Shelley, in dramatizing Beatrice's story, turned a myth and a portrait into a speaking subject. Barbara Groseclose describes the portrait that inspired Shelley: "legend, which had encrusted history and tied the painting to its fancies, had rendered the painting less portrait than icon. . . . [Shelley] knew the story through the heavily embellished manuscript accounts in wide circulation at the time" (223). As a portrait, Beatrice cannot resist having narrative imposed on her. By writing the story of The Cenci as a play, Shelley gives Beatrice a presence and a voice, rather than narrating her story. Richard Allen Cave writes that Shelley "leaves room for an actor's powers of interpretation to realize the full potentialities of a role" (87). Thus, Beatrice remains undelineated by language. During the play, she struggles with language and differends in order to assert herself and avoid continued victimization by language's potentially limiting nature.

The first differend is Beatrice's putative rape, which she never names. In Lyotard's schema, Beatrice must be a victim because her father's power within patriarchal law denies her the symbolic and legal position of plaintiff. Lyotard's definition of the victim, in The Differend , is useful in considering her position: "It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. . . . In general, the plaintiff becomes a victim when no presentation is possible of the wrong he or she says he or she has suffered" (Lyotard 8). Lyotard's question, "If the survivors do not speak, is it because they cannot speak, or because they avail themselves of the possibility of not speaking that is given them by the ability to speak? Or is the question poorly stated?" (10), can be asked regarding Beatrice. The question is poorly stated because, as Lyotard later explains, the distinction between a plaintiff who has access to legal recourse and a victim is vexed. Even were she to name her father's crime and attempt to become a plaintiff, Beatrice would still remain a victim because her father's widespread social power makes legal or social recourse impossible.

Eugene R. Hammond's observation that the "play's principal concern is not with the relation between Cenci and Beatrice, but with the systematic betrayal of Beatrice not only with Cenci, but by her political and religious fathers, Pope Clement VIII (the 'H oly Father') and God ('Our Father')" (25-26), is underscored by Stuart Curran's recognition that "family tyranny and sexual politics . . . are supported by a state system, [and] that the state system is itself dependent upon mystified religious symbols on which [Beatrice] herself depends, in which she herself believes" (75). Debbie Sherwell's 1985 production of the play, in which the actor playing Cenci also played the role of the judge at Beatrice's trial, emphasized that there is no neutral court to which Beatrice can appeal (Cave 93). Because her father's despotic power extends outside of the home and into Roman society, "the author of [her] damages turns out . . . indirectly to be [her] judge" (Lyotard 8). Michael Worton explains how language is essential to this power structure: "The Count is a member of the sinister triumvirate (Cenci, the Pope, and God) who oppress the world and who have transformed language into a means of supporting their position. Beatrice is essentially innocent but she will be slandered for centuries; Cenci is essentially evil, he however is 'shielded by a father's holy name'" (113). None of the names that Beatrice could use within a social and legal world dominated by her oppressor would serve her. Naming her wrong, therefore, would provide her no power.

Beatrice first realizes the futility of accusing her father of his violence and abuse during the banquet scene when her appeals to Roman nobles go unheeded (1.3). Cenci's position as host serves as a metonymy for his social role. His greeting expresses hope that the entertainment he provides will redeem his reputation (248-49; 1.3.1-13). Yet the revelation that Cenci is celebrating the murders of his sons proclaims his invulnerability to social opinion. Secure in his power, he toasts his sons' death, threatens his guests, and proclaims that accusations are useless against him. When Beatrice begs the departing guests to save her self and Lucretia, he neutralizes the influence of her speech on the nobles by overtly threatening violence against those who consider intervening (252; 1.3.129-32). In response Beatrice asks: "Can one tyrant overbear/ The sense of many best and wisest m en?/ Or is it that I sue not in some form/ Of scrupulous law, that ye deny my suit?" (252; 1.3.133-36). Although Beatrice's suit is in the proper idiom, Cenci's threats have made it useless within Roman society. Beatrice scoffs at Orsino's suggestion th at she "[a]ccuse [her father] of the deed, and let the law/ Avenge [her]" because she knows that legal redress is impossible for her (265; 3.1.152-66). Beatrice must find a way to articulate her plight without being limited by language and, thus, propagating her own victimization. Significantly, however, her suit is fruitful in the larger arena of the play's audience. Because we are unthreatened by Cenci and influenced by Beatrice's eloquence the scene forces us to recognize that using language to name does not provide Beatrice an escape from tyranny.

