SOURCE: “Beatrice Cenci and the Tragic Myth of History,” in History & Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature, edited by Stephen C. Behrendt, Wayne State University Press, 1990, pp. 214-34.

[In the following essay, Behrendt explores the political theme and moral crisis depicted in Shelley's verse drama The Cenci.]

History and myth converge in Shelley's deeply political tragedy The Cenci, whose compelling protagonist, Beatrice Cenci, dramatically embodies that crisis which occurs in human affairs when an intolerable situation of perceived injustice and oppression appears to offer no viable legitimized options for action. Voicing the instinctive desire for relief, the individual trapped in such a dilemma naturally responds, as Beatrice does, that “something must be done” (III, i, 86), and The Cenci records the nature and consequences of Beatrice's decision about just what is to be done. The Cenci is a play about revolution, and about the insidious combination of circumstances that engender it. Shelley's tragedy anatomizes a world ripe for the revolution that necessarily occurs, portraying the “sad reality”¹ of a moral, social, and political universe in which the ethical foundations of human institutions are undermined at their most primary level: that of the family unit itself. A familiar metaphor for political relations,² the family and its relationships supplied Shelley with a mythic paradigm grounded in a human reality that cuts across distinctions of audience and faction. Particularly in light of Shelley's practice in previous works of employing allegorical female figures to articulate his political philosophy, the chaotic state of affairs in the Cenci family and the role Beatrice plays therein bore implicit political relevance for the volatile England of 1819.

The course of action Beatrice pursues must be assessed against the backdrop of her incestuous father's unrelenting sadism and the grinding system of institutionalized patriarchal domination in which even the protagonist's surpassing virtue and innocence are insufficient to prevent her being, as Shelley declares in the play's Preface, “violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion” (PP, 238). The audience cannot avoid being drawn into Beatrice's crisis: the power of both the circumstances and the action make that participation as irresistible as the compulsion to pass judgment. Shelley aptly assesses the phenomenon: “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” (PP, 240). Torn by our divided allegiance to the principles of humanity that dictate our sympathy with Beatrice and to the ethical discernment that requires our disapproval of her complicity in acts of murder and concealment, we are pressed inexorably toward Shelley's conclusion that the entire system that has placed Beatrice in her dilemma is both culpable and morally insupportable, a system of terrifying perversion in which, as Stuart Curran has written, “to act is to commit evil.”³

The revolution in The Cenci fails because it is the wrong revolution. Eliminating a tyrant by enlisting his own methods against him merely perpetuates the violent system of revenge and retribution. The Cenci stands as Shelley's argument by analogy about the English nation's need to learn by studying the tragedies of fallen nobility of mind and spirit that the past furnishes, and to choose for itself the only acceptable alternative to the downward spiral of violence: not revolution, but reform of the entire inhering structure of society, its assumptions, and its institutions. To this end Shelley envisioned a stage production that would explore and exploit the social nature of the theater, and particularly the ritualistic function of historical drama as re-presentation of history (or the semblance of history). To the historian's task of recounting the past, however, The Cenci adds the poet's concern with influencing the present and shaping the future.

Shelley fully intended to capitalize in his play upon the same sort of “deep and breathless interest” in Beatrice Cenci that surrounded the Cenci legend as he encountered it in Rome, and that unfailingly combined “a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her” (PP, 239). By 1819 he apparently had encountered the story both in popular discussion and in print: in a manuscript fragment and in Vincenzo Pieracci's 1816 play, Beatrice Cenci.⁴ The tale struck Shelley as exceptionally fitted to drama because of “its capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men” (PP, 239). “Sympathy”—the powerful principle of “the communication of passions” that arises not from reason but from human feelings—the skeptical tradition generally and Hume in particular had designated as “the chief source of moral distinctions,”⁵ and the entire issue of relative success or failure, right or wrong, that this play examines is inextricably linked with Shelley's cognizance of the conflicting and often contradictory roles played by reason and passion (or “sympathy”) in demonstrating the ultimate unattainability of absolute truth. The intellectual tradition of skepticism Shelley had absorbed especially from Hume and Drummond embraced the conviction that all hypotheses require continual testing, and this conviction governs the spectacle with which Shelley confronts his audience.

Shelley's play forces his audience to participate actively in Beatrice's moral and psychological testing and to discover in both her ordeal and their own a prototypical crisis of faith both in humanity generally and, more important, in the individual and autonomous moral and social self. In this interactive process, the audience is compelled to “go out of” its own nature (as discrete individuals and as collective social community) and, as Hume explains in A Treatise of Human Nature and Shelley recommends in A Defence of Poetry, to identify not only with “the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own” but also with “the pains and pleasures of [the] species” (PP, 487-88). The label Shelley attaches to this “great secret of morals” is Love, and his tragedy examines in painful fashion the failure, amid circumstances of overwhelming brutality and degradation, of a virtuous and innocent individual to sustain the love—both for others and, more important, for herself—that might bear her up were not all hope and support seemingly denied her.

