The difference in presentation is decisive, as a London stage play is socially more accessible, popular and therefore powerful than the private experience of reading a play. On the other hand, The Cenci as a published text to be read rather than performed in a public space was both legally permissible and fairly well received, as it was Shelley's only work going into a second edition in his lifetime. Shelley had tried to conform to the stage decorum by omitting entirely the word "incest" from the play, but the play was too transgressive for superficial prophylaxis. That is to say, the aesthetic object was also a symbolic speech-act that transgressed the contemporary norms current on the London stage. Nevertheless, the aesthetic object, The Cenci, could not be performed on the London stage because of the play's father-daughter incest. Beatrice's statement is conditioned by dramatic conventions that distance its immediate reference to contemporary politics the action of the play, The Cenci, takes place in 15th-century Italy, not 19th-century England. I point to this well known instance of self-quotation to illustrate the main idea of my paper: it is the rule, rather than the exception, perhaps especially during the English Romantic literary period, that transgressive discourse, whether of treason, sedition, or blasphemy, has unstable boundaries so that the very same words appear in different contexts and registers for different effects. 1 For Beatrice the "something" turns out to be patricide, which in the terms established by the play is seditious, treasonous, and blasphemous. What yet I know not" ( Cenci III.i.87-88 Letters of Shelley 2:167). Percy Shelley, upon first hearing about the Peterloo Massacre, wrote back to Charles Ollier using the words Shelley had made Beatrice Cenci say after she had been raped by her father: "Something must be done. Romanticism and the Law The Discourse of Treason, Sedition, and Blasphemy in British Political Trials, 1794-1820 Michael Scrivener, Wayne State University
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