And yet Giacomo speaks of plural scorpions who, instead of being cornered by an overwhelming opponent, are encircled by a force of nature, fire. One only has to push the image a little further to imagine not suicide, but a mutual massacre. The ring of fire reduces the encircled scorpions to equals of each other, so that they turn to what is natural (in the state of nature they have reduced to). Thus, Giacomo’s statement, with its plural subjects, equivocates on whether the scorpion will commit suicide, or rather that the ensuing violence will actually be the reciprocal violence entailed by such a reduction. The source of Giacomo's anxiety, furthermore, is the unholy status of the family's persecutor: "For he who is our murderous persecutor/ Is shielded by a father's holy name/ Or I would - " ( 2:2:72-3). The sacrificial crisis at the heart of The Cenci has been engendered by Count Cenci's transformation into murderous opposite of a true father. "A father who is all tyrant seems,/ Were the profaner for his sacred name," argues Orsino (2:2:80-81). Nevertheless, by holding onto the premise that patriarchy in and of itself is not tyranny, but sacred, Orsino demurs from the Shelleyan truth perhaps at the heart of his rendition of Cenci: violence does not profane the sacred, but rather reveals itself to be the core.

I invoke the formula of “the violence of the sacred” to suggest the relevance of René Girard’s theories about the violent origins of community for understanding Percy Shelley's The Cenci. Primarily, I would note that the plot is structured around parricide and incest, the two primary transgressions that call for sacrificial absolution in Girard’s terms. That absolution takes place in the form of Beatrice Cenci’s execution, so that in effect she becomes a “scapegoat” expunged in order to salve the community. The pathos of Beatrice’s predicament has often been seen in existential terms, most notably by Stuart Curran. Yet perhaps the most shocking element of a Girardian reading of The Cenci is that rather than rigorously segregating the fate of Cenci and his daughter, his concept of the monstrous double highlights how Beatrice actually mimes the monstrous actions of her father. If Beatrice puts to rest the scandal of Cenci by killing him, then by doing so she resorts to his methods, but provides an easier victim for the community’s absolution.

In writing a tragedy or a “goat-song” as he would call The Cenci in the preface to Hellas, Shelley knew that he would to describe a logic antithetical to his belief in human perfectibility. Girard’s theory of the sacrifice and tragedy is precisely such a theory, particularly in how it validates the Hobbesian premise of the state of nature. In playing out the logic of sacrifice, The Cenci itself monstrously doubles the renunciatory logic of Prometheus Unbound’s first act. Yet, as we shall see, Girard’s version of sacrifice, although correct in its diagnosis of social logic, is too metaphysical for the theory of sacrifice that emerges from The Cenci as a whole. If Beatrice acts out the Girardian logic, Cenci and Orsino offer other kinds of monstrous behavior seemingly not susceptible to sacrifice. Because of Cenci’s identification with the state and Orsino’s with the church, it becomes clear that a different sacrificial logic obtains for institutions rather than individuals. For instance, Orsino position in the family’s self-destruction is a curious one: "'tis a trick of this same family to analyze their own and other minds./ Such self-anatomy shall teach the will/ Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,/ Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,/ Into the depth of darkest purposes" (2:2:109-114). Rather than importing foreign desires into the heart of Cenci's family, he believes he acts as a catalyst for what they know they should do. In effect, their "self-anatomy" performs the dangerous service of raising the necessary veil of the sacred covering the violent secret at the heart of humanity. If Cenci's actions prepare the way for the violent resolution of the family's trauma, Orsino argues that the source for such actions lay buried in "the depth of darkest purposes."

The fundamental tenet of Girard's analysis of the sacred is that any society deprived of ritual mechanisms threatens to devolve into a Hobbesian war of "all against all." In a universe both deprived of any transcendental code of justice and exposed to violence, everybody has reason to fear the worst. The difference between a projection of one's own paranoia and an objective evaluation of circumstances has been worn away.[2]

Like Hobbes, Girard takes as his premise that violence is the condition of natural man, with the similar corollary that no society can exist in such a state. Rather than a transformative moment of contract, however, Girard argues that there is a transformation of violence. Sacrifice enters here enter as a peculiar kind of catharsis: the enactment of a single death transforms what was the ultimate evil into the ultimate good. As it enshrouds the single death in a mist of ritual, sacrifice makes clear distinctions between legitimate murder and illegitimate murder. Unlike Hobbes' contract, sacrifice must be repeated indefinitely, reaffirming the bloody contract that enabled society to come about in the first place. Instead of a generative contract, Girard postulates a generative murder, sweepingly revising Freud's Totem and Taboo. Freud there postulated an initial murder of the father by sons in a "primal horde" that so reverberates with guilt that the sons instigate the incest taboo and set up a totemic religion. Girard's vision of sacrifice simplifies this scenario:

