Shelley avails himself frequently of the feminine ending in the more conversational and intellectual speeches, but avoids it in higher emotional and poetic utterance. The list of its proportionate appearance in the lines of all the important characters makes this plain: Judge, 25 per cent.; Savella, 20 per cent.; Camillo, 18 per cent.; Olimpio, 16 per cent.; Marzio, 15 per cent.; Orsino, 14 per cent.; Cenci, 14 per cent.; Bernardo, 14 per cent.; Giacomo, II per cent.; Lucretia, II per cent.; Beatrice, 9 per cent.

Irregularity in the number and placing of the accents is much greater than in the case of the syllables, but it is hardly greater in "The Cenci" than in the rest of Shelley's poetry or than, indeed, in most non-dramatic English blank verse. In the more impassioned passages, however, by employing spondaic substitution, he sometimes produces very strong, unyielding, dramatic lines.1

In "The Cenci," as elsewhere, Shelley, like Tennyson, prefers the pause after the even syllables, in contrast to Browning, who so delights in dividing the regular metrical foot. In the extent to which he makes use of the pause Shelley's practice in his different works varies greatly. His early poems, “Queen Mab" and "Alastor," tend to neglect the pause, both at the end of the line and within it. In the "Prometheus Unbound" the pauses are heavier and more frequent, producing a less flowing but weightier rhythm. The first two acts of "The Cenci" reveal a distinctively line rhythm, end-stopped with no internal pause. The lack of this internal pause makes the rhythm less forceful than that of "Prometheus Unbound"; the lack of enjambement makes it less flexible than that of "Alastor." The succession of caesuraless end-stopped lines not infrequently becomes monotonous. It should be noticed, however, that this type of line is chiefly used by Orsino and Cenci, in whose speeches its regularity well expresses cold deliberation and perfect self-control; therefore what is lost in pure poetic beauty is atoned for in these instances by increased characterization. With the beginning of the third act there comes a change in the rhythm coincident with the heightened 1III. i. 157; III. ii. 24; IV. ii. 38; V. iv. 67, 79, 118.

emotional content of the drama. Feminine endings and the line without marked internal pause decrease greatly, and the proportion of enjambements increases accordingly; thus a far more irregular, powerful, and flexible rhythm is attained. This phrasal rhythm, in striking contrast to the line rhythm of the earlier part, governs the last three acts of the play.

3

4

Shelley's command of melody, in which he is perhaps preeminent among English poets, does not forsake him in "The Cenci." Alliteration,1 transverse alliteration,2 internal consonant repetition, assonance, assonance and alliteration combined, all are used repeatedly and with the ease of a master. The amount of these melodic devices in the various scenes depends upon the emotional intensity of the situation: thus, for example, we find the greatest amount of alliteration in the murder scenes, and in the scene immediately after Count Cenci's violation of Beatrice. But on the whole the melody, like the meter, is not peculiarly dramatic; both are simply dramatically adequate, and their real merit is the merit of beautiful verse in itself.

1 E. g., I. iii. 101-07, 138-40; III. i. 13-17, 90-98; V. iv. 16-18.

I. ii. 5–7; III. i. 12; V. iii. 124; V. iv. 35-38, 64, 144.

4

E. g.,

I. i. 12, 23; I. ii. 10, 57, 88; V. iv. 32, 107.

5 V. ii. 144; V. iv. 52.

IX

FINAL SIGNIFICANCE

The dramatic form is usually held to offer the very slightest of opportunities for acquaintance with an author's personality. It is asserted that the drama is a mask behind which the dramatist works, creating characters who may or may not be like himself, expressing thoughts and emotions which may or may not be his own, but affording us no safe criterion by which to distinguish between personal and impersonal elements. Yet, from another point of view, the paradox might be maintained that the drama, instead of being the one artistic form that most conceals the author's personality, is rather the one form that best reveals it. For the drama, more than any other type, makes plain the depth and saneness of the author's understanding of humanity, the real value of his "criticism of life," and the ultimate comprehensiveness of his character. It reveals his personality in the richness or poverty of his experience, and the breadth or limitation of his outlook upon life.

