ROME LETTER
647
gifts. He evidently has another goal: to succeed in giving life to a true
conflict of emotions, executed with the intellectual rigor which true dra–
ma demands. Moravia was fascinated by the deepest possibilities of the
theater, and it is from this desire for tragedy that one must judge his
Beatrice Cenci.
He has not entirely succeeded, but it is honest and
in–
telligent work, whose defects, even, deserve attention.
In form Moravia has tried to imitate the Elizabethan drama, cut–
ting it down as much as possible to classic canons; that is, he does not
allow himself recourse to color and episodes, but forces himself to an
almost Aristotelian unity and concentration. Francesco, his wife Lucre–
zia, Beatrice, and the two servants Olimpio and Marizio, are the only
characters in the drama. All the action takes place in Petrella's castle,
where Francesco Cenci has imprisoned Beatrice and her mother. It faith–
fully follows the story of the Cenci as we know it from the record of
the trial. He leaves out the popular legend which appealed to Shelley
so much, and which, with the addition of a fantastic interpretation of
Francesco as a Renaissance superman, is also the tale which Stendhal
tells. The story of the incest is part of the legend; it was invented by
the defense lawyer, as a desperate measure to save Beatrice and her
mother. Not that Francesco would not have been capable of it: he was
a fierce man, a kind of gangster who we are reminded was to reappear
centuries later as a Fascist. But it is a fact that he did not commit
in–
cest; at least there are no proofs of it. The economy which Moravia
has achieved by eliminating from the story of Beatrice every pathetic
or demonic element gives the drama an exemplary unity; in the contem–
porary Italian theater there are writers who know their craft better
than Moravia, but there is no one who can compare with him in this
redirection of action to the essential, no one who is so far from the
anecdotal and the cinematic. Moravia has thought about facts, not about
form: the facts of the story of Beatrice, their sordidness, their violence,
and the incredibly brutal milieu which they reveal: the powerful Roman
bourgeois family of the seventeenth century, which must have appeared
to Moravia like the gigantic shadow of the Roman bourgeois society
that has provided him with the essential material of his novels.
The finest act of
Beatrice Cenci
is a model of precise and economi–
cal exposition. The scene between Francesco Cenci and his servant Olim–
pio is certainly the best in the play: it begins with the brutal trouble
which enrages old Cenci, and pushes him to work it out in violent and
overbearing actions. He is in financial difficulties. To economize as
well as to prove the power of his will over that of his wife and daughter,
he imprisons them in a castle far from Rome (where they might spend