Why Shelley elected to convey his message through the vehicle of drama is clear from another remark in the Defence:

The connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever other form [of poetry]: and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life (PP, 492).

Shelley's view of the theater presupposes an audience willing to substitute for its customary passive spectatorship an active participation in a dynamic intellectual interaction with the playwright, a relationship mediated through the performance of the text both onstage and in the consciousness of the audience. As Michael Henry Scrivener observes, Shelley envisioned The Cenci as “a catalyst for precipitating another kind of drama in the spectator,” for whom the experience would yield important moral benefits.⁶ Indeed, “truth must be understood in relation to one's social investments,” as Jerome McGann concludes from the dialogic nature of Plato's works.⁷ Though Shelley's Defence links the rise and decline of societies to the relative vigor of the arts throughout history, his dissatisfaction with the contemporary English stage (and its preference for spectacle and sentiment over substance) mirrors his increasing disaffection with English audiences generally. Moreover, Shelley's view of classical tragedy interestingly anticipates the later twentieth-century view of the culture that produced the great Greek tragedies, a view that discovers there not so much serenity, proportion, and rationality as “turbulence, dissonance, and an ambivalent morality that plagues action and passion.”⁸ Shelley believed that tragedy might function to “help us determine who we are and what we are doing to ourselves and others, while making it clear that such questions are never fully answered or finally resolved.”⁹ He extended this conviction also to historical drama, and particularly to that species of historical drama which bears visible implications for contemporary events.¹⁰

The Defence was composed in February and March of 1821, after Shelley had in 1820 secured publication of The Cenci when it had become clear to him that his tragedy would not be staged at Covent Garden as he had intended. Hence his comments on the historical decline of national theaters are not free of personal grievances. Nevertheless, they underscore Shelley's convictions about drama's implicit universal moral significance. Coming as it did after he had completed the significant restructuring of myth evident in the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound (which was not intended for any temporal stage), The Cenci traces—as had both the lyrical drama and Shelley's longest poem, Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam)—the stages of a revolution. Like Laon and Cythna—and unlike Prometheus Unbound—The Cenci is the record of a failed revolution, a rebellion that proceeds to its catastrophe from that most traditional, mythic spring: the conflict between generation and generation, between parent and child. That Shelley chose for his subject the history of the Cenci family, in which the revolutionary activity centers in a female protagonist, is not without significance for Shelley, either as liberal reformer or as husband of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter. Beatrice's dilemma parallels those both of women during Shelley's era (whose advocate Mary Wollstonecraft had sought to be) and of the British populace generally (on whose behalf and for whose edification Shelley had for nearly a decade endeavored to speak in support of reform). Hence her situation and the choices she makes are invested with a significance far greater than the merely historical.

Beatrice Cenci is more than the protagonist in a protohistorical play: she is the central figure in a moral and ethical parable that functions on several interrelated levels. At the level of surface narrative, her role is historical and dramatic. At the level of moral and ethical significance, it is essentially allegorical. And at the level most directly relevant to Shelley's private thoughts and public intentions as he completed his play in 1819, her role is mythic, although Shelley criticism has routinely overlooked the explicit emphasis the poet places in the play's Preface upon the Cenci story's archetypal pattern of myth.¹¹ Shelley weaves these roles into the fabric of a tragedy that elevates history to the level and status of myth, creating a moral and political exemplum designed to reveal dramatically the inevitable destruction from within of even the noblest and best-intentioned society—epitomized in its most paradigmatically virtuous representative—when that society permits, and participates in, the subversion of the morally and imaginatively informed integrative choice to love, and revels instead in the pernicious proclivity toward brutality, domination, revenge, and retribution. Mary Shelley had only just recently explored the effects of this misdirection of impulse in Frankenstein; but to present in its most powerful and devastating fashion the terrible tragedy of such a misdirection of all that is noble and divine in humanity requires not a grotesque creature but rather a protagonist of surpassing beauty and greatness, of tragic grandeur. Beatrice Cenci would seem to be just such a figure.

Beatrice clearly possesses external grandeur, both of social status (the Cenci are a powerful aristocratic family) and of moral character (she is, both by report and by initial behavior, extraordinarily virtuous). Indeed, in the play's Preface Shelley twice expands upon her moral and physical beauty, remarking at last that both in the historical account of her character and in her portrait (attributed at the time to Guido Reni) at Rome, “there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature was simple and profound” (PP, 242). Moreover, she is intellectually acute, capable of drawing minute and sophisticated moral and intellectual distinctions.

