Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civilisation shall never be
restored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the creations of
its artists are immortal, while the fabric of the world

"Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams."

It is curious that for three of his more considerable works
Shelley should have chosen the form of drama, since the last
thing one would say of him is that he had the dramatic talent.
'Prometheus' and 'Hellas', however, are dramas only in name;
there is no thought in them of scenic representation. 'The
Cenci' (1819), on the other hand, is a real play; in writing it
he had the stage in view, and even a particular actress, Miss
O'Neil. It thus stands alone among his works, unless we put
beside it the fragment of a projected play about Charles I
(1822), a theme which, with its crowd of historical figures,
was ill-suited to his powers. And not only is 'The Cenci' a
play; it is the most successful attempt since the seventeenth
century at a kind of writing, tragedy in the grand style, over
which all our poets, from Addison to Swinburne, have more or
less come to grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice Cenci,
the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was executed
with her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father.
The wicked father, more intensely wicked for his grey hairs and
his immense ability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope
impunity for a long succession of crimes, hated his children,
and drove them to frenzy by his relentless cruelty. When to
insults and oppression he added the horrors of an incestuous
passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed, and Beatrice,