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Many readers of Percy Shelley's The Cenci have very justly examined the text alongside his other 1819 drama, Prometheus Unbound, envisioning Beatrice as another figure of the Promethean ideal.1 There is, perhaps, another model of innocent suffering-that of Job-that Shelley may have pondered in his dramatization of the Cenci family tragedy. The Cenci closely follows the thematic development and imagery of the book of Job and evokes that book's protagonist's particular struggles. The play also introduces an important moral complication to the scriptural scheme by casting multiple figures in the work as Jobian variants. For Shelley, who, himself, identifies with the biblical sufferer, Job serves as the mediating archetype by which he shapes his drama's characters.
The summer of 1819, during which Shelley wrote The Cenci, was a time of concentrated distress and bereavement in his household. The preceding months had seen an accumulation of sorrows in unrelenting succession: Clara died in September 1818, Claire lost custody of Allegra in October 1818, Shelley leftElena Adelaide behind in February 1819, and, finally, Shelley's favorite child, William, died in June 1819.2 Mary blamed her husband, in part, for the death of their children, and this strain produced another loss-a greater emotional distance between the grieving parents.3 The combined pressures of childlessness and marital alienation, in addition to his troubled health, perhaps led Shelley to regard himself a victim of divine persecution. He wrote Thomas Love Peacock soon after William's death as one "hunted by calamity" and made weary by a growing burden of trouble: "How heavy a weight when misfortune is added to exile & solitude, as if the measure were not full, heaped high on both."4
During this time, it is likely that Shelley contemplated the relevance of the book of Job, the scriptural text dealing with undeserved and unexplained suffering. Mary's journals often record his reading aloud from various books of the Bible, particularly in 1817 and 1820, and Leigh Hunt sets apart Job as one of Shelley's preferred selections: "His book was generally Plato, or Homer, or one of the Greek tragedians, or the Bible, in which last he took a great, though peculiar, and often admiring interest. One of his favourite parts was the book of Job."5 Shelley makes clear his veneration of...