11 - Prone Minds and Extended Selves: The Cenci

Summary

In the 1970 collection Romanticism and Consciousness, in an essay that aimed to make Percy Shelley more palatable to contemporary readers, Harold Bloom insisted on the acuity of the poet's portrayals of the mind. A case in point was Shelley's 1819 drama The Cenci, about a sixteenth-century Roman family of that name, and specifically about the tyrannical Count Cenci's rape of his daughter, Beatrice. Departing from historical accounts of the actual Cenci family (particularly those accounts’ indeterminacy about a rape), and departing also from the ethos of forbearance articulated in the Preface to the drama, Shelley has the fictional Beatrice succumb to bloodlust in turn as she arranges for her father's murder and is then arrested and sentenced to death. By Bloom's account, behind this tragic outcome lies the Cenci family's skill of introspection, or what the prelate Orsino describes as their capacity for ‘self-anatomy,’ whereby the mind peels back the layers on ‘[d]angerous secrets’ and thus ‘tempts’ itself ‘[i]nto the depth of darkest purposes’ (2.2.110–13). Alluding to this passage, Bloom presents The Cenci as a classic instance of ‘Romantic, experimental tragedy, in which a crime against nature both emancipates consciousness and painfully turns consciousness in upon itself’ (391).

While there can be no doubt about the perils of mental inwardness in the drama, as a copious amount of criticism since Bloom makes clear, equally remarkable is Shelley's treatment of the mind's capacity to turn painfully outward. This concern emerges suggestively in Act I as Beatrice pleads with the guests at a banquet for protection from her father's sadism:

Oh, think what deep wrongs must have blotted out

First love, then reverence in a child's prone mind

Till it thus vanquish shame and fear! O, think! (1.3.108–10)

In the Longman Poems of Shelley, the term prone in that striking phrase ‘a child's prone mind’ is glossed as ‘ready’ or ‘eager,’ as in Cymbeline (‘I never saw one so prone’) and Measure for Measure (‘in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men’).4 However, not only was this usage already archaic in Shelley's day (although admittedly not in the Cencis’), but the ensuing lines draw out a different sense altogether. Beatrice speaks of having ‘borne much, and kissed the sacred hand / Which crushed us to the earth, and thought its stroke / Was perhaps some paternal chastisement!’ (I, iii, 111–13).