In this respect, none of the technical requirements of the drama are without a larger importance. The successful modern dramatist must be democratic enough to know thoroughly his popular audience, composed of all social classes as it is, and to understand how it will be affected by this or that element in his play; he must be practical enough to overcome the specific difficulties involved in stage presentation; he must be imaginative enough to create mentally a small world of realistic human beings and to guide their lives to a predestined end. He must be able equally to handle events, to reveal the inner lives of his characters, and to depict their outer lives entangled in such complex situations of mutual relationship as those which occur in actual society.

If we have all these requirements in mind, when we are confronted with the work of almost any dramatist, it is probable

that at first we shall be conscious chiefly of its limitations. This is abundantly true in the case of "The Cenci."

At the very outset it is evident that Shelley did not know his audience. This was not necessitated by the fact that he was partially antagonistic toward it: Byron and Ibsen, to name no others, were nineteenth century writers even more antagonistic toward their audience, who yet were able to conquer it and compel its homage, because they understood it better than it understood itself. Shelley had none of this clairvoyant understanding. He deliberately selected for stage representation a subject that could not by any possibility have become popular in the theaters of his own time, and did this without at all comprehending the absoluteness of the inhibition. Because such a subject would have been tolerated by what he, perhaps rightly, considered the more manly Elizabethan audience, he deemed it possible that it might be accepted by that of his own day. Herein he showed his usual complete misconception of the power of contemporary ideas of propriety.

This temperamental failure to realize the force of existing circumstances appears also in the numerous technical defects that unfit "The Cenci" for stage representation. Because Shelley found pure character scenes and long speeches of declamation in the Greek drama, he therefore introduced them in a modern play, written to meet an entirely different set of conditions.

When we come to the imaginative aspects of his work we find a more curious situation. On the one hand, Shelley has failed to grasp the surface requirements of the drama, requirements that many lesser men have been able to master with ease. It is initially apparent that the dramatist should be able to tell a story concisely and rapidly, yet this narrative requirement lies quite beyond Shelley's ability. He cannot develop his plot connectedly; the supreme scenes he shows us, but the intermediate links are lacking.

On the other hand, in the far more difficult task of characterization, he meets with success. The convincingness and moving pathos in the character of Beatrice, and the fearful power in that of Cenci must be admitted. The minor charac

ters are in the main adequate; their characterization may be thin, but on the whole it is not unreal. Furthermore, the characters in "The Cenci" are truly interrelated as the characters of a drama should be. They remain in our memory not as isolated figures, but as parts of a complicated nexus of human life. The influence of Cenci upon the other characters, and the influence of Beatrice upon them, the relations of Cenci with the Church, the affection between Beatrice and her brothers, the ambition and treachery of Orsino, are all worked out clearly, and combined in the fundamental situation that dominates the play. The emotional intensity of this terrible fundamental situation, as Shelley has been able to bring it home to our consciousness, reveals a genuine and deep dramatic power in the play. This power is not revealed continuously in a logical development of the situation, but it is shown abundantly in all the pivotal scenes.

Thus, while Shelley is weak in handling the elements of dramatic plot, he proves able to create definite characters and to reveal a tragic entanglement by means of powerful individual scenes. Does this justify us in assuming, with Mrs. Shelley, Leigh Hunt and others, that he would ever have become one of the world's greatest dramatists? Such a question of mere possibility, incapable of proof as it is, may seem at first sight rather barren, but it is really of great importance in relation to the main question as to the nature of Shelley's genius.

Unfortunately, there are two clear facts that militate against the view that Shelley's personality was large enough to fill this role which his extreme admirers claim for him. The first is that the characterization in the play is not genuinely objective. In "The Cenci" Shelley chanced upon a theme that superbly illustrated his special theory of life, and the characters correspond to types of humanity continually present in his mind. Tyrants, heroes, and slaves made up his world, a world which, while true enough to certain aspects of real life, was very inadequate as a representation of the whole. We have no sufficient reason to believe that he would ever have worked himself entirely free from this hampering theory. The same types reappear in his later dramas of "Hellas" and "Charles I," and