And leave-what memory of our having been? Kill not thy child! Let not her wrongs kill thee! 'Tis but the falsehood it can wring from fear GIACOMO. They will tear the truth Even from thee at last, those cruel pains: For pity's sake say thou art guilty now. LUCRETIA. O, speak the truth! Let us all quickly die; And after death, God is our judge, not they; He will have mercy on us. BERNARDO. If indeed It can be true, say so, dear sister mine; And then the Pope will surely pardon you, And all be well. JUDGE. Confess, or I will warp Your limbs with such keen tortures BEATRICE. Tortures! Turn The rack henceforth into a spinning-wheel! Torture your dog, that he may tell when last He lapped the blood his master shed-not me! My pangs are of the mind, and of the heart, And of the soul; ay, of the inmost soul, Which weeps within tears as of burning gall To see, in this ill world where none are true, My kindred false to their deserted selves. And with considering all the wretched life Which I have lived, and its now wretched end; And the small justice shown by Heaven and Earth To me or mine; and what a tyrant thou art, And what slaves these; and what a world we make, The oppressor and the oppressed-such pangs compel My answer. What is it thou wouldst with me? JUDGE. Art thou not guilty of thy father's death? BEATRICE. Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God But that which thou hast called my father's death? And so an end of all. Now do your will; That is the headsman's business. [Exeunt all but LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, and GIACOMO. GIACOMO. Have I confessed? Is it all over now? What 'twas weak to do, "Tis weaker to lament, once being done; Take cheer! The God who knew my wrong, and Our speedy act the angel of his wrath, [made Seems, and but seems, to have abandoned us. Let us not think that we shall die for this. Brother, sit near me; give me your firm hand, You had a manly heart. Bear up! bear up! Oh dearest lady, put your gentle head Upon my lap, and try to sleep awhile: Your eyes look pale, hollow, and overworn, With heaviness of watching and slow grief. Come, I will sing you some low, sleepy tune, Not cheerful, nor yet sad; some dull old thing, Some outworn and unused monotony, Such as our country gossips sing and spin, Till they almost forget they live: lie down! So; that will do. Have I forgot the words? Faith! they are sadder than I thought they were. SONG. False friend, wilt thou smile or weep The clay-cold corpse upon the bier; What is this whispers low? There is a snake in thy smile, my dear; And bitter poison within thy tear. Sweet sleep! were death like to thee, Or if thou couldst mortal be, I would close these eyes of pain; [The scene closes. SCENE IV. A Hall of the Prison. Enter CAMILLO and BERNARDO. CAMILLO. The Pope is stern; not to be moved or bent. And threw behind, muttering with hoarse, harsh voice: "Which among ye defended their old father Killed in his sleep?" Then to another: "Thou Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well." He turned to me then, looking deprecation, And said these three words, coldly: "They must die." BERNARDO. And yet you left him not? CAMILLO. I urged him still;' Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew, BERNARDO. O, God, not so! I did believe indeed He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample [Rushes out. BEATRICE (wildly). My God! Can it be possible I have To die so suddenly? So young to go Oh, Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; On Earth, and ever present? even though dead, LUCRETIA. Trust in God's sweet love, The tender promises of Christ: ere night Think we shall be in Paradise. BEATRICE. 'Tis past! Whatever comes, my heart shall sink no more. I am cut off from the only world I know, [During the latter speches GIACOMO has retired con- GIACOMO. Know you not, mother-sister, know you not? LUCRETIA. Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years: O, what a thought! It gushes to my heart Like the warm blood. BEATRICE. Yet both will soon be cold: O, trample out that thought! Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope: It is the only ill which can find place Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men, BERNARDO rushes in. BERNARDO. O, horrible! That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in Enter CAMILLO and Guards. They come! Let me Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves Are blighted-white-cold. Say farewell, before Death chokes that gentle voice! O let me hear You speak! BEATRICE. Farewell, my tender brother. Think Lived ever holy and unstained. And though name Be as a mark stamped on thine innocent brow BERNARDO. I cannot say farewell! CAMILLO. O, Lady Beatrice! BEATRICE. Give yourself no unnecessary pain, THE sort of mistake that Shelley made, as to the extent of his own genius and powers, which led him deviously at first, but lastly into the direct track that enabled him fully to develop them, is a curious instance of his modesty of feeling, and of the methods which the human mind uses at once to deceive itself, and yet, in its very delusion, to make its way out of error into the path which nature has marked out as its right one. He often incited me to attempt the writing a tragedy-he conceived that I possessed some dramatic talent, and he was always most earnest and energetic in his exhortations that I should cultivate any talent I possessed, to the utmost. I entertained a truer estimate of my powers; and, above all, though at that time not exactly aware of the fact, I was far too young to have any chance of succeeding, even moderately, in a species of composition, that requires a greater scope of experience in, and sympathy with, human passion than could then have fallen to my lot, or than any perhaps, except Shelley, ever possessed, even at the age of twenty-tragedy is the only one of his works that he comsix, at which he wrote the Cenci. The second volume of St. Leon begins with this proud and true sentiment, There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute.' Shakspeare was only a human being." These words were written in 1818, while we were in Lombardy, when he little thought how soon a work of his own would prove a proud comment on the passage he quoted. When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of the Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story. Shelley's imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy. More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead; and he began