Key terms: dramatic monologue, psychology, persona, poet/artist, irony, voyeurism
Browning was a study in contradiction--a Romantic rebel who proposed marriage to a woman he had never even met, lived in exile with her in Italy, and considered himself "the Queen's most loyal subject." Long before Freud published his study of the human psyche, Browning used the dramatic monologue to explore the minds and motivations of a series of men and women--most of dubious ehtics--and to allow the audience to glimpse, through their twisted minds, Browning's very pointed critiques of his society. His settings are often Gothic and exotic.
Most of Browning’s greatest poems are dramatic
monologues--a form very popular in the Victorian period because it allowed
the poet to use a persona speaking with the pronoun I to scrutinize human
actions and motives. The form establishes a connection to the reader much more
so than the novel does. The dramatic monologue addresses an
unseen listener in the dramatic situation, but indirectly the speaker is talking
to us, the readers,
drawing the audience into the emotions while allowing the poet to maintain a
distance from the emotions. As such, the Victorian dramatic monologue allows the
reader to see the speakers at a moment of self-revelation and passion, where
they reveal themselves (and their unperceived ironies) to us.
That unintentional level of revelation is one of the characteristics that
distinguishes this form from the soliloquy.
My Last Duchess (1842)
The intellectual exercise of inferring the real character of the last Duchess from what the Duke says about her to the envoy and then going on to make a moral judgment about him constitutes a large part of our enjoyment of the poem, but that enjoyment is not dependent upon our entering into sympathy with the Duke.
Rather, we enter into this scene on the side of the envoy, and at that level we feel the pull of the Duke's commanding rhetoric. In order to read the poem, we must create the scene in imagination, which means "losing ourselves" within it, forgetting, for the moment, our real, present surroundings in favor of active involvement in the dramatic situation. Our entry is facilitated by its most striking feature, which is the way the Duke so directly addresses us. His narrative in the center of the poem is carefully framed by the first ten lines and the last ten, in which he addresses someone as "you." Because we do not discover until after he has told his tale that this second person is in fact present in the poem, at the moment of our reading we can only assume that it is us to whom he is speaking. (It is true that we eventually discover that this "you" to whom he is speaking is an envoy from a Count, but this identification is not made until very late in the poem.) We are slightly disoriented, on a first reading, by that direct address, and we recognize that an effort is being made to suggest that we are the silent partner in a conversation; even the omission of quotation marks helps sustain the illusion that we have encountered a character who is speaking directly to us. Trusting that our curiosity about what is going on in the poem will keep us reading despite our lack of information about the character of the auditor, Browning leaves us only one source for that information, the Duke's monologue.
The poem is of the type called a dramatic monologue because it consists entirely of the words of a single speaker (persona) who reveals in his speech his own nature and the dramatic situation in which he finds himself. The dramatic monologue reveals its own place and time as it proceeds to uncover the psychology of the speaker at a significant moment in his or her life. Browning's Duke has been labelled despite his apparent cunning as "witless"--why?
The speaker is the arrogant, art-collecting Duke of Ferrara. We might even call him the protagonist, for although we may not agree with him we are forced to identify with him. How does Browning force us to place our sympathies with so objectionable a persona?
The Duke eliminated (divorced? sent to a convent? had executed or poisoned?) his last duchess because (he felt) she undervalued him and treated him as she treated other men. Which trivial incidents in particular produced this response in the Duke? Why does he say "She had a heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad"? (p. 664)
The Duke reveals himself to be an emotionally cold, calculating, materialistic, haughty, aristocratic connoisseur; on the positive side, he is a patron of such artists as Fra Pandolf and Claus of Innsbruck (both fictional). What does he value in art?
What does the Duke confess when he says "This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together." (664) What ironies do we as readers perceive that the Duke does not?
The envoy, alarmed by what he has heard, tries to break away from the Duke, but is restrained by him. What, if anything, does Browning reveal about the envoy? How do we, as horrified eavesdroppers or voyeurs, react?
The Duke regards artists as names to conjure with, but also as social inferiors, lackeys who do his bidding and by their works attest to his refined tastes. Ironically, for the Duke the portrait of the duchess is better than the living duchess herself because he can control who sees and enjoys the portrait; the duchess was beyond his control. Browning allows the reader to assess the Duke for himself. The reader sees that such powerful Renaissance rulers were ruthless and rapacious. He also sees how jealousy and possessiveness can destroy those very things we love the most. What comment(s) do you think Browning was making about his own time through his portrait of a powerful rich man?
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church (1845)
This is another exercise in understanding the excesses of the human psyche. The dying Bishop, in good Renaissance fashion, has been brought into the nave of the church so that he may die in the presence of God; surrounded by his family, he disposes of his earthly goods. Sounds like a nice pious scene, right? Except that he appears to have no religious motivations at all; his "family" are his illegitimate sons; the woman he mourns is his mistress, for whose favors he contended with Bishop Gandolf; and his earthly goods are meant to buy him a beautiful elaborate renaissance tomb, so that succeeding generations will realize he was a more important person than Gandolf, and so (if souls can be permitted these powers) he can lord it over Gandolf even after death. One of the most ironic juxtapositions that reveals the Bishop to us is on p. 665: "Peace, peace seems all. Saint Praxed's ever was the church for peace; And so, about this tomb of mine. I fought With tooth and nail to save my niche, ye know." The Bishop worries about lumps of lapis lazuli "as big as a Jew's head" and tells his sons he will have the ear of the saint to beg favors for them--"horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? --That's if ye carve my epitaph right" (p. 666). It's instructive to remember what Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the corruption of the clergy (p. 157), Shelley's stance on the necessity of Atheism, and the general distrust that thinking people had begun to develop about the church as an organization as you think about the point(s) Browning is trying to convey in this portrait of a dying hypocrite.
Andrea del Sarto (1855)
One of Browning's most complex dramatic monologues, this is a picture of a painter who is highly regarded for his technical skills ("called 'the faultless painter'") yet lacks the inspiration (and perhaps the courage) to rival the skills of Raphael or Michaelangelo, his contemporaries. Based on a true story of a Florentine painter who embezzled money from the King of France to marry his mistress Lucrezia (and who reportedly let his parents die in poverty so that he could keep up with Lucrezia's bills), Browning reveals the psyche of a poet/artist who talks frankly about his art--without actually admitting what he really knows, that he's not the best painter in Florence. He is virtually imprisoned in his own house, afraid to go out where the French king's envoys might see him, facing debt, realizing that Lucrezia's 'cousin' is really her lover--"So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!" (685) He raves about a few treasured compliments and claims he could improve on the technical composition of Raphael's and Michaelangelo's paintings, but always is surrounded with evidence that he's not quite up to the mark. Even his highest philosophic statements about his art--"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"--is tempered by his knowedge: "All is silver-grey Placid and perfect with my art: the worse! I know both what I want and what might gain, And yet how profitless to know, to sigh" (686) He concludes, "And thus we half-men struggle" (687). As a portrait of an artist who has sold out, of someone who realizes he has failed his art and yet continues in his deceptions (of self and others), of someone whose muse cuckolds him as he has betrayed others, Browning provides a powerful insight into the mind of the artist in an increasingly commercial and complacent culture. It is not a comfortable picture. (Compare this with Shelley's "To Wordsworth"--it's the other side of the picture.) But as an exercise in unrelenting intellectual honesty--admitting the uncomfortable truth--this poem goes much further than "In Memoriam" in expressing the Victorian thinkers' conflicts.