[In the following essay, Sperry considers the moral dilemma inherent in Beatrice's decision to seek violent revenge.]

I

Politics begins in the family, as Shelley well knew and as the title of The Cenci reminds us. Begun in Rome in May of 1819, the drama has intellectual and emotional roots that extend far back into the poet's career. As early as May 1811, we find him carrying on an argument with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, as to the reconcilability of law with private judgment and of politics with morality. Hogg's assertion, “that it is a duty to comply with the established laws of yr. country,” is one the poet flatly denies. “Have you forgotten it,” Shelley begins his letter, flaunting the aristocratic blazon of noblesse oblige, “have you forgotten that ‘laws were not made for men of honor’—? Your memory may fail, it is human,” he goes on, in his engaging way of running roughshod over his opponent. However the arguments he adduces mount up tellingly as he proceeds. First there is the universal relativity of law, the fact that, as Byron might later discover, what was “a crime in England” was “praiseworthy at Algiers.” More interesting are those cases where one can perceive conflicting obligations, where it is necessary to draw a “distinction between two different kind of duties, to both of which it is requisite that virtue should adapt itself.” Then, just to add a further complication, he adds: “What constitutes real virtue[:] motive or consequence?” This whole range of reasoning brings him before the end of his letter to a consideration of Sophocles' Antigone, the heroine who stands as the clearest archetype to the character who was to become his own Beatrice Cenci. “But is the Antigone immoral”? he exclaims to Hogg. “Did she wrong when she acted in direct in noble [sic] violation of the laws of a prejudiced society”? Then, gathering fresh impetus from the force of the Sophoclean example to resume his high-handed ways, he brushes Hogg aside with amusing irony: “You will I know have the candor to acknowledge that yr. premise will not stand & I now most perfectly agree with you that political affairs are quite distinct from morality, that they cannot be united.”¹

The gordian knot of issues thus neatly severed by the precocious teenaged controversialist was, of course, to return to haunt him throughout his career. The youthful Shelley could hope to keep the bright realm of ethical absolutes protected from the tainted arena of worldly politics. Still was it not necessary to understand, perhaps even compromise with, the one in order to carry out the eternal dictates of the other? Moreover Shelley found his reasoning, though always acute, less decisive against the arguments of older and more experienced thinkers like Robert Southey and William Godwin. Already he has come round to a more complicated view of the problem in writing to Elizabeth Hitchener early the next year:

Southey says Expediency ought to [be] made the ground of politics but not of morals. I urged that the most fatal error that ever happened in the world was the seperation of political and ethical science, that the former ought to be entirely regulated by the latter, as whatever was a right criterion of action for an individual must be so for a society which was but an assemblage of individuals, ‘that politics were morals more comprehensively enforced.’—Southey did not think the reasoning conclusive.

“He has,” Shelley went on to complain, “a very happy knack when truth goes against him of saying, ‘Ah! when you are as old as I am you will think with me’—this talent he employed in the above instance” (Letters [of Percy Bysshe Shelley] i: 223).

The justification for tempering ethical ideals with expediency in order to achieve practical results was again an issue that surfaced almost from the start of Shelley's personal acquaintance with William Godwin. It is clearly Godwin whom Shelley has in mind in writing again to Elizabeth Hitchener the next month:

The persons with whom I have got acquainted, approve of my principles, & think the truths of the equality of man, the necessity of a reform and the probability of a revolution undeniable. But they differ from the mode of my enforcing these principles, & hold expediency to be necessary in politics in as much as it is employed in its utmost latitude by the enemies of innovation:—I hope to convince them of the contrary of this. To expect that evil will produce good, or falsehood generate truth is almost as rational as to conceive of a patriot king or a sincere Lord of the Bedchamber.

(Letters i: 263)

How was it possible to act in the spirit of moderation and compromise, the need for which Southey and Godwin were continuously urging, and preserve the integrity of one's ideals? Shelley's brief intervention in the politics of the Irish question provided no conclusive test, for the poet succeeded in speaking his mind forthrightly only to withdraw from the scene in deference to Godwin's increasingly agitated protests that the counsels he was urging would prove disastrous. The conflict between commitment to ethical idealism and the seeming demands of political reality remained a potential plaguespot in the back of his conscience throughout his early years. As he wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener toward the end of 1811, “what conflict of a frank mind is more terrible than the balance between two opposing importances of morality—this is surely the only wretchedness to which a mind who only acknowledges virtue it's [sic] master can feel” (Letters i: 149).

