Pieracci and Shelley. An Italian Ur-Cenci (eBook)

Contents 6
Preface 8
Part I 12
"An Italian Ur-Cenci" 12
Appendix A 58
Appendix B 60
Part II 64
Beatrice Cenci (English translation) 64
Beatrice Cenci (Original) 102

PART I An Italian Ur-Cenci (p. 1)

In searching out the background of Shelley`s play The Cenci, scholars have corroborated his assertion that he based it on an Italian manuscript setting forth the late sixteenth-century murder of Count Francesco Cenci by members of his family and their subsequent execution.

By good fortune we have access to Shelley`s declared source, one of the versions of the Cenci legend, a legend which was all that was available to Shelley since the Vatican did not release the true facts of the case until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Numerous echoes in Shakespeare and other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, Calderon, and some contemporary English and Italian plays, as well as the shaping effect of Italian opera and the star system on the English stage, have also been detailed in scholarship that has enriched our apprehension of Shelley`s mind at work.

No one has thus far noticed that in 1816, about three years before Shelley wrote his play, an Italian playwright named Vincenzio Pieracci published in Florence a volume of Tragedie containing four tragedies, among them a Beatrice Cenci.

Most writers on Italian literature and drama make no mention of Pieracci, though he had published an earlier volume of tragedies in 1798, brought out a volume of comedies in 1820, and published two final volumes of comedies in 1822.

Guido Mazzone, an exception, reaches back to Pieracci from his treatment of a much later period and resurrects his tragedies of 1816 as a literary "curiosita." Pieracci had conceived of the four—Michele di Lando, Beatrice Cenci, Francesca da Rimini, and Turno — as exemplars of the four degrees of which the buskin is capable. The Beatrice Cenci was to exemplify the domestic tragedy. Shelley was no stranger to Italian.

The years Shelley spent in Italy "increased his sensitiveness and enthusiasm for Italian poetry," says Neville Rogers, and his Italian studies "went, in fact, far deeper than his studies in Spanish and German." He attempted composition in Italian —for example, poems addressed to Emilia Viviani —and he made translations into English. His translations "directly or indirectly . . . usually connect somehow with his composition."

Pieracci has dropped so far out of sight on the road from the past that a modern Italian critic calls Shelley`s the first dramatic version of the Cenci story, but in 1819 the Beatrice Cenci was still new from the press and had been published in a city and area of Italy that Shelley frequented at that time.

Although Shelley himself makes no mention of an Italian play on the subject, the numerous instances of unacknowledged sources in Shelley —and one might add in Shakespeare, Byron, Picasso, and multitudinous others — makes this omission no surprise. The construction so often put upon one`s having sources, a fact of which Shelley was well aware, makes for few creative artists as frank about them as Kipling in "When `Omar Smote `is Bloomin` Lyre." A reading of both plays puts it beyond reasonable doubt, I think, that Shelley did draw upon Pieracci`s Beatrice Cenci.

"On my arrival at Rome," Shelley says in the Preface to The Cenci, "I found that the story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a deep and breathless interest."