SOURCE: Cameron, Kenneth N., and Horst Frenz. “The Stage History of Shelley's The Cenci.¹” PMLA 60, no. 4 (December 1945): 1080-1105.

In the following essay, Cameron and Frenz summarize the critical response to various performances of The Cenci across Europe and the United States, highlighting the complications involved in staging the play and reappraising Shelley's talents as a dramatist.

Although some of Shelley's Victorian critics—notably Forman²—believed The Cenci to be an acting play, it now seems to have become a settled dictum of Shelley scholarship that it is a closet drama. Woodberry in his edition of the play³ and Bates in his study of it both conclude that it is unsuitable for stage production, Bates summarizing his views as follows:

From all these facts it should be sufficiently clear what answer must be given to the question, how far is The Cenci an acting drama? As a whole it...