Now this moral problem, the potential opposition between an uncompromising idealism and a practical expediency, is the very issue that, realized dramatically within a deeply moving human situation, he returned some years later to reconsider in The Cenci. The fundamental issue upon which the drama turns, to put it simply, is: was Beatrice wrong in planning the murder of her father, Count Franceso Cenci; or was she rather justified in following, like Antigone, the dictates of her conscience and in adopting violent means to relieve both her family and herself from the toils of an insupportable tyranny? The dilemma is one Shelley deliberately prepares for his audience from the outset when he declares in his “Preface” to the play:

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.²

The passage underlines the terms of an inflexible moral imperative, one Beatrice violates in carrying out the murder of her father. What, however, of the practical reality of her situation, the terror disguised within the brief, unobtrusive phrase, “the most enormous injuries”? The threat of incestuous rape which her father first holds over her and then, we are led to believe, actually carries out during the course of the play is simply too terrible for her to endure. The violation, as Shelley movingly presents it, is not simply physical but psychological, one she has no means of defending herself against and that deprives her of all necessary self-possession, driving her to the point of madness. Isolated by the political corruption of the society, church, and state that surrounds her, Beatrice seems to have no other course than to adopt the violent means of her persecutors. Shelley deliberately centers his drama around an ethical problem, a fact in no way diminished by his disclaimer in the “Preface” that “I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true” (240), a statement that bears most on the issue of dramatic probability. Clearly he was drawn to Beatrice Cenci not simply by the Guido Reni portrait and the legendary account of her character and fortitude but by the moral problematics of her situation. James D. Wilson is right when he argues that “The key to understanding The Cenci lies in the extent to which we hold Beatrice responsible for her actions,”³ even if the answer to that question is hardly the whole of Shelley's play. The “Preface” sets forth an ideal of human forbearance; yet as the play proceeds and forces us not simply to observe but both sympathize and judge, we ask ourselves, is there no limit to what Beatrice must endure?

Despite the fact that The Cenci crystallizes, as we have seen, political and ethical problems of such long standing in Shelley's thought, it is a remarkable fact that there exists today no consensus as to how we are to interpret his drama with regard to the issues it raises. The older view, the groundwork for which was laid in Carlos Baker's pioneering study of the poet's development,⁴ is best expressed in a well-balanced and trenchant essay of Robert F. Whitman. “If Beatrice is admirable,” Whitman writes, “it is in spite of, not because of, her act of rebellion. By taking what she thought to be the law of God into her own hands, she acted as a brave and desperate human being—but she was wrong.”⁵ Shelley's drama lends itself to a more contemporary reading, however, and Beatrice emerges from Stuart Curran's later, full-length study of the play as an existential heroine. Faced with the necessity of acting within an illogical universe so corrupt as to be morally absurd, Beatrice has no recourse but to attempt to establish an existential order of her own, and there is neither justification nor point in condemning her in terms of simple ethical platitudes.⁶ The two précis I have provided hardly do justice to the detailed and reasoned arguments they summarize. The differing viewpoints indicate, however, the extent of disagreement over the essential outlook of the play and how it invites or requires us to assess its heroine and her dilemma. The two extremes of reasoning also define a spectrum of opinion within which any number of other judgments arrange themselves, some inclining toward one pole, some toward the other.

