Perhaps Shelley intended this--as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group.

Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino.

He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci.

But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature.

On the other hand the uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through extraordinary suffering in circumstances of exceptional horror--the innocence of a noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo.