“...to poison and corrupt her soul”: Shelley’s Poetic Designs of Incest in The Cenci

Abstract

This paper examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s designs of the father-daughter incest in his tragedy The Cenci. It proposes that Shelley’s deviation from his historical source, concerning Count Cenci’s atrocities and Beatrice’s characterizations, insinuates the idea of incest as the embodiment of a dark poetics that features identity annihilation and assimilation.