"The Cenci" is a five-act tragedy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1819. He makes
Beatrice, whose
portrait by Guido
Reni he saw in the Colonna palace in Rome, as his central figure of this tragedy.
This play is said to be the most impressive single stage play written by a Romantic playwright. That time, the subject made the performance unlike int ht theatre. "The Cenci" was first produced by the Shelley Society in 1886 in private. Occasionally, it has been revived. The French visionary Antonin Artaud provided a scenario seen as the central text in his Theatre of Cruelty.
Percy Bysshe Shelley based his play on the savage history of a 16th-century Roman family, the Cenci. Count Francesco Cenci, a vicious husband and father with a sadistic hunger for punishment, combines hatred for his daughter,
Beatrice, with incestuous lust. The family conspires to have him killed. They are brought to trial, and, despite the compassion aroused by their pitiful-enough story and the self-conduct of Beatrice, they are executed on 11 September 1599.