Shelley: The Pursuit (110 page)

On the following day Claire wrote the first letter to Byron after a long silence: ‘Did you ever read the history of the Cenci’s a most frightful & horrible story? I am sorely afraid to say that in the elder Cenci you may behold yourself in twenty years . . . but if I live Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.’ Since Count Cenci, besides being an atheist, a sodomite and a rapacious materialist, had also murdered his two eldest sons, and raped his eldest daughter Beatrice, this was fairly strong stuff from Claire. On reflection she crossed out the second sentence; but it was still legible.
¹¹

The picture Claire gives of the Shelley household at Via Sestina in mid-May is fairly morbid. ‘Mr Bell, one of the first English surgeons has seen Shelley (who has been very ill) and he has ordered him to pass the summer at Naples & says if S has any consumptive symptoms left by the approach of next winter he must pass the cold season at Tunis . . . . And if Shelley were to die there is nothing left for us but dying.’
¹²
That Claire was orchestrating things somewhat for Byron’s benefit, is indicated by the fact that two days earlier she had been with Shelley
and Aemilia Curran on a day’s expedition to Tivoli, and described it in her diary that evening as ‘one of the pleasantest [days] of my life and one as only Italy can give’.
¹³
None the less, the plan to go further south, to North Africa or even the Near East, remained at the back of Shelley’s mind throughout his time in Italy, as one further place of retreat. In 1821 he was to talk seriously to Claire about it; though not to Mary.

The decision to return to Naples depended on Shelley’s health and the news of Elena. Mary clearly wished to go north to rejoin the Gisbornes in Tuscany, and except for Shelley’s consumptive symptoms, one has the strong impression that she wanted no more to do with Naples. Shelley made her write to the Gisbornes, begging them to come south too for the summer, as a kind of compromise; he had also written himself, promising ‘a piano & some books, & little else, — besides ourselves: but . . . it is intolerable to think of you being buried in Livorno’.
¹⁴
The Gisbornes in the end declined, and nothing remained but to see what June would bring. Meanwhile Shelley continued working sporadically at
The Cenci
, while Mary read Boccaccio’s
Decameron
, and Claire flicked rapidly through Dante’s
Purgatorio
, keeping an eye out for suitable locations for herself and Byron.
¹⁵

What was it that attracted Shelley so persistently to the theme of
The Cenci?
Partly it was a reaction to the prolonged work on the Promethean theme: it was a complete change of scale and style. From cosmic drama, with its intricate meshing of symbolic levels, he turned to domestic melodrama, with a bold simple plot of outrage and revenge, and a language almost entirely bare of all imagery. He later wrote: ‘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 . . . .’
¹⁶
In many respects he had written ‘carelessly’, that is ‘without an over-fastidious and learned use of words’. Artistically, this was a relief. But above all the Cencis’ history offered him a subject which he knew already had a lurid popularity among the expatriate English: indeed there is some evidence that he wrote partly under the fear that someone else would take the idea back to London before he did. But few other writers would have felt confident enough of their powers, or careless enough of their reputation, to try and put a story of incest and parricide on the London stage under their own name. The experience with
Laon and Cynthia
had already taught Shelley that incest was a profoundly controversial and sensitive subject with the London public, and one can certainly trace in its choice an impulse that goes back to the Oxford days of
The Necessity of Atheism
. It is interesting that Shelley did not make Count Cenci an atheist too, though there is authority for it in the manuscript. Instead he makes him a fervent Catholic, as Shelley put it, ‘deeply tinged with religion’. This was, in the end, a more
subtle and provocative choice than atheism, and much more to Shelley’s avowedly shocking purpose. His comments on religion in the preface to the play are suggestive; and show his shrewd penetration into the daily life of Rome:

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 . . . . 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.
¹⁷

The personal horror with which Shelley clearly reacted to this ‘culture of hypocrisy’ shows his own deeply puritan root. Moreover, his description of the ‘passion for penetrating into the mysteries of our being’, as a
religious
impulse (a Protestant one), is perhaps one of the few times he formally admitted the religious element in his own nature. Such powerful and lurid ingredients strongly attracted Shelley to the evil tale of Renaissance family brutality.

The two living Roman monuments to the Cenci story — the palazzo and the picture of Beatrice — were also attracting him at a different and probably less conscious level. The Cenci Palace itself filled his mind with a disturbing symbolic force. He wrote later of it as if it had been one of the specimens in his dream catalogue. ‘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.’
¹⁸
The palace was for him like
the gateway into an underground Inferno, a metaphysical rather than physical one, a hell of the mind.