Shelley envisioned Beatrice being acted at Covent Garden by the lovely and dynamic Eliza O’Neill (1791-1872), the Irish actress who from her first appearance there in 1814 in the role of Juliet had increasingly been acclaimed the worthy successor to the great Sarah Siddons. Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock that the part was so “precisely fitted” for her that “it might even seem to have been written for her,” and that to see Miss O’Neill play the role would “tear my nerves to pieces.” Clearly it was vital that Beatrice be represented by the actress who could most compellingly convey her many excellences on the stage.¹²

Beatrice's experience as Shelley presents it in his play bears out Aristotle's stipulation that the cause of the hero's reversal “must lie not in any depravity but in some great error on his part,” some “error of judgment.”¹³ Aristotle's formulation precisely defines Beatrice, whose “great error” lies—as Blake might have put it—in becoming what she beholds. Her reversal stems from a terrible error of judgment that occurs in a situation of enormous stress; it engenders an internal depravity that comes to mirror with increasingly chilling irony the external depravity that prompted it: Shelley placed at the center of his tragedy the greatest of taboos, incest, an act so morally and socially repugnant that his audience could not but react with revulsion toward Francesco Cenci. In Act III Beatrice is unable to find a word for his crime:

                                        there is none to tell
My misery: if another ever knew
Aught like to it, she died as I will die,
And left it, as I must, without a name …
If I could find a word that might make known
The crime of my destroyer …

(III, i, 114-17, 154-55)

Moreover, Shelley refers in the Preface to Cenci's “capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind.” The unspeakable, unnamable quality of Cenci's offense suggests, in fact, not just incest but also sodomy.

Echoing the Pauline doctrine passed down by the church fathers, William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, had referred to sodomy as a subject “the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature” and “a crime not fit to be named,” and had called it a “capital” crime whose prohibition he deemed “an universal, not merely a provincial, precept.”¹⁴ Similar references to sodomy as unspeakable and unnameable, which abound in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, must have been familiar to Shelley and his audiences, who reasonably could have been expected to understand the extent to which Cenci's crime is in fact identified by the very fact that no one will name it. The implication is historically accurate in any event, for the account of the Cenci story that Shelley had studied indicates that Francesco Cenci had three times escaped the death sentence for sodomy by bribing the pope, Clement VIII.¹⁵

Shelley intensifies the agony of Beatrice's position, making it clear that Cenci's is a brutally calculated plan of domination and degradation that is intended to include still greater horrors at the Castle of Petrella. With acute psychological insight, however, Shelley incorporates into Beatrice's thinking an element of misplaced blame that has frequently been the lot of victims of sexual abuse. He locates the germ of her “error of judgment” in the despairing attitude of “polluted victimization”¹⁶ she assumes in Act III after the assault, an attitude that recalls that of Coleridge's Christabel, who awakes after her nocturnal encounter with Geraldine convinced that “Sure I have sinn’d!”¹⁷ Persuaded that the vicious and demeaning physical and psychological outrages to which she has been subjected have necessarily compromised and incriminated her in both physical and moral / ethical terms, she chooses to retaliate in precisely the terms in which she has been wronged: by a physical attack upon the body of her oppressor. In plotting her father's murder and in employing assassins to execute the deed, she adopts in herself the behavior she has condemned in others. In this she exceeds even Count Cenci: though the play's first conversation makes it clear that Cenci arranges for the murder of his rivals, Scene iii reveals that he is apparently not physically implicated in the deaths of his sons Rocco and Cristofano—something of a technicality since he has prayed earnestly for their deaths. Beatrice escalates the scale of actual violence, though; though her father's assaults upon morality generally are despicable, Beatrice's complicity in murder is ethically no less despicable despite the appeal presented to the audience's sympathies by the extenuating circumstances that surround her actions.

This matter of calculated intention is in fact central to the moral errors to which father and daughter alike fall victim, for in discussing the nature of the passions, Hume had written that “by the intention we judge of the actions, and according as that is good or bad, they become causes of love or hatred. … An intention is requisite to excite either love or hatred.”¹⁸ This passage enables us better to appreciate the error implied in the final authority to which Beatrice turns in determining “what is to be done”:

                                                                                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)

Once Beatrice internalizes her crisis and refers it to her own will for adjudication and counsel, the catastrophe becomes inevitable. So too does the return of mental calm and apparent rationality, which transformation itself reflects Hume's observation that “when a passion has once become a settled principle of action, and is the predominant inclination of the soul, it commonly produces no longer any sensible agitation.”¹⁹ Hence, in the final act, she is able coolly and apparently without compunction to sacrifice the soul of one of the assassins, whom she essentially consigns to hell by sending him to his death with a grave lie upon his soul.

In making her own will the final arbiter, Beatrice in effect appoints herself judge, jury, and executioner, assuming the ego-inflating posture of domination associated with the retributive God of wrath of the Old Testament, of Jehovah the destroyer, who is the figurehead for the whole patriarchal establishment against which Beatrice has been forced to struggle.²⁰ In doing so she rejects the paradigm of self-sacrifice and forgiveness of sins represented in the passion and death of the God of love of the New Testament, of the Jesus Christ who gives his life as exemplum of fidelity to principles of nonviolent response to—and forgiveness of—even the most unmerited wrongs. More immediately, Beatrice reverses the response of Shelley's Prometheus, whose repudiation of revenge the poet had only just finished celebrating in the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound. Indeed, the variations Beatrice sounds on her “I have borne much” theme (I, iii, 111) are variations as well upon Prometheus's anguished cry of “I endure” early in the lyrical drama (I, 24).

