrice did indeed go to the Cenci “at midnight and alone,” her fate was cast to the powers of darkness. She did not meet evil passively; rather, she allowed herself to be drawn in against it, and in so doing made herself party to it. It is here in this confrontation that the vampire myth resolves some of the ambiguity; for in being so intractable to evil, Beatrice has made herself easy prey. Admittedly if she did not act, Cenci might attack her again as he has planned. But if she had passively resisted, there is the possibility that Cenci would have withered away. For Cenci realizes that he pushes best against people who shove back. He understands that “'tis her stubborn will / Which by its own consent shall stoop as low / As that which drags it down” (IV. i. 10-12). Evil does not want to destroy good. Cenci as vampire makes this clear: “I rarely kill the body, which preserves, / Like a strong prison, the soul within my power …” (I. i. 114-15). But Beatrice, flawed by evil and impatient to restore Innocence, cannot withstand the onslaught of experience. Having been attacked, she will retaliate and this action constitutes for Shelley her “pernicious mistake.”¹⁶

Notes

1. For the best explanation of philosophical problems in The Cenci see Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 84-130.

2. “Preface to The Cenci,” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian edition), ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian, 1965), II, 72.

3. That Shelley was fascinated with vampire lore has already been well-established. We have been told by Medwin that as a young man Shelley translated Bürger's “Lenore,” which he (as Dowden continues the story) often enjoyed reciting, “working up the horror to such a heighth of fearful interest” that the guests fully expected to be visited by the Prussian vampire (Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1847; rev. ed., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1913], I, 62; and Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1886; 7th impression, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954], II, 123). A later biographer, Charles Middleton, even went so far as to assert that Bürger's poem first kindled the Gothic flame that especially flared up in Shelley's early poems and adolescent novels (Charles Middleton, Shelley and His Writings [London: T. C. Newby, 1858], I, 47). But there was such general interest in translating the vampire-horror from German literature to English (witness the astonishing success of Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth,” a poem translated again and again) that Shelley was probably reacting more to literary fashion than to any specific work.

4. Stuart Curran, Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 100.

5. The best books on vampires are: Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1928); Anthony Masters The Natural History of the Vampire (London: Mayflower Books, 1972); Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula (New York: Popular Library, 1972); Leonard Wolf, A Dream of Dracula (New York: Popular Library, 1972); Nancy Garden, Vampires (New York: Lippincott, 1973); Gabriel Ronay, The Truth about Dracula (New York: Stein and Day, 1974); and Basil Cooper, The Vampire in Legend, Fact and Art (Secaucus, N. J.: Citadel Press, 1974).

6. For more on this, see Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire, ch. IV, “The Vampire in Christianity”; and Wolf, A Dream of Dracula, ch. IV, “Vampires and the Taste of Blood.”

7. The best explanation of the political and religious use of the vampire myth in the Balkan countries is in McNally and Florescu, In Search of Dracula, chs. 3-7.

8. Stuart Curran believes that the imagery here is drawn from the physiological symptoms of syphilis, see Shelley's Cenci, p. 92. If this is true it serves to strengthen the theme of the infectious nature of evil.

9. The relationship between the vampire and the fertile woman is discussed in Masters, pp. 91-92.

10. Ernest Jones, “On the Nightmare of Bloodsucking,” from On the Nightmare (New York: Liveright, 1971), pp. 116-25), is still the best psychological interpretation of the vampire superstition. See also Masters, p. 45.

11. The role of the Dhampire is discussed in Masters, pp. 44, 143; and Garden, pp. 67-70.

12. In this context it is interesting that later when Beatrice has a vision of her own burial it is “under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! / To be nailed down into a narrow place” (V. iv. 50-51). Is she to be staked into the earth like a lamia?

13. This misunderstanding of Beatrice has continued until recently outside the play as well, with those critics who interpret her almost as an archetype of purity. So she has been variously labelled “an ennobling vision of maidenly purity,” “a harrassed maiden,” and “a feminine ideal,” with the emphasis always on her ethical virginity (E. S. Bates, A Study of Shelley's Drama The Cenci [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1908], p. 80; Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1947], p. 231; and John Symonds, Shelley [New York: Macmillan, 1902], pp. 127-28). But this is quite literally denied in the play—she is not pure; she is not a maiden; she is not ideal. Just as erroneous, however, is the interpretation of her as pathetic victim, a personification of “oppression and female suffering” (Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work [Oxford: Clarendon, 1956], p. 202; or Newman Ivey White, Shelley [New York: Knopf, 1940], II, 140). In either case, to assume she is goodness unfairly victimized or an object of masculine oppression denies her the very humanity that makes her actions benevolently mistaken.

14. On the Punishment of Death, Julian edition, VI, 185.

15. Philosophical View of Reform, Julian edition, VII, 55.

16. Shelley expressed his own feelings about Beatrice's action in the “Preface” to The Cenci: “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. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes.”