Beatrice's realization that naming does not remedy her situation illuminates problems in current theories about the empowerment of victims. In dealing with incest, for example, modern psychiatry commonly believes that accusing your abuser is an empowering act. Recent events, however, emphasize that a victim's speaking out does not end victimization. Frontline 's "Divided Memories" of 4 April and 11 April 1995 documented backlash that challenges the validity of incest victims' recovered childhood memories, while court cases such as the O. J. Simpson trial raise concern that the rights of victims are less strenuo usly defended than the rights of the accused. These trends of subjecting the victim, rather than the accused, to interrogation and media attention suggest that declaring yourself as the recipient of a damage may not be empowering. Beatrice points out that to become a plaintiff and name her wrong and thus allow others to control her story would only perpetuate her injury: "If I could find a word that might make known/ The crime of my destroyer; and that done,/ My tongue should like a knife tear out the secret/ Which cankers my heart's core; ay, lay all bear/ So that my unpolluted fame should be/ With vilest gossips a stale mouthed story;/ A mock, a bye-word, an astonishment . . . " (265; 3.1.154-60). In order to maintain control of her own story, Beatrice chooses not to accuse her father publicly by naming his crime. Because of her facility with lang uage, however, she does not remain a Lyotardian "victim."

Although we recognize the tyranny of language within the play, Beatrice forces us to ask whether we, too, create an atmosphere in which naming perpetuates violence against the victim. At the same time that Beatrice refuses to name her father's crime for Lucretia, Orsino, and Roman society, she also refuses to name her father's crime for us, the audience. Beatrice's characterization of how Roman society would further victimize her once they learned of her story is a metonymy for the response of the play's audience. Robert J. Brophy is correct in characterizing incest in the play as "a structure-shattering symbol" (244) but neglects Beatrice's role in shaping how incest functions in her life and in the play. She controls the story of her violation, refusing to divulge what her audience, both on-stage and offstage, desperately wants to hear--an accusation of her father. If Beatrice named her father's crime she would be dispensable from that moment forward--we would have mastered her story and her character. As long as she does not name her father's crime, we cannot tell her story. We do not know what happened (rape, seduction, suggestion?) or when. She commands our attention, continuing to speak and maintaining both self-definition and a high-profile stage presence in Shelley's play. Critics such as Groseclose have pointed out that the offstage incest marks the turning point in who commands power on stage (226). Beatrice determines what her audienc es hear and she will exact her own justice, rather than leaving herself in the hands of an inequitable judicial system. Beatrice's status, therefore, as one who speaks but does not name, grants her neither the legal and symbolic status of plaintiff nor the lack of control implicit in the role of victim.

Criticism of The Cencihas failed to recognize sufficiently how Beatrice's individuality is articulated through her use of speech. Although Worton argues that "the effect of the rape on Beatrice is to alert her to the insufficiencies of language. She now understands that, by structuring thought, language fulfills a restrictive role and therefore functions as a support for a social system which the poet consistently presents as unacceptable" (115), he ig nores Beatrice's attempt to use language in an altered way so that it is not "restrictive." We can read Beatrice's use of speech as a strategy for dealing with the problem that Lyotard poses: "To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim" (Lyotard 13). Beatrice provides a potent critique of the inadequacy of language: "What are the words which you would have me speak?/ . . . [O]f all words,/ That minister to mortal intercourse,/ Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell/ My misery: if another ever knew/ Aught like to it, she died as I will die,/ And left it, as I must, without a name " (264; 3.1.107-16). Yet within the social and legal world which she inhabits, Beatrice uses speech and avoids naming in order to articulate her independence from the familial, social, and legal system which has victimized her. In the wake of physical abuse that is calculated to reduce her sense of independence, Beatrice's use of language is critical to her struggle for an autonomous identity. She characterizes her pain as a conflict between corrupted flesh and yearning soul: "These putrefying limbs/ Sh ut round and sepulchre the panting soul/ Which would burst forth into the wandering air!" (262; 3.1.26-28). Projecting an autonomous inner character that struggles for expression allows Beatrice to attempt to use language in order to achieve independence from the physical pain that Cenci has imposed on her body.

It is difficult to speak of a crime without reiterating and reaffirming the power of the perpetrator in telling the tale. By refusing to accuse her father, Beatrice refuses to participate in a discourse that bolsters her father's power. When Lucretia asks Beatrice, "My dearest child, what has your father done?", Beatrice nullifies her father's existence by answering, "I have no father" (262; 3.1.39-40). Throughout her narration in act 3, scene 1, Beatrice erases the agent of her suffering, making her own experience the focal point of her speech. Beatrice only mentions her father when Lucretia suggests that she is incapable of recognizing the cause of her suffering:

Lucretia. What ails thee, my poor child? She answers not:
Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain,
But not its cause; suffering has dried away
The source from which it sprung . . .

Beatrice (frantically). Like Parricide . . .
Misery has killed its father: yet its father
Never like mine . . . O, God! What thing am I? (262; 3.1.33-38)

Beatrice's momentary loss of identity, "What thing am I?," is essential to her redefinition of her self. She must establish herself as an autonomous speaking subject, irreducible to the role of daughter which led to her victimization, and dissociate herself from the Beatrice that is named by others in the stories they tell about her victimization by her father: "Do you know/ I thought I was that wretched Beatrice/ Men speak of, whom her father sometimes hales/ From hall to hall by the entangled hair . . . " (262; 3.1.42-45). Her re-cognition of herself indicates that she seeks to redefi ne herself but cannot find language that encompasses all that she has to express: "This is the Cenci Palace;/ Thou art Lucretia; I am Beatrice./ I have talked some wild words, but will no more./ Mother, come near me: from this point of time,/ I am . . . " (263; 3.1.64-68). Beatrice's "I am," left unfinished, both signifies how her identity exceeds the limiting names she lists and bluntly asserts her own independent existence. Unable to articulate who she is with the possible names society provides, Beatrice asks: "Is it my crime/ That one with white hair, and imperious brow, . . . should call himself/ My father, yet should be!--Oh, what am I?/ What name, what place, what memory shall be mine?/ What retrospects, outliving even despair?" (263; 3.1.70-7 6). Her comment regarding her father highlights the inadequacy and insupportability of names. Her ability to ask these questions and to recognize language's inadequacy to articulate an identity for herself apart from her father establishes her as an auto nomous subject rather than a passive, helpless victim.

Beatrice does not act but uses language to propel others to avenge her wrong. In her frustration with the assassins Olimpio and Marzio, she expresses a willingness to kill her father herself. She need not--her spoken threat and mockery convince Olimpio and Marzio to kill him (280; 4.3.25-33). Beatrice is able to use speech to bring about her father's punishment outside of the law. After his death, Beatrice has greater freedom with language and begins to identify herself with the family name as she attempts to redefine what it signifies, using terms such as "centuries of high splendour" (294; 5.3.30). In her evocation of the family name, Beatrice continues to erase the demonic father whose murder she brought about. At the same time, however, she supplants him and fails to disassociate herself from him. Her invocation of violence and her desire for autonomy echo her father's tyranny and autocracy. Lyotard's schema does not account for Beatrice's position. While she is denied the position of "plaintiff" under patriarchal law and she is unable to separate herself entirely from her family name, the action she takes to avenge her rape prevents her from being classified as a "victim." The murder is the second act of violence in which truth is controvertible. Is Beatrice guilty of murdering her father as the result of a speech that impelled the assassins to action? Is the murder justice or crime? Once on trial, Beatrice's refusal to confess allows her to assume a position of authority relative to this differend.

