SOURCE: Ferriss, Suzanne. “Reflection in a ‘Many-Sided Mirror’: Shelley's The Cenci through the Post-Revolutionary Prism.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 15, no. 2 (1991): 161-70.

In the following essay, Ferriss interprets The Cenci as Shelley's comment on the French Revolution and its aftermath.

Following his visit to Versailles in September 1816, Shelley proclaimed the French Revolution “the master theme of the epoch in which we live” (Letters [of Percy Bysshe Shelley] I: 504), recommending it to Byron as “a theme involving pictures of all that is best qualified to interest and to instruct mankind” (Letters I: 508). Shelley himself took up the “theme”: its influence can be seen not only in overtly political compositions such as his own Declaration of Rights and “tyrannicidal version of the Marseillaise” (McNiece 35-6), and in his early poetic works (Queen Mab, the now lost Hubert Cauvin, and Laon and Cythna), but also in his later works, most notably Prometheus Unbound. As...