CENCI:
Why miserable?
Why miserable?
Shelley
And the subject he
loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil
Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who
were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a
victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating
from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had
depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim
of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He
followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good
principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the
regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,
used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond
the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which
they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the
Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to
devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven
portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known
only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on
condition of its being communicated to him. According to the
mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was
destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought
pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing
the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and
Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.
The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and
Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that
of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures
centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the
real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will
flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world
drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of
Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the
tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the
Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus--she was, according to other
mythological interpretations, the same as Venus and Nature. When the
benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her
prime, and is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in
perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further
scope to his imagination, and idealizes the forms of creation--such as
we know them, instead of such as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal
Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth,
the guide of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and
weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss
from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays
on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what
is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations
and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of
Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible
imagery. Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and
remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or
the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the
letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all
that is sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought. "
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we
say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But
they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;
and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,
or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as
the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world
which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do
searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some
valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface. '
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in
an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph
of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last
century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated
by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell
into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the
serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong
and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre
of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam". ) The tone of the composition
is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and
the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more
varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in
the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as
the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring
to our view the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward. '
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the
law of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by
the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in
the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,
and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his
countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own
heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such
disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and
built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to
induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,
did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped
to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn
before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in
their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the
Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms
of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many
passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet
must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and
he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in
a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is
better than any of my former attempts. '
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that
the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a
list of errata written by Shelley himself.
***
THE CENCI.
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
[Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May-August 5,
1819; published 1820 (spring) by C. & J. Ollier, London. This edition
of two hundred and fifty copies was printed in Italy 'because,' writes
Shelley to Peacock, September 21, 1819, 'it costs, with all duties and
freightage, about half what it would cost in London. ' A Table of
Errata in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting is printed by Forman in "The
Shelley Library", page 91. A second edition, published by Ollier in
1821 (C. H. Reynell, printer), embodies the corrections indicated in
this Table. No manuscript of "The Cenci" is known to exist. Our text
follows that of the second edition (1821); variations of the first
(Italian) edition, the title-page of which bears date 1819, are given
in the footnotes. The text of the "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st and 2nd
editions (Mrs. Shelley), follows for the most part that of the editio
princeps of 1819. ]
DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.
Mv dear friend--
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an
absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary
efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else
than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful
and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects
incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to
be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality.
I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content
to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has
been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that
it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the
ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave;
one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet
himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and
how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he
can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of
purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate
in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political
tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated,
and which, had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us,
comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
THE CENCI.
PREFACE.
A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which
was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains
a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one
of the noblest and richest families of that city during the
Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an
old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived
at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed
itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion,
aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This
daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she
considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length
plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common
tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an
impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and
amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus
violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance
and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the
most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome,
the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life
repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the
most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand
crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted
for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for
severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived
his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal
Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against
the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its
own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the
manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some
difficulty. ) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all
the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their
confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and
opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one
tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most
dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of
people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the
overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in
the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is
preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized
it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has
produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great
City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first
suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose.
In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity
of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and
success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the
apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would
bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic
compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus
is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters
of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made
them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of
mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be
insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these
tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the
contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There
must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to
what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose
aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the
human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of
another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is
kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from
his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement,
are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she
would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a
tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have
interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a
dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest
among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is
in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did
and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters
as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making
them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:
thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth
century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented
as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion. To a
Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the
earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men
which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled
at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the
popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous
guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a
cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do
not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy
passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which
terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of
which it has conducted him. Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind
of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the
most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of
life. It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration;
not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connection with any
one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and
without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is
according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a
persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a
chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the
Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul. Thus in the
first scene of the fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to
the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having
administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to
confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as
essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she
perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech
was suggested by a most sublime passage in "El Purgaterio de San
Patricio" of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally
committed in the whole piece. )
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should
interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the
immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal
passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery
may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the
illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects, I have written more
carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of
words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who
assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient
English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do
that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be
the real language of men in general and not that of any particular
class to whose society the writer happens to belong. So much for what
I have attempted; I need not be assured that success is a very
different matter; particularly for one whose attention has but newly
been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.
I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story
as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the
Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido
during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just
representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she
seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed
is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with
folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden
hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is
exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips
have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which
suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we
are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping
and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien
there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite
loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci
appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and
gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature
was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an
actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the
world.
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modernized,
there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the
same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this
tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense
ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of
trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in
which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), supported by granite
columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and
built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over
balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense
stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into
gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information than
that which is to be found in the manuscript.
THE CENCI: A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
COUNT FRANCESCO CENCI.
GIACOMO, BERNARDO, HIS SONS.
CARDINAL CAMILLO.
PRINCE COLONNA.
ORSINO, A PRELATE.
SAVELLA, THE POPE'S LEGATE.
OLIMPIO, MARZIO, ASSASSINS.
ANDREA, SERVANT TO CENCI.
NOBLES. JUDGES. GUARDS, SERVANTS.
LUCRETIA, WIFE OF CENCI AND STEP-MOTHER OF HIS CHILDREN.
BEATRICE, HIS DAUGHTER.
