Shelley’s 1819 verse tragedy The Cenci is a story of incest and patricide set in the Papal Rome of 1599, a story that he claims to have found in “a manuscript communicated to me during my travels in Italy.” Its real origin lies rather in Shelley’s reading of the Jacobean melodrama of Webster, Tourneur, and Ford. Wicked Count Cenci is a thorough scoundrel who rejoices in the sufferings of his enemies: “I love the sight of agony. . . . I am what theologians call hardened . . . till I killed a foe,/ And heard his groans, and heard his children’s groans,/ I knew not what delight was else on earth.” As the play opens, Cenci is enjoying the unexpected news of the deaths of two of his sons and planning the rape of his daughter, Beatrice.
After this dread event, which is never actually named but rather alluded to in dark periphrasis, occurs, Beatrice cries, “My God!/ The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!/ The sunshine on the floor is black!” When Beatrice refuses to revisit his chamber, Cenci lets loose a curse upon her: “. . . let her food be/ Poison, until she be encrusted round/ With leprous stains! Heaven, rain upon her head/ The blistering drops of the Maremma’s dew,/ Till she be speckled like a toad.”
With the help of a priest swain, Beatrice plots her father’s death and is herself given a death sentence by the stern and unforgiving pope, who had,
