SOURCE: “Shelley's The Cenci: Moral Ambivalence and Self-Knowledge,” in Keats-Shelley Review, No. 10, Spring, 1996, pp. 181-203.

[In the following essay, Magarian highlights themes of moral indeterminacy and self-knowledge in The Cenci.]

I

Shelley's play The Cenci (1819) has, at its heart, a journey into the centre of the human psyche which precipitates its heroine's fall from grace into moral and emotional myopia. During this journey some of the deepest of human fears are revealed in the person of Beatrice as she is conducted towards the ‘darkness of the abyss’, as Shelley puts it in the Preface to the play.¹ In this respect the play shares with the earlier Julian and Maddalo (1819) a similar insistence on the nature of what is psychologically disruptive. The Maniac of that poem is presented to the reader in a state of indistinct and fluctuating mental equilibrium. The changing states of his mind are vividly portrayed. Similarly, Beatrice's internal make-up, with all its susceptibility to change and disruption, is what Shelley asks the reader to latch onto in his play. It is my purpose in this essay to undertake a close reading which will illustrate the way the play draws the reader into a complicitous relationship with it. Such a relationship allows for the creation of moral and emotional ambiguities that Shelley refuses to resolve for us. Rather, Shelley implies that the only resolution that might be arrived at can come only from the reader's own confrontation with his or her own self, a confrontation which will echo Beatrice's tumultuous negotiations with self-knowledge.

Like Julian and Maddalo, Shelley's play also adopts an austere and clinical style that Shelley thought to be more conducive to the expression of dramatic passion: ‘I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry’.² Shelley gravitates towards Wordsworth's view of poetry as expressed in the Lyrical Ballads (1798): ‘[The first volume of these poems] … was published, as an experiment … to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation … [poetic] pleasure may be imparted’.³ Shelley's statement on the matter makes a formal bow to Wordsworth: ‘I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the language of men.’⁴ This ‘familiar’ style signals the work's greater realism, as Shelley eschews the poetic style of Prometheus Unbound (1819)—the tragedy's stylistic and philosophical counterpart. As Carlos Baker puts it, Shelley seeks to depict ‘what is’ as opposed to ‘what might be’.⁵

The central problem of the play revolves around how the reader is to evaluate Beatice's moral status. It is impossible to arrive at a definitive interpretation of her character that will place her within the confines of a simple and clear-cut morality. Shelley's achievement here is to present his heroine whole. We are allowed to step inside her mind and experience her reactions to her plight with unsurpassed intensity. It is difficult to judge Beatrice simply because we identify with her so completely; fully to exonerate her or fully to condemn her demands an objective framework that we are simply not given. This deliberate blurring of objectivity is Shelley's means of involving the reader in the assessment and indeed recreation of the moral universe he sets up. Shelley presents us with his drama, then detaches himself from its meanings by involving his readers in acts of interpretative evaluation that he himself cannot provide given that his own objectivity is complete. This lends the play its air of indeterminacy. Earl Wasserman also sees this difficulty as intentional: ‘That we have been baffled in our efforts to make … simplistic evaluations of Beatrice is not, as has been frequently concluded, Shelley's failure or even his confusion of objective, but the actual fulfilment of his goal.’⁶ Shelley's indeterminate presentation of Beatrice is something that the reader has to unravel for himself, in much the same way as Julian and Maddalo suggested that a definitive meaning for the poem could only be found in the reader himself: ‘the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.’⁷ This transference of the interpretative initiative onto the reader is directly linked to Shelley's essential view of dramatic writing as stated in the Preface to the play: ‘The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself.’⁸

But, as so often with Shelley's Prefaces, his tone of authorial lucidity prepares the reader for a clear-cut piece of literature that is not forthcoming. Shelley's view of Beatrice in the Preface does not invite any hesitance in our assessment of her act of ‘retaliation’ against her father. Such retaliation is clearly wrong:

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.⁹

The last sentence, with its implied connection with Christian sentiment (for a similar instance of this Shelley's Essay on Christianity (probably 1817) provides an example: ‘The absurd and execrable doctrine of vengeance seems to have been contemplated in all its shapes by this great moralist [Jesus Christ] with the profoundest disapprobation’¹⁰), is absolute and uncompromising, so much so that Stuart Curran assumes that Shelley is in fact talking about the historical Beatrice, rather than Shelley's creation: ‘Shelley here, it must be emphasised, is referring to the Beatrice of history; his premises are inadequate to encompass the character whom he created.’¹¹ It is tempting to agree with Curran; if this is the case it would allow us to consider the Beatrice of the play, as opposed to the historical Beatrice, in a light that wasn’t as judgemental as that of the above extract. In the play the reader's overbearing urge to identify with her and sympathise with her act of ‘retaliation’ must, however, eventually be subjugated to the fact that Beatrice does finally dispense with moral imperatives—a fact that leads to the need to judge her, in spite of her sympathetic quality. Thus we can only identify with her up to a point. Beyond that her actions are at the best questionable and at the worst immoral. In addition, because there is no unambigously good character in the play who is also fully developed we seize on Beatrice in a manner that brings into sharper focus the fact of her defilement and the horror of this than her subsequent degeneration into moral degradation: the part of the play that contains the greatest moral cruxes.

II

As Stuart Curran puts it ‘Within the perverse framework of this tragedy, to act is to commit evil.’¹² Within this climate of moral perversion, it becomes harder and harder, and in the end impossible, for Beatrice to live up to the Promethean ideal that Shelley articulates in the Preface (‘the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance’¹³) and in Prometheus Unbound (‘I wish no living thing to suffer pain.’ (I. 305)) In addition, it is also her mind that is unhinged by the Count's act of incestuous rape. Prometheus can still say in the midst of his plight ‘Yet I am king over myself’. (I. 492) His mind has not been violated. Beatrice's mental freedom, however, is taken away from her. In other words the external world of evil impinges on the internal world of Beatrice's mind, whereas Prometheus, in the midst of external devastation, preserves the inner sanctum of well-being: ‘Not me, within whose mind sits peace serene / As light in the sun, throned’. (I. 430-1)

However, in The Cenci, not only is Beatrice's antagonist, that is, her father, corrupt, so too is the very fabric of the ruling order which she repeatedly asks help from. Wasserman brings this point into focus: ‘What [is] … revealed is the moral invalidity of theology and the legal system, upon both of which Beatrice has modelled her actions.’¹⁴ Earlier Wasserman makes a point that anticipates this: ‘there consistently hovers over The Cenci [the] … intimation that theology is invented for the sake of human oppression and that the God of Christianity may be only the imaginary projection of a Count Cenci’.¹⁵

Shelley makes explicit this connection between the expediency of oppression and Christianity in this passage from The Moral Teaching of Jesus Christ (1815-1817?): ‘[Christianity] … is the strongest ally and bulwark of that system of successful force and fraud and of the selfish passions from which it has derived its origin and permanence’.¹⁶ Certainly in the play itself Count Cenci and the Pope appear as rivals rather than standing together in any hierarchal system in which virtue is the criterion for moral superiority. Cenci's ‘I little thought he [the Pope] should outwit me so!’ (I. i. 20) is revealing in its nonchalance and absence of any sign of appropriate deference. Camillo's later lines about the Pope, by their implicit but nonetheless insistent suggestiveness, cement notions that offer authorial modes of action as echoing and endorsing paternal ones:

He holds it of most dangerous example
In aught to weaken the paternal power,
Being, as ‘twere, the shadow of his own.

(II. ii. 54-6)

Wherever Beatrice turns, then, she meets with the ‘prismatic and many sided mirror’¹⁷ of corruption. A line from Charles The First (1822), ‘If God be good, wherefore should this be evil?’ (Scene I, 21), can in some ways stand over The Cenci as an ironic gloss on the foundations of evil in the play, for throughout it Shelley suggests that God is not good and actually on Cenci's side:

Aye, as the word of God; whom here I call
To witness that I speak the sober truth;—
And whose most favouring Providence was shewn
Even in the manner of their [his sons] deaths …
                                        Christofano
Was stabbed in error by a jealous man,
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival;
All in the self-same hour of the same night;
Which shews that Heaven has special care of
me.

(I. iii. 55-8, 61-5, my italics)

James Rieger goes so far as to see Cenci, God and the Pope as three strands of the same thread of immorality: ‘The tragedy's great developmental irony is Beatrice's growing awareness, uncompleted until the moment that the herdsman waits for her around the corner, that Cenci, Clement, and Almighty God form a triple entente.’¹⁸ Without the presence, then, of an unambiguous moral framework to fall back on it is harder to view anybody's actions within a clear light. Cenci's legacy is the predominant motif in the play, whether it takes the form of his speeches, or the form of resemblances that characters' utterances begin to make to Cenci's linguistic traits. For example, Lucretia, the most passive character in the play is given to utter the phrase ‘Would it were done!’ (IV. iii. 38) which is a remembrance of Cenci's ‘Would that it were done!’ (II. i. 193). Shelley wants us to perceive this resemblance, as it betokens the way in which Cenci's evil has filtered imperceptibly into the other characters' psyches. This fact is unignorable and makes it difficult to distinguish the characters' actions as clearly their own and not merely the derivative of an initial spark of evil. Thus all actions in the play can be seen, on one level, to be derived from the principal act of the play, Cenci's rape of Beatrice. All that goes before the rape leads to it and all that comes after derives from it. The impact that the rape has on Beatrice is so great as to lead to the circumstances that create the remaining events of the play: Cenci's murder and the trial of Beatrice. In addition, Beatrice's rape, and its aftermath, call into question the larger issue of characterisation within the play. The difficulty the reader has in evaluating her character and its various transformations makes itself felt only after she has been raped. This difficulty also accounts for the difficulty of the play.

III

The opening of The Cenci, which perhaps takes its cue from the opening of Webster's The White Devil (1610-12?)¹⁹ in that it has a similar sense of rushing in headlong without an initial setting of the scene, immediately sets up the expectation of a kinship between moral expediency and religion. In particular the first line of the play suggests the way in which a ‘murder’ is just another item on someone's agenda, a ‘matter’ for merely administrative concern: ‘That matter of the murder is hushed up’. (I. i. 1) The stress on the unreality of this proceeding is indicative of the way in which the proponents of justice operate. We are prepared in the very first line of the play for the picture that Camillo (the same speaker) paints of the Pope in Act V:

He looked as calm and keen as is the engine
Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself
From aught that it inflicts; a marble form,
A rite, a law, a custom: not a man.

(V. iv. 2-5)

In the first extract, in embryonic form, are the beginnings of what will later be elaborated as both the Count's and the law's inhumanity. The Pope is not, in fact, ‘a man’, just as Cenci admits he is not in these lines:

I do not feel as if I were a man,
But like a fiend appointed to chastise
The offences of some unremembered world.

(IV. i. 160-2)

The phrase ‘of some unremembered world’ alerts the reader to Cenci's detachment: he serves another existence, as removed as an abstraction but as real as the power that the Count wields.

Camillo's first speech, then, immediately strikes a balance between the need for judgement and the overwhelming subservience to expediency that must necessarily undermine and distort judgement. His closing two lines (‘As manifold and hideous as the deeds / Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes’ (13-4)) suggest ineffectuality, in that the terms used are understated as if Camillo here gives the Count's barbarity an edge of civility. His words are a little muted by the fact that the Count is there beside him. Both ‘manifold’ and ‘revolted’ are words that invite stronger words that are not forthcoming. The lines finally give the impression of petering out in a mood of partial acquiescence. Even at the start of the play the moral signposts are clouded over and unclear.

Cenci is not simply a straightforward monster. He is himself a cunning and masterful creator of linguistic methods. His language builds its effects with a subtlety that suggests something that transcends mere evil:

True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention pulls:—Aye, we must all grow old—
And but that there remains a deed to act
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mine—I’d do,—I know not what.

(I. i. 96-102)

It is worth pausing here to offer a paraphrase of the passage in order to bring the psychological subtlety of the writing. Cenci says that when he was a young man he was happier than he now is because he could turn his thoughts into actions; and suggests that pleasures of the flesh were of more appeal than revenge. Now, however, he admits that his vitality has waned because of age and decides he will replace it with something else: namely, the execution of a deed that will be so horrible as to reawaken that vitality. He ends by admitting, however, that he does not know what the deed will be. Shelley compresses all this meaning into a passage of great economical clout that nonetheless does not sacrifice stylistic assurance for the sake of brevity. Rather the meaning dictates the form; the passage's power lies in its winding compressiveness and concentration. The way that Shelley has decked out the passage with tantalising pauses and half-realised reticence makes Cenci's evil the more disquieting and compelling. The phrase ‘and now / Invention palls’, for example, allows the verse to subside into a quietness that is eerie. What comes next—‘Aye, we must all grow old’—impresses because of its sense of false self-effacement. Coming where it does the phrase builds its effects with telling power. Cenci, of course, does grow old but with age no suggestion is forthcoming of any corresponding lessening of his capacity for cruelty. The pause before ‘I know not what’ also confirms Cenci's ability to pry on his interlocutor's mind with a deceptive ease and effectiveness. He lets both the reader and the person he is addressing wait.

Cenci is indeed something of a supreme manipulator of language. Of all the characters in the play Cenci is unique in that he controls thought and language, rather than letting them control him. In the following passage he builds his effects with careful deliberation:

If, when a parent from a parent's heart
Lifts from this earth to the great father of all
A prayer, both when he lays him down to sleep,
And when he rises up from dreaming it;
One supplication, one desire, one hope,
That he would grant a wish for his two sons
Even all that he demands in their regard …

(I.iii. 22-28)

Cenci is here putting on his ‘public’ voice and, in doing so, expectations are aroused in the reader of a display of a moral propriety that is not forthcoming. He builds up a web of ironies with benign ease and fosters a mood of pleasant anticipation. This is then dashed by the announcement of his sons' deaths, which is nonetheless perfectly in accord with his phraseology, while contradicting in meaning the import of this passage, which is, apparently, one of benevolence and well-being. The first line, with its insistence on the word ‘parent’ suggests a liturgical harmoniousness that is echoed in the repetitive movement of ‘One supplication, one desire, one hope’. Similarly the lines ‘both when he lays him down to sleep, / And when he rises up from dreaming it’ paint a picture of fully-rounded methodicalness and a quiet dutifulness. The whole piece, with its quasi-Biblical air, is cunningly strategical and leaves the reader in the expectation of an emergence of moral equilibrium. Everyone is taken in, except Beatrice, who makes a comment that immediately alerts the reader to the dissonance that results from the clash between the Count's manner and his meaning. This clash is characteristic of Shelley's refusal to offer his reader objectivity as a means of interpreting his main characters. We too are taken in by the Count so that, as readers, we lack the same moral assurances and certainties that the characters in the play lack. We become involved in the meaning of the events of the play as do the characters within it. We face the same dilemmas and difficulties and our reactions are taken up in the person of Beatrice, a character who voices the inner fears, insecurities and anxieties of the reader. Beatrice thus becomes the mouthpiece of both the audience and the reader, in a similar way to which the narrator of The Triumph of Life (1822) assumes the viewpoint of the reader. It is therefore impossible to judge Beatrice without in some way bringing our own fundamental beliefs into the very arena of morality in which such judgements might reside. This inseparability is Shelley's method of ‘teaching the human heart … the knowledge of itself’²⁰ and forms one of the play's strands of indeterminacy. In judging Beatrice we must also judge ourselves.

Cenci's command of language confirms that, more often than not, language is a distorted transmitter of meaning in the play. There is an insistence on how words often limit and control thought, rather than liberate it. As Orsino puts it in Act V: ‘Shall I be the slave / Of … what? A word?’ (V. i. 98-99) Language has a heavy responsibility, insubstantial and impotent though it is; it can make all the difference yet also, paradoxically, only further emphasise intransigence and inflexibility. Beatrice's lines after she has been raped point to the parody of experience that words represent:

          Of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery …

(III. i. 111-114)

This implies that to use any word would be equally ineffectual: language is relegated to a position of insignificance, and speech, with its insistence on sequential logic, would betoken an internal order that is simply not there. As Ronald Tetreault puts it: ‘[Beatrice is] poised between a language that controls her and a troubled awareness of its consequences’.²¹

Shelley's philosophy of language in the play takes as its starting point this passage from his own prose piece Speculations on Metaphysics (1817) which stresses the way in which words are only substitutional in their recreation of the mental condition: ‘Words are as the instruments of mind whose capacities it becomes the Metaphysician accurately to know, but they are not mind, nor are they portions of mind.’²² This philosophy informs the play and, in particular, characterises many of Beatrice's utterances. These utterances derive their power from this notion of the sheer unparaphrasability of experience.

A passage from Marino Faliero (1820) also echoes The Cenci's view of language. Byron's play, as Charles Robinson has pointed out²³, is similar to Shelley's in that it too is an historical drama that has at its centre sexual violation. In this passage there is a common interest in the discrepancy between action and its expression:

          … the die was thrown
When first I listen’d to your treason.—Start not!
That is the word; I cannot shape
my tongue
To syllable black deeds into smooth names,
Though I be wrought on to commit them.

(III. i. 55-59)²⁴

The passage is characterised by the way in which this discrepancy is palpable and perceivable. The Doge's words impress with their insistent drive towards truth. His stoical matter-of-factness makes no concessions to ambiguity or the veil of distortion. The phrase ‘smooth names’ effectively suggests complicity's habit of twisting truth to its own ends but with consummate discretion. However, in The Cenci language has much more of a foothold within all the characters' beings: it directs their actions as much as reflects on them. The Doge's expression here of the discrepancy between the act and the verbalisation of it is far too absolute to be uttered by anybody in The Cenci. Nobody enjoys such objectivity and independence. Instead language is either being moulded into an instrument by which truth can be perverted or is remoulding a character's thoughts. The note of misrepresentation is struck here:

          and we trust
Imagination with such phantasies
As the tongue dares not fashion into
words,
Which have no words, their horror makes them dim
To the mind's eye.—

