SOURCE: Groseclose, Barbara. “The Incest Motif in Shelley's The Cenci.” Comparative Drama 19, no. 3 (fall 1985): 222-39.

In the following essay, Groseclose discusses how parent-child incest functions as a metaphor for tyranny in The Cenci.

Mary Shelley admired her husband's 1819 play, The Cenci, because it was, she felt, the most direct of his works.¹ The author himself, apparently both pleased and abashed that the writing of the drama consumed scarcely two months, implied a similar simplicity when he told E. J. Trelawny that in The Cenci he had expended considerably less effort on poetic language and “metaphysics” than was his wont.² One scarcely wishes to contradict the two persons most intimately connected with the work, but a survey of the critical literature suggests that the drama is among the poet's densest, richest, and most ambiguous creations.³ Explored from every viewpoint—i. e., from its theatricality to its philosophy—The Cenci...