THE SCENE LIES PRINCIPALLY IN ROME, BUT CHANGES DURING THE FOURTH
ACT TO PETRELLA, A CASTLE AMONG THE APULIAN APENNINES.
TIME. DURING THE PONTIFICATE OF CLEMENT VIII.
ACT 1.
SCENE 1. 1:
AN APARTMENT IN THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER COUNT CENCI AND CARDINAL CAMILLO.
CAMILLO:
That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate. --
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point; he said that you _5
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live: --
But that the glory and the interest _10
Of the high throne he fills, little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
CENCI:
The third of my possessions--let it go! _15
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle:
I little thought he should outwit me so! _20
Henceforth no witness--not the lamp--shall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life:--it angers me! _25
Respited me from Hell! So may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven! No doubt Pope Clement,
And his most charitable nephews, pray
That the Apostle Peter and the Saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy _30
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue. --But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
CAMILLO:
Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou mightst honourably live _35
And reconcile thyself with thine own heart
And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs! --
Your children should be sitting round you now, _40
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you. _45
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count,--you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth
Watching its bold and bad career, as men _50
Watch meteors, but it vanished not--I marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend, _55
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
CENCI:
For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian. --Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint. _60
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter--
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day HIS wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more. _65
CAMILLO:
Thou execrable man, beware! --
CENCI:
Of thee?
Nay, this is idle: --We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime
Seeing I please my senses as I list,
And vindicate that right with force or guile, _70
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart--
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent _75
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel--
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain. _80
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men. _85
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know,
Is as my natural food and rest debarred _90
Until it be accomplished.
CAMILLO:
Art thou not
Most miserable?
CENCI:
Why miserable? --
No. --I am what your theologians call
Hardened;--which they must be in impudence,
So to revile a man's peculiar taste. _95
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls:--Ay, we must all grow old--
And but that there remains a deed to act _100
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mine--I'd do,--I know not what.
When I was young I thought of nothing else
But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:
Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees, _105
And I grew tired:--yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals, _110
The dry fixed eyeball; the pale, quivering lip,
Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the body, which preserves,
Like a strong prison, the soul within my power, _115
Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear
For hourly pain.
NOTE:
_100 And but that edition 1821; But that editions 1819, 1839.
CAMILLO:
Hell's most abandoned fiend
Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt,
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not. _120
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca
Would speak with you.
CENCI:
Bid him attend me
In the grand saloon.
[EXIT ANDREA. ]
CAMILLO:
Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee. _125
[EXIT CAMILLO. ]
CENCI:
The third of my possessions! I must use
Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword,
Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursed sons; _130
Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,
Hoping some accident might cut them off;
And meaning if I could to starve them there.
I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!
Bernardo and my wife could not be worse _135
If dead and damned:--then, as to Beatrice--
[LOOKING AROUND HIM SUSPICIOUSLY. ]
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak
Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.
O, thou most silent air, that shalt not hear _140
What now I think! Thou, pavement, which I tread
Towards her chamber,--let your echoes talk
Of my imperious step scorning surprise,
But not of my intent! --Andrea!
NOTES:
_131 Whom I had edition 1821; Whom I have editions 1819, 1839.
_140 that shalt edition 1821; that shall editions 1819, 1839.
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My lord?
CENCI:
Bid Beatrice attend me in her chamber _145
This evening:--no, at midnight and alone.
[EXEUNT. ]
SCENE 1. 2:
A GARDEN OF THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER BEATRICE AND ORSINO, AS IN CONVERSATION.
BEATRICE:
Pervert not truth,
Orsino. You remember where we held
That conversation;--nay, we see the spot
Even from this cypress;--two long years are past
Since, on an April midnight, underneath _5
The moonlight ruins of Mount Palatine,
I did confess to you my secret mind.
ORSINO:
You said you loved me then.
BEATRICE:
You are a Priest.
Speak to me not of love.
ORSINO:
I may obtain
The dispensation of the Pope to marry. _10
Because I am a Priest do you believe
Your image, as the hunter some struck deer,
Follows me not whether I wake or sleep?
BEATRICE:
As I have said, speak to me not of love;
Had you a dispensation I have not; _15
Nor will I leave this home of misery
Whilst my poor Bernard, and that gentle lady
To whom I owe life, and these virtuous thoughts,
Must suffer what I still have strength to share.
Alas, Orsino! All the love that once _20
I felt for you, is turned to bitter pain.
Ours was a youthful contract, which you first
Broke, by assuming vows no Pope will loose.
And thus I love you still, but holily,
Even as a sister or a spirit might; _25
And so I swear a cold fidelity.
And it is well perhaps we shall not marry.
You have a sly, equivocating vein
That suits me not. --Ah, wretched that I am!
Where shall I turn? Even now you look on me _30
As you were not my friend, and as if you
Discovered that I thought so, with false smiles
Making my true suspicion seem your wrong.
Ah, no! forgive me; sorrow makes me seem
Sterner than else my nature might have been; _35
I have a weight of melancholy thoughts,
And they forebode,--but what can they forebode
Worse than I now endure?
NOTE:
_24 And thus editions 1821, 1839; And yet edition 1819.
ORSINO:
All will be well.