(II. ii. 83-87, my italics)

The word ‘fashion’ suggests tempering, making more tame—almost an automatic reaction to the nature of ‘such phantasies’—in addition to meaning ‘making up’. The discrepancy between mental creation and verbal utterance results in the need to control and rein in. The nature of such phantasies is suggested in another passage from Speculations on Metaphysics:

If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections, and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears,—all that they dare not, or that daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day.²⁵

The emphasis is on how the ‘picture’ that is ‘presented’ is self-contained and prevails from early on: this internal potential for what is latently disquieting is available to everybody, though counterbalanced by the need to keep thought hidden and concealed.

The impotence of language in the play is engendered by the climate of existentialist unknowingness in it. Beatrice's final cry from the heart in Act V is a clear instance of an occasion in the play when a character looks into the ‘abyss’ and confronts the inner emptiness of a godless universe:

          If there should be
No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;
The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

(V. iv. 57-59)

The nihilistic vision that this speech contemplates, while remoulding Claudio's speech from Measure for Measure (III. i. 117-131)²⁶, is one bereft of indications of moral reassurance or the confirmation of an ultimate security that is, for example, available to the characters of Shakespeare's play in the person of the Duke. What The Cenci lacks is an unambiguously good person who can provide a sure moral orientation point. In Measure for Measure even though the Duke's methods are at best debatable the fact that is important about him is preserved; he is outside the limits that mark off fallible humans' insights. There is no such safety net to fall back on in The Cenci.

The act of Beatrice's rape is the clearest instance in the play of its glimpse into chaos. Shelley's comments on incest are revealing, in this regard:

Incest is like many other incorrect things a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or of hate. It may be that defiance of every thing for the sake of another which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism, or it may be that cynical rage which confounding the good & bad in existing opinions breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness & antipathy. (To Maria Gisborne, November 16 1819)²⁷

The latter half of the third sentence of this passage is relevant to The Cenci and possibly has the play in mind, written as it was after the completion of the tragedy. (Shelley was copying The Cenci for the press on August 11 1819, according to Reiman and Powers.²⁸) However, Shelley's distinctly two-sided view of incest strikes one as a little too precise to be tenable. It may simply be the case that, as occurs with his presentation of incest in The Revolt of Islam (1817), Shelley's preoccupation with modes of extremity borders on caricature. The incestuous relationship of Laon and Cythna, though symptomatic of positive familial harmony, asks us to suspend disbelief too greatly:

And such is Nature's law divine, that those
          Who grow together cannot choose but love,
If faith or custom do not interpose,
          Or common slavery mar what else might move
          All gentlest thoughts …

(2686-2690)

In The Cenci Beatrice and Cenci ‘grow together’ but there is no love between them because of Cenci's ‘slavery’—his subjugation of Beatrice. The above lines seem to endorse Mary Shelley on Shelley's view of evil: ‘The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled … Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there would be no evil, and that there would be none.’²⁹ But in The Cenci evil is inherent: it is in fact the normal mode compared with which goodness seems an aberration. Giacomo's following lines provide an example that illustrates that whenever people in the play look for moral guidance they find only moral discord:

I am as one lost in a midnight wood,
Who dares not ask some harmless passenger
The path across the wilderness, lest he,
As my thoughts are, should be—a murderer.

(II. ii. 93-96, my italics)

Giacomo is addressing Orsino; there is an accompanying suggestion that Giacomo wants Orsino to show him the way but, ironically, ‘harmless’ is what Orsino is not. Giacomo is lost within his own mental murkiness—the danger is both external and internal, an objective enactment of a subjective state of mind. The first line is borrowed from the opening of Dante's Divine Comedy, as rendered here in Mark Musa's translation:

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
For I had wandered off from the straight path.

(I, 1-3)³⁰

Dante the pilgrim then tells how he encounters Virgil, who guides him down into the underworld. Virgil is an assured figure of morality. He provides affirmation in the midst of confusion. No such moral assurances are available to Giacomo. His statement of fear confirms that the play is stripped of the order that the hero of The Divine Comedy has access to. The moral universe of Dante's poem is carefully structured and ordered. By contrast, the moral universe of The Cenci is structured only in so much as it is consistently either confused or susceptible to chaos.

IV

The characterisation of Beatrice is the area that offers the severest problems of indeterminacy in the play. It is also the area of the play in which we are most likely to find the play's essential meaning or meanings. Part of the difficulty that the reader is faced with stems from the fluidity of Beatrice's characterisation. She is the central character of the play and, Macbeth-like, changes from an initial state of stoicism tempered with humanity to a limbo of madness, and then finally, at the very end, to a kind of pragmatism that is partly divorced from those initial qualities of humanity. It is hard to evaluate Beatrice because at each turn of the play we must evaluate a new dimension to her character. She in turn is stripped of the means by which she could properly assess herself and her actions. As Stuart Sperry puts it: ‘at the last she is unwilling or unable to see that she has been perverted’.³¹ Beatrice's ignorance about herself precipitates her actions which, in turn, complicate the reader's view of her. After she is raped she becomes a far more shadowy figure in the sense that her concerns and emotions revolve exclusively around one end—the murder of her father. The celebrated chasm speech illustrates the way in which this exclusivity prevails:

          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 … below,
You hear but see not an impetuous torrent
Raging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow,
With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,
Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark ivy's twine. At noon day here
’Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night.

(III. i. 247-265)

The passage as a whole strikes one, on one level, as a declaration of the need for an unflinching resolution. What impresses is the language's functional directness, its raw concision and the way in which it creates its effects with a combination of empirical detachment and cool foreboding. The passage is also strongly suggestive in its psychological incisiveness. As Michael O’Neill comments: ‘The subjective dimension—the relevance of the passage to the spiritual states of both Cenci and Beatrice—is strong enough to prevent us from reading the lines as a piece of “isolated description” [this phrase refers to the Preface]’.³² Beatrice's psyche is at the core of the passage—the rape and the shockwaves that it has caused filter into the imagery. The words ‘tangled hair’ (262) recall the ‘wandering strings’ of hair (III. i. 7) that are undone and are a symbolic projection of the loss of Beatrice's virginity, and indeed self-possession. As in Alastor (1816) the poetry creates its effects by marrying natural landscapes with mental states. But there is also a mood of intensely felt barrenness and primitive violence. The speech can be interpreted as a controlled eruption from the unconscious. Its phraseology is alive to the way passion lies buried in the depths of the mind, like the ‘mighty rock’. The word ‘unimaginable’ also points to the difficulty of visualising these passions, fraught as they are with a sense of danger and vastness. The powerful alliterative pull of ‘terror and with toil’ alerts the reader to the manner in which Shelley is making Beatrice self-conscious about language, allowing her to be aware of its potential for unleashing an implicit but disquieting powerfulness. It is as if the rape has tapped a part of her mind previously locked away and dormant, and which has now been given an opportunity to re-emerge in all the starkness of an imaginative outburst. The lines ‘Even as a wretched soul hour after hour, / Clings to the mass of life’ (252-253) recall the phrasing of one of Beatrice's earlier speeches:

          ’tis substantial, heavy, thick,
I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues
My fingers and my limbs to one another …

(III. i. 18-20)

The drawn out feel of the first line of the first extract (252) suggests the accumulative pull of the first line of the second extract (18) and the words ‘pluck’ and ‘glues’ create a mood encapsulated in the phrase ‘Clings to the mass of life’—namely one of claustrophobic entrapment and sexual repugnance.

The speech closes by reprising the feel of lines 16 to 22 from Act III, scene i. Here we see again, in a different manifestation, the legacy of this mood of claustrophobic violation: ‘and high above there grow, / With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag, / Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair / Is matted in one solid roof of shade / By the dark ivy's twine.’ (260-264) The language stresses an ever-present self-reflexiveness in its repetitions and alliterations: ‘from crag to crag’; ‘solid roof of shade’. These phrases all point to a sense of the ubiquitous and unavoidable. A ‘solid’ roof of ‘shade’ in particular, by making concrete something that is intangible, suggests a certain muscularity, barriers of unalterability, as if Beatrice's mind is no longer flexible. The reemergence of the rape in so many various incarnations in the speech testifies to Shelley's mastery of language here. The fact of this variousness indicates that the memory of the rape remains engulfing and disorientating. The reader is presented with an array of imagery that leaves us groping for a reference point. There is at once too much and too little to grasp onto.

The transformation in Beatrice's character is apparent in the gradual change in the way in which she speaks. After Act III her speeches become increasingly like the Count's, touched by megalomania and an unreal apprehension of her own status. As Stuart Sperry puts it: ‘in the end [Beatrice] … becomes her father's child in a way she was not at the outset of the play.’³³ The resemblances in her speeches are the outward signs of this. For example, after Savella's arrival she says: ‘Both Earth and Heaven, consenting arbiters, / Acquit our deed.’ (IV. iv. 24-25) This sounds like Cenci's:

Aye, as the word of God; whom here I call
To witness that I speak the sober truth;—
And whose most favouring Providence was shewn
Even in the manner of their deaths.