Throughout
The Cenci
as he finally completed it, there are passages of monologue — not only from Beatrice but also from Giacomo her brother, and Orsino a fellow-plotter — which describe in an intensely personal way the effects of evil actions on the mind. At several points one is aware that Shelley is writing dramatized autobiography. The motivations and the consequences of evil, in psychological and analytic terms, form the main theme of the drama. In this the play runs a direct parallel with the central scene of
Prometheus
, the confrontation between Asia and Demogorgon in Act II. In one, evil is examined at a domestic level, in the other, at a cosmic one. In contrast the Count himself, the only completely evil figure in the play, is psychologically insignificant, and has many of the grosser attributes of a pantomime demon. Shelley wrote that the events of the play in ‘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’. It was an idea that seemed to haunt him.

The other Roman memorial, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, also had a peculiar attraction. Shelley not only visited it at the Colonna Palace but had his own copy which he kept on the wall of his room at Via Sestina, and was delighted when the Italian servants instantly recognized it as
La Cenci
.
¹⁹
It is by Guido Reni, said to be painted while she was actually in prison awaiting trial; it was subsequently moved to the Barberini Palace, and finally to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. From the way Shelley described this portrait, it is obvious that not only was he deeply moved by it but also that he strongly empathized with her personality:

There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features . . . . 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 . . . . 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 . . . . Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another . . . .
²⁰

But the most remarkable thing about the Reni portrait is something Shelley did not mention, and we have no hint if he ever consciously realized it; or if anyone else in the household did. But it is immediately apparent to an outside observer
that there is a most striking resemblance between the Reni portrait of La Cenci and the Curran portrait of Shelley.

Both are oddly androgynous creations, whose glance is a mixture of defiance and pathos; the broad, pale forehead; the delicately arched brows; the large almond-shaped eyes; and finally the long faintly aquiline nose — these upper features are so markedly similar that it seems almost certain that Aemilia Curran was influenced by the Reni, even if she was not aware of the common elements between the two subjects.
[3]
As Shelley developed his drama so too did he develop his identification with Beatrice, and Miss Curran seems to have discovered this in a strangely unconscious way in her painting.

The identity between male and female, or at least the transposable or interchangeable elements between the two sexes had long been an under-theme of Shelley’s writing. The masculine role frequently assigned to his heroines like Cythna or Asia, and the passivity of his male lovers like the poet of
Alastor
, is one of the constant and original features of his poetry. With his work on
The Cenci
, Shelley showed signs of developing this feature further into the realization and acceptance of certain elements in his own personality and temperament. Again, the importance of the play lies in its character as a psychological documentary. In later poems, especially ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and
Epipsychidion
, he was to pursue questions of bisexuality and androgynous creative powers with more deliberation.

Shelley worked on
The Cenci
quietly for a week at Via Sestina, and on 23 May, went by himself on a visit to Albano. Mary continued with her Boccaccio, and Claire eagerly consumed a copy of
The Infernal Quixote
, a novel about a young woman corrupted by Mary Wollstonecraft’s principles.
²¹
Three days after Shelley’s return, little William fell ill with a stomach complaint which quickly threatened to make him dangerously feverish. He had perhaps caught some germ from Aemilia Curran who had been painting his portrait the previous week, and had then fallen ill for several days.
²²
Dr Bell called on the 27th, and his diagnosis was encouraging, for Shelley took Claire out for a social evening at the Academy of Music in the Piazza di Spagna. By the 29th Willmouse appeared to be better and Shelley dated his completion of the first draft of
The Cenci
on this day.
²³
Mary used their temporary fright to persuade Shelley not to go southwards again to Naples, where it would be too hot during the summer for the little boy. Instead she successfully urged the mountain cool of the Bagni di Lucca, which was within riding distance of the Gisbornes as she had originally wanted. Another argument was the fact that Bell, for whom they had now developed a great trust and personal liking, was himself going north during the
summer to attend a valued patient, the Princess Paulina Borghese. Mary told Shelley that she wanted Dr Bell to be present at the birth of her next child, for she had recently disclosed that she had become pregnant in February. All this news Mary wrote with some semblance of her former enthusiasm to Mrs Gisborne, adding detailed requests about cooks and houseservants. She even looked forward to doing a little entertaining.
²⁴

But on 2 June, only five days before their planned departure from Rome, William had a serious relapse. On the 4th he started serious convulsions, as little Clara had done the previous year at Venice. Dr Bell was in constant attendance, and Shelley exhausted himself by sitting up in the room for three consecutive days and nights.
²⁵
He was determined not to let this child die, his 4-year-old son, the most precious child of his life. Claire wrote a brief note to the Gisbornes on the 5th. Two days later, at midday, Willmouse died, silently, without fuss. He was buried at once in the Protestant Cemetery.