74 efts: Small lizards.
79–82 nightshade … long beaks: Kingfishers (‘halcyons’), vegetarians since the fall of Jupiter, eat nightshade, formerly poisonous, which is now innocuous.
111–24 PBS borrowed details for these lines from a sculpture, in the Vatican Museum, of the Chariot of the Moon whose horses are linked by a two-headed (‘amphisbaenic’) snake. Phidias was the pre-eminent sculptor of Athens in the fifth century BC. See Donald H. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1987), pp. 278–83.
120 will mock: Will imitate, though in the stillness of marble, the motion of the steeds they represent.
136 ‘All hope … here’: The inscription over the gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno III.9.
140 abject: Here, a noun: ‘outcast’.
167 glozed on: Given a specious and deceptive commentary.
187 unreclaiming: Unprotesting.
204 inane: Empty space.
ACT IV
11 the Father: Jupiter; he is called ‘the King of Hours’ (l. 20) by the ‘dead Hours’ (l. 13) which he has ruled; hence ‘Time’ has not ended (l. 14), only that period of time dominated by Jupiter.
34 One: Prometheus.
58 the figured curtain: Cp. III.iii.113–14 and note.
109–10 The consciousness of time may be slowed down by love (‘siren wiles’) and the experience of wisdom.
140 clips: Circumscribes, encloses.
169 gathering sphere: Perhaps alluding to the speculation of some contemporary scientists that new planets were formed from the particles and gases in nebulae.
184 unpavilioned: Uncovered, open.
207 Mother of the Months: A conventional poeticism for the moon.
209 interlunar: Between the disappearance of the old and the reappearance of the new moon.
213 Regard like: Resemble, look like; OED (v. 10) cites this instance as a rare and obsolete sense.
219 The ‘winged infant’ that directs the moon-chariot has details in common with the visionary figures in Daniel 7:9 and Revelation 1:14.
230 fire that is not brightness: Perhaps referring to infra-red radiation, a phenomenon investigated by the astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) and the chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829). For Herschel, see also note to II.iv.1–7.
236–68 Panthea’s vision recalls that of ‘the likeness of the glory of the Lord’ in Ezekiel 1:28 which influenced Milton’s image of the chariot of divine power in Paradise Lost VI.749–852. It also draws upon contemporary scientific speculation on the atomic composition of matter. See Thomas Reisner, ‘Some Scientific Models for Shelley’s “Multitudinous Orb”’, KSJ 23 (1974), pp. 52–9.
246 inter-transpicuous: ‘Visible between or through each other’ (OED, citing this instance).
261 drowns the sense: Is sublime; i.e. overwhelms the senses.
269 mocking: Imitating.
272 tyrant-quelling myrtle: ‘Tyrant-quelling’ is borrowed from Coleridge, ‘France: An Ode’, l. 37. In ancient Greece, myrtle was sacred to Aphrodite, goddess of love, and associated with the struggle for liberty, recollecting Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who slew the tyrant Hipparchus of Athens in 514 BC, having concealed their daggers in ceremonial myrtle branches.
275–318 In these lines, PBS condenses information from contemporary scientific thinking on a range of topics, including geology (ll. 280–83), the water cycle (ll. 284–7), archaeological studies on the evolution and destruction of civilizations and species, including proto-hominids (ll. 287–316), either gradually or by a catastrophe such as a flood (ll. 314–16). Lines 316–18 dramatize the suggestion, by Pierre-Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde (1796), that these extinctions might have been precipitated by the impact or near miss of a comet displacing the oceans.
281 Valueless: Punning on the two meanings of ‘priceless’ and ‘worthless’.
283 vegetable silver: Of a substance combining mineral and vegetable; cp. ‘vegetable fire’ (III.iv.110).
291 gorgon-headed targes: Light shields decorated with the head of a monster (gorgon) which had snakes in place of hair. See headnote to ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, In the Florentine Gallery’.
303 anatomies: Skeletons.
319–502 PBS’s playful equation of gravitational with erotic attraction in this dialogue reaffirms love as the governing principle of the universe.