If we hope to get to the root of the matter we must put the father out of our minds and concentrate on the fact that the enormous impression made on the community by the collective murder is not due to the victim's identity per se, but to his role as a unifying agent. (VS, 214)

The identity of the victim is no longer important: rather, it is the imposition of unanimity, in a bizarre parody of social contract theory, that counts. Girard draws the sanguine conclusion that "[i]f this is true, the generative violence constitutes at least the indirect origin of all those things that men hold most dear and they strive most ardently to preserve" (VS, 93). Thus, all society has a religious origin because only religion can enshroud (in ritualistic sacrifice) violence with the sacred and keep the sacrificial crisis at bay.

Surely no system could be further from Shelley's own beliefs. In line with Godwin, he read history as foretelling the necessity of progress, if only men could be properly educated. Though he did not deny the reality of evil, Shelley did not give it the ontological status that Girard does; as Stuart Sperry puts it, "Shelley believed, contrary to the doctrine of original sin, that evil enjoys no necessary authority or substance and that it would inevitably give way once the superior attractions of virtue were realized." [3] Thus, Prometheus Unbound looks forward to a wholly other unanimity: "the triumph of a universal consensus that is forever imminent in our better nature" (Sperry, 126). Amidst these Promethean visions lurk complications, however; that Shelley took time off from his masterpiece to describe the "sad reality" of The Cenciindicates that he was wary of too easy a solution to apparently insoluble problems (Cenci, 3). While no critic has ever underscored sacrificial aspects of The Cenci, the editor of the Bobbs-Merrill edition, Roland Duerksen, begins his introduction with the comment that, "A prominent American journalist, commenting recently on twentieth-century society wrote, 'Violence is a vicious circle, breeding violence and feeding on itself'" (vii). One only has to push this so far before one is curious whether the play engages in any attempt to sacralize one kind of violence to stop the cycle. The interpretation of the play in fact hinges on whether we can judge Beatrice's violence as legitimate; as Sperry points out, this makes her resemble a heroine from Greek tragedy:

The fundamental issue upon which the drama turns on is, to put it simply, was Beatrice wrong in planning the murder of her father, Count Francesco Cenci, or was she justified in following, like Antigone, the dictates of her conscience and in adopting violent means to relieve both her family and herself from insupportable tyranny. (Sperry, 130)

As Girard argues, there are only two ways to justify violence absolutely: either the sacred violence of sacrifice or sanctioned judicial murder. To some extent, these choices are paralleled by the two deaths of the play: first, the murder of Cenci the tyrant and then the execution of Beatrice. If both finally seem illegitimate, it is only because, in the last instance, Shelley wants to repudiate any notion of legitimate murder.

Nevertheless, the grounds he chose for his play encourage other readings. Though Shelley did not believe religion was necessary for society, the society he portrays thought differently:

But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a cloak to be worn on particular days; . . . Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of life.(8)

For Shelley, religion so suffused Italian society that one could simply not make a distinction between the two; indeed, the final authority in The Cenci is the Pope. Exploring this milieu represents a sacrifice for Shelley since he tries "to avoid the error of making [the characters] actuated by my own conceptions of right and wrong" (7). There is also something inherently unsettling about the tragedy of Beatrice as well. The necessarily oblique presentation of the tragedy's hinge, Cenci's incestuous rape of Beatrice, conceals a deeper horror: "This story of The Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous" (7). Cenci himself seems almost a monstrous double of Prometheus: rather than a rebellious god punished for his actions, Cenci is a human criminal whose actions are sanctioned by the church. Cardinal Camillo laments at the beginning that though Cenci is "Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes, / Yet I have ever hoped you amend, / And in that hope have saved your life three times" (1:1:54-56). In fact, Camillo's comments contain an oblique reference to the fact that Cenci has actually purchased the reticence of the Papal anger and seems to revel in having done so, since, "No doubt Pope Clement,/ And his most charitable nephews, pray/ That the Apostle Peter and the Saints/ Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy/ Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days/ Wherein to act the deeds which are stewards/ Of their revenue" (1:1:28-33). Cenci's ironic comment about the church's dependence upon his depredations offers another reading of events in the play that delegitimates the sacred. Financial motivations contaminate the actions of many characters in the play, suggesting that the sacred is nothing more than a cover for self-interest. For all his sanguinary intentions, Cenci himself is aware of the financial consequences of his actions. As he considers his latest ransom payment, Cenci declares: "The third of my possessions! I must use/ Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword/ Falls from my withered hand" (1:1:126-8). His concern about his sons is in part a fear of having to make provisions for them.

