It failed and deserved to fail.
To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist.

Even its purple patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it.
Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious.

One would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least likely of men to write a true drama.

Yet the _Cenci_ approaches that goal, and the fragment of _Charles the First_ makes so great a grip on the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature that it should have been finished.

Yet Shelley himself gave it up.