Is the petition yet prepared? You know
My zeal for all you wish, sweet Beatrice; _40
Doubt not but I will use my utmost skill
So that the Pope attend to your complaint.
BEATRICE:
Your zeal for all I wish;--Ah me, you are cold!
Your utmost skill. . . speak but one word. . .
[ASIDE. ]
Alas!
Weak and deserted creature that I am, _45
Here I stand bickering with my only friend!
[TO ORSINO. ]
This night my father gives a sumptuous feast,
Orsino; he has heard some happy news
From Salamanca, from my brothers there,
And with this outward show of love he mocks _50
His inward hate. 'Tis bold hypocrisy,
For he would gladlier celebrate their deaths,
Which I have heard him pray for on his knees:
Great God! that such a father should be mine!
But there is mighty preparation made, _55
And all our kin, the Cenci, will be there,
And all the chief nobility of Rome.
And he has bidden me and my pale Mother
Attire ourselves in festival array.
Poor lady! She expects some happy change _60
In his dark spirit from this act; I none.
At supper I will give you the petition:
Till when--farewell.
ORSINO:
Farewell.
[EXIT BEATRICE. ]
I know the Pope
Will ne'er absolve me from my priestly vow
But by absolving me from the revenue _65
Of many a wealthy see; and, Beatrice,
I think to win thee at an easier rate.
Nor shall he read her eloquent petition:
He might bestow her on some poor relation
Of his sixth cousin, as he did her sister, _70
And I should be debarred from all access.
Then as to what she suffers from her father,
In all this there is much exaggeration:--
Old men are testy and will have their way;
A man may stab his enemy, or his vassal, _75
And live a free life as to wine or women,
And with a peevish temper may return
To a dull home, and rate his wife and children;
Daughters and wives call this foul tyranny.
I shall be well content if on my conscience _80
There rest no heavier sin than what they suffer
From the devices of my love--a net
From which he shall escape not. Yet I fear
Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze,
Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve _85
And lay me bare, and make me blush to see
My hidden thoughts. --Ah, no! A friendless girl
Who clings to me, as to her only hope:--
I were a fool, not less than if a panther
Were panic-stricken by the antelope's eye, _90
If she escape me.
NOTE:
_75 vassal edition 1821; slave edition 1819.
[EXIT. ]
SCENE 1. 3:
A MAGNIFICENT HALL IN THE CENCI PALACE.
A BANQUET.
ENTER CENCI, LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, ORSINO, CAMILLO, NOBLES.
CENCI:
Welcome, my friends and kinsmen; welcome ye,
Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church,
Whose presence honours our festivity.
I have too long lived like an anchorite,
And in my absence from your merry meetings _5
An evil word is gone abroad of me;
But I do hope that you, my noble friends,
When you have shared the entertainment here,
And heard the pious cause for which 'tis given,
And we have pledged a health or two together, _10
Will think me flesh and blood as well as you;
Sinful indeed, for Adam made all so,
But tender-hearted, meek and pitiful.
FIRST GUEST:
In truth, my Lord, you seem too light of heart,
Too sprightly and companionable a man, _15
To act the deeds that rumour pins on you.
[TO HIS COMPANION. ]
I never saw such blithe and open cheer
In any eye!
SECOND GUEST:
Some most desired event,
In which we all demand a common joy,
Has brought us hither; let us hear it, Count. _20
CENCI:
It is indeed a most desired event.
If when a parent from a parent's heart
Lifts from this earth to the great Father of all
A prayer, both when he lays him down to sleep,
And when he rises up from dreaming it; _25
One supplication, one desire, one hope,
That he would grant a wish for his two sons,
Even all that he demands in their regard--
And suddenly beyond his dearest hope
It is accomplished, he should then rejoice, _30
And call his friends and kinsmen to a feast,
And task their love to grace his merriment,--
Then honour me thus far--for I am he.
BEATRICE [TO LUCRETIA]:
Great God! How horrible! some dreadful ill
Must have befallen my brothers.
LUCRETIA:
Fear not, child, _35
He speaks too frankly.
BEATRICE:
Ah! My blood runs cold.
I fear that wicked laughter round his eye,
Which wrinkles up the skin even to the hair.
CENCI:
Here are the letters brought from Salamanca;
Beatrice, read them to your mother. God! _40
I thank thee! In one night didst thou perform,
By ways inscrutable, the thing I sought.
My disobedient and rebellious sons
Are dead! --Why, dead! --What means this change of cheer?
You hear me not, I tell you they are dead; _45
And they will need no food or raiment more:
The tapers that did light them the dark way
Are their last cost. The Pope, I think, will not
Expect I should maintain them in their coffins.
Rejoice with me--my heart is wondrous glad. _50
[LUCRETIA SINKS, HALF FAINTING; BEATRICE SUPPORTS HER. ]
BEATRICE :
It is not true! --Dear Lady, pray look up.
Had it been true, there is a God in Heaven,
He would not live to boast of such a boon.
Unnatural man, thou knowest that it is false.
CENCI:
Ay, as the word of God; whom here I call _55
To witness that I speak the sober truth;--
And whose most favouring Providence was shown
Even in the manner of their deaths. For Rocco
Was kneeling at the mass, with sixteen others,
When the church fell and crushed him to a mummy, _60
The rest escaped unhurt. Cristofano
Was stabbed in error by a jealous man,
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival;
All in the self-same hour of the same night;
Which shows that Heaven has special care of me. _65
I beg those friends who love me, that they mark
The day a feast upon their calendars.