Nevertheless, Cenci also introduces the possibility of a sacred interpretation of events. In killing his own sons, Cenci does not choose to rely on human means, but rather asks, "I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!" (1:1:134). We could take this as simply an impious ejaculation to implore chance to take Cenci's vengeance upon his son, yet the count's reaction to the news takes a horrible twist: he calls a feast in order to celebrate the good news. The banquet seems to begin as a celebration of a successful initiation, as Cenci claims: "It is indeed a most desired event./ If, when a parent from a parent's heart/ Lifts from this earth to the great Father of all/ A prayer . . ./ One supplication, one, one desire, one hope/ That he would grant a wish for his two sons" (1:3:21-7). Cenci then pictures the banquet as a rite to celebrate the granting of this wish: "It is accomplished, he should then rejoice,/ And call his friends, and kinsmen to a feast" (1:3:30-1). Yet Beatrice immediately suspects that the festivities are not a celebration of happy results: "Great God! How horrible! Some dreadful ill/ Must have befallen my brothers" (1:3:33-34). She rightly interprets the only possible rationale for Cenci to engage in useless expenditure: indeed, Cenci claims at the start that "I have too long lived like an anchorite," which marks the festival as special (1:3:4). One can hardly say that Cenci presents the festival as impious; rather, events tell him that this is fulfillment of God's will. He prefaces his announcement of the death of his son's by exclaiming, "God!/ I thank thee!" (1:3:40-1) Despite his interpretation, the other celebrants do not share his satisfaction: "My disobedient and rebellious sons/ Are dead!--Why dead!--What means this change of cheer?" (1:3:43-4) They must confront "the sober truth" that "Providence was shown/ Even in the manner of their deaths" (1:3:56-8). One son was crushed when a church collapsed as he was at the mass and the other son was killed during the same hour of the night.

Cenci himself vacillates upon the consequences of these deaths. Foremost on his mind is that "The tapers that did light them the dark way/ Are their last cost" (1:3:47-8). Cenci's grubby concerns with threaten to reduce his festival to the most banal explanation that, being freed of their financial burden, he has chosen to expend an amount in return, and thus give a gift to his true god, Mammon. Rather than reducing the horror of the festival, these revelations make the proceedings increasingly terrible: they witness the honesty and audacity of a man fully assured of the legitimacy of what he is doing. Cenci's audacity leads him to make his most outrageous gesture in the name of that legitimacy: "Oh thou bright wine whose purple splendour leaps/ And bubbles gaily in this golden bowl/ Under the lamplight, as my spirits do,/ To hear the death of my accursed sons! Could I believe thou wert their mingled blood,/ Then I would taste thee like a sacrament" (1:3:77-82). Not the least sign of this gesture's outrageousness is that it is dedicated to the Devil, as though Cenci were inverting the destination as well as the purpose of sacrifice. Cenci does not quite go through with the gesture, since he argues that he has drunk enough of pleasure at the news his son's deaths. If his guest's presence tends to curb his audacity, by the end of the scene a new resolution causes him to imbibe the wine "As if thou wert indeed my children's blood/ Which I did thirst to drink! The charm works well;/ It must be done; it shall be done" (1:3:176-8). The final inversion of sacrifice is that Cenci's communion does not cathartically end violence, but is the prelude to more violence.

Beatrice's purity stands in contrast with Cenci's perversity in this scene. Even in acknowledging her father's evil, she can remind herself of a more natural state of relations: "What, although tyranny and impious hate/ Stand sheltered by a father's hoary hair?" (1:3:100-1) Like Camillo, her reverence for her father's station has long deterred her from believing that Cenci incarnated evil; instead, she "has kissed the sacred hand/ Which crushed us to the earth" (1:3:111-2). She takes submission, whether to Cenci's bloodlust so "that my father/ Were celebrating now one feast for all" or more hopeful submission on Cenci's part to God, as the only cure the ills that plague the family (1:3:139-140). Beatrice has already demonstrated her capacity for self-sacrifice in her relation with her former lover Orsino, who has turned priest and broke their "youthful contract." For all that, she says, "I love you still, but holily,/ Even as a sister or spirit might" (1:2:24-5).

