Mere poetry and strange flesh: Shelley’s The Cenci and Calderón’s El Purgatorio de San Patricio
In this essay, I examine the act of “conscious plagiarism” that Shelley committed by incorporating into The Cenci a passage from Calderon de la Barca’s seventeenth‐century Spanish play El Purgatorio de San Patricio. I argue that Shelley, drawing on his reading of August Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, uses the passage from Calderon to enter a major debate about the nature and significance of the tragic drama among European Romantics. For Schlegel, and for other German Romantic theorists, Calderon represented the quintessential Romantic (and Christian) solution to the problem of tragic action in a world without an immanent “fate.” Insisting simultaneously that we live in a world riven by sheer contingency and that we are nonetheless continuously subject to a divine providence, Calderon achieves a symbolic “Eucharistic” reconciliation of the noumenal and the phenomenal. I draw attention to the pervasiveness of Eucharistic imagery (both satanically parodic and otherwise) in Shelley’s play...