It was the twenty-seventh of December:
Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.
[THE ASSEMBLY APPEARS CONFUSED; SEVERAL OF THE GUESTS RISE. ]
FIRST GUEST:
Oh, horrible! I will depart--
SECOND GUEST:
And I. --
THIRD GUEST:
No, stay! _70
I do believe it is some jest; though faith!
'Tis mocking us somewhat too solemnly.
I think his son has married the Infanta,
Or found a mine of gold in El Dorado.
'Tis but to season some such news; stay, stay! _75
I see 'tis only raillery by his smile.
CENCI [FILLING A BOWL OF WINE, AND LIFTING IT UP]:
Oh, thou bright wine whose purple splendour leaps
And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl
Under the lamplight, as my spirits do,
To hear the death of my accursed sons! _80
Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,
Then would I taste thee like a sacrament,
And pledge with thee the mighty Devil in Hell,
Who, if a father's curses, as men say,
Climb with swift wings after their children's souls, _85
And drag them from the very throne of Heaven,
Now triumphs in my triumph! --But thou art
Superfluous; I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine to-night.
Here, Andrea! Bear the bowl around.
A GUEST [RISING]:
Thou wretch! _90
Will none among this noble company
Check the abandoned villain?
CAMILLO:
For God's sake,
Let me dismiss the guests! You are insane,
Some ill will come of this.
SECOND GUEST:
Seize, silence him!
FIRST GUEST:
I will!
THIRD GUEST:
And I!
CENCI [ADDRESSING THOSE WHO RISE WITH A THREATENING GESTURE]:
Who moves? Who speaks?
[TURNING TO THE COMPANY. ]
'tis nothing, _95
Enjoy yourselves. --Beware! For my revenge
Is as the sealed commission of a king
That kills, and none dare name the murderer.
[THE BANQUET IS BROKEN UP; SEVERAL OF THE GUESTS ARE DEPARTING. ]
BEATRICE:
I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What, although tyranny and impious hate _100
Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?
What if 'tis he who clothed us in these limbs
Who tortures them, and triumphs? What, if we,
The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh,
His children and his wife, whom he is bound _105
To love and shelter? Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world?
O think what deep wrongs must have blotted out
First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind,
Till it thus vanquish shame and fear! O think! _110
I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand
Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke
Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love, and tears _115
To soften him, and when this could not be
I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the Father of all,
Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard
I have still borne,--until I meet you here, _120
Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast
Given at my brothers' deaths. Two yet remain,
His wife remains and I, whom if ye save not,
Ye may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves. _125
O Prince Colonna, thou art our near kinsman,
Cardinal, thou art the Pope's chamberlain,
Camillo, thou art chief justiciary,
Take us away!
CENCI [HE HAS BEEN CONVERSING WITH CAMILLO DURING THE FIRST PART OF
BEATRICE'S SPEECH; HE HEARS THE CONCLUSION, AND NOW ADVANCES]:
I hope my good friends here
Will think of their own daughters--or perhaps _130
Of their own throats--before they lend an ear
To this wild girl.
BEATRICE [NOT NOTICING THE WORDS OF CENCI]:
Dare no one look on me?
None answer? Can one tyrant overbear
The sense of many best and wisest men?
Or is it that I sue not in some form _135
Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?
O God! That I were buried with my brothers!
And that the flowers of this departed spring
Were fading on my grave! And that my father
Were celebrating now one feast for all! _140
NOTE:
_132 no edition 1821; not edition 1819.
CAMILLO:
A bitter wish for one so young and gentle.
Can we do nothing?
COLONNA:
Nothing that I see.
Count Cenci were a dangerous enemy:
Yet I would second any one.
A CARDINAL:
And I.
CENCI:
Retire to your chamber, insolent girl! _145
BEATRICE:
Retire thou, impious man! Ay, hide thyself
Where never eye can look upon thee more!
Wouldst thou have honour and obedience
Who art a torturer? Father, never dream,
Though thou mayst overbear this company, _150
But ill must come of ill. --Frown not on me!
Haste, hide thyself, lest with avenging looks
My brothers' ghosts should hunt thee from thy seat!
Cover thy face from every living eye,
And start if thou but hear a human step: _155
Seek out some dark and silent corner, there,
Bow thy white head before offended God,
And we will kneel around, and fervently
Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee.
CENCI:
My friends, I do lament this insane girl _160
Has spoilt the mirth of our festivity.
Good night, farewell; I will not make you longer
Spectators of our dull domestic quarrels.
Another time. --
[EXEUNT ALL BUT CENCI AND BEATRICE. ]
My brain is swimming round;
Give me a bowl of wine!
[TO BEATRICE. ]
Thou painted viper! _165
Beast that thou art! Fair and yet terrible!
I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame,
Now get thee from my sight!
[EXIT BEATRICE. ]
Here, Andrea,
Fill up this goblet with Greek wine.
loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil
Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who
were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a
victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating
from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had
depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim
of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He
followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good
principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the
regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,
used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond
the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which
they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the
Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to
devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven
portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known
only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on
condition of its being communicated to him. According to the
mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was
destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought
pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing
the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and
Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.
The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and
Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that
of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures
centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the
real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will
flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world
drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of
Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the
tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the
Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus--she was, according to other
mythological interpretations, the same as Venus and Nature. When the
benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her
prime, and is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in
perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further
scope to his imagination, and idealizes the forms of creation--such as
we know them, instead of such as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal
Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth,
the guide of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and
weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss
from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays
on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what
is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations
and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of
Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible
imagery. Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and
remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or
the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the
letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all
that is sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought. "
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we
say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But
they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;
and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,
or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as
the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world
which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do
searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some
valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface. '
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in
an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph
of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last
century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated
by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell
into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the
serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong
and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre
of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam". ) The tone of the composition
is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and
the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more
varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in
the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as
the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring
to our view the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward. '
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the
law of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by
the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in
the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,
and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his
countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own
heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such
disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and
built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to
induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,
did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped
to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn
before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in
their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the
Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms
of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many
passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet
must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and
he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in
a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is
better than any of my former attempts. '
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that
the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a
list of errata written by Shelley himself.
***
THE CENCI.
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
[Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May-August 5,
1819; published 1820 (spring) by C. & J. Ollier, London. This edition
of two hundred and fifty copies was printed in Italy 'because,' writes
Shelley to Peacock, September 21, 1819, 'it costs, with all duties and
freightage, about half what it would cost in London. ' A Table of
Errata in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting is printed by Forman in "The
Shelley Library", page 91. A second edition, published by Ollier in
1821 (C. H. Reynell, printer), embodies the corrections indicated in
this Table. No manuscript of "The Cenci" is known to exist. Our text
follows that of the second edition (1821); variations of the first
(Italian) edition, the title-page of which bears date 1819, are given
in the footnotes. The text of the "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st and 2nd
editions (Mrs. Shelley), follows for the most part that of the editio
princeps of 1819. ]
DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.
Mv dear friend--
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an
absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary
efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else
than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful
and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects
incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to
be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality.
I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content
to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has
been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that
it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the
ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave;
one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet
himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and
how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he
can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of
purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate
in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political
tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated,
and which, had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us,
comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
THE CENCI.
PREFACE.
A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which
was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains
a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one
of the noblest and richest families of that city during the
Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an
old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived
at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed
itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion,
aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This
daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she
considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length
plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common
tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an
impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and
amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus
violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance
and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the
most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome,
the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life
repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the
most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand
crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted
for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for
severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived
his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal
Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against
the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its
own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the
manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some
difficulty. ) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all
the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their
confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and
opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one
tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most
dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of
people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the
overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in
the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is
preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized
it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has
produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great
City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first
suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose.
In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity
of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and
success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the
apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would
bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic
compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus
is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters
of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made
them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of
mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be
insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these
tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the
contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There
must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to
what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose
aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the
human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of
another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is
kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from
his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement,
are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she
would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a
tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have
interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a
dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest
among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is
in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did
and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters
as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making
them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:
thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth
century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented
as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion. To a
Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the
earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men
which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled
at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the
popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous
guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a
cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do
not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy
passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which
terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of
which it has conducted him. Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind
of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the
most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of
life. It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration;
not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connection with any
one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and
without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is
according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a
persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a
chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the
Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul. Thus in the
first scene of the fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to
the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having
administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to
confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as
essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she
perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech
was suggested by a most sublime passage in "El Purgaterio de San
Patricio" of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally
committed in the whole piece. )
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should
interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the
immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal
passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery
may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the
illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects, I have written more
carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of
words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who
assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient
English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do
that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be
the real language of men in general and not that of any particular
class to whose society the writer happens to belong. So much for what
I have attempted; I need not be assured that success is a very
different matter; particularly for one whose attention has but newly
been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.
I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story
as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the
Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido
during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just
representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she
seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed
is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with
folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden
hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is
exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips
have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which
suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we
are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping
and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien
there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite
loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci
appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and
gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature
was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an
actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the
world.
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modernized,
there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the
same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this
tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense
ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of
trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in
which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), supported by granite
columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and
built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over
balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense
stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into
gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information than
that which is to be found in the manuscript.
THE CENCI: A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
COUNT FRANCESCO CENCI.
GIACOMO, BERNARDO, HIS SONS.
CARDINAL CAMILLO.
PRINCE COLONNA.
ORSINO, A PRELATE.
SAVELLA, THE POPE'S LEGATE.
OLIMPIO, MARZIO, ASSASSINS.
ANDREA, SERVANT TO CENCI.
NOBLES. JUDGES. GUARDS, SERVANTS.
LUCRETIA, WIFE OF CENCI AND STEP-MOTHER OF HIS CHILDREN.
BEATRICE, HIS DAUGHTER.
THE SCENE LIES PRINCIPALLY IN ROME, BUT CHANGES DURING THE FOURTH
ACT TO PETRELLA, A CASTLE AMONG THE APULIAN APENNINES.
TIME. DURING THE PONTIFICATE OF CLEMENT VIII.
ACT 1.
