Tortured Logic: Answering to No One in Shelley's The Cenci

This article offers a reading of Percy Shelley's verse-drama, The Cenci and Shelley's theory of dramatic poetry more broadly. In The Cenci, sexual violence is an instrument of juridical torture, draining narrative and testimony of therapeutic or legal value. The essay contends that Beatrice Cenci's refusal to answer questions about her incestuous assault or to call herself a "parricide" exposes the mechanisms that undergird her impossible situation. Yet her response to this violence is nonetheless generative: not inarticulate but disarticulated, Beatrice repurposes her sense of violation in embodied and poetic, rather than narrative and rhetorical, terms. She is, thus, in every sense, both a subject of torture and an exemplar of Shelley's "dramatic poet." Contextualizing his dramaturgy amid gendered and violent "spectacles" in Romantic-era theater, I show how Shelley's ideas anticipate twentieth-century writings on the interrelationship between violence and language.