SOURCE: Lockridge, Laurence S. “Justice in The Cenci.” Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 2 (spring 1988): 95-8.

In the following essay, Lockridge addresses Shelley's belief in non-violent resistance to cruelty and oppression.

Questions of moral psychology, freedom, and justice are explored by Shelley in his five act play, The Cenci (1819), his dramatization of Count Cenci's murderous hatred of his children, his incest with his daughter Beatrice, her plotting with her stepmother Lucretia and brother Bernardo to have the Count murdered by two hired assassins, and their subsequent arrest, torture, and execution by order of Pope Clement VIII in 1599. The play is a severe testing of a principle Shelley urges elsewhere: of returning hate with love or of resisting injustice non-violently. Here he draws our sympathies to a heroine who violates this principle. He portrays the extreme circumstances that appear to compel Beatrice to retaliation, and yet he does not in his Preface...