The great English Romantic poet Percy Shelley transports us to corrupt and sumptuous Renaissance Rome with a ripped-from-the-headlines verse drama, set within the noble household of Count Cenci, a tyrannical patriarch with a virtuous daughter Beatrice. After two of his sons are brutally killed, Cenci celebrates by throwing a banquet, toasting their spilled blood with wine. Fearful for her own life, when Beatrice pleads protection from their guests and is denied—and when she finds out her lover Orsino has betrayed her for the priesthood—she concocts a desperate plot to take control of her own destiny.
Produced in partnership with the Byron Society of America, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.
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Livestream and On-Demand access made possible by the special support of the Michael Tuch Foundation.
This event will premiere live in-person from the Lenard Nimoy Thalia Theatre on Thursday, November 5, 2026 at 7:00 PM ET. The recording will be available from 7:00 PM ET on Friday, November 6 until 11:59 PM ET on Sunday, November 15. Open Captions will be available from 7:00 PM ET on Saturday, November 7 until 11:59 PM ET on Sunday, November 15.
THE CAST
[Content Advisory: This performance includes depictions of domestic and sexual violence, incest, coercive control, and murder. Some audience members may find this distressing.]
“And what a world we make, / The oppressor and the oppressed.”
–Beatrice, The Cenci, Act V, 1819
“...Mr. Shelley, far from having even palliated its moral and its dramatic improprieties, has rendered the story infinitely more horrible and more disgusting than he found it, and has kept whatever in it is most revolting constantly before our eyes.”
–The British Review, 1821
“Universal approbation soon stamped The Cenci as the best tragedy of modern times.”
–Mary Shelley, Note on The Cenci, 1839
“In fact no one has more clearly understood than Shelley
the mission of the dramatist and the meaning of the drama.”
–Oscar Wilde, reviewing the Shelley Society’s production of The Cenci, Dramatic Review, 15 May 1886
ABOUT THE PLAY
When Percy Bysshe Shelley arrived in Rome in 1819, he encountered one of the city’s most haunting legends: the story of Beatrice Cenci (1577–1599). For more than two centuries, her story had fascinated locals and visitors, awakening what Shelley called a “deep and breathless interest.” Both Percy and Mary Shelley immersed themselves in the story, and Shelley soon recognized in it the material for what he hoped would become a great modern tragedy.
Shelley transformed this Roman legend into a tragedy that asks what becomes of justice when every institution entrusted to uphold it has failed. Subjected to relentless cruelty and sexual violence by her father, Beatrice is denied protection by her family, the state, and the Catholic Church. Rather than merely recounting a notorious Renaissance murder trial, however, Shelley explores the workings of power, tyranny, and resistance. At the center of the drama stands one of the greatest tragic heroines of the nineteenth century, whose struggle continues to provoke ethical debates about justice, agency, conscience, trauma, and whether resistance can escape the violence it opposes.
Shelley was not alone in his fascination with Beatrice Cenci, her story, and her image. The celebrated portrait long believed to depict Beatrice Cenci, traditionally attributed to Guido Reni, is now generally thought to have been painted by the seventeenth-century Bolognese artist Ginevra Cantofoli or another artist of her circle. The painting became one of the most admired images of Shelley’s time. Now housed in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini, the portrait inspired later generations of writers and artists, including Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens. Whether or not it truly represents Beatrice Cenci, the painting helped transform her from a historical figure into one of Romanticism’s most powerful cultural icons.
The Palazzo Cenci, which Shelley himself visited during his stay in Rome, still stands in the city’s historic Sant’Angelo district and may be visited today. Shelley described it as a “vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture,” which he believed remained much as it had during “the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this tragedy.” Once the home of Beatrice and her family, the palace remains one of Rome’s most evocative landmarks, where history, legend, and literature continue to intersect.
The Cenci occupies a distinctive place within Shelley’s body of work, not least due to its range of influences. We hear echoes of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Shakespeare, not to mention Dante, Calderón, and Renaissance Italian history. Yet The Cenci is unmistakably Shelleyan in its moral and poetic vision. What first appears to be a melodrama of innocence confronting monstrous evil gradually becomes an exploration of how tyranny corrupts individuals, families, and institutions alike. Few of Shelley’s works confront so directly the questions that preoccupied him throughout his career: how power corrupts, when resistance becomes necessary, and whether justice can survive in a world governed by avarice and violence.
Jacobean revenge tragedy perhaps most clearly presides over The Cenci’s language, its shocking plot, and its characterizations. These formal choices reflect Shelley’s hope that The Cenci would reach a general theatrical audience. Whereas Shelley acknowledged that the highly figural “lyrical drama,” Prometheus Unbound (1820), would likely have a limited readership, he described The Cenci as "of a more popular kind" than anything he had previously written. Shelley went as far as to imagine seeing The Cenci performed in one of London’s government-sanctioned patent theaters. These popular aims notwithstanding, Shelley did not offer The Cenci’s potential audiences simple heroes and villains or clear moral resolutions. As he explains in the play’s Preface, “The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself.” The Cenci pursues that knowledge through what Shelley calls the “restless and anatomizing casuistry” by which we “seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification.” In other words, our sympathy for Beatrice leads us to seek justification for her actions even as we recognize their moral difficulty. Therein lies the play’s great dilemma.
