The Cenci

Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1819 CE · Play · English · Romantic

A Roman count throws a banquet for the city's nobility to celebrate the deaths of two of his sons, and turns on the daughter who stands up in front of the guests and asks them to take her away. The Pope keeps the count's money and declines to intervene, and her stepmother and brother agree that the household cannot wait for the law. Shelley wrote it for Covent Garden from a manuscript account of the family obtained in Rome in 1818, and no theatre would stage it for seventy years.

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