Bridgewater Review

Volume 36 | Issue 2 Article 5

Nov-2017 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci and the “Pernicious Mistake” of the Regency-era Melodrama Derek Leuenberger Bridgewater State University, [email protected]

Recommended Citation Leuenberger, Derek (2017). Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci and the “Pernicious Mistake” of the Regency-era Melodrama. Bridgewater Review, 36(2), 9-12. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol36/iss2/5

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. license by the government. This posi- Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci tioned melodramatic performances outside the control of authorities, and and the “Pernicious Mistake” of elite observers of the time were quick to fret over the potential consequences the Regency-era Melodrama of the form’s rise to prominence. George Colman the Younger (1762- Derek Leuenberger 1836), Examiner of Plays during the uring the widespread social and economic reign of George IV, claimed in 1824 that melodrama espoused “the doc- th th tumult of late-18 - and early-19 -century trine that government is Tyranny, that Britain, popular markets for art and literature Revolt is Virtue, and that Rebels are D Righteous” (quoted in M. Hays and A. emerged quickly and had immense influence on the Nikolopoulou, eds. Melodrama [1996], form, content, and style of the cultural genres they ix). In the chaotic years immediately fueled. In the Romantic theater especially, the arrival following Waterloo, the radical writer Percy Shelley (1792-1822) might typi- of melodrama—plays with extravagant plots and cally have used the same words in far physical action accompanied by songs and an orchestral backdrop—gave voice to millions of Britons displaced geographically, economically, and socially by decades of war, industrialization, and political repression. The melodrama was introduced to England in 1802 by Thomas Holcroft’s A Tale of Mystery, initiating what Romanticism scholar Jeffrey Cox deems “a popular response to the excitement and anxiety generated as traditional social and cultural orders were challenged by the revolutions in America, France, and elsewhere” (47).

Melodrama—literally “drama with melodrama portrayed the victims of music”—provided a dispassionate the new British world as alienated from description of the passionate stories of the protections and justice afforded to suffering and moral vindication that the wealthy. On the stage, this sensibil- the lower classes of Britain told to ity drove toward a climactic moment themselves. Melodrama and its starkly of acclamation, in which the audience divided moral world, emotionally- gave loud voice to its condemnation of The Cenci, Title page of the first edition. fraught dialogue, frequent violence, the villain, hailed the exposure of his and raucous audiences became a potent (nearly, but not always, “his”) crimes, more approving tones, but Shelley, channel for poor Britons to dramatize and cheered the delivery of justice. too, was alarmed by the intersection complaints against the government, of melodrama’s drive for retributive In a direct and literal sense, melodrama mill owners and overseers, landlords, justice and its targeting of poor and represented the fundamental exclusion and other modern villains. In the working-class audiences. While Shelley of the lower orders from elite society: context of disappearing economic bases had expressed conflicted views about the patent theater system in England in agriculture and domestic manufac- the lower classes since his earliest forays prohibited the exhibition of “serious” turing in the early 19th century—the into radical literature, his 1819 play spoken drama in theaters other than the traditional mainstays of the British The Cenci highlights his deep concerns few—such as Covent Garden, Drury economy—and the altered social struc- about working-class melodrama and its Lane, and the Haymarket—granted tures that accompanied these changes, moral and political effects. Specifically,