(I. iii. 55-58)

But with this echo comes the suggestion that the fact that God should sanction something in this play is not necessarily good. There is a strong hint here that Beatrice too has replaced integrity with expediency and gone back on her very first remark: ‘Pervert not truth’ (I. ii. 1). Beatrice's immovability is stressed in a way that also reminds one of Cenci's unflinching, sub-human will:

          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)

The Shakespearean resemblances (lines 48 to 51 are a reworking of Macbeth's: ‘I had else been perfect, / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air’ (III. iv. 20-22)³⁴), seem to have been inserted here to help us see that, beneath the apparent affirmation, there is a grave distortion involved in Beatrice's self-mythologising picture of herself. Like Macbeth she has lost sight of herself.

The most telling sign of the way in which Beatrice's character has transmuted into a resemblance of Cenci's is the fact that as Beatrice approaches Marzio in Act V, scene ii, he covers his face, just as Beatrice covered her's when Cenci approached her in Act II, scene i. She has in fact become the visible incarnation of her father. Shelley, by making these resemblances to Cenci, is undermining our desire to side with Beatrice. These echoic nuances are subtle but hard to ignore. They point to the way in which evil reflects itself in the play—whether it is in the way that religion is synonymous with injustice or in the way in which characters' corruptions filter into each other. There is no escape from evil and Beatrice's decline into it reinforces this feeling. I share Wasserman's view that this is part of the didactic intention that Shelley saw as being at the root of drama. He sees her moral ambivalence as being designed to ‘[engender] … our internal debate … and cause us to know ourselves.’³⁵ As Shelley puts it in A Defence of Poetry (1821): ‘In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.’³⁶ This passage, however, rather uneasily weighs notions of ‘censure or hatred’ with notions of ‘self-knowledge and self-respect’. The two seem to have been juxtaposed as if they were exact opposites and mutually exclusive. In addition the first part of Shelley's sentence relates to the internal issues of the drama, whereas the second concerns what that drama might bring forth, externally, in the sense of a lesson having been learnt or absorbed from the enactment of the play. The slipperiness of the passage testifies to a mode of indeterminacy that leaves a residue of the unfathomable in the reader's mind.

The speech that closes Act IV is one of the most subtle in the play. In it are variously combined motifs from Beatrice's period of initial righteousness, ‘though’ now twisted into something that resembles Shelley's description of Michelangelo's Christ in The Last Judgement: ‘Under the holy Ghost stands Jesus Christ in an attitude of haranguing the assembly. This figure which his subject or rather the view which it became him to take of it, aught to have modelled of a calm severe awe-inspiring majesty, terrible yet lovely, is in the attitude of common place resentment.’³⁷ The phrase ‘terrible yet lovely’ recalls Shelley's description of Beatrice in the Preface: ‘Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another’. (My italics)³⁸ Beatrice has lost that quality here; she gives an impression of caricature and token sentiment:

She knows not yet the uses of the world.
She fears that power is as a beast which grasps
And loosens not: a snake whose look transmutes
All things to guilt which is its nutriment.
She cannot know how well the supine slaves
Of blind authority read the truth of things
When written on a brow of guilelessness:
She sees not yet triumphant Innocence
Stand at the judgement-seat of mortal man,
A judge and an accuser of the wrong
Which drags it there.

(IV. iv. 177-187)

The speech builds to a partial climax, partial because it is opposed by the tone Beatrice employs, one that holds nobility and a parody of nobility in suspension. The speech is full of images of both token malevolence (‘beast’, ‘snake’, ‘supine slaves’) and token virtue (‘brow of guilelessness’, ‘triumphant Innocence’). Beatrice's apprehension of virtue has become too simplistic and reduces it to the level of a commodity, quantifiable and unreal. We cannot quite believe in her exalted claim for ‘triumphant Innocence’ which is dragged to ‘the judgement-seat of mortal man’, undercut as this sentence is by the rhetorical posturing Beatrice cultivates, which in turn suggests her own moral myopia. She cannot conceal her own telling self-righteousness which pierces the veil of the irony that she also draws across her import here. Beatrice's innocence has been inflated, by her continual denial of guilt, into a caricature.

By the end of the play she does manage to regain a large measure of self-knowledge and assume a more benign quality once more. In one of her last speeches she dimly realises that she has become the visible incarnation of her father:

          Even though dead,
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe,
And work for me and mine still the same ruin,
Scorn, pain, despair?

