Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the major English Romantic poets.  During his life, Shelley was considered a radical in his poetry, political and social views.  We will discuss more about this in a later posting. He drowned on July 8, 1822.

Shelley is renown today primarily due to his lyric poetry.  Some of his most famous poems are Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind; When Soft Voices Die; and The Masque of Anarchy.  When I think on how wonderfully written each of these is, I do not feel so bad that my poetry may never be known outside a smallish circle.  To have brought some smiles to those I love and care for is reward enough.

In today’s musing, we will take a look at the groundbreaking verse drama, The Cenci.  This particular piece was written in 1819.  People often talk to me about how long my poems are.  Again I take some degree of comfort in looking at writers such as Shelley and realizing that longish pieces sometimes have a lot to say.  It is only when they do not that they are too long.  Then again, Benjamin Franklin said it best when he spoke of his own writing and suggested that brevity is a good thing.

The Cenci A Tragedy, In Five Acts was inspired by the Italian House of Cenci, particularly Beatrice Cenci.  She was a young Roman noblewoman who murdered her father, Count Francesco Cenci.  The subsequent trial gave birth to a legend about her that has endured since her beheading in 1599.

As a quick aside, it might be noted that in Shelley’s day and age, it was not uncommon that like today, he elected to self publish and arranged for its printing himself.  Like today, this decision was predicated on costs.  After it’s printing, he chose to have the play staged with its intended audience being the popular multitude.  The themes of incest and parricide, however, made this play unable to be publically performed in England until 1922.  Despite these controversial themes this work is considered as uniquely important and such is deemed as a representative work of Western Literature.

Act I

This tragic masterpiece opens with Cardinal Camillo discussing a murder in which the Count is implicated.  The Count hold a tyrannical iron fist over his family and sends his own sons to die of poverty and starvation in Salamanca, Spain.  While this is ongoing, the virtuous Beatrice attempts to petition the Pope in hope of removing the Count from his brutal hold over the Cenci family.

On news of the death of his sons, the Count holds a celebratory feast commanding his guests to revel.  As he drinks the wine at the festival, he remarks the wine as his “children’s blood” which he had a great thirst to drink.  As the feast unfolds, Beatrice pleads with the other guests for protection from this mad man.  These pleas fall on death ears.  There is too much fear of the Count’s brutality and retribution.

Act I can be read in its entirety here:

http://www.bartleby.com/18/4/13.html

An adaption of this tale may be listened to here: