SOURCE: Cheeke, Stephen. “Shelley's The Cenci: Economies of a ‘Familiar’ Language.” Keats-Shelley Journal 47 (1998): 142-60.

In the following essay, Cheeke asserts that Shelley's play is “deeply insecure about its theater, its audience, its style and its language.”

Shelley's composition of The Cenci in the late spring and summer of 1819 was an experiment in the rigorous economies of an unfamiliar genre.¹ Writing to Peacock in late July announcing the new work, Shelley stresses the “pains” he has taken to make the play “fit for representation” on the London stage.² The play itself thematizes some of the pain of representation, and there is perhaps from our own perspective the attendant pain of knowing that Shelley's high hopes for a popular theatrical success, desires which permeate the work, were unrealized. The problematic preface to the play invokes the folk-lore nature of the Cenci myth in Italy as a kind of guarantee that...