"Les Cenci (The Cenci) is Artaud's only known play based on the guidelines of the Theatre of Cruelty. The play relates Artaud's version of the story of the late-sixteenth-century Roman nobleman, Francesco Cenci, and his daughter Beatrice. Written in a style meant to overwhelm the audience's moral preconceptions, The Cenci dramatizes the torture that the cruel Count Cenci invoked upon his family; the family's plot to have him murdered; and the family's torture and execution by Catholic authorities. On stage, The Cenci involves a spectacle of light and sound. Artaud directed and starred as Cenci in the original production of the play in 1935. The play shocks the audience not only because of its cruelty, violence, incest, and rape, but because its characters seem to speak strangely and artificially. This is because the theory behind the play, which is influenced by the surrealist movement and by Balinese dance theatre, calls for the characters to represent universal forces instead of realistic individuals." --

Shelley's tragedy, The Cenci, has been regarded as an avant-garde attack on orthodox Christian principles, a celebrated cause for Victorian intellectuals, a vehicle for innovative minds of the theater, a historical oddity, a neglected masterpiece. Derived from the dark legends of one of Rome's great families, the Cenci records a history of sadism, incest, and murder. Shelley's one actable play has received little attention in modern times. Professor Curran studies it first as a poem-its patterns, themes, imagery-then as a play. After showing its relationship to England's Regency theater, he analyzes the fascinating course of its stage history, and finds Shelley foreshadowing such modern emphases as psychodrama, the existential vision, the Theatre of Cruelty. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Most readers know Antonin Artaud as a theorist of the theatre and as a playwright, director and actor manqué. Now, John C. Stout’s highly original study installs Artaud as a writer and theorist of biography. In Alternate Genealogies Stout analyzes two separate but interrelated preoccupations central to Artaud’s work: the self-portrait and the family romance. He shows how Artaud, in several important but relatively neglected texts, rewrites the life stories of historical and literary figures with whom he identifies (for example, Paolo Ucello, Abelard, Van Gogh and Shelley’s Francesco Cenci) in an attempt to reinvent himself through the image, or life, of another. Throughout the book Stout focusses on Artaud’s struggles to recover the sense of self that eludes him and to master the reproductive process by recreating the family in — and as — his own fantasies of it. With this research John C. Stout has added considerably to our understanding of Artaud. His book will be much appreciated by theatre scholars, Artaud specialists, Freudians, Lacanians and both theorists and practitioners of life writing.

"Artaud remains one of the significant and influential theorists of modern theatre."—Gerald Rabkin, Rutgers University

This book examines the influence of the early modern period on Antonin Artaud’s seminal work The Theatre and Its Double, arguing that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and their early modern context are an integral part of the Theatre of Cruelty and essential to its very understanding. The chapters draw links between the early modern theatrical obsession with plague and regeneration, and how it is mirrored in Artaud’s concept of cruelty in the theatre. As a discussion of the influence of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on Artaud, and the reciprocal influence of Artaud on contemporary interpretations of early modern drama, this book is an original addition to both the fields of early modern theatre studies and modern drama.