SOURCE: Lockridge, Laurence S. “Justice in The Cenci.” Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 2 (spring 1988): 95-8.

[In the following essay, Lockridge addresses Shelley's belief in non-violent resistance to cruelty and oppression.]

Questions of moral psychology, freedom, and justice are explored by Shelley in his five act play, The Cenci (1819), his dramatization of Count Cenci's murderous hatred of his children, his incest with his daughter Beatrice, her plotting with her stepmother Lucretia and brother Bernardo to have the Count murdered by two hired assassins, and their subsequent arrest, torture, and execution by order of Pope Clement VIII in 1599. The play is a severe testing of a principle Shelley urges elsewhere: of returning hate with love or of resisting injustice non-violently. Here he draws our sympathies to a heroine who violates this principle. He portrays the extreme circumstances that appear to compel Beatrice to retaliation, and yet he does not in his Preface excuse her. The play is a good example of how, in Ricoeur's phrase, the “ethical laboratory” of literature permits writers to experiment with values, to revise preconceptions, even to contradict themselves.

To pose most precisely the questions raised by Beatrice's predicament, we can first turn to Shelley's ethical writings elsewhere. In the fragmentary “Essay on Marriage” we find him arguing, with Godwin, for a universal act utilitarianism: “To consider whether any particular action of any human being is really right or wrong we must estimate that action by a standard strictly universal. We must consider the degree of substantial advantage which the greatest number of the worthiest beings are intended to derive from that action” (Shelley's Prose, ed. D. L. Clark, p. 215). The principle of utility is generated by “benevolence,” our wish to “seek the happiness of others,” he writes in Speculations on Morals (1817, 1821), in accordance with a hedonistic concept of value—that is “called good which produces pleasure; that is called evil which produces pain” (p. 187).

Like Godwin and Hazlitt, Shelley thinks that the principle of benevolence or utility is insufficient: one could within its terms promote the pleasure of the majority and yet wreak pain and indignity on some minority group. Hence he adds that “there is a sentiment in the human mind that regulates benevolence in its application as a principle of action. This is the sense of justice. It is through this principle that men are impelled to distribute any means of pleasure which benevolence may suggest the communication of to others, in equal portions among an equal number of applicants” (p. 190). He draws an example of ten men shipwrecked on a desert island who must distribute subsistence equally.

There are therefore three principles of human action to keep in mind: benevolence, which impels to beneficent acts and which Shelley calls the principle of utility; distributive justice, which “regulates benevolence” by spreading its effects equally; and retributive punishment, which he considers intrinsically wrong—“The distinction between justice and mercy was first imagined in the courts of tyrants” (p. 203). In The Cenci he fashions a conflict between the claims of benevolence and the claims of retributive punishment in a historical situation where the possibility of distributive justice is nil.

Benevolence is said to have been part of Beatrice Cenci's basic nature. Her brother Giacomo speaks of Beatrice,

Who in the gentleness of thy sweet youth
Hast never trodden on a worm, or bruised
A living flower, but thou has pitied it
With needless tears!

(III, i, 365-69)

In his Preface, Shelley describes her as “one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another,” and he emphasizes her “patience,” “imagination,” and “sensibility.” What causes her to plot her murderous father's death? and what would Shelley have her do otherwise? To this latter question, he provides a direct answer in his Preface, but its implementation is, to say the least, difficult to conceive:

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. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character. …

We might recall Julian's assurance to Maddalo that “Much may be conquered, much may be endured / Of what degrades and crushes us. We know / That we have power over ourselves to do / And suffer—what, we know not till we try, / But something nobler than to live and die—.”