In the Preface Shelley clarifies the issue, drawing at least a tentative distinction between apparent disgrace and real dishonor: “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.” Beatrice's error lies in her deliberate violation of the specific injunction of Romans 12.19: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” Hers is the tragic flaw of hubris, the deadly sin of pride that impels her to arrogate to herself a function that is presumably God's alone. That she is a Roman Catholic in a Catholic country, and, moreover, that her father is barely dead by her devices when the emissaries of the pope arrive to arrest him in the name of the church (and hence of God) adds the crushing weight of cosmic irony to the gravity of her crime. Guilty not just of parricide, she sins doubly in blaspheming as well.

As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that we must distinguish in Beatrice two significantly different voices. One is that of the virtuous woman we see initially and who is the unarguably innocent victim of both her father's abuse and the irresponsible earthly and heavenly patriarchy that tolerates it. The other is that of the skillful rhetorician whose increasingly profound self-delusion ironically increases in direct proportion to the fervency of her exercises in self-justification. Were the issues of right and wrong, of innocence and guilt, as clear-cut as these formulations imply, though, The Cenci would be little more than a formulaic morality play. But Shelley shrewdly enlists theater's immense emotional potential to complicate the audience's task by arranging matters so that the audience instinctively sides with Beatrice. It is no surprise that Shelley longed to have Count Cenci acted by the greatest of all Romantic actors, Edmund Kean, even though he admitted the impossibility of any such arrangement.²¹ Although he disliked Kean's violent acting style enough to walk out of a performance of Hamlet in 1814,²² Shelley fully appreciated its powerful impact in live performance. The heightened pity and terror that an actor like Kean might have elicited from a theater audience would necessarily have reinforced their bond of sympathy with Beatrice and made them party to the hubris that in these desperate circumstances seems to sanction actions that would ordinarily be condemned. Rendered emotionally defenseless by the horror of what Beatrice suffers, the audience is naturally primed to accept and endorse vengeance upon her oppressor. Shelley's strategy is to force the audience to recognize how easy and naturally they—like Beatrice—slip into sympathetic complicity in activities of which they normally would rationally disapprove. This unsettling recognition is central to the process of reeducation that Shelley has in mind: the audience must learn to resist and repudiate the longing for vengeance upon an oppressor that is itself the origin of Beatrice's fall. More important, it must reject the entire system of human behavior that makes violence and retribution an attractive and even desirable option. Beatrice's passion for what Curran calls an “ethical absolute,” however noble or “right,” is as futile as her father's pursuit of the sort of epitome of depravity we encounter also in Flannery O’Connor's violent Misfit, who declares that there is “no pleasure but meanness.”²³

Shelley expects his audience to make difficult and momentous moral and intellectual choices in dealing with The Cenci, however distasteful those choices may prove to be. This expectation underscores the rhetorical nature of the play and its grounding in the tradition of the skeptical debate, in which truth is never absolute but only relative. Shelley confronts his audience with that most difficult of dilemmas: the need to reconcile intensely subjective emotional responses with objective reasoning and discrimination in coming to discoveries that are at once relevant to the self-knowledge both of each individual member of the audience and of that audience taken as a political body, as a community in which the potential for action is great. The process of recognition at which Shelley aims must arise, furthermore, not from any overt moralizing by the author through his characters but rather from the plot itself. In this matter Shelley again follows Aristotle, who asserts that “it is the action in it, i.e., its Fable or Plot, that is the end and purpose of tragedy”; for “the most powerful elements of attraction in Tragedy, the Peripeties and Discoveries, are parts of the Plot” (Poetics, 1461). The relevance of this dictum to political fiction is underscored by Irving Howe's observation that because ideology is abstract it is not easily accommodated in the political novel, whose preoccupation is necessarily with the quality of concrete experience: “It is precisely from this conflict that the political novel gains its interest and takes on the aura of high drama. … [The political novelist's] task is always to show the relation between theory and experience, between the ideology that has been preconceived and the tangle of feelings and relationships he is trying to present.”²⁴ Shelley declares similarly that “there must … be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose” (PP, 240). Hence although Shelley considers Beatrice's desire for revenge “morally condemnable,” he tries to show her “as she was,”²⁵ leaving it for the audience to judge her from her actions.

Aristotle distinguishes between poetry and history on the grounds that poetry's statements “are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Poetics, 1464). Hence the author of a tragedy is advised to “first simplify [his story] and reduce [it] to a universal form, before proceeding to lengthen it out by the insertion of episodes” (Poetics, 1472). Shelley's Preface indicates that he has pursued just this strategy with the Cenci story, for “anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring” (PP, 239-40). In short, history must be made into poetry, or, to paraphrase Aristotle, “the thing that has happened” must become also the “kind of thing that might happen” (Poetics, 1463; italics added). In this fashion a story of such universal dimensions as that of Beatrice Cenci becomes more than just poetry, however: it assumes the nature and significance of myth. Moreover, it participates in that element of prophecy which Shelley associated throughout his career with patriotism and the desire to play a part in the renovation of humanity and human institutions.

