[In the following essay, Rees investigates the role of Orsino as a minor character and emblem for evil in Shelley's play.]

Shelley's treatment of his minor characters in The Cenci—all the dramatis personæ, that is, except Beatrice and Cenci himself—has never been found very satisfactory, and the general judgment as far as it concerns their dramatic effectiveness cannot be disputed. Nevertheless, the ideas behind Orsino, at least, are worth some attention and they have not been fully brought out by any commentator. Swinburne thought Orsino's rôle potentially interesting (Essays and Studies, London 1911, p. 221) but considered that Shelley had failed to make use of his opportunities. The portrait of Orsino could have been developed, he thought, into a subtle study of a curly-haired young priest, playing on villainy as on a lute, a Caponsacchi choosing self-indulgence and damnation instead of misery and redemption. But, he concludes, the hand was wanting for such a picture. He was right to the extent that Shelley was no collector of psychological curios in the Browning manner, but, all the same, he has missed the point.

Cenci and Orsino are the two principal agents of evil in the play. The religious background is supposed to be Roman Catholic but it is perfectly plain that it is in fact nothing of the sort. Fatherhood is another name for cruelty and oppression whether it is an attribute of God, Cenci or the Pope. These three are the unholy but supremely powerful trilogy, in league together, supporting each other, perverting or destroying all good impulses which might dispute their sway. When Cenci prays to God he is always answered, Beatrice never. But she rebels against the power of evil and her rebellion threatens to be dangerous. Therefore she must be crushed and in such a way, if possible, as ‘To poison and corrupt her soul’ (IV, i, 45) for her goodness, as it is, is capable of abashing even Cenci. The most effective way of drawing the sting of her goodness is to corrupt it and this Cenci attempts to do by sexual violation. Yet though it is Cenci who performs the rape, it is Orsino who delivers Beatrice up into Cenci's power and puts not only her body but also her soul in danger of defilement. He suppresses her petition to the Pope and so cuts off her last channel of escape, and after the outrage he encourages her to murder Cenci, thus offering her up as a sacrifice to embattled authority. What is the significance of Orsino's part?

He has two soliloquies which explain his motives and attitudes precisely. In the first (II, ii, 104-61), he plots to work Giacomo up to the point of murdering Cenci and calculates that the family will then fall into his power and he can take Beatrice as his mistress. He has every confidence in the success of this plan because:

Some unbeheld divinity doth ever,
When dread events are near, stir up men's minds
To black suggestions; and 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 … as I will do.

In other words Orsino, though the story requires him to be a priest of the Roman church, acknowledges no Christian god but a ‘dark spirit’ whose evil suggestions he intends to use in order to bring others under his domination. By the time of the second soliloquy (V, i, 74-104), the whole plan has miscarried. Orsino betrays Giacomo to the guards, makes his own escape and reviews briefly what has happened:

I thought to act a solemn comedy
Upon the painted scene of this new world,
And to attain my own peculiar ends
By some such plot of mingled good and ill
As other weave; but there arose a power
Which grasped and snapped the threads of my device
And turned it to a net of ruin. …

The dark spirit has proved more powerful than he thought. Orsino's confidence that he could ‘flatter’ it and manipulate it to his own service has been gravely misplaced. He himself was all the time but a tool of the black god who has used him to knit up a ‘net of ruin’ in which he has been enmeshed as well as Beatrice and all her family.

Orsino's part makes clear much of what lies behind the whole play. Cenci and Beatrice face each other as the chief antagonists, the two poles of human activity as Shelley sees it. Cenci is Jupiter, or his alter ego, the power which reigns and crushes the good under foot. Beatrice is no Titan like Prometheus but a young girl, for in the world as it is evil is full grown but good as yet weak and uncertain of its rôle. Cenci acts consciously as the agent of the evil power, in complete confidence of his god's care of him. Beatrice has been brought up also to believe in God, a god of justice and mercy, but her god does not exist. He is only a lie, one of the many imposed on the good in order to persuade them to acquiesce in suffering and to delude them in their struggles to resist evil—as Beatrice is deluded when she commits murder and descends to brazen lies, denying the noblest qualities of her nature in the faith that she has divine sanction for what she does. In fact, in her planning of the murder she is responding to the evil suggestions of the dark spirit. ‘I pray thee God’, she begs, ‘Let me not be bewildered while I judge’ (III, i, 126-7) but the irony of this is patent for her appeal to the deity produces only:

… an undistinguishable mist
Of thoughts, which rise, like shadow after shadow,
Darkening each other. …

(170-2)

The whole of this scene bears out Orsino's account of the operations of his ‘dark spirit’ who when dread events are near stirs up men's minds to black suggestions and Orsino throughout, with his insinuations and promptings, is doing what he planned, ‘flattering’ the dark spirit, abetting its work in the minds of others so that, as he believes, his own ends may be served.

In the end Beatrice knows that she has been deceived. In a terrible speech when Camillo brings the final death sentence, she suspects at last that God and Cenci are not opposed, as she had always believed, but one (V, iv, 47-74). Disillusioned, however, she is not crushed, but once more superb. She relies at last on nothing but self-control and the fellowship of human love and, strong in these, asserts her ultimate freedom from poison and corruption in spite of the concerted attack of the forces of evil. In the murder and the trial scenes she has denied the human virtues of compassion and honesty in the name of a god who was really a devil and who tempted her to destroy her own virtue, but she has drawn back in time, cast violence and fear behind her, and regained her strength.

In Prometheus Unbound the Fury taunts Prometheus with the weakness of goodness in the world:

… In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.

(I, 618-31)

The minor characters of The Cenci exemplify these various kinds of impotence in the conflict with evil: Camillo who thanks his god he does not believe Cenci's own account of his villainies, the guests at the banquet, Lucretia with her platitudinous piety, the priests with their hypocrisy, the whole society which allows Beatrice to suffer without lifting a finger to help her. Orsino alone does not quite come into any of the categories described by the Fury for he is neither one of the good but weak nor is he a powerful man rejoicing in his own wickedness. He is ambitious and he covets power but he wants the additional luxury of believing that he has not violated too many moral scruples in attaining it. ‘I'll do as little mischief as I can’, he promises himself (II, ii, 118-9), but this palterer, who faced with the choice between good and evil tries to play with both for the gratification of his own mean desires, is a traitor more dangerous to the struggling champion of good than the avowed oppressor. By Orsino and his like the cause of humanity striving to throw off the tyranny of evil is betrayed from within. He has a clearer intellectual recognition of the issues involved in the struggle than anyone else in the play and he deliberately chooses to reduce them to a calculation of selfish advantage.

The Cenci is not a wholly successful play in spite of its dramatic and poetic power and could never be so because Shelley quite failed to recognize how far his own ‘peculiar feelings and opinions’ had entered into what was meant to be a more or less accurate rendering of a sixteenth century Italian story. Orsino is a key figure in the movement of unacknowledged ideas just below the surface and it is one aspect of Shelley's failure that he is dramatically so insignificant.