But Count Cenci, who rejoices publicly over the deaths of two of his sons, is degrading and crushing in the extreme. Perversely analogous to Necessity, he is an external power that literally becomes internal. Nature in the form of the West Wind enters and heightens the self in its freedom and power. But Count Cenci enters his daughter incestuously and corrupts her nature, depriving her of all power, freedom, and identity, in an extreme Blakean “hindering.” In all this he appears to have God on his side: his prayers for the deaths of his sons are swiftly answered, one of them dying when a church falls on top of him. Shelley never suggests that the Count is capable of redemption, that he could warm to his daughter's love or refrain from raping her. He lacks the potential shame that Shelley credits to British soldiers, who could be won over by passive resistance in the populace. Significantly, Beatrice has in the past futilely “sought by patience, love and tears / To soften him …” (I, ii, 115-16). What is Shelley implying that Beatrice ought to do or not do beyond this? Earl Wasserman writes that she “should have defeated the tyrant with patient, stoic endurance and pity.” But does not “should” imply “could”? And she has already tried this tactic.

Rather than create a character as a blunt ideological tool in the resolution of such a question, Shelley has given Beatrice a complex characterization that shows how psychological dislocation infects ethical perception and will. Much of the play dwells on her response to the incest and on her vocalized decision-making. She weighs committing the patricide like a well-intentioned moralist, but comes to the wrong conclusion from the standpoint of the playwright who writes the Preface. “I have prayed / To God, and I have talked with my own heart, / And have unravelled my entangled will, / And have at length determined what is right” (III, i, 218-21). Shelley has said in his Preface that no human being can be dishonored by the act of another. Beatrice's response to incestuous rape, however, is one of a profound sense of contamination, so profound that her mental imagery compounds incest with necrophilia, herself the corpse. She complains of “a clinging, black, contaminating mist / About me … 'tis substantial, heavy, thick, / I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues / My flesh to a pollution, poisoning / The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!” (III, i, 17-23). She is not “mad” but “dead,” her limbs putrefied. A good actor playing Count Cenci can convince any audience that her response is not overblown.

Is hers not the special case limiting the general rule that one should respond to hate with love? Does not the play's logic insist that circumstances can so collude as to make retributive punishment both necessary and to that degree right? To the claims of retributive punishment are added those of self-defense—the Count is eager to repeat the rape. “What have I done? / Am I not innocent?” she cries, and most of us agree.

But following the rape she begins to speak in a way that reveals her own moral contamination. She has absorbed her oppressor's poison. To her stepmother Lucretia she says:

                                                                                          Aye, 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 lightning which avenges it;
Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying
The consequence of what it cannot cure.
Some such thing is to be endured or done:
When I know what, I shall be still and calm,
And never any thing will move me more.

(III, i, 86-94)

Throughout the play, she stops short of naming the deed, whether patricide or incest. Terming the incest “expressionless,” she can “feign no image in my mind / Of that which has transformed me” (III, i, 108-09); “there are deeds / Which have no form, sufferings which have no tongue” (III, i, 141-42). She asks her stepmother not to “speak” a simple matter of fact—that Lucretia is indeed Lucretia—for if this were true, then the world would be real, and it would follow “that the other [the incest] too / Must be a truth, a firm enduring truth, / Linked with each lasting circumstance of life, / Never to change, never to pass away” (III, i, 59-63).

These speeches imply her deep evasiveness about the nature of “deeds.” The incest and the patricide do and do not exist in fact. Beatrice's unhinging has its psychological component in the breaking of an incest taboo, compounded with the horror of rape. It also has a more conceptual component in her assuming false alternatives as to the nature of the act: either that the incest has somehow never taken place, or that it has become for all time part of her essence.

In this error we find the key to the Beatrice who is horrendously injured, the Beatrice who orders the murder of the Count, and the Beatrice who unheroically denies that she has participated in the murder plot. In not naming the incest, she tries to lend it an unreality, but the attempt results only in a psychically dislocating dread, the deed taking on the overpowering indefiniteness of dark sublimity. In saying that “something must be done” without naming the deed of patricide, she betrays the same kind of evasion.

