SOURCE: Forman, Alfred, and H. Buxton Forman. Introduction to The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts, pp. v-xii. New York: Phaeton Press, 1970.

In the following essay, originally published in 1886, Forman and Forman delineate elements of horror and poetry in The Cenci, labeling Shelley the “chief tragic poet since Shakespeare.”

When Milton gave to the world in 1671 his dramatic poem Samson Agonistes, he set before it a short discourse “Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy.” The discourse opens thus:—

“Tragedy, as it was antiently compos'd, hath been ever held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems: therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight stirred up by reading or seeing...