By the summer of 1819, Shelley had already published Laon and Cythna, and had (he thought) completed Prometheus Unbound in three acts. The former develops a personal mythology, and the latter restructures familiar mythological materials. The viability of myth and mythic consciousness depends upon an audience's participation in both the formulation and the endowing with significance of that myth or mythic consciousness. In The Cenci Shelley labors in perhaps the most artistically “cramped” vehicle of all, creating a work tied at least in part to both the shape and the details of history, a work that, because it has no narrator, assigns its audience greater responsibility for both the “telling” and the interpretation of the story. As Joseph Wittreich observes, however, though prophets (like epic poets) may recount history, they do so “less to record it than to bring it to an apotheosis.”²⁶ Like the prophet Wittreich describes, Shelley explores the past in his works in an attempt to liberate humanity from that past, and from the cycle of recurrent error of which history furnishes sad record.²⁷

Shelley's choice of historical subject matter is important here. To choose the subject of the Cenci family is to accept that “this happened,” that the actual “shape” of the events cannot be profoundly altered (however much the details might be altered, embellished, or suppressed) but can only be observed and assessed. Shelley wanted his audience to be no less knowledgeable about the story and its catastrophic culmination than were the spectators at, say, Oedipus Rex. Indeed, he even suggested publicizing details of the play's plot in advance, partly to arouse interest, of course, but also to replace the customary concern with what happens with the greater one of how it happens.²⁸ In the ritualistic playing-out of this familiar story, Shelley wants his audience to discern the relevance as analogy of the Cenci story, to get beyond the individual tragedy of the historical Beatrice Cenci and to perceive the inherent horror of the superstructure of custom and belief that leads Beatrice to choose such a terrible course of action in the first place. Shelley believes with Blake that error must be given form and recognized before it can be repudiated, and The Cenci is properly regarded as a complex and unrelenting embodiment of a misguided and oppressive patriarchal system and the self-consuming monsters it spawns. Such a fallen state of affairs produces no-win situations in which even the virtuous inevitably become scorpions (to use Shelley's image) stinging themselves to death.

It is upon this point of prophetic significance that Shelley's own position in 1819 bears greatest relevance to the mythic dimensions of Beatrice Cenci and of Shelley's play as a whole. By 1819 Shelley had settled in Italy, a self-exiled liberal reformer whose previous poetry and prose everywhere counsels against the desire for revenge of real or imagined wrongs in human affairs. Like his father-in-law, William Godwin, Shelley feared the bloody consequences of any repetition in England of the sort of radical alteration of the social and political structure that had occurred with the French Revolution. Conditions were indeed ripe for revolution in England during the latter years of the Regency: crop failures and political repression had aggravated the already acute socioeconomic dilemma arising from a postwar economic recession, the mechanization of the trades and industries, and the return to the work force of war-weary soldiers who found no jobs to which to return. In August of 1819 came the bloody action against the crowd of reformers at Manchester, to which Shelley responded from Italy with the series of impassioned poems that proved too hot for the cautious Leigh Hunt to publish in the Examiner.

The Examiner in fact sheds interesting light upon the ground occupied by Shelley and other liberal reformers in 1819, as they contemplated the approaching crisis in English domestic affairs. In the first issue of the Examiner for 1819, Hunt had written: “A spirit is abroad, stronger than kings, or armies, or all the most prominent shapes of prejudice and force. … This spirit is knowledge[:] that gigantic sense of the general good which has awaked for the first time in the known history of the world. … All classes feel that something, as the phrase is, must be done.”²⁹ By late July, though, by which time Shelley had completed The Cenci, Hunt's tone had darkened considerably: “It is a fact, notorious and undeniable, that the present possessors of power are in the daily habit of violating the constitution; and it is a fact, undeniable and awful, that the suffering classes know it, and feel it, and will not let the consideration go out of their hearts.”³⁰ The volatility of the situation in England was a recurrent theme in the Examiner in 1819, as well as in those other liberal journals with which Shelley had asked Hunt to keep him supplied. It is therefore not unreasonable to see in The Cenci an attempt to enlist the vehicle of live theatrical performance in the poet's attempt to play an active part—even from the distance his departure had imposed—in the stabilization, the reformation, and the reorientation of English society and values. It was as live theater, Shelley obviously believed, that The Cenci held the greatest potential for educating the public and providing the necessary brake to the speeding vehicle of public unrest that increasingly threatened to become a runaway as had happened in France thirty years earlier.

Beatrice Cenci's “great error,” then, consists in her deliberate subscription to the impulse toward vengeance and retribution for injuries inflicted by a powerful and vicious oppressor. This is not to say that she has failed to give more acceptable alternative measures their fair chance to work on her behalf. As she declares publicly to the guests at Cenci's banquet in Act I,

I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand
Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke
Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love and tears
To soften him, and when this could not be
I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the father of all,
Passionate prayers.

(I, iii, 111-19)

Later in the play the duplicitous Orsino tempts Beatrice at her moment of crisis with a series of brutal questions calculated further to undermine her instinctive virtue:

                                                            Should the offender live?
Triumph in his misdeed? and make, by use,
His crime, whate’er it is, dreadful no doubt,
Thine element; until thou mayest become
Utterly lost; subdued even to the hue
Of that which thou permittest?