388–93 King Bladud, the legendary founder of the city of Bath, having been exiled as a child because of his leprosy, became a swineherd. Noticing that those of his pigs that bathed in the warm mud of a marsh did not suffer from skin disease, he followed their example and was cured and returned to his father’s court.
415 Orphic: In Greek myth, Orpheus was the first poet. His verse and music were credited with magical powers.
444 my pyramid of night: The conical shadow which the earth casts away from the sun into space.
455 Covered: The word has a sexual connotation.
473–5 In Euripides, The Bacchae 1051 ff., Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, unwittingly kills her son Pentheus while in the frenzy of a Dionysian ritual.
526 birth: Species, or race.
529–30 Cp. the orders of angels enumerated in Paradise Lost V.600–601: ‘Hear, all ye Angels, Progeny of Light, / Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers.’
539 elemental Genii: Spirits representing natural phenomena.
555 Earth-born: Prometheus, who, as a Titan, descended from Uranus (the Heavens) and Gaia (the Earth).
562–9 The stanza echoes and revises the defeat and imprisonment of the Devil in Revelation 20:1–3.
575 Cp. Satan’s defiant words in Paradise Lost I.94–6: ‘Yet not for those, / Nor what the potent victor in his rage / Can else inflict, do I repent or change.’
THE CENCI
According to MWS, PBS had the idea for The Cenci after seeing in the Palazzo Colonna at Rome on 22 April 1819 a portrait then believed to be of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni (1839 II, p. 274; the identity of both sitter and artist is now doubted). On 11 May, PBS, MWS and Claire Clairmont visited the Palazzo Cenci in Rome and three days later MWS records that PBS ‘writes his tragedy’ (MWS Journal I, p. 263). As he makes clear in his Preface, PBS drew on a historical account in Italian of the Cenci family. MWS had copied this in May 1818 from an MS in the possession of the Shelleys’ friend John Gisborne, and began to translate it, perhaps with some help from PBS, in May 1819 (see Poems II, pp. 865–75); the translation was published in 1840 and is reproduced in BSM X. Notes on the Cenci family in PBS’s hand also survive, in the Huntington Library (see MYR (Shelley) IV). Composition was interrupted by the death of William Shelley on 7 June and not resumed until PBS, MWS and Claire had moved to the Villa Valsovano, near Livorno, on 17 June, where Mary says ‘the principal part’ was written (1839 II, p. 276). PBS and MWS made the press copy in August and an edition of 250 copies had been printed by Glauco Masi at Livorno by 21 September (Letters II, p. 119).
PBS hoped that The Cenci could be performed in London and, conscious of his scandalous reputation in England, sent a copy, no doubt with the title-page, Dedication and Preface removed, to T. L. Peacock on 10 September, asking him to ‘procure for me its presentation at Covent Garden’ (Letters II, p. 102). PBS had in mind two of the leading actors of the day, Edmund Kean and Eliza O’Neill, for the parts of Count Cenci and Beatrice. However, Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, found PBS’s depiction of the subject of Cenci’s rape of his daughter ‘so objectionable, that he could not even submit the part to Miss O’Neil [sic] for perusal’ (1839 II, p. 279) and rejected the play outright for performance. The Cenci was first performed privately in 1886 and in public in 1922, each time in London.
Apart from a few brief fragments, the only recorded surviving manuscripts of The Cenci are those of the Dedication and the Preface (MYR (Shelley) IV). In autumn 1819, PBS had the 250 copies of the play that were printed in Italy sent to Charles Ollier in London, where The Ce
nci was published early the following year, dated 1819. In April 1820, PBS sent a list of errata in the 1819 text to Ollier, who published a second edition (the only one of PBS’s works to reach an authorized second edition in his lifetime) in spring 1821. Our text is based on the 1819 Italian printing, though we have incorporated readings from the 1821 edition, from the list of errata, and from the alterations in PBS’s and MWS’s hand in a copy of the 1819 text that PBS inscribed to his friend John Taafe, which are given in Poems II.