November 2017 9 Shelley worried that melodrama’s The legendary story of Beatrice’s recent events, indicating that the ability to ignite its audiences’ passions traumatic suffering and her revenge is convention was still in practice dur- and desire for vengeance was socially the direct connection forged by Shelley ing Shelley’s day. He certainly would dangerous and morally suspect. with the dramatic world of working- have been familiar with the con- class theater, especially its elements of ceit: Charles Brockden Brown, the The Cenci is one of Shelley’s most strik- gothic horror, which melodramas read- American writer who was a favorite ing works, not merely because of its ily incorporated. Shelley’s Dedication of both Percy Shelley and his wife, the violence, but also because it contains and Preface to the published version of famous gothic novelist Mary Shelley some of his most striking depictions the play states that “the drama which (1797-1851), suggests in the preface to of social and political power, as well as I now present to you is a sad reality,” Wieland (1798) that his readers may genuinely tender portrayals of personal based on a manuscript that was “com- remember a notorious murder case suffering that intensify the play’s hor- municated” to him in Italy and “copied on which his novel is based. For the rors. The play follows the destruction from the archives of the Cenci Palace at gothic novelist, these kinds of prefatory of the Cenci family in 16th-century Rome” (R. Ingpen and W.E. Peck, eds, declarations offer a kind of half-serious Rome and, particularly, the tragic fall Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, means of warding off accusations of a of its eldest daughter, Beatrice. Central v.2 [1965], 67, 69). This move mirrors depraved imagination—an accusation to Shelley’s critique of the working- not only the purportedly historical with which the radical and atheist Percy class melodrama is the complex moral horrors of the gothic novels from which Shelley was all too familiar—as well world that emerges out of a seemingly the play borrows many of its structural as offering an initial promise of exoti- straightforward opposition of evil and characteristics, but also the true-crime cism and mystery to readers hungry innocence. The Cenci family is led by bases of many melodramas. The debt to for sensational characters and scandal- the sinister Count Cenci, tormentor gothic fiction is clear: the preface to the ous acts. Most significantly, though, of his second wife Lucretia, his sons first edition of Horace Walpole’s The these “found” manuscripts somehow, imaginatively, have worked their ways into English (or American) hands, and they augur terrible secrets that demand Shelley says in the Preface to to be made public. Though the facts of The Cenci that “Revenge, Shelley’s tragedy are to a broad extent historical, the play inhabits that twi- retaliation, atonement are light region between documented fact and centuries-old legend. Therefore, pernicious mistakes,” no less in the story of la Cenci must be fitted, as Shelley says, “to the apprehensions of drama than they are in real life. my countrymen in such language and action as would bring it home to their hearts” (70). For him, this uncovered history holds an essential kernel of Giacomo and Bernardo, and his daugh- Castle of Otranto (1764), for instance, public appeal, but it is one that must be ter Beatrice. The Count is a remorseless claims that “The following work deployed cautiously. villain, whose crimes against his family was found in the library of an ancient Shelley seeks from his audience a and others are detailed throughout Catholic family in the north of England. response of conflicted empathy with the play, but the crux of the plot is the It was printed at Naples, in the black Beatrice’s suffering and transforma- shocking rape of Beatrice by her father. letter, in the year 1529” (v). Likewise, tion, and not a unified condemnation. Beatrice, with the help of her step- Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) In her 1995 book, Melodramatic Tactics, mother and Giacomo, later contracts begins with the framing device of a University of Chicago scholar Elaine the murder of Count Cenci. They medieval manuscript found by English Hadley says that the melodramatic are discovered by agents of the Pope, tourists in Italy, William Beckford mode’s theatrical polarization of scoun- tortured, and sentenced to die. Shelley’s pretends to be the editor rather than drel and hero, villain and victim, is an interest lies primarily in the complex the author of Vathek (1787), and Charles invitation for the audience to identify character of Beatrice, who in the course Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, with the idealized victim (31-32). of carrying out and attempting to con- published one year after The Cenci, Hadley points to an important trans- ceal the murder of her father, becomes professes to base some episodes in formation in English theater in the way victimizer as well as victim.

10 Bridgewater Review Percy Bysshe Shelley by Alfred Clint, after Amelia Curran, and Edward Supposed Portrait of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni (Bologna 1575-1642). Ellerker Williams. Oil on canvas, circa 1829, based on a work of 1819. Oil on canvas, 1599. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Roma, © National Portrait Gallery, London, UK. Palazzo Barberini. audiences’ sensibilities were implicated for melodrama. As they worked of the authors, but their key similarity in the performance. Audiences claimed toward climactic moments of the was the insistence on a conclusive the long-standing “right” to voice exhibition of guilt, they fed audiences’ identification of a guilty agent. Thus, their approval or disapproval of a play’s desire to know not so much “what’s the bond to “sad reality” in melodrama aesthetic merits. In the Regency years, happened” as to express “what it was crucial to the radical and communal playwrights now sought to anticipate already knows” (196). goals of working-class theater, which audiences’ reactions, to harness their sought to clarify the baffling web of the Just two years before Shelley wrote The political voice and “bring out onto the causes of individual misery into a com- Cenci in Italy, workers in England had stage, before the audience, that which prehensible target for class anger and been outraged by the 1817 murder of a had been recently rendered private and action. Shelley, though, was particu- young woman named Mary Ashford, mysterious and to make it public and larly wary of the theatricalized wish- allegedly by the son of a wealthy explicable again” (59). Thus, a vocal fulfillment of the melodrama, wherein landowner in Warwickshire. In his and participatory audience was essential the revelation of guilt is accompanied Theatric Revolution (2006), Georgian to the melodrama’s attempt to coalesce by satisfactory retribution. drama scholar David Worrall describes and collectivize popular political con- the furious reactions to the murder, In melodrama, the audience’s judg- sciousness. The genre’s means of doing including reams of popular “news” ment is not determined by the action so was exhibiting recognizable and stories, pamphlets, and at least three on the stage but confirmed by it. This “real” acts of violence, revelation, and separately authored melodramas: The requires the vocal and public consensus just desserts. The desire and demand for Murdered Maid, The Mysterious Murder, of the audience through acclamation, these sorts of moral pronouncements, and Presumptive Guilt, or, the Fiery Ordeal which seeks to generate a stabilized and according to Simon Shepherd and (318-19). These contemporary treat- collectively experienced moral world. Peter Womack in their 1996 cultural ments defended or condemned either Shelley’s depiction of Beatrice under- history, English Drama, created a Ashford or her accused killer, Abraham cuts this process, however, by denying peculiar expectation among audiences Thornton, according to the sympathies audiences any climactic moment of