The questions I have touched on are the more material for the reason that they involve the whole logic of Shelley's career and the relationship The Cenci bears to Prometheus Unbound between the third and fourth acts of which the former play was written. In shifting from the style of Greek tragedy to that of Jacobean revenge drama, Shelley was also moving, partly with his wife Mary's urging, from the esoteric to the exoteric mode with the hope of writing a play that might actually be produced on the London stage and win him popular acclaim and financial reward. But there are also overtones of something like a principle of psychological compensation involved in the remarkable transition. Having celebrated the triumph of love and the millennium in the rarefied atmosphere of Prometheus Unbound and its “beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” (“Preface” 135), he was now impelled to depict a far darker scene, what he described in his letter dedicating The Cenci to Leigh Hunt as the “sad reality” (237) reflected in the despairing plight of a virtuous heroine pressed beyond the limits of human endurance. If, by bringing him back down to earth, The Cenci served Shelley as an emotional counterirritant, does it, however, also represent a reweighting of moral emphasis? Given his dedication throughout his career to the principle of love, it is hardly likely, for that matter hardly decent, to suppose that, having dramatized the victory of the godlike Prometheus, he should now want to draw down the deprecation of an audience upon a human and fallible heroine for her “error.” If the play teaches, it does so in a way that transcends any such kind of simple moral demonstration. Viewing the extraordinary pattern of similitude in dissimilitude that links Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, Earl R. Wasserman, the most distinguished modern commentator on the two works, is quick to warn that “it would be misleading to read them merely as exactly opposite sides of the same moral coin”;⁷ but the uneasy juxtaposition of his “merely” and “exactly” may leave one without much confidence as to the proper balance to strike between them. In moving from Prometheus Unbound to The Cenci, Shelley was shifting his perspective from the immutable and ideal to the temporal and actual as he does throughout so much of his work, like The Revolt of Islam, where the seeming defeat of Laon and Cythna in the world of mortality is framed by the eternal Temple of the Spirit from which the lovers depart and where they are triumphantly reunited at the end. The two perspectives are quite different, but there is no necessity to assume any kind of incompatibility between them. Beyond this easy, partly familiar correlation, however, what most strikes one, despite the curious pattern of analogies that link the two plays, is the total difference in their emotional dynamics, centered, perhaps, in their quite different notions of catharsis. If in The Cenci Shelley employs certain Promethean themes, he does so in an entirely different way and with a quite different effect than in the earlier composition.

The special problems The Cenci still raises might seem to justify one more full-length critical reading of the drama. Some works of literature lend themselves to explication, however, in terms of a single crux of such importance that it crystallizes in itself the vital interpretive problems; and The Cenci is a play of this kind. The crux I refer to is the most obvious and dramatic piece of irony in the play: the arrival of the Pope's legate, Savella, with a warrant for Cenci's arrest and instant execution only moments after Beatrice and her hirelings have carried out the Count's murder near the end of Act iv. The timing of Savella's totally unexpected and seemingly fortuitous appearance is so striking as to assume, beyond any other element in the play, the aura of deliberate dramatic contrivance. The sense of irony the legate's entry generates is so powerful that, given what we know of Shelley's craftsmanship, it is hard not to sense that the poet saw the effect as somehow vital to the significance of his play. But just how are we to interpret the irony? It is significant that critics of the play, differing on so much else, have found themselves in sharpest disagreement on this single issue. For some older commentators, the irony served to underline Beatrice's error in adopting violent means to do away with her father by showing that, had she only waited, the course of justice would have been taken out of her hands.⁸ For others, quite to the contrary, Savella's arrival is the culminating absurdity in a cruel and illogical world where the only course open to Beatrice is to seek to impose a moral order of her own and where she is punished for bringing about the very end that society itself has at last belatedly ordained.⁹ The two analyses are closely similar in their perception of the irony but diametrically opposed in the conclusions they draw from it. Even Earl Wasserman largely begs the question when he warns that “the reader falls into a moral trap” if he interprets Savella's arrival as “an intentional cosmic irony”; for, he goes on, “To think, as many readers have thought, that this is cosmic irony is to assume that the Count's crimes should have been entrusted to the law, an assumption that contradicts the ethics upon which the drama is built.”¹⁰ Assuming the reader avoids the moral trap Wasserman describes, however, how does the episode influence us? If Savella's arrival is not an instance of cosmic irony, what kind of irony is it and what are its effect and purpose?

Savella's unexpected arrival and the questions it raises crystallize the ethical problem Shelley sought to treat in The Cenci. To see this fully it is necessary to trace some of the major tensions of the play back to the psychological roots it shares with Prometheus Unbound. As critics have partly observed, there is a train of Promethean imagery that runs throughout The Cenci, while the struggle of wills between Jupiter and Prometheus in certain ways resembles that between Count Cenci and his daughter. Beyond this, however, there is a deeper logic underlying the two plays, one that finds its source in Shelley's peculiar fascination with the Promethean situation and the major ironies investing it. We know that Prometheus from the start possesses, in his knowledge of Zeus's fatal marriage to Thetis and the offspring destined to depose the tyrant, the secret that is the key to Zeus's tenure and the safety of his reign. Zeus's intent, therefore, is not merely to punish Prometheus for his theft of the fire but to crush him, to break his will, to force him to reveal the secret that will render the monarch eternally secure. Prometheus's role, correspondingly, is to defy the tyrant's power, to endure, and to persevere until the arrival of the inevitable hour that is destined to liberate him and to bring his assailant's downfall.

Now this particular relationship between the two antagonists sets up a tension that is the essence of the Promethean situation and that Shelley was quick to grasp. For in one way the hero has Zeus already in his power; in one sense his victory is assured. All that is required of him is the perseverance necessary to hold out until the arrival of the promised hour hidden, in Shelley's phrase, in that “far goal of Time” (Prometheus Unbound iii. iii. 174). Indeed, his failure is virtually unthinkable since the survival of mankind and of human hope depends upon him. All he needs is patience, primarily in the older sense of the word: the ability to suffer, to endure. Granted this, he cannot fail.

Yet look at his position from the opposite perspective: how long must Prometheus, how long can he, endure? Whether one contemplates the horrors of the eagle and the pain of avian dismemberment or the more sophisticated psychological tortures of historical awareness that Shelley, in his adaptation of the myth, obliges his hero to undergo, how is it possible for Prometheus to hold on? All these agonies are, moreover, subservient to a crueller aspect of his position: the fact that while the end of his travail is determined, its extent is by no means fixed. Aeschylus's hero declares that the term of his suffering is ten thousand years; and later he tells Io that he will be rescued by offspring (that is to say Hercules) from the thirteenth generation of her descendants. For Shelley's hero, however, there is not even this kind of distant fixity, as Mercury's tormenting questioning reveals: “Once more answer me: / Thou knowest not the period of Jove's power?” To Prometheus's resolute rejoinder, “I know but this, that it must come,” Mercury goes on: “Alas! / Thou canst not count thy years to come of pain?” (i. 411-14). The taunting questions prepare the way for a truly frightening train of speculation that takes us to the heart of the peculiar terror of the Promethean situation:

MERCURY.
                                                                                                                        Yet pause, and plunge
Into Eternity, where recorded time,
Even all that we imagine, age on age,
Seems but a point, and the reluctant mind
Flags wearily in its unending flight
Till it sink, dizzy, blind, lost, shelterless;
Perchance it has not numbered the slow years
Which thou must spend in torture, unreprieved?

(i. 416-23)

Mercury's argument employs the logic of the asymptote in which time and eternity, though theoretically distinct, come to appear for all practical purposes indistinguishable. Of what use to Prometheus is the promise of an end to his ordeal if he has not the means of envisioning it, of foreseeing its actual place in the future as the way of measuring the diminishing time that divides him from it?

Shelley's grasp of the Promethean situation derives from his understanding of the particular dynamics of its terror. The imagination of the reader or spectator is violently propelled back and forth between two opposing poles of speculation. Given the perpetuation of the status quo, Prometheus's continued endurance, his ultimate triumph, however distant, is preordained and assured, so that any surrender must seem to us virtually unthinkable, especially since all human hope depends upon his victory. Yet this movement of mind is immediately countered by another rush of the imagination when we suddenly realize the immensity of time and suffering that must, at least potentially, elapse before the arrival of the promised end, a burden that defeats our own ability even to imagine, not to say endure, it. How can Prometheus fail to triumph? How can he possibly hold out against the terrible sufferings that beset him? The paradox that so forcibly grips our minds is driven home by another even more terrifying chain of speculation. Let us suppose that, after centuries of defiance, Prometheus's endurance finally breaks so that he yields to Jupiter the fatal secret only to discover that his promised deliverance was immediately at hand—a day, an hour, perhaps even only a minute beyond the point of his capitulation. What an intimidating hypothesis, one that thrusts itself on us even while we reject it as intolerable! Yet the contingency is the very one Shelley dramatizes at the turning point of The Cenci with the arrival of Savella.