Clearly, Beatrice is marked off for her purity in the first act, and it looms larger when placed against the duplicity of Orsino. From the beginning, he is portrayed as someone who sees with unblinkered pragmatism the means of getting what he want. He stands in the middle of Cenci's perversity and Beatrice's purity as someone who will deploy illicit means to serve his good intentions, so that "I shall be well content if on my conscience/ There rest no heavier sin than what they suffer/ From the devices of my love" (1:2:80-2). The play witnesses a degradation of Orsino's motives, however. He speaks of love here and yet he characterizes Beatrice as a victim of his designs. Later when he ponders the murdering of Cenci and the means of extracting a felicitous end to foul means, he imagines a scenario where a secret unanimity will guarantee his success with Beatrice: "Her father dead; her brother bound to me/ By a dark secret, surer than the grave;/ Her mother scared and unexpostulating/ From the dread manner of her wish achieved" (2:2:148-151). Such imaginings do not have to be pushed too far to find Orsino wishing for a murder of Cenci sanctified by the collective guilt of his family. If Shelley characterizes Orsino here as overwhelmed by his love for Beatrice, his role in the carrying out of the murder reveals again the evil of his means. Orsino procures the murderers for the family, who carry out their actions for money, while when only he manages to escape, and in so doing sends Giacomo to his captors. Ironically, he, with less pure motives, survives his "plot of mingled good and ill" while Beatrice must suffer in her purity.

Orsino's intervention tends to reduce the sacrificial subtext to a mere murderous plot. The increasing entanglement of Beatrice and Cenci, however, puts into play darker designs, however. One of the reasons that Girard singles out tragedy in his pursuit of the sacrificial crisis is that it engages in reversals which undermine differences: Thus, in tragedy, "Tyranny, too, is essentially unstable. A newcomer can ascend unexpectedly to the very summit of power, only to plummet, while one of his opponents assumes his position" (VS, 149). Such reversals make monsters out of victims. My argument has been that Cenci has essentially made a monster out of himself, turning mere fatherhood into tyranny. Though he has been motivated by money in the persecution of his sons, his resolution to incestuously sully Beatrice shows that Cenci's tyranny is taking a supernatural turn: he characterizes the act as "A deed which shall confound both night and day" (2:2:183). After the rape, Cenci believes he is the instrument of God's will. He says that just before he dies he "will pile up my silver and my gold;/ My costly robes, paintings and tapestries;/...And make a bonfire of my joy, and leave/ Of my possessions nothing but my name," completing the action by resigning his soul "which is a scourge.../Into the hands of him who wielded it" (1V:1:56-64). For a moment, Cenci imagines himself as participating in a general economy of sacrificial loss, as Bataille would have it, rather the restricted economy of Girard and the social recuperation of violence.

Even as Cenci imagines himself as a monstrous figure of loss, he wishes to make a monster of Beatrice, so that "I will make/ Body and soul a monstrous lump of ruin" (4:1:94-95). Cenci utters these words as he waits to be attended by Beatrice and finally submitted to, yet she never comes: apparently, Cenci's wish will not come true. Though Beatrice has this final moment of purity before the death of her father, however, she too has started to become monstrously other. After recovering from her attack, she vows that "something must be done/. . . which shall make/ The thing that I have suffered but a shadow/ In the dread lightning which avenges it" (2:1:87-9). Her desire for arises out of a fear that her father has managed to infect her as well: "O blood, which art my father's blood,/ Circling through these contaminated veins" (3:1:95-6) Nor can she turn to one solution for such contamination and spill her own blood, as she clings relentlessly to faith and its injunction against suicide.

At this precise moment, Orsino offers her the option that might resolve the crisis by less explosive means: "Accuse him of the deed, and let the law/ Avenge thee" (3:1:149-51). Beatrice's response is "Oh, ice-hearted counsellor" (3:1:154). Clearly, the purely formal apparatus of the law will not deliver Beatrice satisfaction of revenge. Yet her characterization of Orsino as "ice-hearted" (which is a final confirmation of her suspicions) is accurate, since he harbors other means of revenge beside the legal one: it is up to him to introduce the means of committing the murder of Cenci. Nevertheless, Beatrice cannot be omitted from guilt in conceiving the first attempt, as she suggests the ravine as the appropriate place to take their revenge. The impersonality of the mode, one of having a boulder roll over Cenci, suggests impersonal means of sacrifice, as though Beatrice was thinking of sanctified means for the illicit end she has in mind. The scene of the actual murder however witnesses the complete transformation of Beatrice into her opposite. Even before the climactic confrontation, Beatrice implores them to "Come follow!/ And be your steps like mine, light, quick and bold" (4:3:42-3) Like her father, she has begun to cloak her action with the veil of the sacred. This becomes even more apparent when she acts to drive the murderer back after they had demurred in killing a sleeping old man. Their very reticence seems sacrilege in the case of "a deed where mercy insults Heaven" (4:3:30). As much she veils the murder, the moment reveals that she is as stalwart as her father in gaining her wishes, as she snatches the dagger. Thus, her actions give the lie to her words by betraying their origin in her desire for pure vengeance. In effect, Beatrice does come to Cenci when she takes hold of the dagger.

The ironic arrival of Pope's representatives shows that the murder has not had its cathartic effect: instead, it represents simply one more move in the cycle of reciprocal violence. In part, it has already been sullied, for even as Beatrice tells Marzio and Olimpio that "Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God/ To a just use," Beatrice gives them gold and a mantle, thereby suggesting the fundamentally corrupt nature of the act. Beatrice, in literally paying for the deed as well feeling overwhelmingly peaceful, becomes more like her father, though she hoped the murder would cleanse her family. The Pope's legation ensures that no catharsis will ensue; or rather, that more violence will be necessary in order to put the rest their problems.

To suggest that Beatrice has become the monstrous double of her father may feel unduly harsh. Girard would characterize the need to exempt Beatrice as a desire for "romantic melodrama" where "A static Manichaean confrontation of "good guys" and "bad guys" occurs (VS, 150). Yet the complexity of Shelley's drama compels us to see a certain equivalence in the actions of Cenci and his daughter. Sperry writes that Cenci

triumphs not by despoiling her of virginity but by corrupting her deeper integrity, by inducing her to believe that she can escape injuries that appear to her intolerable only by assuming his power and spirit, by becoming one with the very being she detests. (Sperry, 137)

Cenci succeeds by having his daughter resort to the means he himself had recourse to, and in effect turns her into his monstrous double. Thus, it is striking that in the later assertions that Cenci's murder was unjust, his "hoary hair" is appealed to as an emblem of fatherhood, just as Beatrice's hair has embodied her virginity. Paradoxically, Beatrice becomes most like her father when she insists upon her innocence during her trial. Although the circumstances are unjust, rife as they are with torture, Beatrice's own refusal of guilt resembles her father's obduracy. Indeed, in her fervor, she becomes disgusted with her family and the world, lamenting "this ill world where none are true,/ My kindred false to their deserted selves" (5:3:68-9)

Beatrice still clings to the notion that her actions were justified in holy terms, but the murder clearly did not have its desired effect, but merely turned violence towards the other members of the family. The legation of the Pope effectively rendered this inevitable, though their arrival merely confirms what we knew already: that the murder could not be justified. Nevertheless, their arrival enables a sacrifice to take place, but one by the judicial mechanism instead. Perhaps the Church believes it is only carrying out the proper punishment for a crime, but Camillo's final plea to the Pope engenders a reply that reveals other motives as well. Receiving the letter begging for mercy for Beatrice, the Pope replies, "Paolo Santa Croce/ Murdered his mother yester evening/ And he is fled. Parricide grows rife/ That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young/ Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs" (5:4:18-22). Though the Pope imagines a scene of authority overwhelmed (a scenario that Shelley would be sympathetic with) rather than one of reciprocal violence, the implicit rationale for the execution is the same: commit this murder in order to prevent these other murders.

The punishment of Beatrice and the others is intended to quell a more general disease of violence, leaving only "our common name/ . . . as a mark stamped" on the brow of the last remaining Cenci, Bernardo, and thus inflicting the mark of Cain on the only member innocent of the plot. Such scapegoating is explicit in sacrifice and implicit in capital punishment, and is symptomatic of a culture where some forms of revenge are legitimated. Yet Shelley offers a sublime alternative to Beatrice's revenge:

Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passion by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. (7)

Shelley's notion of kindness is of course modeled on Jesus's injunction to Christians to "turn the other cheek." Although in a different register, Shelley's solution to tragic violence bears affiliations with Rene Girard's own solution to reciprocal violence: the Johannine logos. Though not veiled with the metaphysics that Girard feels compelled to introduce (in his own act of prophetic violence), Shelley imagines that only the absolute opposite of revenge. Ironically, Shelley maintains that a representation of such forbearance on Beatrice's part would not be heard by his contemporaries: "the few whom such an exhibition would have interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest among the mass who surround them" (7) Even for the optimistic Shelley, people were not ready to hear any tragic message besides one with echoes of sacrifice.