Review: Percy Shelley’s The Cenci
When I first started on this, I knew that I’d be reading something deeply searing, uncomfortable, yet engrossing. The Cenci deals with incest, parental abuse, rape, murder, religious authoritarianism, torture, nature, Catholicism, and more. In five acts Percy Shelley follows his predecessors Sophocles and Shakespeare by taking a story from the deep past and reanimating it with his own poetic imagination and creating something that’s excellent in both language and dramatic force. Shelley does well to conceal the rape and the murder of Cenci offstage, leaving us with the evocative power of the devastating effects of all this violence. He also follows Greek drama in its general abstinence from displaying on-screen violence, while he is almost very Shakespearean in his own Shelleyan way through the way poetry is interwoven into speech so that I cannot isolate a specific line so much as take passages as wholes. I am impressed also by Shelley’s grasp of metaphors, similes, figurative language, and while it can get a bit thick at times (this is the Romantic era), it generally feels right for this sort of elevated drama that has not only an important lesson to teach (authoritarianism is devastating and can, unchecked, lead to both violence and to enabling) but also pity to evoke. Beatrice’s speech after the rape has a mad cadence in which all nature is wrecked.
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!
The sunshine on the floor is black! The air
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe
In charnel pits!
Interestingly, Shelley has a particular feel for the religious setting, for an Italian Catholic world that is “alien” to us Anglo-Americans but which is just as real as anything within our Protestant-influenced world. He also has an excellent grasp of the motivations and desperation that drives an essentially saintly and brave woman like Beatrice Cenci to commit this murder, a deceitful Orsino to do what he does at the expense of those around him, and the madness of the tyrannical Cenci himself to wreck damage on his family through deceit and violence.
I would recommend everyone read The Cenci at least once in their lifetime. It’s one of Shelley’s most engrossing dramatic works both in poetry and in drama, though Prometheus Unbound is perhaps his most successful and sublime, and its focus on rape, the culture of authoritarianism, and revenge, make it feel very timely in an era of #MeToo and attention to sexual abuse and rape and violence.
Shelley was right to see the deep past as a reservoir of stories and images. Like Yeats after him in “Leda and the Swan”, and Shakespeare before him in King Lear (which Shelley considered the greatest drama of all time), and Keats alongside him in his various odes, Shelley believed in the power of myth to enchant, terrify, teach, exhort, and empower readers to be free and to imagine and to come through their readings to a kind of emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and ultimately sensual enlightenment.