Prometheus Unbound portrays the advent of the millennium through the triumph of a hero of godlike capacities as an ideal vision of what is potentially achievable if only in the reaches of futurity. In The Cenci Shelley was moved to trace, by way of contrary reaction, the undoing of a virtuous but intensely human heroine who, representing the Promethean ideal, was to fail, partly on account of the overwhelming force of oppression and partly through the vulnerability of her human nature, a drama producing that keen sense of loss we customarily associate with great tragedy and which Prometheus [Unbound] necessarily lacks. It is almost as if Shelley, having depicted the victory of Prometheus, now felt himself drawn to the mortal Io, the maiden whom the hero comforts in the latter part of Aeschylus's play but whom he is unable to save from the terror of Hera's dreadful persecution.¹¹ In the visionary and triumphant drama the possibility of heroic failure, if never inconceivable, is deliberately suppressed. What, however, of those human souls less fortified, less determined than Prometheus who might fail where he was destined to succeed? How, as a matter of practical ethics, were they to be seen and ultimately judged? In thinking about the two plays and their common relationship to the myth, it is important to recognize how much Shelley, while introducing the subtler psychological torments of Mercury, deliberately eschewed in his Prometheus the primitive violence that characterizes the primeval legend. The point emerges with some clarity if we compare Shelley's play with the work of his contemporary, the painter Henry Fuseli, whose treatment of the bound Prometheus has that nightmare quality characteristic of the artist at his best.¹² The bird—eagle or vulture—is lurking and obscene, nor do we require the insights of depth psychology to sense, as the bird forces open the god's thigh with its talons, how much Fuseli has taken the liver as an obvious euphemism in a way that goes straight to the roots of the male ego. In Shelley's Prometheus this aspect of the hero's ordeal is never treated. In The Cenci the genital threat is not merely explicit but overpowering. It is Beatrice's ability to endure everything except sexual violation that explains her collapse.

To understand how much The Cenci, and in particular the Savella episode, is grounded in the Prometheus myth is not of itself to resolve the controversies that, as we have seen, surround the episode's significance or, for that matter, the interpretation of the drama. As we find her at the outset of the play, Beatrice Cenci is a maiden of exceptional fortitude and courage, defiant before the threats of her father and a tower of support to her beleaguered mother and younger brother. She is, in fact, a kind of feminine counterpart to Prometheus transposed to a domestic situation that is no less terrifying for the absolute power and fiendish tyranny exercised by her father. Just as Jupiter is intent to break Prometheus's will, so Cenci is intent to break his daughter's; only he knows by intuition and exults in the sure weapon of his success. For Count Cenci possesses one notable advantage over Jupiter: a father's insight into the nature of his daughter. Cenci knows she cannot withstand the ordeal of being sexually forced. If Beatrice Cenci possesses a tragic flaw, it is her virginity or, more exactly, her idealization of her virginity, as the center of her moral life and nature. It is the element essential to her sense of her own integrity as a human being. Shelley brings to his study of Beatrice's anguish a sympathy and psychological insight that quite transcend the few celebrated but meretricious treatments in the fiction of the earlier century. It was, indeed, his hope that the genuine seriousness of his moral purpose and the delicacy of his handling would palliate the drama's more sensational aspects and permit its presentation at Covent Garden, a hope that was disappointed when the subject was found objectionable and his play rejected.

I have said that Beatrice's tragic flaw is her idealization of her own virginity, a statement that implies an element of moral condemnation. But how else are we to take the major ethical declaration of the “Preface” to the play, which, as we have seen, Shelley himself applies specifically to his heroine, that “Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes”? From the outset of the drama Shelley succeeds in engaging our sympathies strongly in the plight of his heroine. At the opening of the third act she staggers wildly on stage towards her mother having been violated for the first time by her father:

                                                  How comes this hair undone?
Its wandering string must be what blind me so,
And yet I tied it fast.—O, horrible!
The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls
Spin round! …
                                                                                          … My God!
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!

(iii. i. 6-10, 12-13)

By the fifth act, when the persecution of her father, condoned and extended by the authorities of state and church, has run its full course, the figure of violation recurs, but now as an image of desolation and terror enveloping the universe:

                                                                                If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!
If all things then should be … my father's spirit,
His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;
The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

(v. iv. 57-62; my emphasis)

For all this Shelley's drama never lets us forget, as Beatrice becomes gradually drawn into the conspiracy to murder her father, the precepts of forbearance and non-violence dramatized in Prometheus and reaffirmed in the “Preface” to The Cenci, a standard by which she must be ultimately judged. As a part of the conspirators' first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Count on his way to the Castle of Petrella, Beatrice describes the huge rock which she suggests can be rolled down to crush him as he passes through a ravine beneath:

                                                                                … there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulph, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns.