(III, i, 172-77)

In imputing blame for Cenci's survival to an act of omission and weakness on her part, Orsino plays upon precisely that self-doubt which has led Beatrice to consider herself implicated in, and corrupted by, her father's vice. Shelley more than once raises in his poetry and prose the suggestion that, in failing to resist it, the oppressed participate in their own oppression. Shelley paints himself into something of the same corner into which he paints Beatrice, however, for the line separating principled passive resistance from practical submission in the interest of surviving is a fine and infinitely flexible one. The shift from absolute rejection of revolutionary violence in Shelley's early works to the qualified (or, occasionally, the wholehearted) acceptance of it as a practical means to an end in later works like Swellfoot the Tyrant, Hellas, and “Ode to Liberty” indicates that, though he staunchly resisted such violence in England, he gradually and reluctantly abandoned his aversion to its employment in service to liberty elsewhere.

Orsino's temptation of Beatrice with a rhetorical vision of Cenci's triumph over the forces of good directly echoes the Furies' temptation of Prometheus with the vision of the crucified Christ in Act I of Prometheus Unbound, and it is undertaken for the same purpose. Both visions are invoked to intensify the protagonists' self-doubts by misrepresenting history, and both find a significant antecedent in Satan's temptation of Jesus atop the pinnacle of the temple in Paradise Regained. Prometheus recognizes in the visions conjured up by the Furies Jupiter's own insidious designs: “I close my tearless eyes, but see more clear / Thy works within my woe-illumed mind” (I, 636-37). He concludes, furthermore, that his strength—indeed, his salvation—lies not in revenge but in self-sufficient endurance:

The sights with which thou torturest gird my soul
With new endurance, till the hour arrives
When they shall be no types of things which are.

(I, 643-45)

Beatrice Cenci responds to her temptation in exactly the opposite fashion, determining to endure no more but rather to be revenged upon her tormentor. With a mastery of terrible irony, Shelley has her declare, as we have seen, to “have at length determined what is right” (III, i, 221; italics added). In a world in which best options are merely the least of evils, “what is right” can exist only in relative terms. This is precisely why The Cenci is about “a sad reality,” as Shelley's dedication to Hunt proclaims, rather than about “my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just” (PP, 237).

Of course, Shelley does not mean to suggest that Beatrice (or any other victim, for that matter) is abjectly and unresistingly to accept brutality and oppression. But he agrees with Christ's counsel to Peter in the garden of Gethsemene: striking off the ear (or the life) of the offender does no good and indeed merely perpetuates an intolerable cycle of violence. What is called for is not revenge but rather a sympathetic and informed understanding of the weakness and complexity of human nature that enables the victim to appreciate that the oppressor is the ultimate, unwitting victim of his or her own cruelty. Prometheus understands this, as had Jesus on the Cross (“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” [Luke 23.34]). In pitying the Furies, Prometheus effectively disarms them, even as he recants his curse partly because it had constituted a momentary lapse in his ability to be “king over myself, and rule / The torturing and conflicting throngs within” and partly because he so fervently wishes “no living thing to suffer pain” (I, 492-93, 305). In short, genuine liberty and dignity can never be taken away: they can only be surrendered, rashly, blindly, irrationally.

The self-poisoning nature of the lust for vengeance is a theme that had preoccupied Shelley from the earliest stages of his career. Already in Zastrozzi, for instance, the beautiful Matilda plots the murder of Julia, her rival. When the scheme miscarries, Matilda murders Julia herself and brutally mutilates the corpse, exemplifying the hideous atrocities to which the lust for revenge of perceived slights can drive the individual.

More important is Shelley's Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte (1817). Ostensibly written on the occasion of the princess's death, the pamphlet in fact excoriates the government's conduct in entrapping and executing—on the day following the princess's death—three members of the abortive Derbyshire rebellion of 1817.³¹ Shelley's pamphlet concludes with a funeral procession that appears at first to be that of the dead Princess Charlotte. But in a daring rhetorical maneuver, Shelley shifts his reference:

A beautiful Princess is dead:—she who should have been the Queen of her beloved nation, and whose posterity should have ruled it for ever. … Liberty is dead. … Let us follow the corpse of British Liberty slowly and reverentially to its tomb: and if some glorious Phantom should appear, and make its throne of broken swords and sceptres and royal crowns trampled in the dust, let us say that the Spirit of Liberty has arisen from its grave and left all that was gross and mortal there, and kneel down and worship it as our Queen.³²

Only a few months after completing The Cenci, Shelley included among his responses to the Peterloo Massacre The Mask of Anarchy, whose apparatus includes the chariot of the Phantom of Liberty prefigured in the conclusion of the Address. Beatrice Cenci is, in fact, the most prominent and compelling among a considerable number of politically allegorical female figures in Shelley's works, including Ianthe (Queen Mab) and Cythna. Like the two phantoms in particular, she is a figurehead for the oppressed, for Liberty soiled and subjugated by irresponsible patriarchal power and authority.

