ng one would say
of him is that he had the dramatic talent. 'Prometheus' and 'Hellas',
however, are dramas only in name; there is no thought in them of scenic
representation. 'The Cenci' (1819), on the other hand, is a real play;
in writing it he had the stage in view, and even a particular actress,
Miss O'Neil. It thus stands alone among his works, unless we put beside
it the fragment of a projected play about Charles I (1822), a theme
which, with its crowd of historical figures, was ill-suited to his
powers. And not only is 'The Cenci' a play; it is the most successful
attempt since the seventeenth century at a kind of writing, tragedy in
the grand style, over which all our poets, from Addison to Swinburne,
have more or less come to grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice
Cenci, the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was executed
with her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father. The
wicked father, more intensely wicked for his grey hairs and his immense
ability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope impunity for a long
succession of crimes, hated his children, and drove them to frenzy by
his relentless cruelty. When to insults and oppression he added the
horrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed,
and Beatrice, faced with shame more intolerable than death, preferred
parricide. Here was a subject made to Shelley's hand--a naturally pure
and gentle soul soiled, driven to violence, and finally extinguished, by
unnameable wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, is on the
side of the persecutor. Haunted by the grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni's
picture of Beatrice, so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo her
name--though it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')--he
was tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once into
the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in
earthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the
action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease with
which he wrote--it cost him relatively the least time and pains of all
his works--it would be rash to infer that he could have constructed an
equally good tragedy on any other subject than the injured Beatrice and
the combination, which Count Francesco Cenci is, of paternal power with
the extreme limit of human iniquity.

With the exception of 'The Cenci', everything Shelley published
was almost entirely unnoticed a