Shelley was only partly successful in reaching a broader audience. On the one hand, because he published the text both in Italy and England, The Cenci is the only major work printed as a second edition in his lifetime. On the other, despite Shelley’s confidence that The Cenci would find a commercial and critical audience, he faced rejection from critics and theaters upon its publication. Even after his death, British theatrical censorship prevented its public performance throughout the nineteenth century because of its treatment of domestic abuse, blasphemy, sex, and violence. Once restrictions eased, an 1886 landmark private production by the Shelley Society in London attracted an audience that included Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. The play’s first public performance in England followed in 1922, the centenary of Shelley’s death. Since then, The Cenci has enjoyed a rich and varied theatrical afterlife. It has inspired operatic adaptations by Alberto Ginastera, Havergal Brian, and Berthold Goldschmidt, as well as Antonin Artaud’s revolutionary Les Cenci (1935), an attempt to more fully actualize his influential “Theatre of Cruelty.” More recently, a growing number of university and professional productions have reaffirmed the play’s remarkable dramatic power, introducing Shelley’s tragedy to new generations of performers and audiences.
This production marks Red Bull Theater’s second staging of The Cenci. The company first presented Shelley’s tragedy in 2008 under the direction of Eleanor Holdridge, with the late Roger Rees delivering a celebrated performance as Count Cenci. Nearly two decades later, Holdridge returns to the play, reaffirming Red Bull Theater’s longstanding commitment to reviving neglected masterpieces of dramatic literature. This return production also inaugurates The Romantic Revivals Project, the next chapter in a collaboration between Red Bull Theater and scholars that has been bringing Romantic drama to the stage since 2012. Through partnerships among artists, scholars, students, and audiences around the world, the project seeks to restore the dramatic works of the Romantic period to performance and public conversation.
ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
Today, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is perhaps most commonly introduced as the husband of Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and the celebrated author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831) and The Last Man (1826). Yet Shelley was himself one of the Romantic period’s most radical and influential writers and thinkers. While perhaps best known today as a poet, he was also a playwright, essayist, literary critic, translator, and political thinker whose writings have continued to inspire and provoke readers around the world for more than two centuries. Famously signing a hotel register “Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist,” Shelley openly embraced political and religious positions considered dangerously radical in his time. Shelley criticized the monarchy, organized religion, censorship, and inherited privilege in both his poetry and prose. His outspoken political and religious views led to his expulsion from the University of Oxford in 1811 after publishing The Necessity of Atheism, inaugurating a life marked by financial hardship, public controversy, and voluntary exile from England.
Although many of his contemporaries condemned his political and religious views, the ideals he championed have become central to his legacy, making him one of the most influential writers of the modern world. Beyond verse dramas like The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, or political tracts like A Philosophical View of Reform, some of his most well-known poetic works include “Mont Blanc,” Alastor, “Ozymandias,” “The Masque of Anarchy,” Adonais, Epipsychidion, “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” and his unfinished final poem, The Triumph of Life.
But Shelley’s influence extends far beyond literary realms. His writings have inspired generations of writers, artists, reformers, and political movements across the globe. “The Masque of Anarchy,” his great poem of nonviolent resistance, profoundly influenced Mahatma Gandhi and, through that legacy, Martin Luther King Jr. Its language has likewise been invoked by democratic movements from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to the 2010–2012 Arab Spring. Writers including Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Derek Walcott, Alejandro Carpentier, Rubén Darío, Ben Okri, and countless others have drawn inspiration from his works, while poems such as “Ozymandias” continue to resonate in classrooms, public discourse, film, television, and popular culture. Perhaps anticipating his own importance to future political and aesthetic discourse in A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley famously declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Shelley’s life ended tragically in 1822 when, at the age of twenty-nine, he drowned in a storm off the coast of Italy in the Bay of Lerici. His body was cremated on the beach near Viareggio in the presence of friends including Lord Byron and Edward John Trelawny before his ashes were interred in Rome’s Protestant (Non-Catholic) Cemetery, where they remain today. Together with the nearby Keats-Shelley House, the cemetery continues to draw readers, scholars, and visitors from around the world who come to honor his legacy. More than two centuries after his death, Shelley’s poetry, drama, and prose remain central to conversations about liberty, equality, social justice, environmental responsibility, and human rights.
Portrait Captions:
Amelia Curran (1775–1847), Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London.
Louis-Édouard Fournier (1857–1917), The Funeral of Shelley, 1889. Oil on canvas. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool. The painting depicts the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley on the beach at Viareggio, Italy, following his death by drowning in July 1822.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This performance marks the formal launch of The Romantic Revivals Project, an initiative of the Keats-Shelley Association of America dedicated to returning the dramatic works of the Romantic period to the stage and to public conversation. The project builds upon a longstanding partnership with Red Bull Theater and is enriched by the support and collaboration of the Byron Society of America and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. We extend our deepest gratitude to George Krupp, whose extraordinary generosity and longstanding commitment to the arts and humanities have made this initiative possible. We are equally grateful to Jonathan Mulrooney for his generous support of this production. Finally, we offer our heartfelt thanks to Jesse Berger, Nathan Winkelstein, Craig Baldwin, Jessica Fornear, Sherri Kotimsky, Eleanor Holdridge, and the many remarkable artists, designers, technicians, administrators, and staff of Red Bull Theater whose talent, dedication, and collaboration have brought Shelley’s tragedy to life for a new generation of audiences.
- JULIE CAMARDA | University of Chicago & OMAR F. MIRANDA | University of San Francisco