But unlike the Princess Charlotte (who dies naturally in childbirth), the “Princess” Liberty (dead of neglect and abuse in England), and the Phantom of Liberty (who rises triumphant, even apocalyptic, from the carnage), Beatrice Cenci is her own worst enemy, her own destroyer. Like Oedipus, she sentences herself by and to her own hand. But unlike Oedipus, she proceeds not to “justice,” truth, and self-knowledge but rather to vengeance, prevarication, and self-deception. Shelley suggests that the essence of Beatrice's tragic fall—and the locus of the genuine pathos her circumstances elicit from us—is her failure to live up to her heroic potential. In failing to remain steadfast in the humanizing principles of love and integration, she rejects society itself in an act of tragic self-aggrandizement. The underlying mythic design here is that of the Fall. Beatrice succumbs to the temptation to commit an act—murder—that is expressly forbidden by God. In determining within her own will “what is right,” she becomes in fact her own tempter, her own Satan, responding in the fashion of the oppressor, returning injury with injury.

Shelley had to force his audience to rethink their allegiance to Beatrice, finally, and to recognize—however reluctantly—the error of the choices she has made. He uses the fate of the hired assassin Marzio for this purpose. When Beatrice confronts him in Act V after he has named her to the authorities under torture, Marzio finds himself so overwhelmed that he cannot repeat his accusation. In a speech combining dramatic irony with massive self-deception, Beatrice swears a false oath as prelude to her question:

                                                                                                    Think
What 'tis to blot with infamy and blood
All that which shows like innocence, and is,
Hear me, great God! I swear, most innocent,
So that the world lose all discrimination
Between the sly, fierce, wild regard of guilt,
And that which now compels thee to reply
To what I ask: Am I, or am I not,
A parricide?

(V, ii, 149-57)³³

Through Beatrice, Shelley challenges the audience also to distinguish between appearance and reality—between what “sympathy” prompts and what rational analysis dictates—and to comprehend the actual facts of what it has witnessed, lest it too “lose all discrimination.”

Moreover, Marzio's response to Beatrice's question (“Thou art not!”) implicitly dooms him to an eternity in Hell, for that response is an outright lie, a lie that he never recants but bears to his death on the rack, where he holds his breath resolutely and dies of suffocation.³⁴ His answer, like all of his final speech, indicates the degree to which he has been seduced by Beatrice's rhetoric, even as Eve had been deceived by the Serpent. That she is subsequently implicated by her own brother and mother makes even more poignant this needless sacrifice of Marzio's eternal soul. Whether we judge his death suicide or death-by-torture, Beatrice cannot be absolved of responsibility. Though she could not have known he would take his own life (for a Catholic, yet another mortal sin), she chooses to let his torture proceed, even as, having settled upon a course of action and determined that Cenci must die, she was unswerving in her dedication to that end. Her attempt to exonerate herself at Marzio's expense is occasionally regarded as a last desperate attempt to escape that “demonstrate[s] her valor in the face of hostile destiny.”³⁵ But however much he might wish to “save” Beatrice, Shelley cannot, bound as he is both by history and by the ethical design of his tragedy. What he wishes to demonstrate to the audience is, in fact, the tragic erosion of valor. So consistently does Beatrice misstate fact and misrepresent reality after the crisis of Act III, Scene i, that her rhetorical maneuvering increasingly reinforces her conviction that she is blameless, free of responsibility in her father's death. Shelley requires that his audience face up to the universal truism that the greatest crimes against humanity are fraught with self-delusion and self-justification.

In terms of political allegory, then, Beatrice Cenci might have stood as an important warning to the theater audience Shelley hoped most to reach. In the explosive climate of 1819, the notion of real evil attractively packaged (or disguised) as apparent good held particular relevance. The bloody lesson of the French Revolution was still fresh in the English mind and, especially for a Godwinian gradualist like Shelley, the great moral and patriotic imperative was to stave off in England the natural and seemingly justified thirst for violent redress of wrongs on the part of the people generally. Like Beatrice Cenci, the later Regency Englishman and Englishwoman could not but feel the painful “generation gap” that was becoming ever more apparent as the official “father-figure” (both the government in the abstract and the profligate prince regent, who substituted for his apparently mad father) tried to maintain an everweakening grip on power by means of oppression and intimidation. Nor could the fate of the petition for assistance and intervention that Beatrice and her family address to the pope, which the scheming Orsino deliberately withholds to further his own designs,³⁶ fail to suggest to some the similar fate of the floods of petitions submitted—with apparently equal lack of success—to Parliament by the advocates of reform during the Regency.