November 2017 11 Shelley recognized the double-edged The Cenci is one of Shelley’s nature of revolutionary action with its capacity to spiral into a cycle of most striking works, not merely recrimination and revenge, as it did in the French Revolution, or to result in because of its violence, but also violent repression and retribution by because it contains some of his government forces, as it did in British working-class revolts—the Pentrich most striking depictions of social Uprising of 1817, and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which had occurred and political power, as well as only two months before the comple- tion of The Cenci. These events, and genuinely tender portrayals of others like them during the turbulent last years of the Regency, became ral- personal suffering that intensify lying cries for workers’ movements in Britain, and they were kept persistently the play’s horrors. before the public through popular art. Shelley says in the Preface to The Cenci that “Revenge, retaliation, atonement acclamation. This begins with Count killers dump it out a window, and it are pernicious mistakes” (71), no less Cenci’s rape of Beatrice in Act II. The gets hung up in a tree. It is eventually in drama than they are in real life. For rape is never shown on stage. It is never discovered by agents of the Pope, but him, the “sad realities” of history must explicitly named or described by any- Shelley never allows a cathartic display provoke a corrective reconsideration of one; no curtain drops over a portentous of Cenci’s corpse. And after the arrest the nature of justice and its dramatiza- encounter. But Beatrice’s agonized con- of the family and the killers, Beatrice tion. He insists that the play’s moral versation with Lucretia, in which she turns on all who might reveal the plot. tension resides in the “restless and anat- refuses to name “the thing that I have Again, though, Shelley denies the omizing casuistry with which men seek suffered” (III.i.88), leaves little doubt audience an easy shift to a new target. the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that about what has happened and who has Threatened with torture, Beatrice she has done what needs justification” done it. Shelley felt that he had made argues that no one has the moral (142). It is this humanizing of suffering it clear enough, and he later wrote to standing to judge her guilt, and her and of guilt that Shelley believed could his friend, Thomas Love Peacock, that questions are pointedly directed at stop the responsive cycles of revolu- his greatest concern was whether “such the audience: tionary violence and authoritarian a thing as incest in this shape…would Who stands here repression that had stalled progress and be admitted on the stage” (quoted in happiness in his time. Ingpen and Peck, eds. Complete Works, As my accuser? Ha! wilt thou v.10, 61). But the “delicacy,” as Shelley be he, calls it, with which he treats Beatrice’s Who art my judge? Accuser, trauma refuses to bring the Count’s witness, judge, crimes entirely into the public light. What, all in one? (V.ii.173-76) Likewise, any satisfaction that Beatrice’s revenge might afford is withheld from The play ends with Beatrice and the audience’s view. Count Cenci is Lucretia awaiting execution, bind- murdered offstage by hired assassins, ing up one another’s hair in a gesture who initially refuse “to kill an old and of intimacy and mutual compassion sleeping man” (The Cenci, IV.iii.9) out that again denies the possibility of an of pity. After stopping Beatrice from acclamatory moment. Shelley’s depic- carrying out the murder herself, the tion of Beatrice as both sufferer and Derek Leuenberger is Director of English assassins finally kill Cenci, but the perpetrator undercuts the Manichean Language Learning in the Minnock Institute entire affair is bungled and pathetic: moral world of the melodrama and its for Global Engagement. in trying to conceal the body, the collective judgment.

12 Bridgewater Review