(V. iv. 69-72)

His spirit has lived on in her and she has unwittingly worked for him. This fact is at first shrouded in the cocoon of Beatrice's self-deception and so, at first, it is difficult to perceive the true import of these lines. The way the realisation emerges—that she has become her father—accounts for the true significance of these lines. Beatrice's view of her actions is one that fails to take into account her own guilt. It is left up to the reader to fill in the gaps in Beatrice's apprehension of herself. It is only when we do this that the play finally rises to the heights of its own dramatic methods. Though we have all along identified with Beatrice, though of all the characters she has been the only one we could emphathise with, in many ways she was the one person that we needed to be most objective about. By the end of the play the vistas of such objectivity begin to come into sight as Beatrice perceives the nature of the moral universe of the play, and with her perception comes Shelley's insistent reminder that the reader, not Shelley himself, must supply his own moral frameworks within which to place Beatrice's perceptions.

In her final speech Beatrice reclaims a dignity and stoical resignation that we have not witnessed since Act I. The quiet ordering of life implicit in the binding of the hair is a final gesture toward the life that is about to be denied. It also suggests, as Stuart Peterfreund has pointed out, that ‘Beatrice … [symbolically reclaims] her purity, if not the literal physical fact of her virginity’.³⁹ This last speech finally puts the ‘monster of thought’ to rest as Beatrice's mental state subsides into a gentle suspension—gentle enough to be communicated through language and not in spite of it. This final act of resignation does allow us to discern that a type of integrity has reemerged here, though earlier quashed within the play's environment of overbearing corruption. If Shelley had not allowed it to have been quashed then The Cenci would be an altogether less ambivalent work, and not one that continually presses on the reader the need for a definitive interpretation of Beatrice's status—and of the play's meaning, so closely tied up are the two—while consistently refusing to provide an assured basis for arriving at such an interpretation. In The Cenci Shelley's achievement has been to confront the reader with moral ambiguities that we know we must somehow resolve while showing the way in which these ambiguities are beyond resolution. We leave the play in the dark, feeling chastened and yet still expectant.

Notes

1. In this article quotations from and references to Shelley's poetry and prose are taken from Shelley's Poetry and Prose, A Norton Critical Edition, (eds.) Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London: Norton, 1977), hereafter PP. The quotation from Charles The First is taken from Shelley's Poetical Works, Oxford Standard Authors, (ed.) Thomas Hutchinson, corr. G. M. Matthews (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), hereafter PW. PP, p. 240.

2. PP, p. 241.

3. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (ed.) R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (first pub. 1963; London and New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 241.

4. PP, p. 241.

5. Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 142.

6. Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), hereafter Wasserman, p. 121.

7. PP, p. 113.

8. Ibid., p. 240.

9. Ibid.

10. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Julian Edition, (ed.) Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (first pub. 1926-30; London: Ernest Benn, 1965), hereafter Julian, vol. vi, p. 232.

11. Stuart Curran, Shelley's ‘Cenci’: Scorpions Ringed With Fire (Princeton: Princeton University, 1970), p. 139.

12. Ibid., p. 132.

13. PP, p. 240.

14. Wasserman, p. 94.

15. Ibid., p. 92.

16. Julian, vol. vi, p. 255.

17. PP, p. 491.

18. James Rieger, The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: George Braziller, 1967), p. 115.

19. John Webster, The White Devil, (ed.) John Russell Brown, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), p. 7.

20. PP, p. 240.

21. Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 137.

22. Julian, vol. vii, p. 63.

23. Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 144.

24. Byron, Poetical Works, Oxford Standard Authors, (ed.) Frederick Page, a new edition corr. by John Jump (3rd edition; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 417, ll. 55-9.

25. Julian, vol. vii, p. 64.

26. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, (ed.) G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), pp. 566-67, ll. 117-31, hereafter Shakespeare.

27. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, (ed.) Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), hereafter Letters, vol. ii, p. 154.

28. PP, p. 236.

29. PP, p. 271.

30. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, vol. i, Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (London: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 67, ll. 1-3.

31. Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley's Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Harvard and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), hereafter Sperry, p. 137.

32. Michael O’Neill, The Human Imaginings: Conflict and Achievement in Shelley's Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 84.

33. Sperry, p. 137.

34. Shakespeare, p. 1326, ll. 20-2.

35. Wasserman, p. 121.

36. PP, p. 491.

37. Letters, vol. ii, pp. 80-81.

38. PP, p. 242.

39. Stuart Peterfreund, ‘Seduced by Metonymy: Figuration and Authority in The Cenci’, in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, (ed.) G. Kim Blank (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1991), p. 191.