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    The Cenci: “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
    The Cenci: “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
    The Cenci: “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
    Ebook154 pages2 hours

    The Cenci: “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

    By Percy Bysshe Shelley

    3.5/5

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    Shelley is one of the most revered figures in the English poetical landscape. Born on the 4th August 1792 he has, over the years, become rightly regarded as a major Romantic poet. Yet during his own lifetime little of his work was published. Publishers feared his radical views and possible charges against themselves for blasphemy and sedition. On 8th July 1822 a month before his 30th birthday, during a sudden storm, his tragic early death by drowning robbed our culture of many fine expected masterpieces. But in his short spell on earth he weaved much magic. The Cenci, A Tragedy in Five Acts was a verse play that Shelley tried to have performed at Covent Garden in his lifetime. He was unsuccessful despite the play being his only work to be published in a second edition and many acclaiming the work as a tragic masterpiece. He was inspired to dramatise this real life story of the tragic execution of a young Italian woman in 1599 for the pre meditated murder of her father after viewing a portrait of her, Beatrice Cenci by the painter Guido Reni. After seeing a performance of the play in 1886 George Bernard Shaw commented that: Shelley and Shakespeare are the only dramatists who have dealt in despair of this quality

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateJan 3, 2014
    ISBN9781783949175
    The Cenci: “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      This is actually a proper play as opposed to a lyrical drama but, in what seems to be the story of Shelley's life, the play so offended people that it was never performed until 1922. Once again Shelley is pushing the boundaries of his society by demonstrating things that are so shocking that people really do not want to see them. In a way people are willingly keeping themselves blindfolded because what Shelley is revealing to us is so shocking that it can shake the foundations of our own subjective reality.The Cenci is set in 1599, when the Reformation had reached its height and the glory days of the Catholic Church were far behind them. However it is not necessarily a religious play, but rather it is a political play with uses events in the past to criticise the political reality of the day. What was shocking about the play was that it dealt with incestral rape and how the whole event was covered over by the powers that be. This forced the children of the antagonist, Francesco Cenci, to take the law into their own hands and then have the full force of the law come down upon them.The play is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy not because of some aspect of a fatal flaw but rather that the perpetrator of the crime was never going to be punished for his crime, and in the end it was the victim that was punished for the act of another. This is something that, sadly, we still see today, and not a week goes by when we hear of some woman in some conservative country being punished because she was raped.What the play shows is how the legal system is heavily weighed in favour of the powers that be. Francesco Cenci was a powerful noble in Italy, and in a way he was above the world. However we still see aspects of familial support, because when he rapes his daughter, his sons crowd around his daughter to seek to restore her honour. However the arbitrator of justice, at that time the church, found itself going against those who had been wounded. Okay, there is also revenge in this play, but much of it has to do with the fact that nobody else would make a move against Cenci. There is also the idea that justice cannot be taken into one's own hands because when people start taking justice into their own hands then the rule of law breaks down (if it ever existed, as at times it seems to apply to one group of people and not to another).While the rule of law did not theoretically exist in sixteenth century Rome, there was still very much a law: ecclesiastical law. However, at the time, and even for centuries beforehand, this law was abused, mostly to keep the church in power, which meant that nobody could actually question the church. Even Cenci would not have been immune to the power of the ecclesiastical courts, however it is the nature of the hypocrisy because those who were guilty only of thinking for themselves were punished while the real monsters would be free to roam the land, simply because nobody could bring any charges against them.
    • 4/5
      Shelley the romantic poet tries his hand at writing a stage script, set in sixteenth century Rome during the papacy of Clement VIII. The story of the Cenci family, the degenerate and abusive patriarch, and the family that suffered at his hands. Appeals to the pope for help led nowhere, and the family concocts a plot to be rid of him and find peace. This story is an indictment of the Catholic Church, the papacy, and the patriarchal system in general that allows the young and innocent to suffer horribly at the hands of a brutal father. Written in a style reminiscent of Shakespeare, but with definite traces of the romantic era to which Shelley belonged, this piece makes beautiful reading even when the subject matter is horrifying.

    Book preview

    The Cenci - Percy Bysshe Shelley

    The Cenci. A Tragedy In Five Acts

    by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most revered figures in the English poetical landscape.   Born on the 4th August 1792 he has, over the years, become rightly regarded as a major Romantic poet.  Yet during his own lifetime little of his work was published. Publishers feared his radical views and possible charges against themselves for blasphemy and sedition.  On 8th July 1822 a month before his 30th birthday, during a sudden storm, his tragic early death by drowning robbed our culture of many fine expected masterpieces. But in his short spell on earth he weaved much magic.  Among his many great works is The Cenci, a five act tragedy which is published here along with several other classics.  Shelley’s words are alive with intent, meaning and emotion. A true poet for all our ages.

    [Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May - August 5, 1819; published 1820

    Index Of Contents

    DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.

    PREFACE

    DRAMATIS PERSONAE

    ACT 1.

    SCENE 1.1

    SCENE 1.2

    SCENE 1.3

    ACT 2.

    SCENE 2.1

    SCENE 2.2

    ACT 3.

    SCENE 3.1

    SCENE 3.2

    ACT 4.

    SCENE 4.1

    SCENE 4.2

    SCENE 4.3

    SCENE 4.4

    ACT 5.

    SCENE 5.1

    SCENE 5.2

    SCENE 5.3

    SCENE 5.4

    NOTE ON THE CENCI, BY MRS. SHELLEY

    DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.

    Mv dear friend

    I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary efforts.

    Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects

    incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has been.

    Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.

    In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.

    All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,

    PERCY B. SHELLEY.

    Rome, May 29, 1819.

    PREFACE

    A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and

    amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome, the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its

    own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some difficulty.) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all

    the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one

    tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.

    On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her, who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized it as the portrait of La Cenci.

    This national and universal interest which the story produces and has produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose. In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of mankind.

    This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous: 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

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