Beatrice Unbound: Adaptations of Shelley’s The Cenci

This essay considers three twentieth-century re-imaginings of Shelley’s The Cenci : Artaud’s play Les Cenci , Bernold Goldschmidt’s opera Beatrice Cenci , with a libretto by Martin Esslin, and both the play and opera versions of Beatrice Chancy by George Elliot Clarke with music by James Rolfe. Shelley and his adaptors in thinking through the figure of Beatrice take up what Shelley sees as the struggle of “oppressor to the oppressed.” Shelley writing during the reactionary restoration after the Napoleonic Wars, Artaud writing between the World Wars, Goldschmidt composing as a refugee from the Nazis, and Clarke seeking to illuminate the practice of slavery within Canada, all explore both oppression’s devastating impact and the possibility of a resistance to tyranny. Artaud’s version, which places Count Cenci as father at its center, altered the reception of Shelley’s play, influencing later adaptations and even the way we read Shelley’s play itself. In the end, that Shelley offers the most radical and ultimately feminist vision of a way beyond the patriarchal society that ensnares all these various Beatrices.