Beatrice must remain reticent during the trial in order to maintain control over the initial differend--the story of her rape. When Savella asks Beatrice, "Is it so?/ Is it true, Lady, that thy father did/Such outrages as to awaken in thee/ Unfilial hate?", she acknowledges the hate, but refuses to explain what Savella recognizes as a "secret"--the initial violence that caused Beatrice's hatred (284; 4.4.100-106). Thus Beatrice remains in command by refusing to name two things: her violation by her father and her violation of the law.

While Lucretia fears the confessions that will be forced (286; 4.4.170-75), Beatrice firmly believes that she can challenge the authority of law and says that Lucretia "cannot know how well the supine slaves/ Of blind authority read the truth of things/ When written on a brow of guilelessness:/ She sees not yet triumphant Innocence/ Stand at the judgement-seat of mortal man,/ A judge and an accuser of the wrong/ Which drags it there" (286; 4.4.181-87). Beatrice is confident in her belief that law can read only what is presented to it. As long as she maintains her innocence and refuses to admit her role in her father's murder, she will challenge law by becoming its "judge and . . . accuser." With no indisputable evidence, the trial relies on linguistic representations.[1] Although Marzio, one of the assassins, refuses to confess, the letter of introduction that he carries from Orsino is the first aid to the legal investigation (284; 4.4.88-89). Because it does not name the crime, however, the letter is of limited use. Furthermore, because the letter itself refuses to name the roles played by various individuals and, as a written document, is of contestable authorship, Beatrice's confession is still vitally important.

Beatrice mocks the system that requires her confession. Upon being asked if she recognizes Orsino's letter, she replies:

Entrap me not with questions. Who stands here
As my accuser? Ha! Wilt thou be he,
Who art my judge? Accuser, witness, judge,
What, all in one? Here is Orsino's name;
Where is Orsino? Let his eye meet mine.
What means this scrawl? Alas! ye know not what,
And therefore on the chance that it may be
Some evil, will ye kill us? (293; 5.2.172-79)

As she is being arrested, Beatrice speaks the first of her anti-confessions, in which she not only refuses to name her role in the murder but also impugns the authority of the law and its language (284; 4.4.111-29). Beatrice calls into question the authority of law by emphasizing its lack of correspondence with divine will. Her claim that she is as innocent as a child born fatherless functions, after she claims that she has no father, to point out language's instability. She emphasizes that, if the language of the law cannot encompass her experience, it cannot determine her guilt. By alluding to her father's abuse and calling his murder "retribution," she suggests that language and law are incapable of dealing with her because, in relation to the pair of violent acts, she is neither victim nor culprit, innocent nor guilty. To separate these acts and to impose one category on to Beatrice is to be unjust and to do violence to her experience.

The trial's purpose, however, is to name who is innocent and who is guilty on the basis of accusations and confessions. After being tortured, Marzio confesses and implicates Beatrice and L ucretia (289; 5.2.23-29). In response, Beatrice calls the practice of torture into question, refuting the law by pointing out that torture does not yield truth (289-90; 5.2.35-59). Her words, however, are another form of torture for Marzio, who pleads: "Oh, spare me!/ Speak to me no more!/ That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,/ Wound worse than torture" (291; 5.2.108-10). Beatrice confronts him, emphasizing how his words are pivotal and using her power of language to persuade him not to use his to her detriment. Her speech is another anti-confession that emphasizes how her story cannot be reduced to a decision of guilt or innocence (292; 5.2.120-57). Beatrice ends her speech with a question to which it is impossible to provide a just answer: "Am I, or am I not/ A parricide?" (292; 5.2.156-57). Before posing this question, she emphasizes the inadequacy of names in several ways. She emphasizes that her sufferings are unnamable, and elides the two fathers--Cenci and God--so that agents of good and evil are blurred. She begins by citing her father's abuse as proof of her innocence, then erases her father's abuse by claiming the "stainless fame" of a family name that must remain unbesmirched by accusation. Faced with the realization that naming does not do justice to Beatrice, Marzio recants (292; 5.2.158-59). As he is being tortured in order to compel a re-accusation, Marzio commits suicide by holding his breath, indicating that speech itself has become impossible for him. In order to be just, he must be silent and die.

