SHELLEY AND “THE CENCI”
When Shelley in his preface to “The Cenci”〖H. C., xviii, 281.〗 speaks of “teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself,” he expresses intentions not widely different from those of all dramatists, including Dryden; but when he mentions his desire to “make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart,” he indicates his own predilection. This he followed in choosing as his subject a “dark and secret” crime, the situation into which the monstrous Cenci forces Beatrice being unspeakable and abnormal. As suitable backgrounds, Shelley selects a sinister banquet, a gloomy castle at night, and a prison with instruments of torture. Yet he wishes not to fix attention upon physical horrors, but to use them to call forth in his characters extreme revelations of vice and virtue. He feels that only under such dread circumstances can the deepest potentialities of human nature be displayed. The very extremity of Beatrice’s plight lays bare the core of her womanhood, revealing to the full the sensitiveness of chastity and the courage of innocence.