(iii. i. 247-57)

The stone never descends, for Count Cenci passes by the intended spot an hour too soon. Ironically the lines describe Beatrice herself as a kind of failing Prometheus, slowly giving way to the insupportable weight of her miseries as they drag her down into despair.

Borrowing a device of the Elizabethan history play, Shelley partly reverses the balance of our sympathies in the latter portion of his drama. We see the Count on his deathbed, in appearance like the gracious Duncan:

                                                                                                    an old and sleeping man;
His thin grey hair, his stern and reverent brow,
His veined hands crossed on his heaving breast,
And the calm innocent sleep—

(iv. iii. 9-12)

whom even the hired assassins Olimpio and Marzio, at first dare not molest. Throughout the play, we may admire Beatrice's strength of character; but we are also appalled, near the end, as we watch her brazenly lie to her judges and mercilessly browbeat the pain-crippled Marzio into retracting his confession so that he dies upon the rack. In entertaining the malign suggestions of her treacherous lover, Orsino, in joining the ranks of the conspirators and first condoning, then urging the murder of her father, she in fact adopts the violence and absolutism of his ways. Nor can we escape the irony that in the end she becomes her father's child in a way she was not at the outset of the play. He triumphs not by despoiling her of her virginity but by corrupting her deeper integrity, by inducing her to believe that she can escape injuries that appear to her intolerably monstrous only by assuming his power and spirit, by becoming one with the very being she detests. The fact that at the last she is unwilling or unable to see the way she has been in fact perverted only makes the essence of her tragedy the more compelling.

II

It remains to examine the peculiar nature of the catharsis The Cenci produces and its means for doing so. Shelley's drama of divided sympathies achieves its power of ethical realization by the way it succeeds in placing the reader or spectator directly on the horns of that dilemma at the heart of the Promethean situation, the situation best crystallized in The Cenci by the arrival of Savella. Like Earl Wasserman, I find the central statement on the moral problem of the play in the part of the “Preface” where Shelley writes:

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.

(240)

The statement is difficult and condensed, and the psychological process, the movement of imagination to which it refers, demands elucidation. Let us consider the conflicting and alternative judgments the passage contemplates: on the one hand murder, parricide; the most heinous of crimes; the betrayal of one's begetter to whom, as the source of our being, honor and obedience are naturally due. Yet weigh against this our revulsion at incestuous rape, a violation, moreover, that is deliberately meditated as the culminating cruelty against an innocent child who merits love and not dishonor. Caught up in the emotional dialectics of the predicament, the imagination of the reader is propelled back and forth between two sets of ethical imperatives in the effort to establish some preponderance between them, in the attempt, that is, to justify the one enormity by the other, only to find the task impossible. The effort of mind is both “superstitious” and “pernicious” not only because, driven by some of the deepest guilts and fears of the human psyche, it is profoundly irrational in origin but because at the same time it seeks a carefully reasoned resolution of the “either/or” kind to the human dilemma confronting it.

Paradoxically, it is precisely out of this struggle of the imagination, erring though it may be, that the play's catharsis—ethical and profoundly emotional—arises. Here again I turn to Wasserman who in his analysis of the drama has shown how Shelley deliberately draws the reader into a situation that excites “pernicious casuistry” but does so with an artifice the poet elsewhere describes as “sublime casuistry” and for a deliberate moral end.¹³ That aim, as Wasserman goes on to declare, is self-knowledge, the knowledge of ourselves, the highest kind of knowledge tragedy can impart. Yet Wasserman's discussion of such realization as it arises in and through our understanding of Beatrice's example seems curiously judicial and impassive. Thus he argues that the play brings us to an understanding that “Inherent purity of character can coexist with moral error; and, since sublime casuistry reveals that error cannot be reconciled with the purity, that purity is unaltered by the error.” What follows for Wasserman is our realization that Beatrice's “moral nature has not been corrupted by her acts; she has been ‘thwarted’—turned aside—from it, but it persists.” Moreover “we misread,” he goes on to add, “if we believe it a sign of her corruption that after the crime she can say, ‘The spirit which doth reign within these limbs / Seems strangely undisturbed’ (iv. iii. 63-64).”¹⁴

