[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

 that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way,
give them either a pleasant or unpleasant sensation since  what
they want is a sensation of some sort (KL II, 189; Lamia would lead
the title of the 1820 volume).31
My claims for The Fall are thus limited: I treat it not as an end-
point in Keats s development but as an experiment, one that reflects
his sophisticated and ambitious thinking about the forging of writer-
reader relationships in a literary marketplace structured by new
forms of celebrity. In its ability to charge the scene of reading with
affect, his experimentation with novel personality effects in frag-
ments like The Fall and  This living hand looks like a success from
our perspective, but our perspective is one shaped by a reception
history that has operated out of Keats s control. Neither publica-
tion history, reception history nor authorial intention stands fully
determinative of meaning or value, of course. While living, Keats
inspired fierce devotion among a close circle of friends, but wider
fame had to await the efforts of memorialists writing after his death.
Like Shelley s, Keats s posthumous celebrity has been characterized
by the passionate attachments of readers to the poet as well as to his
poetry: the poet becomes an object of intense and complicated feel-
ing.32 The readings in this chapter have aimed to show Keats actively
negotiating the terms of such celebrity, not through an investment
in a culture of posterity, but rather through the tactical management
of his relationship to a contemporary culture of fame.
3
The Cenci s Celebrity
The image of Shelley as a poet unconcerned with contemporary
fame maintains a remarkable tenacity, such that his popular image
might still be summed up by the description of him in Edward
Trelawny s 1878 Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author:  Whilst he
lived, his works fell still-born from the press; he never complained
of the world s neglect, or expressed any other feeling than surprise
at the rancorous abuse wasted on an author who had no readers.
Trelawny s description in essence, of course, describes a claim to
celebrity a celebrity Shelley maintains despite, or even because of,
his lack of readers, and a celebrity Trelawny hoped would sell copies
of his memoir. Trelawny indeed continues his account of Shelley s
indifference to fame by quoting a telling conversation with the
poet:   But for the reviewers, he said, laughing,  I should be entirely
unknown.  But for them, I observed,  Williams and I would never
have crossed the Alps in chase of you. Our curiosity as sportsmen
was excited to see and have a shot at so strange a monster as they
represented you to be.  1
Couched in the leisured language of genteel sportsmanship,
Trelawny s account of Shelley s notoriety nicely captures the fraught
interdependence of the relationships among the expatriate poet,
the reviewing system in Britain, and the public of curious read-
ers (readers of reviews, at least, if not of poems). Thanks to several
excellent recent accounts of the way Shelley addresses a range of
potential reading publics, we now have a strong sense of the urgency
of Shelley s attempted negotiations among both real and imagined
audiences, and of the complexity of these audiences themselves.2
68
The Cenci s Celebrity 69
In this chapter, I offer an account of Shelley s The Cenci (1819) that
builds on this scholarship through a consideration of the problem of
authorial charisma and its cognate, readerly fascination.
Shelley wrote The Cenci in the summer of 1819, between work on
the third and fourth acts of Prometheus Unbound, whose  beautiful
idealisms he says are meant for  the highly refined imaginations of
the more select classes of poetical readers. 3 While Prometheus would
help secure Shelley s posthumous fame as a poet of sensation, Shelley
imagined his sensational revenge tragedy garnering more immediate
popular acclaim. The preface to the printed version of the play makes
it clear that Shelley is banking on the appeal the sensational story
has already demonstrated in Italy, where, the preface tells us,  the
story of the Cenci was a subject not to be mentioned [& ] without
awakening a deep and breathless interest. [& ] All ranks of people
knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the overwhelm-
ing interest which it seems to have had the magic of exciting in the
human heart. 4 The celebrity of the Cenci story is tied to the fame
of Guido Reni s portrait of la bella parricida, already one of the most
renowned pictures in the city when Shelley arrived in Rome. Like so
many nineteenth-century literati, Shelley found himself absorbed
by the painting and the story behind it: Trelawny reports Shelley
telling him  the image of Beatrice haunted me after seeing her por-
trait. 5 Shelley s interest in the story is primarily political and ethi-
cal: the horror of Beatrice s experience, the example of her resistance
to tyrannical authority, and the moral issues raised by her actions
clearly drive Shelley s writing. But Shelley s play reflects at the same
time a fascination with the way in which readers can be  haunted
by stories, a deep concern with the ethics and structure of readerly
fascination itself.6 As it draws on and refashions the celebrity of its
heroine, The Cenci also examines the structure of the mass-market
celebrity with which it works: the celebrity of cultural objects, such
as the captivating portrait and the absorbing tale, as well as the
celebrity (or notoriety) of persons, such as the iconic Beatrice and the
romantic poet himself.
In a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, Shelley described The Cenci
as a teaser to engage the attention of a broad audience. Writing
from Italy to direct his literary affairs in England, he tells Peacock
he has  taken some pains to make [the] play fit for representation,
asserting that  as a composition, it is certainly not inferior to any
70 Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity
of the modern plays that have been acted, with the exception of
[Coleridge s] Remorse; that the interest of the plot is incredibly greater
and more real; and that there is nothing beyond what the multitude
are contented to believe that they can understand, either in imagery,
opinion, or sentiment. 7 He outfits the play with the requisite Gothic
elements a dark old castle, a beautiful maiden and he hopes to
recruit the famous actress Eliza O Neill to play Beatrice s part. Though
the question of the incest gives him some anxiety, Shelley claims
to have treated the subject with  peculiar delicacy. He asks that
the play be submitted anonymously to the Covent Garden theater,
and not committing himself too far he tells Peacock that  after
it had been acted, and successfully (could I hope for such a thing), I
would own it if I pleased, & use the celebrity it might acquire to my
own purposes. 8 It is a commonplace about celebrity that it can be
experienced as a dispossession of self; here, Shelley anticipates that
dispossession by describing it as a strategy of dispossessing his work.
He disowns his play in advance and scripts  the celebrity it might [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]