ABSTRACT
As old as the drama itself, the incest plot received considerable attention in classical Greek drama, again among the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, and once more during the Romantic period. That mode of reception might seem to have defined the fate accorded both Lord Byron's Manfred, written in 1817 but not performed until 1834, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Cenci, written in 1819, first performed privately by the Shelley Society in 1886, but not performed publicly until 1922. The analogy of decline and death could readily be extended as metaphor of rebirth and rejuvenation: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive', said Wordsworth of the French Revolution. In staging Joanna Baillie's Rayner, Thomas Dibdin sought to amplify Baillie's implication of the villain as an incest-driven voluptuary whose mother and mistress kept his desires in a tempestuous cycle of arousal and satiation.
