SOURCE: “Shelley's The Cenci: Moral Ambivalence and Self-Knowledge,” in Keats-Shelley Review, No. 10, Spring, 1996, pp. 181-203.

In the following essay, Magarian highlights themes of moral indeterminacy and self-knowledge in The Cenci.

I

Shelley's play The Cenci (1819) has, at its heart, a journey into the centre of the human psyche which precipitates its heroine's fall from grace into moral and emotional myopia. During this journey some of the deepest of human fears are revealed in the person of Beatrice as she is conducted towards the ‘darkness of the abyss’, as Shelley puts it in the Preface to the play.¹ In this respect the play shares with the earlier Julian and Maddalo (1819) a similar insistence on the nature of what is psychologically disruptive. The Maniac of that poem is presented to the reader in a state of indistinct and fluctuating mental equilibrium. The changing states of his mind are vividly portrayed...