The Cenci

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.