and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose passions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language. This On the other hand, Shelley most erroneously conceived himself to be destitute of this talent. He believed that one of the first requisites was the capacity of forming and following up a story or plot. He fancied himself to be defective in this portion of imagination-it was that which gave him least pleasure in the writings of others though he laid great store by it, as the proper framework to support the sublimest efforts of poetry. He asserted that he was too metaphysical and abstract-too fond of the theoretical and the ideal, to succeed as a tragedian. It perhaps is not strange that I shared this opinion with himself, for he had hitherto shown no inclination for, nor given any specimen of his powers in framing and supporting the interest of a story, either in prose or verse. Once or twice, when he attempted such, he had speedily thrown it aside, as being even disagreeable to him as an occupation. The subject he had suggested for a tragedy was Charles I., and he had written to me, "Remember, remember Charles I. I have been already imagining how you would conduct some scenes. municated to me during its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together. I speedily saw the great mistake we had made, and triumphed in the discovery of the new talent brought to light from that mine of wealth, never, alas! through his untimely death, worked to its depths his richly-gifted mind. We suffered a severe affliction in Rome by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot associated too intimately with his presence and loss. Some friends of ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the *Such feelings haunted him when, in the Cenci, be makes Beatrice speak to Cardinal Camillo of that fair blue-eyed child, Who was the load-star of your life. And say All see, since his most piteous death, That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time, summer. Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fire-flies flashed from among the myrtle hedges :-nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed. At the top of the house, there was a sort of terrace. There is often such in Italy, generally roofed. This one was very small, yet not only roofed but glazed; this Shelley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and became waterspouts, that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward, and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part of The Cenci. He was making a study of Calderon at the time, reading his best tragedies with an accomplished lady living near us, to whom his letter from Leghorn was addressed during the following year. He admired Calderon, both for his poetry and his dramatic genius; but it shows his judgment and originality, that, though greatly struck by his first acquaintance with the Spanish poet, none of his peculiarities crept into the composition of The Cenci; and there is no trace of his new studies, except in that passage to which he himself alludes, as suggested by one in El Purgatorio de San Patricio. "The object of the present letter is to ask a favour of you. I have written a tragedy on a story well known in Italy, and, in my conception, eminently dramatic. I have taken some pains to make my play fit for representation, and those who have already seen it judge favourably. It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterise my other compositions; I having attended simply to the impartial development of such characters as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced by such a development. I send you a translation of the Italian MS. on which my play is founded; the chief circumstance of which I have touched very delicately; for my principal doubt as to whether it would succeed, as an acting play, hangs entirely on the question as to whether any such a thing as incest in this shape, however treated, would be admitted on the stage. I think, however, it will form no objection, considering, first, that the facts are matter of history, and, secondly, the peculiar delicacy with which I have treated it*. "I am exceedingly interested in the question of whether this attempt of mine will succeed or not. I am strongly inclined to the affirmative at present; founding my hopes on this, that as a composition it is certainly not inferior to any of the modern plays that have been acted, with the exception of Remorse; that the interest of the plot is incredibly greater and more real, and that there is nothing beyond what the multitude are contented to believe that they can understand, either in imagery, opinion, or sentiment. I wish to preserve a complete incognito, and can trust to you that, whatever else you do, you will at least favour me on this point. Indeed this is essential, deeply essential to its success. After it had been acted and successfully, (could I hope for such a thing) I would own it if I pleased, and use the celebrity it might acquire to my own purposes. Shelley wished The Cenci to be acted. He was not a play-goer, being of such fastidious taste that "What I want you to do, is to procure for me he was easily disgusted by the bad filling up of the inferior parts. While preparing for our departure its presentation at Covent Garden. The principal from England, however, he saw Miss O'Neil character, Beatrice, is precisely fitted for Miss several times; she was then in the zenith of her O'Neil, and it might even seem to have been written for her, (God forbid that I should see her play glory, and Shelley was deeply moved by her impersonation of several parts, and by the graceful it—it would tear my nerves to pieces) and in all sweetness, the intense pathos, and sublime vehe- respects it is fitted only for Covent Garden. The chief male character I confess I should be very mence of passion she displayed. She was often in his thoughts as he wrote, and when he had finished, he became anxious that his tragedy should be acted, and receive the advantage of having this accomplished actress to fill the part of the heroine. With this view he wrote the following letter to a friend in London : In speaking of his mode of treating this main incident, Shelley said that it might be remarked that, in the course of the play, he had never mentioned expressly Cenci's worst crime. Every one knew what it must be, but it was never imaged in words-the nearest allusion to it being that portion of Cenci's curse, beginning, "That if she have a child," &c. |