The signal phrase here is “destroying / The consequence of what it cannot cure.” Unlike Blake's Oothoon, she regards the sexual contamination as incurable, yet in retaliation she will contradictorily attempt to deny the consequence that has already seized upon her. Later speeches bear out that she wishes to contain the event almost mathematically. Revenge or “atonement” implies an equivalency that would result in erasure, leaving her “calm and still.” When Lucretia fears the consequences of the murder, Beatrice replies: “O fear not / What may be done, but what is left undone: / The act seals all” (IV, iii, 5-7). Thus she would bracket the patricide, regard it as a self-sealing act without consequence, the incest and the patricide cancelling one another out. After the Count is dead, she says to Lucretia:

                                                                                                    The deed is done,
And what may follow now regards not me,
I am as universal as the light;
Free as the earth-surrounding air; as firm
As the world's centre. Consequence, to me,
Is as the wind which strikes the solid rock
But shakes it not.

(IV, iv, 46-52)

She errs: acts do have consequences and there is no such thing as complete erasure of the past. Retributive punishment, instead of balancing and cancelling, is inefficient; it compounds the original crime, and makes the avenger vulnerable to the powers she challenges.

Her subsequent unheroic denial in court of patricide is a continuation of the effort to cancel both incest and patricide. It is not out of cunning that she self-righteously forces Marzio, the assassin she hired, to lie about her involvement, even though this sends Marzio back to the torture chamber and to his death. She has almost convinced herself, through these evasions, of her own non-involvement. There is a split in her consciousness between being and doing—her being disclaims the doing as a desperate means of protecting what remains of her ego. Perhaps Shelley has Coleridge's play Remorse (1812; revision of Osorio, 1797) in mind, for The Cenci is written as if in qualifying refinement of Coleridge's conviction that acts necessarily stick to us because of conscience, no matter what our tactics of evasion or repression. Only Count Cenci's son, Giacomo, feels the stylized remorse of Jacobean tragedy (V, i, 2-4). Beatrice feels no remorse, but not because she defiantly knows retaliation to have been just. Rather, she has dissociated herself mentally from the act. To confess the patricide would be to admit to herself, as Coleridge puts it, the “abiding presentness” of both the patricide and, worse, the incestuous rape that provoked it. Thus, she voices explicitly the doubleness, not duplicity, that has been characteristic of her throughout. When the judge asks if she is guilty of her father's death, she refuses to decide. Her father's death

                                                                                … is or is not what men call a crime
Which either I have done, or have not done.

(V, iii, 84-85)

How, then, do we see the role of Beatrice in relation to Shelleyan ethics? She demonstrates in the first place that her natural benevolence is not enough to soften tyrants or even to prevent its own conversion into hate. Her own heart becomes “cold,” just as Count Cenci's is “hardened.” Some other virtue or power is necessary, as complement of benevolence. We must ask whether there is any personal virtue or power she might have practiced that would have prevented her victimization.

I think the answer is no. She is wholly coerced into moral compromise despite her many strengths. Shelley acknowledges that there are victims in the world. Wasserman has argued that she does have the prior choice of whether to permit the motive of revenge to enter her will, and is therefore culpable. Once she has freely given admission to the motive, she becomes part of a causal chain of evil; motive is to act as cause is to effect, as the Count is to Beatrice. Humans always have the choice as to whether they will break the causal chain of evil and deny it entrance into their own will. (Shelley: A Critical Reading [1971], pp. 101-15.) Wasserman's reading has the strength of making the play consistent with the Preface, where Shelley says that no person can be truly dishonored by the act of another and that Beatrice has erred in taking revenge. But this is one instance, in my view, where we should trust the play, not the playwright. Beatrice's prior power of choice is in no way dramatized or alluded to. What we do know is that she has attempted by love and patience to convert the Count prior to the rape. The revenge motive is indeed implanted against her will by her father's act of rape; about this she has no choice. Shelley has used the strongest possible images of violation and contamination to make vivid the fact of evil having been forced upon her from without. Like Christabel, Beatrice becomes evil without having been culpable. His statement in the Preface that no person can be dishonored by another's act must be regarded as a wishful misreading of his own play. The Cenci portrays a world so evil that it can tragically infect the innocent. Shelley is more cogent when he says Beatrice is “violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion.” Evil is a power that overrides the question of culpability. Ours is a world so evil that retributive punishment can seem attractive to the most hardened pacifist.