SCENE 1. 1:
AN APARTMENT IN THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER COUNT CENCI AND CARDINAL CAMILLO.
CAMILLO:
That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate. --
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point; he said that you _5
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live: --
But that the glory and the interest _10
Of the high throne he fills, little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
CENCI:
The third of my possessions--let it go! _15
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle:
I little thought he should outwit me so! _20
Henceforth no witness--not the lamp--shall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life:--it angers me! _25
Respited me from Hell! So may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven! No doubt Pope Clement,
And his most charitable nephews, pray
That the Apostle Peter and the Saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy _30
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue. --But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
CAMILLO:
Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou mightst honourably live _35
And reconcile thyself with thine own heart
And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs! --
Your children should be sitting round you now, _40
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you. _45
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count,--you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth
Watching its bold and bad career, as men _50
Watch meteors, but it vanished not--I marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend, _55
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
CENCI:
For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian. --Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint. _60
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter--
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day HIS wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more. _65
CAMILLO:
Thou execrable man, beware! --
CENCI:
Of thee?
Nay, this is idle: --We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime
Seeing I please my senses as I list,
And vindicate that right with force or guile, _70
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart--
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent _75
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel--
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain. _80
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men. _85
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know,
Is as my natural food and rest debarred _90
Until it be accomplished.
CAMILLO:
Art thou not
Most miserable?
CENCI:
Why miserable? --
No. --I am what your theologians call
Hardened;--which they must be in impudence,
So to revile a man's peculiar taste. _95
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls:--Ay, we must all grow old--
And but that there remains a deed to act _100
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mine--I'd do,--I know not what.
When I was young I thought of nothing else
But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:
Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees, _105
And I grew tired:--yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals, _110
The dry fixed eyeball; the pale, quivering lip,
Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the body, which preserves,
Like a strong prison, the soul within my power, _115
Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear
For hourly pain.
NOTE:
_100 And but that edition 1821; But that editions 1819, 1839.
CAMILLO:
Hell's most abandoned fiend
Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt,
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not. _120
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca
Would speak with you.
CENCI:
Bid him attend me
In the grand saloon.
[EXIT ANDREA. ]
CAMILLO:
Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee. _125
[EXIT CAMILLO. ]
CENCI:
The third of my possessions! I must use
Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword,
Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursed sons; _130
Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,
Hoping some accident might cut them off;
And meaning if I could to starve them there.
I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!
Bernardo and my wife could not be worse _135
If dead and damned:--then, as to Beatrice--
[LOOKING AROUND HIM SUSPICIOUSLY. ]
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak
Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.
O, thou most silent air, that shalt not hear _140
What now I think! Thou, pavement, which I tread
Towards her chamber,--let your echoes talk
Of my imperious step scorning surprise,
But not of my intent! --Andrea!
NOTES:
_131 Whom I had edition 1821; Whom I have editions 1819, 1839.
_140 that shalt edition 1821; that shall editions 1819, 1839.
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My lord?
CENCI:
Bid Beatrice attend me in her chamber _145
This evening:--no, at midnight and alone.
[EXEUNT. ]
SCENE 1. 2:
A GARDEN OF THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER BEATRICE AND ORSINO, AS IN CONVERSATION.
BEATRICE:
Pervert not truth,
Orsino. You remember where we held
That conversation;--nay, we see the spot
Even from this cypress;--two long years are past
Since, on an April midnight, underneath _5
The moonlight ruins of Mount Palatine,
I did confess to you my secret mind.
ORSINO:
You said you loved me then.
BEATRICE:
You are a Priest.
Speak to me not of love.
ORSINO:
I may obtain
The dispensation of the Pope to marry. _10
Because I am a Priest do you believe
Your image, as the hunter some struck deer,
Follows me not whether I wake or sleep?
BEATRICE:
As I have said, speak to me not of love;
Had you a dispensation I have not; _15
Nor will I leave this home of misery
Whilst my poor Bernard, and that gentle lady
To whom I owe life, and these virtuous thoughts,
Must suffer what I still have strength to share.
Alas, Orsino! All the love that once _20
I felt for you, is turned to bitter pain.
Ours was a youthful contract, which you first
Broke, by assuming vows no Pope will loose.
And thus I love you still, but holily,
Even as a sister or a spirit might; _25
And so I swear a cold fidelity.
And it is well perhaps we shall not marry.
You have a sly, equivocating vein
That suits me not. --Ah, wretched that I am!
Where shall I turn? Even now you look on me _30
As you were not my friend, and as if you
Discovered that I thought so, with false smiles
Making my true suspicion seem your wrong.
Ah, no! forgive me; sorrow makes me seem
Sterner than else my nature might have been; _35
I have a weight of melancholy thoughts,
And they forebode,--but what can they forebode
Worse than I now endure?
NOTE:
_24 And thus editions 1821, 1839; And yet edition 1819.
ORSINO:
All will be well.
Is the petition yet prepared? You know
My zeal for all you wish, sweet Beatrice; _40
Doubt not but I will use my utmost skill
So that the Pope attend to your complaint.
BEATRICE:
Your zeal for all I wish;--Ah me, you are cold!
Your utmost skill. . . speak but one word. . .
[ASIDE. ]
Alas!
