Beatrice's Spell, by Belinda Jack

A mutating story of uncommon violence

Francesco Cenci's record of violence was surprising even for a Renaissance nobleman. By September 1598, his son Giacomo, his daughter Beatrice and his second wife Lucrezia could take no more; they decided to kill him. It wasn't easy, as he kept the women prisoners in a castle in the Abruzzi mountains. But an attack of gout on a visit favoured their plan, and they persuaded two servants to beat him to death in bed. The body was thrown off a balcony, which was broken as if in an accident. The story nearly ended there.

Beatrice and Lucrezia did not go to the funeral. The break in the balcony looked inauthentic. The wife of one servant hid, rather than burned, the bedding. Gossip spread to Rome, the body was exhumed, and interrogation by the usual methods elicited confessions. Giacomo, Beatrice and Lucrezia went on trial.

Beatrice's plea in mitigation, that her father had raped her, was entirely credible, so of course discounted by the Papal court. The defendants were found guilty and publicly executed, Giacomo with extreme cruelty. Beatrice was 22, beautiful, and had shown great courage under torture and at trial. Her funeral drew crowds bearing flowers and votive candles in a mass outpouring of grief and sympathy. The Cenci wealth passed to the Papacy.

Belinda Jack's book traces the story as it mutated in plays, novels, sculpture and photography. Its terrible darkness, she argues, called to some corresponding darkness in the psyches of Percy Shelley, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Cameron, Antonin Artaud and many others.

Jack has more to say on their lives than their works. Shelley, she argues, bullied at Eton, was himself a bully to women, so in The Cenci (1819) his sensibility divides between father and daughter, and no tyranny justifies murder. But his play, especially the magnificent fifth act, endorses killing in self-defence, and Beatrice is "ever holy and unstained".

Jack is vivid on Melville's Gothic experiences at sea and the painful comedy of Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty. Their morbid attraction to the Cenci story makes unexpected links between the sexual politics of her subjects.

But with irritating feyness, Jack attributes mystic powers to the legend: choosing it for revision intensified despair, wrecked reputations and hastened deaths. Her story needs no such embroidery. Shelley wrote some of his greatest poetry and prose after The Cenci. His failure to lower the sails of the Don Juan in the storm that killed him can hardly be pinned on Beatrice.

Accretions to the myth included a visit by Guido Reni to Beatrice's prison the night before her execution. When a portrait listed "believed to be of the Cenci girl" surfaced in 1783, it was ascribed to Guido. Multiple spin-offs depicted him painting Beatrice in her cell. Unless he painted her in her shroud, the dust-jacket probably shows a sybil. But we need an innocent, wistful face to front this story.