Both as metaphor and as myth, the history of the Cenci family was germane to English affairs. Like Francesco Cenci, the English royal father figure might be perceived as an irresponsible disciplinarian who had conspired in the deaths of his sons by committing them to protracted and often unpopular wars (against France and, earlier, against the American colonies). His cruelties against the “mother country” are manifest, from the destruction of her sons and daughters to the plundering of her national dowry. Finally, if we permit ourselves to regard Beatrice at least on one level as Liberty—as An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte gives us reason to do—we can appreciate how a liberal reformer like Shelley could see in the England of 1819 a tale of brutality and incest not unlike that which had decimated the Cenci family. Aristotle claimed that the best dramatic situation for the tragedian is one in which “the deed of horror” is contemplated within a family unit, and in which the protagonist makes a discovery—typically of kinship—“in time to draw back” (Poetics, 1468-69). Beatrice has several such opportunities, but she fails to acknowledge what should be a “discovery”: that, like the violence of which she is the victim, murder is an unnatural act that violates the universal “kinship” of humanity. But Shelley wants his audience to discover their own emotional and sociopolitical kinship with Beatrice, whose situation is in so many ways analogous to their own, and to temper their own behavior in accordance with what that discovery reveals, both about Beatrice and about their own potential for self-destruction. For like Beatrice, England stood in 1819 on the brink of committing the sort of national parricide and ethical suicide to which France had recently fallen victim. But unlike Beatrice Cenci—and France—the English people had not yet taken the fatal step. Therein, finally, lies the real point of Shelley's great political drama. Shelley would have his country reclaim and preserve the grandeur of its greatest heroine—Liberty—before that grandeur becomes a tragic one.

Notes

1. Dedication of The Cenci, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 237. Hereafter cited in the text as “PP.”

2. See Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘This Accursed Family’: Blake's America and the American Revolution,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 27 (Winter 1985), 30-52.

3. Stuart Curran, Shelley's “Cenci”: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 132.

4. See George Yost, Pieracci and Shelley: An Italian “Ur-Cenci” (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1986). Yost's introductory essay offers compelling evidence for regarding Pieracci's play, published in Italian in Florence, as an important source for The Cenci.

5. C. E. Pulos, The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1954), p. 23. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), p. 398.

6. Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), p. 188.

7. Jerome J. McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), p. 29.

8. J. Peter Euben, “Preface,” Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), p. x.

9. Euben, p. xii.

10. It is worth noting Shelley's abortive efforts in 1822 to produce another stageable, salable historical drama, Charles the First, whose subject was also directly relevant to the political and social climate of Shelley's time.

11. Curran, pp. 32-33.

12. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 102; ca. 20 July 1819. Ironically, she had only a week earlier, on 13 July 1819, made her final appearance before retiring from the stage to marry William Becher.

13. Poetics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1467; subsequent references are to this edition.

14. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (4 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1769), IV, 215-16. See also Louis Crompton, Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985).

15. Yost, p. 11. Like others before him, Yost misses the point of Shelley's handling of the “unspeakable,” concluding that the poet “drops the charge of sodomy” (p. 30).

16. Yost, p.27.

17. Christabel, l. 381.

18. Hume, pp. 348-49.

19. Hume, pp. 418-19.

20. For an interesting examination of the issue of the play's irresponsible patriarchies, see Eugene R. Hammond, “Beatrice's Three Fathers: Successive Betrayal in Shelly's The Cenci,” Essays in Literature, 8 (Spring 1981), 25-32.

21. Letters, II, 102-3.

22. Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1947), p. 20.

23. Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), p. 132.

24. Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel, (1957; rpt. New York: Avon, 1967), pp. 22-23.

25. Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 401.

26. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1979), p. 34.

27. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of the prophet's role and function, see Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘The Consequence of High Powers’: Blake, Shelley, and Prophecy's Public Dimension,” Papers on Language and Literature, 22 (1986), 254-75.

28. Letters, II, 120; 21 September 1819.

29. Examiner, No. 575; 3 Jan. 1819, 1.

30. Examiner, No. 604; 25 July 1819, 465.

31. For additional information about the event, see Newman Ivey White, Shelley (2 vols.; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), I, 545-46; Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975); and P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelly and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 175-77. See also Scrivener's discussion of the pamphlet, pp. 133-37.

32. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck (10 vols.; London: Ernest Benn, 1926-30), VI, 82.

33. Significantly, while Cenci's is a crime that cannot be named but only referred to obliquely as “the act” or “the deed,” Beatrice's crime has a name—parricide—that is repeatedly uttered explicitly in the play. I thank my student Kevin Binfield for pointing this out to me in the course of his own striking investigation of The Cenci.

34. Marzio's denial of the truth here, and his self-reproach at having named the person the audience knows to be the guilty party, recalls the manner in which Caleb Williams castigates himself for having revealed the murderer Falkland in Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794). Both are deluded in their faulty beliefs that those they accuse somehow do not deserve their punishment; both Marzio and Caleb strongly regret having revealed the truth to the respective authorities.

35. Yost, p. 43.

36. Yost points out that though the manuscript record Shelley consulted (Es) indicates that Beatrice's petition to Clement VIII went unanswered, Pieracci, like Shelly, has the petition intercepted and suppressed by an intermediary, in this case Francesco Cenci's friend Aldobrando. Interestingly for the political dimension of the tale that Shelley explores, Pieracci calls the pope “the Sovereign” (l Sovrano); Yost, p. 35.