Weak and deserted creature that I am, _45
Here I stand bickering with my only friend!
[TO ORSINO. ]
This night my father gives a sumptuous feast,
Orsino; he has heard some happy news
From Salamanca, from my brothers there,
And with this outward show of love he mocks _50
His inward hate. 'Tis bold hypocrisy,
For he would gladlier celebrate their deaths,
Which I have heard him pray for on his knees:
Great God! that such a father should be mine!
But there is mighty preparation made, _55
And all our kin, the Cenci, will be there,
And all the chief nobility of Rome.
And he has bidden me and my pale Mother
Attire ourselves in festival array.
Poor lady! She expects some happy change _60
In his dark spirit from this act; I none.
At supper I will give you the petition:
Till when--farewell.
ORSINO:
Farewell.
[EXIT BEATRICE. ]
I know the Pope
Will ne'er absolve me from my priestly vow
But by absolving me from the revenue _65
Of many a wealthy see; and, Beatrice,
I think to win thee at an easier rate.
Nor shall he read her eloquent petition:
He might bestow her on some poor relation
Of his sixth cousin, as he did her sister, _70
And I should be debarred from all access.
Then as to what she suffers from her father,
In all this there is much exaggeration:--
Old men are testy and will have their way;
A man may stab his enemy, or his vassal, _75
And live a free life as to wine or women,
And with a peevish temper may return
To a dull home, and rate his wife and children;
Daughters and wives call this foul tyranny.
I shall be well content if on my conscience _80
There rest no heavier sin than what they suffer
From the devices of my love--a net
From which he shall escape not. Yet I fear
Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze,
Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve _85
And lay me bare, and make me blush to see
My hidden thoughts. --Ah, no! A friendless girl
Who clings to me, as to her only hope:--
I were a fool, not less than if a panther
Were panic-stricken by the antelope's eye, _90
If she escape me.
NOTE:
_75 vassal edition 1821; slave edition 1819.
[EXIT. ]
SCENE 1. 3:
A MAGNIFICENT HALL IN THE CENCI PALACE.
A BANQUET.
ENTER CENCI, LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, ORSINO, CAMILLO, NOBLES.
CENCI:
Welcome, my friends and kinsmen; welcome ye,
Princes and Cardinals, pillars of the church,
Whose presence honours our festivity.
I have too long lived like an anchorite,
And in my absence from your merry meetings _5
An evil word is gone abroad of me;
But I do hope that you, my noble friends,
When you have shared the entertainment here,
And heard the pious cause for which 'tis given,
And we have pledged a health or two together, _10
Will think me flesh and blood as well as you;
Sinful indeed, for Adam made all so,
But tender-hearted, meek and pitiful.
FIRST GUEST:
In truth, my Lord, you seem too light of heart,
Too sprightly and companionable a man, _15
To act the deeds that rumour pins on you.
[TO HIS COMPANION. ]
I never saw such blithe and open cheer
In any eye!
SECOND GUEST:
Some most desired event,
In which we all demand a common joy,
Has brought us hither; let us hear it, Count. _20
CENCI:
It is indeed a most desired event.
If when a parent from a parent's heart
Lifts from this earth to the great Father of all
A prayer, both when he lays him down to sleep,
And when he rises up from dreaming it; _25
One supplication, one desire, one hope,
That he would grant a wish for his two sons,
Even all that he demands in their regard--
And suddenly beyond his dearest hope
It is accomplished, he should then rejoice, _30
And call his friends and kinsmen to a feast,
And task their love to grace his merriment,--
Then honour me thus far--for I am he.
BEATRICE [TO LUCRETIA]:
Great God! How horrible! some dreadful ill
Must have befallen my brothers.
LUCRETIA:
Fear not, child, _35
He speaks too frankly.
BEATRICE:
Ah! My blood runs cold.
I fear that wicked laughter round his eye,
Which wrinkles up the skin even to the hair.
CENCI:
Here are the letters brought from Salamanca;
Beatrice, read them to your mother. God! _40
I thank thee! In one night didst thou perform,
By ways inscrutable, the thing I sought.
My disobedient and rebellious sons
Are dead! --Why, dead! --What means this change of cheer?
You hear me not, I tell you they are dead; _45
And they will need no food or raiment more:
The tapers that did light them the dark way
Are their last cost. The Pope, I think, will not
Expect I should maintain them in their coffins.
Rejoice with me--my heart is wondrous glad. _50
[LUCRETIA SINKS, HALF FAINTING; BEATRICE SUPPORTS HER. ]
BEATRICE :
It is not true! --Dear Lady, pray look up.
Had it been true, there is a God in Heaven,
He would not live to boast of such a boon.
Unnatural man, thou knowest that it is false.
CENCI:
Ay, as the word of God; whom here I call _55
To witness that I speak the sober truth;--
And whose most favouring Providence was shown
Even in the manner of their deaths. For Rocco
Was kneeling at the mass, with sixteen others,
When the church fell and crushed him to a mummy, _60
The rest escaped unhurt. Cristofano
Was stabbed in error by a jealous man,
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival;
All in the self-same hour of the same night;
Which shows that Heaven has special care of me. _65
I beg those friends who love me, that they mark
The day a feast upon their calendars.
It was the twenty-seventh of December:
Ay, read the letters if you doubt my oath.
[THE ASSEMBLY APPEARS CONFUSED; SEVERAL OF THE GUESTS RISE. ]
FIRST GUEST:
Oh, horrible! I will depart--
SECOND GUEST:
And I. --
THIRD GUEST:
No, stay! _70
I do believe it is some jest; though faith!
'Tis mocking us somewhat too solemnly.
I think his son has married the Infanta,
Or found a mine of gold in El Dorado.
'Tis but to season some such news; stay, stay! _75
I see 'tis only raillery by his smile.
CENCI [FILLING A BOWL OF WINE, AND LIFTING IT UP]:
Oh, thou bright wine whose purple splendour leaps
And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl
Under the lamplight, as my spirits do,
To hear the death of my accursed sons! _80
Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,
Then would I taste thee like a sacrament,
And pledge with thee the mighty Devil in Hell,
Who, if a father's curses, as men say,
Climb with swift wings after their children's souls, _85
And drag them from the very throne of Heaven,
Now triumphs in my triumph! --But thou art
Superfluous; I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine to-night.
Here, Andrea! Bear the bowl around.
A GUEST [RISING]:
Thou wretch! _90
Will none among this noble company
Check the abandoned villain?
CAMILLO:
For God's sake,
Let me dismiss the guests! You are insane,
Some ill will come of this.
SECOND GUEST:
Seize, silence him!
FIRST GUEST:
I will!
THIRD GUEST:
And I!
CENCI [ADDRESSING THOSE WHO RISE WITH A THREATENING GESTURE]:
Who moves? Who speaks?
[TURNING TO THE COMPANY. ]
'tis nothing, _95
Enjoy yourselves. --Beware! For my revenge
Is as the sealed commission of a king
That kills, and none dare name the murderer.
[THE BANQUET IS BROKEN UP; SEVERAL OF THE GUESTS ARE DEPARTING. ]
BEATRICE:
I do entreat you, go not, noble guests;
What, although tyranny and impious hate _100
Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?
What if 'tis he who clothed us in these limbs
Who tortures them, and triumphs? What, if we,
The desolate and the dead, were his own flesh,
His children and his wife, whom he is bound _105
To love and shelter? Shall we therefore find
No refuge in this merciless wide world?
O think what deep wrongs must have blotted out
First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind,
Till it thus vanquish shame and fear! O think! _110
I have borne much, and kissed the sacred hand
Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke
Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!
Have excused much, doubted; and when no doubt
Remained, have sought by patience, love, and tears _115
To soften him, and when this could not be
I have knelt down through the long sleepless nights
And lifted up to God, the Father of all,
Passionate prayers: and when these were not heard
I have still borne,--until I meet you here, _120
Princes and kinsmen, at this hideous feast
Given at my brothers' deaths. Two yet remain,
His wife remains and I, whom if ye save not,
Ye may soon share such merriment again
As fathers make over their children's graves. _125
O Prince Colonna, thou art our near kinsman,
Cardinal, thou art the Pope's chamberlain,
Camillo, thou art chief justiciary,
Take us away!
CENCI [HE HAS BEEN CONVERSING WITH CAMILLO DURING THE FIRST PART OF
BEATRICE'S SPEECH; HE HEARS THE CONCLUSION, AND NOW ADVANCES]:
I hope my good friends here
Will think of their own daughters--or perhaps _130
Of their own throats--before they lend an ear
To this wild girl.
BEATRICE [NOT NOTICING THE WORDS OF CENCI]:
Dare no one look on me?
None answer? Can one tyrant overbear
The sense of many best and wisest men?
Or is it that I sue not in some form _135
Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?
O God! That I were buried with my brothers!
And that the flowers of this departed spring
Were fading on my grave! And that my father
Were celebrating now one feast for all! _140
NOTE:
_132 no edition 1821; not edition 1819.
CAMILLO:
A bitter wish for one so young and gentle.
Can we do nothing?
COLONNA:
Nothing that I see.
Count Cenci were a dangerous enemy:
Yet I would second any one.
A CARDINAL:
And I.
CENCI:
Retire to your chamber, insolent girl! _145
BEATRICE:
Retire thou, impious man! Ay, hide thyself
Where never eye can look upon thee more!
Wouldst thou have honour and obedience
Who art a torturer? Father, never dream,
Though thou mayst overbear this company, _150
But ill must come of ill. --Frown not on me!
Haste, hide thyself, lest with avenging looks
My brothers' ghosts should hunt thee from thy seat!
Cover thy face from every living eye,
And start if thou but hear a human step: _155
Seek out some dark and silent corner, there,
Bow thy white head before offended God,
And we will kneel around, and fervently
Pray that he pity both ourselves and thee.
CENCI:
My friends, I do lament this insane girl _160
Has spoilt the mirth of our festivity.
Good night, farewell; I will not make you longer
Spectators of our dull domestic quarrels.
Another time. --
[EXEUNT ALL BUT CENCI AND BEATRICE. ]
My brain is swimming round;
Give me a bowl of wine!
[TO BEATRICE. ]
Thou painted viper! _165
Beast that thou art! Fair and yet terrible!
I know a charm shall make thee meek and tame,
Now get thee from my sight!
[EXIT BEATRICE. ]
Here, Andrea,
Fill up this goblet with Greek wine.