If the moral force of an individual—here, Beatrice's benevolence—is insufficient to extreme situations, the other tactic, retributive punishment, proves self-defeating for reasons beyond the self-corruption of the agent. The Count is part of a larger network of depravity and power, a network so canny it is prepared to dispense with him when his grotesquerie endangers it. Shelley is not indulging a cheap irony when he has it disclosed that the Count was to be executed by the church anyway. This turn of events in no way exonerates the church from its collusion with power; it simply reaffirms its commitment to power at whatever cost. The moral force of an individual, working as an assassin seeking retribution, does not stamp out evil in the state and, as it turns out, only makes Beatrice more vulnerable to the powers that be. Shelley has written a play in which no act totally right can be undertaken by the heroine; only the “wild justice” of revenge is available to her.

Since neither benevolence nor retributive punishment redresses tyranny, how can hope persist? The covert answer is a reordering of power within the state that would make Count Cencis and corrupt cardinals unthinkable. This reordering would be under the dictates of distributive justice. Beatrice and the rest of us could be free only in a state free of the authoritarian collusion with which The Cenci begins. The Count's parental tyranny is a figure of tyranny in general; to redress it would require a socio-political, not domestic, solution. At this point, however, Shelley's vacillation between a revolutionary and a reformist politics makes itself felt. He wants the ends of revolution, but unlike Blake he cannot stomach violent means. Beatrice's act of assassination proves futile, but what means are available? To be sure, none in late-Renaissance Rome. Shelley is writing in a post-revolutionary period that does have paradigms for collective action against tyranny. He proposes a reformist program for England in A Philosophical View of Reform; America, France, Spain, Italy, and Greece set forth the revolutionary posture, whether successful or abortive. It would have been anachronistic, however, to suggest these options in The Cenci. What Shelley says of the persecuted Tasso applies well to Beatrice: “Tasso's situation was widely different from that of any persecuted being of the present day, for from the depth of dungeons public opinion might now at length be awakened to an echo that would startle the oppressor. But then there was no hope” (Letters [of Percy Bysshe Shelley] II, 47).

The Cenci implies that authority can truly dishonor the innocent and powerless, and that there may be, at certain times in history, no salvation for individuals. Salvation must come through a larger socio-political movement seeking distributive justice. Short of this, individuals can only band together for local and temporary retaliation. Beatrice has been forced, for all her inherent benevolence, into the role of an assassin; a truly revolutionary role is unavailable to her. The Cenci has demonstrated that the moral life of individuals must in extreme circumstances be supplemented by a larger politics. The Poet in The Triumph of Life laments that “God made irreconcilable / Good and the means of good”—a lament suitable to a moment in the historical continuum but not with reference to the larger dialectics of history. The complete vindication of Shelleyan ethics can only come by way of historical accommodation, and the historical moment for it is necessarily closer now than it was in Beatrice's day.

The Cenci, then, is a dark play, a tragedy, but this is not to say that it represents a “negative” view of humankind in contradistinction to the “positive” of Prometheus Unbound. Rather, it is an analytic of human action that explores the limits of benevolence and personal ethics, and the dangers of a wildly just resistance. Within its historical setting the “dark spirit” is certainly in control, but Shelley is not legislating nihilism here. The principle of human action only implied in the play—distributive justice—can be engaged now, if it could not have been in late Renaissance Rome. He gives the tyrannies of church and state the worst possible face, as if to say to his audience that they must be resisted now in England and elsewhere.

Note

Abridged from a discussion of The Cenci in The Ethics of Romanticism, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 1989. Editions cited: The Cenci in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon Powers (1977); Shelley's Prose, ed. David Lee Clark (1954, rev. 1966); and The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Frederick L. Jones (1964).