Although Beatrice eventually submits, she never confesses:

Judge. Art thou not guilty of thy father's death?

Beatrice. Or wilt thou rather tax high judging God
That he permitted such an act as that
Which I have suffered, and which he beheld;
Made it unutterable, and took from it
All refuge, all revenge, all consequence,
But that which thou hast called my father's death?
Which is or is not what men call a crime,
Which either I have done, or have not done;
Say what ye will. I shall deny no more.
If ye desire it thus, thus let it be,
And so an end of all. Now do your will;
No other pains shall force another word.

Judge. She is convicted, but has not confessed.
Be it enough. Until their final sentence
Let none have converse with them. (295; 5.3.77-92)

Beatrice's refusal to confess reveals that the law creates its own truth. It is important that she not be allowed to speak to others, because she could counter the voice of the law. Beatrice's decision to submit undermines the law by forcing it to punish her without her acknowledging her guilt and the law's "justice." She decides to submit after reflecting on injustices which she catalogues (295; 5.4.69-76). Even as she surrenders, Beatrice comments on the tyranny of the judge and the system that he represents.

Beatrice's death is her silencing. Bernardo's farewell to her uses her mouth and her voice as a metonymy for her life: "They come! Let me/ Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves/ Are blighted . . . white . . . cold. Say farewell, before/ Death chokes that gentle voice! Oh, let me hear/ You speak!" (300; 5.3.137-41). Beatrice must die and must be silenced precisely because she denies the law. As long as she lives, she continues to threaten the law by being able to tell her own story, as Lucretia emphasizes when hoping for a pardon: "We may all then live/ To make these woes a tale for distant year" (299; 5.4.93-94). Beatrice's incessant use of speech results from and reveals the inadequacy of the language of patriarchal law. She refuses to accept the name "guilty," because that does not sufficiently describe her situation. She must create different speaking strategies in order to do justice to her experience. Similarly, because of the control she exercises, Beatrice resists the name "victim." Although denied plaintiff status, she is not a victim. Beatrice urges Bernardo to remember her , despite the name that will be affixed to him as well as her: "And tho'/ Ill tongues shall wound me, and our comm on name/ Be as a mark stamped on thine innocent brow/ For men to point at as they pass, do thou/ Forbear, and never think a thought unkind/ Of those, who perhaps love thee in their graves" (300; 5.4.149-54). Similarly, Shelley's play urges us to see Beatrice as a complex subject who struggles against being defined by others. Although Lyotard's concepts of "the differend" and "the victim" are helpful in considering Beatrice's relationship to law and society, we only do violence to her by labeling her a "victim."

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Works Cited

Cave, Richard Allen. "Romantic Drama in Performance." The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium. Ed. Richard Allen Cave. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986. 79-104.

Curran, Stuart. "Shelleyan Drama." The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium. Ed. Richard Allen Cave. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986. 61-78.

"Divided Memories." Frontline. PBS, 4 April and 11 April 1995.

Groseclose, Barbara. "The Incest Motif in Shelley's The Cenci." Comparative Drama 19 (1985): 222-39.

Hammond, Eugene R. "Beatrice's Three Fathers: Successive Betrayal in Shelley's The Cenci." Essays in Literature 8 (1981): 25-32.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Theory and History of Literature 46. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "The Cenci." Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. 236-301.

Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Worton, Michael. "Speech and Silence in The Cenci." Essays on Shelley. Ed. Miriam Alcott. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1982. 105-24.