Through his grasp of Shelley's skeptical methodology, Wasserman has, I think, seen more deeply into the play than any other critic, and his discussion is one to which I am considerably indebted. Yet his scholastic determination to preserve a purity of ethical distinction has led him to neglect the emotional dynamics of the work and the crucial role they play in determining the drama's effect and meaning. From the time when we first see her bravely defy her father's tyranny to the end when, with different feelings, we watch her excoriate her judges and prepare herself for execution seemingly in complete conviction of her own innocence, we are deeply involved in and moved by Beatrice. The moral and emotional catharsis of the play proceeds out of this sympathetic identification and, as we have seen, from our struggle to reconcile our inescapable recognition of the way she has usurped her father's violence with our abhorrence of the forces driving her to it as her only means of deliverance. Such is the power of the dilemma in which Shelley places the spectator, so traumatic our predicament, that its effect is ultimately to force us to see the necessity of moving beyond a conventional standard of ethical judgment, based on counterpoise and calculation, to one that is more difficult and complex but also necessary and humane. It is to urge the transcendence of the moral imperative of love. As Shelley wrote in his review of Godwin's novel, Mandeville, comparing it to Caleb Williams, “there is no character like Falkland, whom the author, with that sublime casui[s]try which is the parent of toleration and forbearance, persuades us personally to love, while his actions must forever remain the theme of our astonishment and abhorrence.”¹⁵

In her next to last speech in the play Beatrice turns to her younger brother, Bernardo, to exclaim:

                                                                                                    One thing more, my child,
For thine own sake be constant to the love
Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I,
Though wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame,
Lived ever holy and unstained.

(v. iv. 145-49)

As we hear these parting words pronounced in such a solemn and authoritative way, a number of conflicting thoughts run through us. Is Beatrice mad? Is she simply self-deceived? Is she, rather, clinging to the pretense of innocence necessary to sustain her to the end of her ordeal? Or is she speaking the literal truth? These questions, which are not easy to separate one from another, force themselves upon us and demand some kind of resolution. Beatrice, we know, has erred. She has committed an act of retaliation. She has been guilty, in the terms Shelley himself sets out in the “Preface,” of a “pernicious mistake.” Yet this line of reasoning is not, by itself, adequate to our understanding of her plight. The full sense of her tragedy lies, I think, in our recognition of the fact that she has been so wrenched by her injuries that, whether we consider her mad or sane, she has lost the ability to judge of her own situation. It is as if the searing pain of her violation has cauterized her other faculties, leaving her oblivious to everything but the burning sense of her injuries and the trauma of her father's touch. This deeper wound to her psychological and moral equilibrium is perhaps the worst that can befall a character on the stage, a condition that traditional approaches to the ethics of tragedy are reluctant to admit. In arraigning Beatrice before her judges, in forcing us to adjudicate between her lies and their hypocrisy, Shelley places us in an intolerable situation. It is a strategy deliberately contrived to compel us to recognize the bankruptcy of conventional kinds of ethical discrimination, to force upon us the necessity of ascending to a higher level of moral awareness. It is to invite, indeed require, us to condemn Beatrice's actions unblinkingly and to love her (an act incorporating but transcending mere forgiveness) simultaneously. Shelley's reasoning, needless to say, will strike many of his critics as ethical relativism of a sort both sentimental and dangerous. Nevertheless I have no doubt that he regarded the moral recognition of his play truer to the underlying spirit of Christianity than the sacrilegious politics of false piety and self-interest he everywhere exposes. One might add that in the way it both manipulates and educates the emotions of its viewers, his drama makes its point with a characteristic ferocity of logic.

Throughout The Cenci Shelley maintains a delicate balance between commitment to unchanging ethical principles and a recognition of the way our judgment is actually shaped and formed by the human drama that unfolds before us on the stage. His play suggests both permanent ideals of conduct and the way those ideals can appear to alter under the pressure of human circumstance. In her speech just before the one last cited, at a point where hopes have been raised by Bernardo's last-minute appeal to the Pope, Beatrice exclaims:

O, trample out that thought! Worse than despair,
Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope:
It is the only ill which can find place
Upon the giddy, sharp and narrow hour
Tottering beneath us.