The Cenci owes much to the English tragedies of the Renaissance period, especially Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, although commentators have also discerned the influence of a range of other dramatic forms, including Classical Greek tragedy. At the heart of the play is Beatrice’s murderous response to the abuse which she and her family suffer at the hands of her father and the ‘restless and anatomizing casuistry’, as PBS puts it in his Preface, which this response prompts in the audience as they ‘seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification’ (here). Comparable enquiry into the ethics of force and retribution is present in Prometheus Unbound and Hellas, examples of PBS’s sustained interrogation of the role of violence in the political process: can violence ever be a legitimate or even a necessary response to oppression, or is it only ever an instrument for breeding further violence? MWS records that PBS was ‘writing the Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us’ (1839 II, p. 205) – which prompted The Mask of Anarchy, an important poetic engagement with the issue of retribution for authorized carnage.
The Cenci is the third work in verse by PBS to treat explicitly the topic of incest, which he, in a letter of 16 November 1819, describes as a ‘very poetical circumstance’ which can consist in either ‘the excess of love or of hate’ (Letters II, p. 154). Laon and Cythna (1817) and ‘Rosalind and Helen’ (1818) offer a view of incest more in keeping with what PBS, in his letter, calls ‘that defiance of every thing for the sake of another which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism’ (Letters II, p. 154). Cenci’s abuse of his daughter, conversely, typifies ‘that cynical rage which confounding the good & bad in existing opinions breaks through them for the purpose of rioting in selfishness & antipathy’ (Letters II, p. 154). Aware of the obstacle that the theme of incest posed to representation on the contemporary stage, PBS took pains to treat the subject with ‘peculiar delicacy’, as he wrote to Peacock (Letters II, p. 102). Apart from the ‘Song’ which closes Act V, Scene iii, The Cenci is in blank verse dialogue throughout, with little of what PBS, in his Preface, describes as ‘mere poetry’ (here), i.e. imagery beyond what is strictly required for the development of dramatic plot and character. PBS goes on to state the principles on which he based his choice of language in the paragraph beginning ‘In a dramatic composition’ (here).
Critical commentaries include: Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 202–21; Paul A. Cantor, ‘“A Distorting Mirror”: Shelley’s The Cenci and Shakespearean Tragedy’, in G. B. Evans (ed.), Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, Harvard English Studies 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 91–108; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); D. Harrington-Lueker, ‘Imagination versus Introspection: The Cenci and Macbeth’, KSJ 32 (1983), pp. 172–89; Jacqueline Mulhallen, The Theatre of Shelley (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), pp. 85–113; and Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 84–128.
Dedication Leigh Hunt (1784–1859); poet, essayist and editor of the liberal weekly The Examiner, Hunt had been a close friend and supporter of PBS since 1817. He had been imprisoned from 1813 to 1815 for criticizing in print the Prince Regent in an instance of the ‘political tyranny’ to which PBS alludes in the final paragraph (here).
p. 273 a sad reality: On 15 December 1819, PBS wrote to Charles Ollier of his plans to write poems ‘the subjects of which will all be drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities’ (Letters II, p. 164).
PREFACE
p. 274 Clement VIII (1536–1605): Pope from 30 January 1592.
p. 275 Guido’s picture: See headnote.
p. 276 Revenge … mistakes: Cp. Hellas, ll. 729–30: ‘Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind, / The foul cubs like their parents are’.
anatomizing casuistry: Close moral analysis of a difficult case. In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, PBS attributes to Milton’s characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost a comparable ‘pernicious casuistry’ (here).
p. 277 those modern critics … to belong: The use of familiar language as proper to poetry had been variously argued by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) and Leigh Hunt in the Preface to The Story of Rimini (1816).
[Shelley’s note]: See note to III.i.243–65 for the ‘speech’ to which PBS refers in his footnote. Earlier in 1819, PBS was introduced by Maria Gisborne to the work of the Spanish Golden Age dramatist and poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681).
p. 278 Mount Palatine: The Palatine Hill in central Rome, traditional site of the first settlement of the city.
Castle of Petrella: See note to II.i.168.
ACT I
Scene i
1 the murder: Referred to by Cenci in ll. 21–3.
