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  • Shelley’s Unsung Muse:Eliza O’Neill and the Inspiration Behind The Cenci
  • James Armstrong (bio)

Scholars have long known that the nineteenth-century actress Eliza O’Neill was a significant factor in Percy Shelley’s decision to compose his 1819 tragedy The Cenci as a performable, stage-worthy drama. Shelley’s previous attempt at writing a play, Prometheus Unbound, was a closet drama that defied any attempt at staging. Within months after composing the bulk of that piece, however, Shelley had penned a completely different work.1 Unlike Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci has been acted with great success on numerous occasions. It has attracted theatre artists as diverse as Aurélien Lugné-Poë, Karel Capek, and Antonin Artaud (Curran 277). What scholars have been slow to recognize is exactly how performances by a single Irish actress convinced Shelley to put aside closet drama and attempt a work so different from his previous writing. How was it that O’Neill came to have such an impact on a major writer like Shelley?

Mary Shelley wrote in her note on The Cenci that her late husband wished to have the tragedy acted. Though Percy Shelley was “easily disgusted” by the acting of his day, the Shelleys had seen O’Neill “several times” while preparing for their departure to Italy (336). According to Mary Shelley, O’Neill was often in her husband’s thoughts as he wrote The Cenci, and he wanted O’Neill to act the leading role of Beatrice. Playwrights commonly create roles with specific performers in mind, even if those performers never come to act the roles they inspire. As Marvin Carlson notes in his book The Haunted Stage, all audiences are continually “ghosting” past performances and past performers onto the plays that they watch, seeing both the current [End Page 17] play and their own recollections of past performances at the same time (7). This process of ghosting also takes place when writers conceive new parts in their minds. Past performances of individual actors “haunt” the playwright as he or she composes a new dramatic text. Carlson points out not just obvious examples of this, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller writing to the strengths of Weimar actors, but also more unexpected examples, such as Henrik Ibsen, a playwright with tenuous ties to the theatre, being constantly concerned with the qualities certain actors might bring to a role.

Though Shelley’s ties to the theatre were likewise tenuous at best, he seems to have done the same thing with Eliza O’Neill, ghosting her in his mind into the role of Beatrice Cenci. In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley himself stated that O’Neill was “precisely fitted” for the role of Beatrice, and “it might even seem to have been written for her” (504). The letter confirms Mary Shelley’s statements about O’Neill often being in her husband’s thoughts as he wrote the play. The testimonies of both the author and his wife credit O’Neill with a significant impact on Shelley’s writing, yet few people even know who she was. One of Shelley’s most important muses remains largely unrecognized.

Eliza O’Neill, later Lady Wrixon-Becher, is not completely unknown today. Her brief entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography mentions some of her more famous roles, including Belvidera in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved [Fig. 1], Mrs. Haller in The Stranger (an adaptation of a melodrama by August von Kotzebue), and the title role in Nicholas Rowe’s Jane Shore. The Garrick Club has two portraits of O’Neill, one of which depicts O’Neill as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy. [Fig. 2] This artwork connects O’Neill with her predecessor at Covent Garden, Sarah Siddons, as Sir Joshua Reynolds had famously painted that actress as the Tragic Muse in a 1784 portrait. O’Neill’s contemporaries would frequently compare and contrast her with Siddons, often highlighting the younger O’Neill’s sympathetic emotional qualities against the older Siddons’s stoic classicism. For instance, in a letter to her niece, the novelist Jane Austen wrote that a certain acquaintance “does not shine in the tender feelings...

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