(v. iv. 97-101)

The still possible arrival of some new Savella, this time with a warrant for release, together with Beatrice's allusion to the fateful hour confronting them, put us in mind once again of the Promethean situation. Her speech makes clear that what we are beholding is something more terrible, even, than a failed Prometheus. What we are witnessing is a radical perversion, at least in Beatrice's mind, of the principle of hope, the extinction of the vital Promethean spark essential to mankind's redemption. In Shelley's ethics hope is necessarily the cardinal virtue (except in so far as it is subsumed within the greater power of love). Hope alone can provide the resolution necessary to await the promised hour when the tide of evil ultimately must reverse itself—the expectation that gives man the courage to last out the term of his ordeal. Brutalized by anguish and repeated disappointment, however, Beatrice has come to see hope as not simply fruitless but as its very opposite, “the only ill,” “worse than despair.” If it serves only to draw out endlessly the period of human suffering, hope is an unpardonable self-deception. In the way she steels herself against the temptation to yield once again to the most instinctive of all human impulses, we sense the dreadful change that has overcome her. It is this more awful kind of capitulation, or derangement, that Shelley asks us to judge and understand in The Cenci.

If, as I have argued, the important moral issues Shelley raises in his play cannot be finally settled in terms of abstract principles alone but are shaped and informed by the drama of the play itself and the way it determines our attitude toward Beatrice, then the ending of the final act and the way, in particular, in which she goes to her death emerge as crucial. One can recall Mary Shelley's judgment that “The Fifth Act is a masterpiece. It is the finest thing [Shelley] ever wrote, and may claim proud comparison not only with any contemporary, but preceding, poet. The varying feelings of Beatrice are expressed with passionate, heart-reaching eloquence.”¹⁶ It is above all Beatrice's final speech, the last in the play, delivered before she steps forth to execution, that best substantiates Mary Shelley's judgment and that marks a high point of Shelley's dramatic genius. We live in a day of modern directorial practice, the art of lending old plays new emphasis. Change and reinterpretation are no doubt essential. Nevertheless it is disconcerting to imagine how quickly one could destroy through misemphasis the delicate balance of sympathy and ironic awareness Beatrice creates in us in the brief speech in which she bids the Cardinal Camillo and her mother a final farewell:

Give yourself no unnecessary pain,
My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie
My girdle for me, and bind up this hair
In any simple knot; aye, that does well.
And yours I see is coming down. How often
Have we done this for one another; now
We shall not do it any more. My Lord,
We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well.

(v. iv. 158-65)

Our attention is caught by the imagery of knotting and untying and of Beatrice's hair, the metaphor Shelley uses throughout with great delicacy for his heroine's virginity, on which, as we have seen, the construction of her character depends. The scene moves us with its domesticity and quiet pathos: mother and daughter providing for each other the common services they will never again exchange. At the same time we are struck by the muted sarcasm of her words to Camillo, “Give yourself no unnecessary pain, / My dear Lord Cardinal,” and her tone of domination toward Lucretia, “Here, Mother.” In her self-assurance the woman is summed up in all her strength of character and all her weakness as she moves together with her parent toward her death with her insistent “Well, 'tis very well.” For we know it is not well. The tragedy of Beatrice Cenci is not her physical undoing but the violation of her spirit and her mind. It lies in an ultimate failure of will and endurance that is the more compelling for the reason that we are made to comprehend it so completely. If in Prometheus Unbound Shelley left us a model of heroic resolution to admire, he gave us in Beatrice a heroine whose failure must move us to compassion and love.

Notes

1. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) i: 80-82. The edition is hereafter cited as Letters in the text.

2. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977) 240. Citations of Shelley's work are to this edition.

3. “Beatrice Cenci and Shelley's Vision of Moral Responsibility,” Ariel 9 (1978): 80.

4. Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1948) 138-53.

5. “Beatrice's ‘Pernicious Mistake’ in The Cenci,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 74 (1959): 253.

6. See Curran's chapter, “The Tragic Resolution” in his Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970) 129-54.

7. Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971) 101.

8. For the clearest statement of this viewpoint, see Whitman 253.

9. See Curran 141-42.

10. Wasserman 93.

11. Stuart Curran has perceptively pointed out a number of resemblances between Shelley's Beatrice and Aeschylus's Io in Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975) 130-33.

12. There are an oil painting and a pen and ink drawing that are closely related. See Paola Viotto, L'Opera Completa di Füssli (Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1977) nos. 20, 20¹, page 88.

13. See Wasserman 118-20.

14. Wasserman 119, 125.

15. Shelley's Prose; or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1954) 309. The passage is cited by Wasserman 119.

16. “Note on The Cenci, by Mrs. Shelley,” The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1945) 337.