3 fief: Land.
Pincian gate: Part of the fortifications of ancient Rome; now at the northern end of the Via Vittorio Veneto.
4 conclave: Gathering of cardinals and the Pope; the Papal Court.
7 compounded: Settled by (punitive) payment.
16 nephew: Perhaps a euphemism for ‘illegitimate son’; Cenci’s reply implies nepotism and corruption in the papacy.
51 meteors: Any atmospheric phenomenon could be so denominated.
57 Aldobrandino: The nephew of the Pope. The family name of the historical Clement VIII was Aldobrandini.
69 list: Wish.
87 captious: Both ‘entrapping’ and ‘capacious’.
94 Hardened: Obdurately closed to divine influence.
113 the bloody sweat of Christ: Cp. Luke 22:44 on Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the eve of the crucifixion: ‘his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’
114–15 The image of the body as a prison for the soul is Platonic, e.g. Phaedo 82d–e.
121 Salamanca: A city in north-western Spain.
127 Close husbandry: Care in expenditure.
141–4 Cp. Macbeth II.i.56–8: ‘Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps which way they walk, for fear / Thy very stones prate of my whereabout.’
Scene ii
23 loose: Loosen, untie.
75 vassal: Changed on PBS’s list of errata from ‘slave’ in the first edition.
85 anatomize: Literally, ‘dissect’; figuratively, ‘analyse in great detail’.
Scene iii
4 Anchorite: Hermit.
60 a mummy: ‘A pulpy substance or mass’, specifically of ‘dead flesh’ (see OED n. 1, b–c).
68 the twenty-seventh of December: Comparing Cenci with the biblical King Herod, who is said to have ordered the slaughter of all male children under two years of age (Matthew 2:16–18), a massacre remembered in the Christian calendar on 28 December, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Cp. II.i.133–6.
73 the Infanta: The title of the daughter of the King of Spain (in l. 39, the news of the death of Cenci’s sons is communicated in letters from Salamanca).
74 El Dorado: In Spanish, ‘the golden one’, a legendary city of fabulous wealth believed to be located in the Spanish Americas.
77–90 Cenci, raising the cup of wine, parodies the Christian rite (‘sacrament’, l. 82) of the Eucharist.
108–10 The sense of these difficult lines seems to be: ‘Imagine the wrongs which must have been done not only to cause the devotion and respec
t for my father to be erased, but also to embolden me to speak out in public against him like this.’
109 prone: Impressionable.
126 Prince Colonna: Head of one of the oldest aristocratic households in Rome.
127 chamberlain: Responsible for managing the Pope’s household.
151 ill must come of ill: A succinct statement of the ethical principle embodied in The Cenci. Cp. Macbeth V.i.68–9, ‘Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles’, and Hellas, ll. 729–30. Cp. also IV.iv.139.
151–3 Frown … seat: Recalling the appearance of Banquo’s ghost to Macbeth in Macbeth III.iv.
ACT II
Scene i
26 secure: Presumably combining the two senses: sure of finding her and sure of finding her alone.
27 At the Ave Mary: At the hour of the Angelus, the Catholic devotion performed morning, noon and evening, in which the Hail Mary (Ave Maria) features prominently. Since Act II, Scene i, evidently takes place the morning after the banquet in Act I, Scene iii (see II.i.106), Lucretia probably means either noon or 6 p.m.
71 gangrened: Made rotten.
86 coil: Turbulent existence; drawing on Hamlet III.i.68–70: ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil / Must give us pause.’
111 Commentators have identified a number of precedents for Beatrice’s wish to be swallowed up in the earth, including: Aeschylus, Persae 915–17; Virgil, Aeneid X.675–6; and Marlowe, Doctor Faustus V.ii.88.
142 sudden: Fast-acting.
168 Castle of Petrella: Rocca Cenci, in the village of Petrella Salto, north-east of Rome. See note to III.i.240. For detailed discussion of the ambiguities in PBS’s account of the castle and its location, see Poems II, pp. 737n and 767n.
Selected Poems and Prose Page 87