I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:  thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind.  They are represented as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion.  To a Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci.  It will especially be startled at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous guilt.  But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of which it has conducted him.  Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the most certain knowledge.  It is interwoven with the whole fabric of life.  It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration; not a rule for moral conduct.  It has no necessary connection with any one virtue.  The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.  Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.  Cenci himself built a chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul.  Thus in the first scene of the fourth act Lucretia’s design in exposing herself to the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.

I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice’s description of the chasm appointed for her father’s murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech was suggested by a most sublime passage in “El Purgaterio de San Patricio” of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally committed in the whole piece.)